🚀 go-pugleaf

On 1/5/2011 12:14 AM, John Lewis wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2011 01:20:06 -0000, "Trimble Bracegirdle"
> <no-spam@never.spam>  wrote:
>
>
>> The problem occurs at the start up of these games which can not cope
>> with modern complexities in the ATI OpenGl driver.
>
> Huh. What "modern complexities" ?
>
> How  inconvenient, when a comprehensive OpenGL driver fix on ATi's
> part would probably have been a 15 minute exercise by one of their
> driver team.. ATi's GL support seems to be always late and
> half-baked...

Except that in this case, it is due to a bug in id software game
engines. One of the first things the software in Quake 3 (and also
Quake 2) engine do, is to ask for the openGl extensions supported
by the graphic driver. It also sets aside a memory buffer where
the reply from the driver (a list of extensions) are stored.
These early games didn't anticipate the number of extensions
that would be supported by subsequent versions of the API. So you
either get buffer overrun or seriously cut down list of extensions
(if the application writer at least checked for a max limit) which
either crash the game or affect regular functioning.

I downloaded Return to Castle Wolfenstein source code, to fix it
myself and the problem was obvious. Actually, the code even had
a comment about the buffer size not enough for future compatibility
and someone had arbitrarily increased the size about two or
three times as a quick workaround.

When nVidia released OpenGl 4.0 support, their customers ran into
exact same problem. Quake 3 games stopped working. To their credit
though, they fixed the issue quickly by detecting the application
and then only sending extensions supported by OpenGl 2.0. ATI's
10.10e (hotfix) drivers do the same and most Quake3/2 games work
(with Call of Duty as the only big exception)

Until ATI added fix for game engine's shortcoming, the workaround
was to copy atioglxx.dll (from Catalyst 10.4 and before) into the
game directory. I am not sure why that method stopped working
for Trimble. Currently I have three Quake 3 engine games installed.
Alice and Quake 3 (both original and Live) run fine without any
issues on 10.10e driver, and Call of Duty requires copying the dll file.

My 2¢
--
Noman