Chess Titans

[rocky minnow]

Also comes with chess*

[sly root]

it really is one of the best Remix projects i've seen so far

[rocky minnow]

Ngl there's only like 4 textures and one chess board

Where you can attach an entire mesh around it

Opens doors to endless scenes

[cursive bridge]

So mesh replacement. You can anchor anything to that board

[rocky minnow]

Depends on how creative you are with your approach

[cursive bridge]

Could anchor a whole level to it, gonna be sweet

[sly root]

didn't Adam do that before?

or was that with nvChess

[rocky minnow]

Yeah he did attach a room he made

Wanna see?

[cursive bridge]

Hell yes he did

[sly root]

now you guys need to make a disco room, with giant disco balls everywhere

this 100x

[sly root]

i found it again

[rocky minnow]

Funny thought in my head but uhh, could you anchor cod2 carentan map to the chess board? More preferably floating mid air or just on some heighten object like crates or that old black cars hood

Nice little remix project Collab lol

[viral cypress]

Haha by whining a bit, I not only made this channel come alive, but you guys admitted this is one of the best remix projects :)

[rocky minnow]

It's simplicity makes up for it

[balmy dagger]

I'd totally go for the skyrim intro cart ride

[sick flint]

Here was a quick block out of a room I'm not going to go with for all the BTS pals.

[viral cypress]

I am trying to find a balance between fov and camera altitude, I was thinking maybe I should just expose both?
150 fov 45 altitude

How would you expect the game to look at 150 fov?

[rocky minnow]

i expect it to be bad

what's the sweet spot FOV

[viral cypress]

Regular chess titans is 30 fov and 95 altitude

Adam's fov patch makes it 40 - 90

uh

is this an easter egg

[cursive bridge]

Oh wow you can change the camera angle and fov. Nice one. Didn't know that

Think you could also remove the spring back when you move the camera so it holds that position forever if you move the camera?

[viral cypress]

Adam found all this, it had in the fov version of his patch

[viral cypress]

That's already in the settings

[viral cypress]

I found this these fov / altitude pairs keep the board relatively at the same distance to the camera.

[viral cypress]

I updated the main post and the repo, now fully migrated to use the asi mod.
I noticed that Github releases allow you to upload anything and there's no straightforward way to verify if binaries match with the source. You can grab the asi mod from actions https://github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/chess-titans-rtx-asi/actions which is exactly what remix repos do. As far as I know, I don't have any control over the builds generated there other than the workflow config which you can inspect here https://github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/chess-titans-rtx-asi/blob/main/.github/workflows/rust.yml

To switch, simply get the release zip which bundles both the asi mod and Ultimate ASI Loader and extract all near the chess.exe. As I said, you can grab the binaries from actions and https://github.com/ThirteenAG/Ultimate-ASI-Loader/releases/latest for Ultimate ASI Loader

Oh you also need to replace the patched exe with the original one since it will be patched at runtime now.

You can then safely delete start.bat, chess-rtx-launcher.ps1, launcher.conf, d3d9.dll, d3d9.ini, the patches. Don't forget to rename bridge_d3d9.dll back to d3d9.dll afterwards.

[sick flint]

Wonder if we can tie the fov and camera orientation to key presses

I should also check if there’s some other g_ variables that are interesting

[viral cypress]

It is totally possible but I am a bit exhausted right now

Spent too much time staring at screen lately :)

[cursive bridge]

no need to go outside and touch grass we got RTX remix grass!

[viral cypress]

Feels good man

[hidden elk]

Honey, I shrunk myself

[viral cypress]

@sick flint I wanted to ask, have you ever had issues similar to this one but with another patch?

A generic asi mod, that will say apply all patches in say ./patches could be useful?

at runtime

[sick flint]

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about :/

[viral cypress]

I mean you have this issue with chess titans patch of yours, when applied to the file itself. Have you came across something similar.

