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Sudden slowdown and DirectX DRM confusion


Cid SilverWing
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Cid SilverWing

This seems to be a repeating problem - the slowdown itself - but the cause behind my particular case is sure to be a puzzle. I've been playing LRR on my Windows 7 for quite a bit without any crippling issues (aside from the usual ones, obviously).

 

I always run the game from my shortcut with 3 commands: -best -ftm -programmer

 

In Compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3, full admin rights and all that jazz. Literally only today when I decided to pop the virtual drive and play some, I observe an aggressive slowdown on the menus, Chief's animations and whenever there's a landslide. My FPS gets hit so bad even my cursor feels it.

 

I've never had this problem before, which is why this is doubly infuriating, as I've already tried the 2 choices of video cards on the CLGEN thing without results.

 

Relevant specs:

NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 (4GB RAM)

Intel Core i5 CPU quad-core, 3,33 GHz

16GB System RAM

 

The problem is the game RUNS, and it's fully functional, but the slowdown makes inputs sluggish.

 

While I'm writing this post, I ran into an aggravating anomaly with the DRM thing - I tried to bypass the problem by running VirtualPC and installing the game there, but nothing in the world would make the game desist with the "No Direct3D accelerator found" nonsense, even after putting the DRM file in the game directory and adjusting compatibility modes. It will only ever launch directly from the .exe, never the shortcut, with or without the file. Even then it always prompts me to pick a video device, which for a Virtual Windows XP 32-bit installation, gives me only the single choice of "RGB Emulation".

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Doesn't sound like the problem is a fault of LRR, but something else. Any recent changes to drivers? Updates? new programs?

 

No one hasn't gotten LRR to run on a VM past level select with RGB mode.

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Cid SilverWing

Been updating my video drivers regularly, as I'm supposed to. It's admittedly been a number of months since I last played, but this slowdown came completely out of left field all the same.

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Running LRR with integrated graphics instead of my GPU makes it run flawlessly. Go into your nVidia control panel and set LRR to not use your GPU.

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Even then it always prompts me to pick a video device,

 

It always does that when you launch it from the .exe without any special parameters.

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Been updating my video drivers regularly, as I'm supposed to. It's admittedly been a number of months since I last played, but this slowdown came completely out of left field all the same.

Well, I know that at least for AMD... updates to their drivers have stop the game from working. I don't know about nVidia, but it's not that far fetched to assume this will also happen at some point.

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Cid SilverWing

Running LRR with integrated graphics instead of my GPU makes it run flawlessly. Go into your nVidia control panel and set LRR to not use your GPU.

 

Went into the control panel and couldn't find much. Do you have any screenshots of precisely where the relevant setting is?

 

EDIT: Found the settings, and while it did seem to alleviate the menu slowdown, Chief's animations still chop my framerate. Least it's a LITTLE more playable than before now.

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If you don't mind modding your game, you can turn Chief's animations off. In the Lego.cfg file, there's a line near the top:

DisplayAdvisor			TRUE
Change that to FALSE and he will go away and stop tanking your framerate. His voice will remain.
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You need to extract the game files first. Start here: '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>

Cyrem hasn't finished the new modding tutorial and he archived the old one. Here are some relevant bits:

Modding Tools

Before you get started you are going to need some tools to modify the game. Most of the tools that do the "modification" are made by the community. This means that everything you need is free and doesn't have any sort of adware bundled with them like a lot of other software do.

PSPad - Website

This application not required, however it is a recommend because it contain a lot of neat tools that modders and programmers will use. It also heaps keep the files you will edit nicely formatted. Alternately you could use Notepad.

WAD Tool - Topic

You must download this tool. It is used to extract the files out of LEGO® Rock Raider's data files. To run this program you must have Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 installed. If you don't have this, you can download it here.

Preparation

Now that you know what you can do and have downloaded the required tools; it is time to start preparing a modding environment. Setting up the mod environment is required because if you don't you could easily forget the mods you have made and could wind up with a game that won't start and you won't know why. So please take the time to setup the environment.

The first thing you will need to do is make a backup of the LEGO® Rock Raiders game directory. This is very important so we can keep our modded game separate from the original. If you have installed to the default installation directory you can find the folder in C:Program FilesLEGO® MediaGames Rock Raiders . If you can't find the folder there try doing a search for LegoRR.exe and that should lead you to the correct folder. Next, copy the whole Rock Raiders folder and paste it in the same place. This will create a copy of that folder. Rename the folder to Rock Raiders (Modded) or any other name you please.

