Psychotoxic (2004) Absolute Mess of a game

[rotund pike]

This game is an utter mess and there's one immediate word I need to put here that'll probably murder any further interest in the game BUT someone did solve this part already... sorta...

Ahem: Starforce. There's a Russian distribution of this game that removed that stuff better than the other patch floating around online that I remember, but I'm not sure how perfect it is.

So putting that main thing aside, this game has one very famous issue that led to a partial fix coming into existence thanks to me. The developers made use of the VP3 video codec, I believe, to save on license stuff, and the way they implemented it into the game engine is quite strange, and I'm not sure if anybody else ever did it. It's an OpenGL game engine, and the videos are played back with a DirectX-based video decoding playback instance that is RENDERED over the OpenGL instance of the game using a poorly documented feature of Windows that got removed after XP, literally breaking this game just a couple years after it originally came out (like if I remember how it was described correctly, the OpenGL instance literally is put to sleep when anything directx is in focus).

The dxwnd developer gho created a partial fix for the issue, but I've always wondered if there could maybe be a more definitive way of fixing the issue (like the gho fix is awkward to record with OBS because if you try using game capture, OBS literally loses focus on the game whenever any videos are played, and they play alot of videos for this game; oh and also it only works in windowed mode, gho never solved the issue for fullscreen use). At the very least, digging into said functionality because this game is bizarre.

Cover Art

[rotund pike]

I'm finding there's confused discussion of bypassing the DRM on myabandonware because they only provided the game files there, no explanation. I should try messing with this game again someday to see if I remembered things correctly with dropping in the russian exe. there was never any patch release for the game anyhow. This game BTW is a very pure definition of abandonware because apparently the publisher is gone and nobody involved wanted to touch the game anymore, and apparently it was even pulled from shelves? Might be remembering the last part wrong but yeh there was a ton of BTS drama for this.

[woeful viper]

KRBDZSKL (well-known Starforce cracker) posted a DRM-free patch for v1.0 of this game on rutracker. You might wanna try it. Cannot link to it here.

[rotund pike]

that might be the version we had ran in the past

depends on how old it is

strange thing is, I don't recall the game ever having any official patches

so it's weird to be seeing something labelled "1.4" unless that's just related to their versions of cracking it

huh, I guess there's more bugs than I thought. In the past I was playing with a rip of the "3 CD" version, and apparently there was also a DVD release

APPARENTLY, I'm just now learning this, the DVD version might be a newer version and also it has its own bugs.

well, I played the 3 CD english version to clarify, and someone else did a segmented run using the russian version that iunno if that was 3 CD or DVD type.

later I got ahold of a russian version, damned if I remember what, that had a pretty good DRM free executable, the nature of which I'm uncertain.

that exe could be placed into the english installation with no problems that I ever experienced

way better than the crack exe I had used with it prior (that still had some DRM nonsense in it)

[rotund pike]

I think they used lua 4 for scripting with this game. It's obfuscated or encoded or whatever so you can't edit it, but if it could be made tangible, that'd probably blow the floodgates open for making the game less stupid. Perhaps replace the video playback stuff with something better.