[sick flint]

Ohhh

Nope

[viral cypress]

If so, we could build a generic asi mod. You put your .1337 patches in a parent folder. The asi mod patches the exe with them all at runtime

For any game

[viral cypress]

Okay, still could be useful for convenience

How you think I ripped all this :)

they're plain text

And for patching dlls, I think I could use the winapi to get the base address to them as well

[sick flint]

Well that would speed things up a lot

[viral cypress]

Well I like to work future proof, and I got everything in place. Should be easy. (I regret saying this every time, let's see if this will be different)

[viral cypress]

https://github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/runtime-patcher-asi
Here, you can get it from actions. Tell me what improvemets could be made.

I tested with chess titans and it works all fine. Haven't tried for DLL's yet
It should work since unlike last time, it calls the GetModuleHandle with the string in the 1337 file: chess.exe
The chess asi mod in the other hand doesn't do that and it would try to patch any exe loads it (patch function still checks the original bytes but you get the point).

I was going to try on CoD 2 but apparently I lost the original ones :/

[viral cypress]

hello

[viral cypress]

Oh uh

[pseudo escarp]

keep crashing

[viral cypress]

Can you elaborate please?

[cursive bridge]

Ok I will keep crashing

[viral cypress]

Do you want help or should we keep crashing?
Edit: 4.1 bridge release notes has couple crash and hang out fixes listed, you might wanna try again. I too sometimes have cases where the game refuses to start ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[stone cove]

When he moves camera, game becoming "Not responding" for a while, and eventually crashing. Apart from that, visuals seems to be fine. (RTX 3060M)

[viral cypress]

Are you a friend of him?
Also do they use the asi mod I linked there

#1110245358040260668 message

[stone cove]

I'm his temporal representative. No, he just downloaded archive with game

[viral cypress]

What archive

There was one packaged archive in this server, it is too old and you shouldn't use it.

[stone cove]

I cannot find initial file here, basically it is the main game .exe

Nothing else was downloaded

[stone cove]

Can be

[viral cypress]

Not even these?

[stone cove]

Thank you, we will try later 🙂

[viral cypress]

This is just the game fiels, it doesn't have the full instalation

files*

If you only have ches.exe, things gone wrong

@sly root Can I redistribute Chess Titans ? People having issues with getting the right version (since the installers check your cpu arch, you need to manually extract files) but I can't any sign of licencing information

find*

It is copyrighted under Microsoft

[sly root]

i wish i could say yes, but it's almost certainly against their terms to distribute it outside of their own products or packs

[viral cypress]

I will do a tutorial video then ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[sly root]

i just had a look around and can't find anything solid either 😦

sorry

[viral cypress]

How is this even possible

[stone cove]

@pseudo escarp

[pseudo escarp]

I fixed the crash that was mentioned before. Finally, I can join the RTX chess club. Thanks!

[viral cypress]

https://youtu.be/YeyTjR5JBLk
Lets put this in Chess Titans

[rocky minnow]

looks more detailed than the Sponza scene

[sick flint]

I'll let ya'll have the fun of mapping over the materials this time

[balmy dagger]

Export everything as FBX and ingest via toolkit.

Let it burn 🔥

[sick flint]

Then file a bug report that 63GB asset import crashes the toolkit

Hopefully will get Nyle some better internet to download the asset to try

[viral cypress]

The worse thing is, this is a zip, so you need at least double the storage just to unzip it. They should have use tar instead.

[viral cypress]

They have 3 versions of each material

render is 4k everything, renderLow is 1k, renderXLow is..

256x256

Could save a lot with 4k albedo, 2k normals and 1k rest

[rocky minnow]

is there a way to hotswap mod.usda to change the placement of chess board around this whole scene

with a click of a button you can be teleported to any part of this room

[viral cypress]

You can, but it will load everything from scratch. We need something like the secret cubes for Portal, but they are hardcoded.

[sick flint]

Oh my he actually downloaded it

[viral cypress]

I managed to reduce the total size from 71GiB to 35 with this

All it took is my SSD's lifespan

[viral cypress]

I will genuinely try this, if it doesn't work, let the usd scripting hell begin

[sick flint]

Nyle sweating watching from the sidelines

[viral cypress]

My pc is dying

It maxed out everything, cpu, gpu, ram, disk

[rocky minnow]

sneak into a lab with a beast workstation PC to do this I suppose

[viral cypress]

Ah great :/

Doesn't usd composer support asset streaming?