Next up, we will create a shortcut the will unlock all the game levels. The point of this is so that when you are modding you can test you mods on different levels without having to unlock them. We are going to create this shortcut in your Rock Raiders (Modded) folder, so go into there. Now, single click on LegoRR.exe so that it is highlighted then press (ALT) and drag and drop the file in the same folder. This will create a shortcut to that file. Rename the shortcut to LegoRR - Levels Unlocked. After that, right click on the shortcut and choose 'Properties' from the menu that appears. In the "Target" text field on the "Shortcut" tab you will see a path to LegoRR.exe with quotes around it. After the closing quote type in: -testlevels (Don't put quotes around this part.) and click "Ok" to close the dialogue. To test that you did this correctly, run the game from that shortcut and the game levels should all be unlocked.

WAD Files

Now that you are initially prepared we'll take on some more preparation by understand what a WAD file is and what it does. WAD files are a data file that contains most of the graphics, sounds and configuration files that LEGO® Rock Raiders uses. It is similar to a ZIP file however it does not encrypt and does not compress. Rock Raiders comes with two WAD files and you will find them in your Rock Raiders (Modded) folder you previously created.

These two WAD files called LegoRR0.wad and LegoRR1.wad contain files within them. LegoRR0.wad contains the game graphics such as images and 3D models, level files and most of the sounds. LegoRR1.wad contains the main game configuration file and the objective text for each level. We will want to get these files out, so this is why you have downloaded the WAD Tool.

WAD Extraction

The WAD tool really makes extraction quite easy and it usually only takes a few clicks to do it. To begin the extraction process, start the program. On the program menu, click File then choose Open WAD. This will bring up the open file dialog to locate a WAD file to open. Now in this dialog, browse to the Rock Raiders (Modded) folder which we created earlier for modding. Now in that folder select LegoRR0.wad as the first file we will extract and click Open. After a few seconds to a minute the file will have loaded into the extractor. To finish the extraction process, click WAD from the menu and choose Extract All Files.

After around 30 seconds all the files should have extracted to a new folder called LegoRR0 within the Rock Raiders (Modded) folder. Now repeat this same process except open and extract the LegoRR1.wad file this time. Once this is done you will have two folders: LegoRR0 and LegoRR1 within the Rock Raiders (Modded) folder.

Preparation Part II

Ok, now for the last bit of preparation. You are now going to move the files from these extracted folders to another so that modifications can be made to the game quickly. Essentially we are changing they way it loads files from a WAD file to loading the files individually.

Firstly, open the LegoRR0 folder within the Rock Raiders (Modded) folder you just extracted previously. Now select all the files and folder within LegoRR0 and copy them. Then browse back to the Rock Raiders (Modded) folder and open the Data folder. Paste the files and folders you copied with the Data folder. If a message comes up asking whether or not to merge folders, click yes. Next do the same thing with the LegoRR1 folder you extracted by copying all the files and folders within that folder and pasting them in the Data folder.

Once all the files and folders from LegoRR0 and LegoRR1 have been moved into the Data folder, delete the LegoRR0 and LegoRR1 folders that are within Rock Raiders (Modded) folder. Lastly rename the LegoRR0 and LegoRR1 WAD files to something different to prevent the game from loading the originals.

Your First Mod: "Hello World" loading bar

You have finally made it to making your first game modification to Rock Raiders! So for our first mod we are going to try something easy. What you're going to do is change the text "Loading" when the game starts to the very famous welcome "Hello World".

Browse back to your Rock Raiders (Modded) folder and open the Data folder. In there you should see a file called Lego.cfg. Open this file with PSPad that you downloaded at the beginning of this guide. Once you have opened this file you will see that it is quite a large configuration file. Now you will see the text "Main" followed by an opening bracket "{". You can call this a Properties Section because at the end of Main's properties there is a closing bracket "}". Now in the Main properties section look for a line starting with LoadingText. This is one of Main's properties and to the right is the value of the LoadingText property. The value of LoadingText is set to "Loading" by default, so if we change this the change will be reflected in the game also. So to complete this modification, change "Loading" to "Hello_World" without the quotes but with the underscore. If you are wondering, the underscore "_" represents a space in the text. If we didn't put the underscore between the words the game will crash.

And that is it, the final line that you edited should look like this before you save it:

LoadingText Hello_World

Special Thanks

I would like to say “thank-you” to the Rock Raiders United Community. Without this great group of people Rock Raiders would still be just another failed game with long lost fans. The original sole purpose of Rock Raiders United was to bring together fans and put life back into this game through modding. With over 100 members, this community has done just that and continues to grow.

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