4Story charters, monsters, mounts are not animated

Hagar · Post by **Hagar** » Mon May 11, 2009 7:48 am

Hi,
4Story is free mmorpg game, some kind WoW clone. Its run fine but has really annoying bug reported here http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17488 by Pat and confirmed by me and Irfan Adilovic. There is nothing going on around this bug since February. Its not random bug its rather solid

so maybe finding it and fixing wont be so hard. In addition, as I said before game is totally free so you can install it on your machine and do you developers magic that we poor wine user arent even able to imagine

If any developer would push things bit forward we would be appreciated.

jay · Post by **jay** » Mon May 11, 2009 10:03 am

Hmmm,
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=7888
needs a cleanup I think:

Don't you need the most recent version to play anyway?
Probably it's best to merge all versions listed to "4Story All Versions" (e.g. like http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=2243 ).

Then those playing it should use all their votes on them so it might get some dev love sooner or later.

I'm not a wine dev (yet) though, just a user, good luck...

whaevr · Post by **whaevr** » Tue May 12, 2009 6:39 pm

I've put my vote on it..

Also made a video of it..you can view it below by clicking the link, the game really does work great if it wasn't for that one bug.

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=8OQY869Y

Irfy · Post by **Irfy** » Wed May 13, 2009 5:50 am

Got two things to note:

1) Votes go into bugs, and bugs are not duplicated for different versions, rather, all the different versions are marked as being affected by this one bug. Thus, merging the versions into one won't help in the voting.

If however, the two versions ever get different problems, we'd have to split them again later, so I'm generally against merging the different versions.

2) The game is very very very playable with this bug. It just not as nice, but it's completely functional.

What bothers me more (and is higher up in my what does not work list) is the overhead texts. When you fight against players from the other kingdom, you don't see colors and cannt read the text. Thus you cannot decide whether to run away or stay and fight. You cannot even know if they are friends or fiends. And this has nothing to do with 3D, so it should be even easier to fix.

I guess I'm just too lazy to post a bug about it, seeing how uninteresting they are for developers...

Hagar · Post by **Hagar** » Thu May 14, 2009 4:48 am

Hi Irfy,
1. You have absolutely right about voting for bugs. But there is second voting application popularity. You can see it in the table on the left. All users have 3 points to vote. Guild wars all version have 142 votes and is second on platinum apps list when you enter AppDB.. that is why I would like to merge and I think that is why jay suggested it.

I personally don't think that 4Story need versions. In my opinion all game versions (global, German, Polish) have the same engine, the same core only difference is content (items, quest) and language. As such shouldn't create different bugs. If in the future we will have to split, ok let's be it but now we don't but what we really need is to turn developers attention at 4Story and it bugs.

2 Yes, game is playable but I asked two of my friends to play. They installed, played 10 minutes and left it, all because this bug.

I'm not so far in game to take part in wars

but I get you. All overhead text are very hard to read. You have my word I'll report that bug soon, but I have to check something first. I've seen in registry that game wants arial font.. maybe installing it into wine will fix this bug and I want to check different dpi settings.

Btw: You have wrote about problems you have with fullscreen. Can you change game resolution (in game or using setting button before connectiong)? For me game runs 1024x768 and I'm not able to change that this way.
I'm using Kubuntu 9.04 with nvidia repository driver. Starting the game kills my advanced settings (compiz like) but there was no problem for me to alt+tab but my desktop was then in game resolution (1024x768). I have found that there are two keys in registry that set resolution for 4Story. Run regedit from comand line find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Zemi Interactive\4Story_PL\Settings. There are ScreenX and ScreenY entries, right click on each choose modify then set decimal and put your desktop resolution. I've changed them to my desktop resolution (1440x900) now everything runs fine (I'm able to alt+tab even with compiz like plugins). Maybe that is beter workaround for you. Let me know if it helps so I'll write overall guide about that.

Taking things together what do you think about:
1. Deleting old version "open beta" and "1.01" they are unmaintained and forgotten.
2. Merging "1.2 German (03/22/09)" and "12.17.09" together into all versions.