Huh, my ssd filled up completely 😮

I don't like this

I have 2 gigs of empty space

Thats the largest swap I ever seen

[balmy dagger]

And here were his last words ✝️

[viral cypress]

Phew

Whose idea was to ship this thing with png textures

[sick flint]

I have a script that can automate the conversion if that’s whatcha need.

[viral cypress]

Yes please 🙏

[sick flint]

I’ll dm it to ya when I get home

Do you need height maps to be converted? They have an extra step with chainner

[viral cypress]

I havent found any

[viral cypress]

This script is great

tho, now I have tons of usdc files referencing to the png versions 🤔

[viral cypress]

Can't get Portal RR build with this, no chess_d3d9.log generated. Lots of this in NvRemixBridge.log:

[17:50:42.790] info:  Client window became active, reenabling timeouts for bridge server!
[17:51:44.054] info:  Client window became inactive, disabling timeouts for bridge server...
[17:51:44.609] info:  Command processing loop finished, cleaning up and exiting...
[17:51:44.609] info:  Shutdown cleanup successful, exiting now!
[17:51:44.610] info:  [Uptime]: 541s

[viral cypress]

Nevermind, it requires foss bridge

[viral cypress]

@gray pulsar like this?

[gray pulsar]

oh this was fast 🫣

[viral cypress]

This opens sooo much new possibilities

I have an issue tho, it crashes the bridge server after like 100th call.

d3d9.log

[20:33:50.058] info:  Command received: ApiSetConfigVariable
...
[20:33:50.063] info:  Command received: IDirect3D9Ex_GetAdapterMonitor
[20:33:50.063] info:  Command received: IDirect3D9Ex_CheckDeviceFormat
[20:33:50.064] info:  Command received: IDirect3D9Ex_CheckDeviceFormat
[20:33:50.064] info:  Command received: IDirect3D9Ex_CheckDeviceFormat
[20:33:50.064] info:  Command received: IDirect3D9Ex_CheckDeviceFormat
[20:33:50.797] warn:  Still waiting on the Present semaphore to be released...
[20:33:50.797] err:   Bridge was disabled while waiting on the Present semaphore, aborting current operation!

NvRemixBridge.log

[20:33:44.969] info:  [API-SV] Config Var: "rtx.skyBrightness" with lenght/size: 17 / 17
[20:33:44.970] info:  |> Config Value: "1.00"�" with lenght/size: 4 / 4
[20:33:44.970] info:  [API-SV] SetConfigVariable(): success
[20:33:45.184] info:  [API-SV] Config Var: "rtx.skyBrightness���" with lenght/size: 17 / 17
[20:33:45.185] info:  |> Config Value: "1.00�%" with lenght/size: 4 / 4
[20:33:45.186] info:  [API-SV] SetConfigVariable(): error: 1

uh

I guess its my bad

[sly root]

i was wondering if this would become possible with xor's mod

that's amazing

reminds me of what we tried to do by modifying rtx.conf with a script lol

[gray pulsar]

mhh not sure .. I remember having some weird string results here and there as well ...

[rocky minnow]

How did you manage this

asi loader?

[viral cypress]

xoxor4d 's bridge api

[viral cypress]

yea in my asi mod for chess titans

Imagine putting in an easter egg, where a plane will just randomly pop up with animated rick roll on it :D

[rocky minnow]

Noooooooooo

😭

[rocky minnow]

Or a pulsating light that lights up and dims gradually when you move a piece

Remix APIs opens opportunity for such scripting maybe

[gray pulsar]

if I can bridge the gap between the game and the bridge that is 😂

[cursive bridge]

Spit balling here, i know nothing about anything but could we potentially script the rotation of a direct light like a sun across the sky? changing its tempurture and exposure based on angle or time of day or something?

