Making The Classic Client Less Eye-Bleedicious

[FiftyTifty]

Seeing as how the Enhanced Client is getting bugger all attention, I decided ta mess around and see what I could get workin' with the eye-killing client of yore. What might be contributing to it, in windowed mode anyway, is that GDI and GDI+ aren't hardware accelerated in post-Windows XP operating systems. in Windows Vista and onwards, we're running Ultima Online on the CPU when windowed.

Enable full screen, and it uses either DirectDraw or Direct2D, cannae remember which.


ANYHOW!

I've managed to get it...Bearably smooth, but there are two problems: the mouse icon frequently flickers, and the full screen mode is limited to 1024x768. Changing the resolution in UOSteam causes the client to crash, once you get past the login screen.

Anyhow, 'eres me settings so far:

[article]
Right-click client.exe -> Properties -> Compatibility:

"Run this program in compatibility mode for:" "Windows XP (Service Pack 3)"

Enable: "Disable visual themes"
Enable: "Disable desktop compisition"
Enable: "Run this program as an administrator"




UOSteam:

General

Disable: "Reduce CPU usage"


Options -> Title Bar

Set "Custom title bar mode" to "Disabled"




Uo.cfg:

Find the "FullScreenRes" entry.

Change FullScreenRes= to whatever resolution you want; this will shrink the gameplay window (due to the higher resolution) whilst giving more black space for UI placement.

e.g:

FullScreenRes=1280x1024




In-game Options:


Mouse Icon

Enable: Run Mouse in a separate Thread


Eye Icon

Disable: "Enable page flipping in full screen mode"
Disable: "Use GDI in full screen mode"
Disable: "Reduce display framerate"
Enable: "Use full screen display"
Enable: "Enable frame skipping. May improve performance on slow video cards"

[/article]

Razor is a flickering mess, so that's a no-go.


Any tips on how to get rid of the mouse flicker? It's a bloody pain I tell ya.


An' fer those curious, ta show that I ain't running on some Windows 95-era compy, me specs are:

OS: Windows 7 64bit. GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB. CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 3.4GHz. RAM: 4x4GB DDR3 1333MHz.

 

[Voxpire]

What happens if you change the client's option to run the mouse in a separate thread?

 

[FiftyTifty]

What happens if you change the client's option to run the mouse in a separate thread?

It's on by default. Disabling it gets rid of the flicker, but moving the mouse becomes agony; as if it's running at 8 fps or so. Probably because it's synced to the Classic Client's framerate when it isn't pushed to a separate thread.
[doublepost=1463841855][/doublepost]To get more in-depth as to why full screen "feels" better than windowed, here's a Microsoft article on the matter.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/li...ng_direct2d_and_gdi_acceleration_in_windows_7

In particular:

Location of resources
GDI maintains its resources, in particular bitmaps, in system memory by default. Direct2D maintains its resources in video memory on the display adapter. When GDI needs to update video memory, this must be done over the bus, unless the resource is already in the aperture memory segment or if the operation can be expressed directly. In contrast, Direct2D can simply translate its primitives to Direct3D primitives because the resources are already in video memory.

Naturally, this will drive frametimes up the wall, which makes windowed mode feel worse, as there is more latency getting in the way. What's even worse, is that GDI is only software accelerated on Vista, and is only partially hardware accelerated on Windows 7 and newer.

 

[FiftyTifty]

Found out that you can adjust the full screen resolution just by editing the UO.cfg file. In particular:

[article]FullScreenRes=1024x768[/article]

Merely edit it to whatever resolution you want. I find that the actual render window, where all the fun happens, is too small for 1280x1024. FullScreenRes=1152x864 is a good res, for us non-rectangular monitor people. Take note that changing the settings via the option window in-game will reset the full screen res to default, so do this after getting everything configgerificated.

Shame that the same trick doesn't work for the render window. Ah well.

I'll update the first post ta include this lil' nugget.

Edit: Bah, it's gotta be a 5:4 resolution, I think. Setting it to FullScreenRes=1280x1024 works, but FullScreenRes=1152x864 just defaults back to 1024x768

Edit2: This is bizarre. Changing the resolution doesn't work anymore; it defaults back to 1024x768. Last night, however, it worked just fine.

Bloody odd.