DaVince · Post by **DaVince** » Thu May 14, 2009 4:23 pm

Hagar wrote:2 Yes, game is playable but I asked two of my friends to play. They installed, played 10 minutes and left it, all because this bug.

Don't mind that, more important bugs that actually make the game less playable go first.

jay · Post by **jay** » Sat May 16, 2009 8:45 am

No offense, but I'm a bit amused at some statements in this thread.

Character animation is for sure very important for the gaming experience, calling a game very³ playable without character animation is like calling a movie completely watchable if there's no (good/real) acting (but the story and effects [sorta] work! "It just not as nice, but it's completely functional") or "the MS office interface is in all flashy [blinking!] pink - who cares, everything else works!"

The animations deliver a huge part of the gaming atmosphere and without it the game is awkward and annoying to look at - and completely different from the windows gaming experience to say the least.

If that games players wouldn't want animations and stuff they would have picked some command line MUD game etc.. but they picked a recent 3d game and have to notice there's no character animation AT ALL.

By the way, I'm sure the same bug affects other games, at least it really reminds me of the bug in of a particular 3d sex game (I think it was "cherrydolls", but need to download and check), which is actually more entertaining without any character animations and eyes and teeth floating outside of the body

but I guess you would consider character animation more important for gameplay there

I'm not saying that someone has to do something about this bug (I'm not even playing the game myself), but I think claiming that the lack of character animations in a modern 3d MMORPG isn't important is rather ridiculous, especially because the awkward, obvious and permanently visible bug of lacking any character/model animation will have almost every windows user trying the game on wine saying "WTF?! LOL! no thanks!" and go right back to windows.

As I consider this bug quite important or at least interesting (I'm also trying to find other games affected by it) I'm currently trying to find out why it comes to "warn:d3d:transform_worldex Unsupported blend matrix set" instead of the animation (if I override that check the bug looks the same like it did in cherrydolls -> bone animation is moving the whole model instead of it's parts, making it tilting), but I'm new at this and it might be an unsolvable d3d/opengl incompatibility .. whatever.

Have a nice day,
Jay

PS: Oh and yes, those names/overhead texts are indeed quite a pain to read :/

whaevr · Post by **whaevr** » Sat May 16, 2009 11:25 am

I submitted a bug report for the text as well. I then also submitted it to be linked to 4Story.

I also requested to become a super maintainer so I could clean up all the old versions and what not.

Also jay, I agree with what you said completely.

And Hagar tell your friends to vote for the app if they don't like the state its currently in. Everyone that trys it and doesn't like it should

I mean to get on the top 10 list for silver apps you need at least 31 votes..that doesn't seem like a lot.

jay · Post by **jay** » Sat May 16, 2009 11:48 am

Well, so that's what I found out so far:
The problem seem to be that 4story uses the vertex blending extension for character animation. Vertex blending was supportet by (some) old ati cards and later got emulated by either the operating system or by the (windows, not linux) drivers using vertex shaders. So Wine would need to have an own way to handle vertex blending (e.g. using vertex shaders) in case the driver doesn't support or emulate it, but that's quite a large task in comparision to the few applications that actually rely on vertex blending.

also see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emul ... ocus=56766

It's probably an interesting (but not too easy) task though.

Let's hope we have more luck with the name issue hehe,
Jay

jay · Post by **jay** » Sat May 16, 2009 12:48 pm

whaevr wrote:I submitted a bug report for the text as well. I then also submitted it to be linked to 4Story.

Interesting, I just noticed that the character captions (names+icons) seem to display correctly (readable and colored) when the camera is really really close to the name, can you confirm that?
I first seemed to me that "blue" is supposed to be transparency as the text/symbols get more and more blue the farther the camera moves away, but couldn't find any overhead text transparancy on screenshots, so I guess, judging by the color, that it's the (exact the same shade of) blue "fog" which is beyond the visible area, which is calculated for those captions, but with the wrong distance...

whaevr · Post by **whaevr** » Sat May 16, 2009 5:23 pm

Your right!

Although the camera has to be pretty close for it to turn normal. Like you said.

Seems you figured it out...

whaevr · Post by **whaevr** » Sat May 16, 2009 5:39 pm

I added an up-close screenshot showing the proper text with your explanation on bugzilla.