[gray pulsar]

yes you can 👍
you could even animate the post processing effects - volumetric fog parameters and more

[cursive bridge]

oh wow exciting stuff. slap this data into a direct light and rotate from -90 to +90 🙂

[viral cypress]

pufff gambit

I keep crashing the NvRemixBridge for some reason

Uh wait

I am crashing something, but it's not remix, nor my asi thread.
I don't know what is actually crashing??

@gray pulsar Does bridge api has its own thread?

[gray pulsar]

negative

[viral cypress]

Ok nevermind that, it was a dumb mistake
||I messed up the calling conventions, corrupting the stack then crashing at the second call||

[gray pulsar]

oh thank god 😂

[viral cypress]

@gray pulsar pls help!
I call bridge_api_initialize(), it succeeds, then I make sure bridge_api_initialized == true.
RegisterDevice() is taking too long, then:

d3d9.log

[20:10:01.450] info:  Command sent: Syn
[20:10:01.450] info:  Command sent: ApiRegisterDevice
[20:10:01.451] info:  Most recent Device Queue commands received by Server
[20:10:01.451] info:  Most recent Module Queue commands sent from Client
[20:10:01.451] info:  Most recent Module Queue commands received by Server
[20:10:01.471] err:   Timeout. Connection not established to server.
[20:10:01.471] err:   Are you sure the server was invoked by this application and is running?
[20:10:02.424] err:   GetAdapterCount() failed with: no response from server.
[20:10:02.440] err:   GetAdapterCount() failed with: no response from server.
[20:10:02.455] err:   GetAdapterCount() failed with: no response from server.
[20:10:02.471] err:   GetAdapterDisplayMode() failed with: no response from server.

NvRemixBridge.log

[20:09:28.678] info:  Running in x64 mode!
[20:09:28.679] info:  Launched server with GUID 798e3c3b-b07b-444d-ae05-144b15269760
[20:09:28.680] info:  Server started up, waiting for connection from client...
[20:10:01.446] err:   Timeout. Connection not established to client application/game.
[20:10:01.446] err:   Are you sure a client application/game is running and invoked this application?

[gray pulsar]

huh wasnt that working before or did you not register the device before?

[viral cypress]

I was only calling SetConfigVariable, and it was working fine. Now I tried to create a light, which I assume requires the RegisterDevice() to be called before.

[gray pulsar]

Ah gotcha. Yea indeed it does! Lets see ..

@viral cypress Could you maybe artificially delay the registration of the device to see if that fixes it?

[viral cypress]

Hmm now it executed instantly, but light stats show no sphere light (Idk if that includes lights from the api).
I think that solved it tho, now I gotta find where the light spawns.

[gray pulsar]

Yea I think you tried to register the device before the client/bridge created one

light stats wont show api lights for some reason

[viral cypress]

Still can't get the light working, gotta give it another shot tomorrow.

[22:15:46.005] info:  [API-SV] get_device(): success
[22:15:46.006] info:  [API-SV] dxvk_RegisterD3D9Device(): success
[22:15:46.006] info:  DebugMessage. i = 1337, length = 32 = 32, text = 'About to create a sphere light..9/'
[22:15:46.039] info:  DebugMessage. i = 1337, length = 57 = 57, text = 'Created (hopefully) a sphere light with handle 3621989164'

Should I expect a log in between about the CreateSphereLight?

[gray pulsar]

mhh make sure your light values are sane (not to big of a radius / radiance)
CreateLight does not create a msg but I think I'll change that to debug log

[viral cypress]

Still no dice, yea I am not trying to recreate the sun

Does the api copy the structs or should I keep it alive until destroying the light?

[gray pulsar]

Just try a distant light first .. that gets rid of the need for a specific position.
You do not need to take care of the structure lifetime on your end

[viral cypress]

Nope, I get valid handles but no light to be seen

The problem is, I am using Rust for the dll, and the issue is almost definetely with the bindings I wrote for your api. I just can't figure out where. Sorry if I am wasting your time.

