Attached is a patch for some hacks that will get The Sims to run and not crash (for a while).
First, there's the easy problem of the cursors not working. This is because Sims.exe calls LoadCursorFromFile on a bunch of files that contain icons, not cursors. As the only difference between the two is that the cursor has a hotspot in front of it, I added some code to treat the icon as a cursor with no hotspot. Other programs may benefit from this patch, as it seems it is something you can get away with on Windows.
Then there's the problem of the actual crash. This is caused by CreateSurface in ddraw returning an error and Sims.exe doesn't check for the error. It is returning an error because Sims.exe is trying to create a depth buffer without specifying a valid pixelformat. Note that it actually does pass a pixelformat, it's just all zeros, except for the dwSize member. Again, this appears to be something you can get away with on Windows.. the pixelformat defaults to the current screen format.
Once these patches are applied there are significant problems with the game.
Minor: the company logo flashes and won't go away without a mouse click. Minor: the scrolling text of pointless terms sometimes overlaps itself Annoyance: there seems to be some blitting error on the "neighborhood" screen that results in parts of the splash screen not being overwritten. Major: the characters in the game are not redrawn correctly, and eventually, it will crash.
Overall result: not playable.
If someone with a better understanding of wined3d code could have a look, I'd love to receive some hints on what could be causing these issues.
Thanks,
Trent
Hi,
First, thank you for all the debugging work with the game. This is exactly what we need, people who debug their favorite apps and find out what is going wrong.
First, there's the easy problem of the cursors not working. This is because Sims.exe calls LoadCursorFromFile on a bunch of files that contain icons, not cursors. As the only difference between the two is that the cursor has a hotspot in front of it, I added some code to treat the icon as a cursor with no hotspot. Other programs may benefit from this patch, as it seems it is something you can get away with on Windows.
I do not know this Function, but you can find out what really happens on windows by writing a test app that does the same with this function as The Sims. The test should be included in dlls/user32/tests/.
Then there's the problem of the actual crash. This is caused by CreateSurface in ddraw returning an error and Sims.exe doesn't check for the error. It is returning an error because Sims.exe is trying to create a depth buffer without specifying a valid pixelformat. Note that it actually does pass a pixelformat, it's just all zeros, except for the dwSize member. Again, this appears to be something you can get away with on Windows.. the pixelformat defaults to the current screen format.
Also here a test will be helpfull, and here I know the Function. I suspect that Windows overwrites the pixelformat. In older DirectDraw versions, a z buffer bit depth is set in the dwMipmapCount member in the surface description. A test could be included in dlls/ddraw/tests/dsurface.c. You can copy one of the existing tests to create a surface with the same properties The Sims sets. Then check the returned value, perhaps it should fail, but with a different error code. If it succeeds, call GetSurfaceDesc on the new surface and check the pixelformat.
On 05/09/07, Stefan Dösinger stefandoesinger@gmx.at wrote:
First, there's the easy problem of the cursors not working. This is because Sims.exe calls LoadCursorFromFile on a bunch of files that contain icons, not cursors. As the only difference between the two is that the cursor has a hotspot in front of it, I added some code to treat the icon as a cursor with no hotspot. Other programs may benefit from this patch, as it seems it is something you can get away with on Windows.
I do not know this Function, but you can find out what really happens on windows by writing a test app that does the same with this function as The Sims. The test should be included in dlls/user32/tests/.
That's a known issue actually. My original cursor patchset solved that by checking the file's magic in CURSORICON_LoadFromFile().
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H. Verbeet -
Stefan Dösinger -
Trent Waddington