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18494

jay · Post by **jay** » Sun May 17, 2009 12:07 pm

whaevr wrote:I added an up-close screenshot

Me too

whaevr · Post by **whaevr** » Sun May 17, 2009 8:01 pm

Now we just need people to vote for the app.

Hagar · Post by **Hagar** » Mon May 18, 2009 8:59 am

Hi guys.
Nice to hear some voice from you.

Jay I agree with you that this animation bug is very important. As I said this bug is pushing people away. If I called game "playable" I meant that there is no bugs that would prevent you from leveling up and getting better gear. I didn't mean visual playability and comfort.

Whaevr big thx for reporting text bug and yes I can confirm that text is displayed OK when camera is close to object. It happens that I'm super maintainer of 4Story

In my second post in that thread I did two ideas how clean up and change 4Story AppDB

1. Deleting old version "open beta" and "1.01" they are unmaintained and forgotten.
2. Merging "1.2 German (03/22/09)" and "12.17.09" together into all versions.

Guys give me a green light and its done ASAP

. I told my friends to vote but they were to lazy to register

I have idea to post on 4Story forums (global, Polish) and ask all people of good will

to vote..but after we clean up things in AppDB.

jay
If I get that well 4Story uses some kind old unsupported API to animate models and that's why we have this bug?

jay · Post by **jay** » Mon May 18, 2009 10:45 am

Hagar wrote:In my second post in that thread I did two ideas how clean up and change 4Story AppDB
1. Deleting old version "open beta" and "1.01" they are unmaintained and forgotten.
2. Merging "1.2 German (03/22/09)" and "12.17.09" together into all versions.
Guys give me a green light and its done ASAP

I checked the 4story german website (fortunately I can understand German

), it seems that the publisher gameforge is doing the translation instead of the original producers/publishers (ZEMI).
They seem to keep the codebase unchanged, but e.g. they needed 2 months for translating and releasing one of the bigger patches.

Therefore I would suggest:
Delete non-existing/obsolete versions ("1.01", "Open Beta"), but keep the English version and the German version separated.
Due to the translation delay, bugs affecting the original version may not (yet) be affecting the German version.
They couldn't be reproduced there or could even be related to game features with wouldn't even be available in the German version.

I would suggest these "version" changes:

"12/17/08" -> "English version by ZEMI INTERACTIVE INC."
"1.2 (German, 03/22/09)" -> "German version by Gameforge AG"

and, if anybody is willing to test it, the Korean version can be added as well of course.
Maybe ZEMI releases English patches at the same time as the original Korean ones, then they could have a common entry "English/Korean version by ZEMI INTERACTIVE INC.", if not they would have to be separated too for the same patch delay reasons as with the German version.

I don't understand any Korean, so I couldn't find out if they released their patches together with the English ones or earlier ;-P

So whenever a German patch would be released you would log in and check if the wine bugs that were detected in the same English patch weeks ago (and not fixed by now) are in the German version too. If yes you would link the bug to the German version as well.

Hagar wrote: jay
If I get that well 4Story uses some kind old unsupported API to animate models and that's why we have this bug?

Yes, sorta - at least that's the way I understood it.
I will have a closer look when I get a chance too, but if you want to discuss this further with me just send me your AIM/YIM/ICQ/MSN/SKYPE/IRC/whatever as PM so I can add you to my contact lists.

Best Regards,
Jay

PS: I recently started playing Perfect World. This game has like 11 different publishers, some translate the game in various languages, others add an own development team and game features etc... That's why I had the idea of checking who the German publisher of 4Story is and how they influence their game version ^^.

PPS: Yes I know, I type terribly much...

Irfy · Post by **Irfy** » Mon May 18, 2009 1:03 pm

jay, it's a personal view on things, obviously. I'm not trying to generalize things - you shouldn't either. It just happens that I couldn't care less about animations (*), and that the overhead texts majorly annoy me. There are votes, we can vote on the bugs - everyone's happy. I don't think that arguing about importance of things, expecting everyone to agree is productive.