You do not need to take care of the structure lifetime on your end
So I can drop it just after calling the create function? Because Rust does and I have to explicitily take control otherwise. I tried this already.

If you are interested:
https://github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/chess-titans-rtx-asi/blob/bridge_api/src/bridge_api.rs - header
https://github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/chess-titans-rtx-asi/blob/608d65cbdf51b6567285f99bb708f91e05c70c1e/src/lib.rs#L38 - implementation

[gray pulsar]

never looked at rust code before but does that return the hash value or the pointer to the value?
hash: hash(&"light0"). You could just try with a hash value of 1 .. or 13 .. 14

[viral cypress]

hash value

[gray pulsar]

and CreateDistantLight should then return the hash you specified

[viral cypress]

:(

[gray pulsar]

where can I get this game from? 😄

[sick flint]

Uh I posted it before

[viral cypress]

Huh, if I use the hash function, the handle and hash are different.
||Uh I suck||

[sick flint]

I’m sure it’s pinned here since you have to patch the exe so it doesn’t sleep the main thread.

[viral cypress]

Posted what

[viral cypress]

win7games.com
You have to open the setup with 7z, there you will find two versions of chess titans, one is x86
If you run the installer it will install x64
I think the files had the same name and in the same folder -somehow-, I remember finding it by trial & error

[sick flint]

Where to download the game

[viral cypress]

oh, its not pinned tho

[gray pulsar]

found one

[viral cypress]

so will you quickly write an asi mod to prove mine suck :D

[gray pulsar]

nah just send me yours. I'll attach VS to the bridge and see what its doing

[viral cypress]

let me trigger a build real quick

[rocky minnow]

chess titans getting the xoxor4d treatment 🙏 🔥

[sick flint]

Peak remix shall return with the second phase of chess titans

[viral cypress]

https://github.com/Kamilkampfwagen-II/chess-titans-rtx-asi/actions/runs/9860169978

[sick flint]

@gray pulsar I just remembered a fun tidbit about this game: the PDB for it is public

IDA auto downloads it from Microsoft

[viral cypress]

It turned out that I needed to call DrawLightInstance every frame, which I tried before but had an entirely different issue also.

[gray pulsar]

I've just added RegisterEndSceneCallback to the api. That allows you to register a function that the api is calling once the game calls EndScene .. that way you dont need to hook anything (I've updated the thread with example code)

[viral cypress]

So it's also game agnostic, thats super duper useful!

[gray pulsar]

indeed 🙌
https://gist.github.com/xoxor4d/f8be2acb0504732cecb1c3271dd75ad9

[viral cypress]

My first bridge api light!

It's quite boring tho

[hidden elk]

What does it do

[viral cypress]

Blind you

[hidden elk]

[viral cypress]

for now

@gray pulsar Do I need to destroy & recreate the light each time I wanna change its properties?

[gray pulsar]

Thats what the doc states yes https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/blob/main/tests/rtx/apps/README.md

Since lights are usually changing a lot (they move, their intensity varies, etc), to update a light with the new parameters, recreate it by calling remixapi_Interface::DestroyLight + remixapi_Interface::CreateLight but with the same .hash value as the old one

[viral cypress]

Huh, didn't know this page exists

thanks, now I can ping you less :)

[gray pulsar]

yea they recently added it and 2 small examples on how to use it

[frank warren]

When the world says hello back 👀

Amazing stuff you all have been up to

[sick flint]

I need to get Remix rooms for the chess board to exist in

[gray pulsar]

btw. @viral cypress is there a reason for this?
Had to change that or spawned meshes will move with the camera 🫣

[rocky minnow]

Grab a few from ReSTIR FG demo

[viral cypress]

Nah, I just liked the way light moves.

[viral cypress]

Oh btw the latest asi mod has key bindings for adjusting fov (R: default, F: +, V: -) and fullscreen (Enter)

[viral cypress]

@cursive bridge Is it possible that I can upload your mod to github?

[cursive bridge]

yep go for it 🙂 I think you can do a lot better though with these textures now
https://cc0-textures.com/t/th-floor-tiles-06