And whatever I think is not arbitrary - there is always a reason for my opinion: the overhead texts problem majorly influences my ability to find out whether I'm surrounded by enemies when I port myself to another place during a war, which makes it difficult to be effective, and of help to my guild.

On the other hand, the animations are a pure eye candy, they don't hinder you in doing anything, they just visually annoy. However, I acknowledge that my "just" is your "majorly".

(*) That was an overstatement for the sake of the argument. I do care about animatons, they're the second item on my annoyances list.

jay wrote:No offense, but I'm a bit amused at some statements in this thread.

Character animation is for sure very important for the gaming experience, calling a game very³ playable without character animation is like calling a movie completely watchable if there's no (good/real) acting (but the story and effects [sorta] work! "It just not as nice, but it's completely functional") or "the MS office interface is in all flashy [blinking!] pink - who cares, everything else works!"

The animations deliver a huge part of the gaming atmosphere and without it the game is awkward and annoying to look at - and completely different from the windows gaming experience to say the least.

If that games players wouldn't want animations and stuff they would have picked some command line MUD game etc.. but they picked a recent 3d game and have to notice there's no character animation AT ALL.

By the way, I'm sure the same bug affects other games, at least it really reminds me of the bug in of a particular 3d sex game (I think it was "cherrydolls", but need to download and check), which is actually more entertaining without any character animations and eyes and teeth floating outside of the body but I guess you would consider character animation more important for gameplay there

I'm not saying that someone has to do something about this bug (I'm not even playing the game myself), but I think claiming that the lack of character animations in a modern 3d MMORPG isn't important is rather ridiculous, especially because the awkward, obvious and permanently visible bug of lacking any character/model animation will have almost every windows user trying the game on wine saying "WTF?! LOL! no thanks!" and go right back to windows.

As I consider this bug quite important or at least interesting (I'm also trying to find other games affected by it) I'm currently trying to find out why it comes to "warn:d3d:transform_worldex Unsupported blend matrix set" instead of the animation (if I override that check the bug looks the same like it did in cherrydolls -> bone animation is moving the whole model instead of it's parts, making it tilting), but I'm new at this and it might be an unsolvable d3d/opengl incompatibility .. whatever.

Have a nice day,
Jay

PS: Oh and yes, those names/overhead texts are indeed quite a pain to read :/

Irfy · Post by **Irfy** » Mon May 18, 2009 1:13 pm

About the merging thing, I don't think it's a big deal anyway. I'm slightly biased to keeping all active versions separate, abandoning old versions, but it can't be bad if we collapse them all to a single one - Hagar you have my blessing to do whatever you see fit

jay · Post by **jay** » Mon May 18, 2009 1:41 pm

Irfy wrote:jay, it's a personal view on things, obviously. I'm not trying to generalize things - you shouldn't either. It just happens that I couldn't care less about animations (*), and that the overhead texts majorly annoy me. There are votes, we can vote on the bugs - everyone's happy. I don't think that arguing about importance of things, expecting everyone to agree is productive.

And whatever I think is not arbitrary - there is always a reason for my opinion: the overhead texts problem majorly influences my ability to find out whether I'm surrounded by enemies when I port myself to another place during a war, which makes it difficult to be effective, and of help to my guild.

On the other hand, the animations are a pure eye candy, they don't hinder you in doing anything, they just visually annoy. However, I acknowledge that my "just" is your "majorly".

(*) That was an overstatement for the sake of the argument. I do care about animatons, they're the second item on my annoyances list.

Hehe, no, I don't really care about the animations, but I see that there are (many) people that do care about them and I won't pretend they don't exist and that the lack of animation is not important just because I don't need them.

Hagar · Post by **Hagar** » Mon May 18, 2009 2:05 pm

Old versions deleted. There are three versions now: English (global), German and Polish (coming soon). If you want vote for application popularity please use English (Global) version.

whaevr · Post by **whaevr** » Mon May 18, 2009 4:38 pm

There..we've pretty much given the whole 4Story app a facelift here.

Everything is much more organized and we have the bugs properly documented, and the tests are up-to-date.

Its a wine dev's dream come true

All we need now is votes..

*cough*community*cough*