[Warhammer Dark Omen Forum]

Warhammer Dark Omen Forum

They all existed before the PC game. Even some of the named characters had models.
Possible exception: Witch Hunters first appeared as a model in 2010.

Their miniatures catalog in 1996 was 180+ pages. Plus they already had out 8 army books.

The Imperial Steam Tank was released in 1992.

40K: Gladius Relics of War free on Steam until June 1, 2023
https://store.steampowered.com/app/489630/Warhammer_40000_Gladius__Relics_of_War/

Epic 40k: Final liberation is free for the next 41 hours.

https://www.gog.com/#giveaway

Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - free on GOG until June 8th 2022

https://www.gog.com/en/game/warhammer_skulls_2022_digital_goodie_pack

I thinking my ddwrapper should work with `BltMirror=1`.
So the `to do` is to check that the wrapper works properly with Dark Omen's Direct3D on Windows (ddwrapper doesn't work with most d3d games...). Figure out how to use a proxy dll of a built-in dll in Wine...

My GOG Sothr install guide for Wine is here.
Check out my *newly fixed* color cursors for SOTHR here.

The primary directdraw surface is specified as both the source and destination of a DDBLTFX_MIRRORUPDOWN operation.

I actual wrote a wrapper to fix this ~6 years ago... old versions of dgvoodoo2 had a similar issue with this operation.

I'll see what I can dig up this weekend.

p.s. I got SOTHR working with Wine. I patched it to use 32-bit color... because when I tried playing around with

Code:

Xephyr :1 -screen 640x480x8

I messed something up and couldn't use my Ubuntu install for a week. 

I think the GOG install has been fixed (for windows).

The GOG release also works in BoxedWine
https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine/discussions/34

The setup is not very user friendly at the moment...

Maybe I dreamed this but... at some point I may have patch in Fast InvSqrt() into MS Reality Labs for a big performance boost.
Which may be helpful for running in an emulator.

===

The original v1.1 release runs in `Ubuntu 20.04 + Wine5.0` with custom patch to make it 32bpp...
I haven't tried the original installer, yet.
My backport of the `Color and Animated Cursors` from Dark Omen are working for the moment on Win8 and Ubuntu, maybe this is tied to the graphics card?

AFAICT, Kex is akin to SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer).

Linux solution ... Win98 VM for the adventurous....

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&p=944148#p944148

I believe kjliew is talking about qemu-3dfx,
with the regular Win98 ddraw.dll replaced with one from WineD3D, and my window mode hex-edit?

GoG.com is selling the other three games from the SSI warhammer pack.
EA is still a thing.
"Abandon ware" isn't a thing.

Dark Omen doesn't have a fancy DRM just a CD check.

I haven't played any of the newer warhammer games... but here is a look back at some old titles...

Space Marine: is a good reskin of (I assume) Gears of War. Fun to speed through -- once.

Mark of Chaos: Battle didn't feel like warhammer, units can move thru enemy units. Human campaign was pretty tired.

Shadow of the Horned Rat - someone poured their soul into this game but it is fairly unpolished. Magic in particular is underwhelming. Very hard to live all the way thru to the end. (much better story than Dark Omen, in my opinion. IIRC, "friendly smart AI" is good here but is sorely missed in Dark Omen)

Blood Bowl (1995) - fun game w/bad DOS graphics.

Blood Bowl (2009) - very good. Commentary gets very repetitive. Surprisingly bad frames-per-second, maybe this was fixed in BloodBowl 2? I didn’t like the way Cyanide treated their customers & modders.

Final Liberation – surprisingly fun for a such a simple game! Amusingly, the difficulty starts hard then gradually progresses to very easy as you move thru the game.   

Chaos Gate - I couldn't really get into this game... fun sound track though.

Space Hulk: vengeance of the blood angels - bought the 3DO version by mistake; never played it :-/

Dawn of War - got all 6? 8? games on sale for like $5. I think I played all the way thru the original but I don’t remember it to well. I just re-downloaded them on Steam but it looks like they don't work out-of-the-box on Linux.

One would use a hex-editor to "diff" Dege's patched executable with the original executable to obtain the patch sequence.  I wonder about the "fullscreen window mode" hack currently in the Mod Pack...

It should be easy to reverse the width/height stuff (found by Ghabry, I assume)

Code:

typedef int (*getTextWidth_t)(void* font, const char* text);
typedef int (*getFontHeight_t)(void* font);

getTextWidth_t getTextWidth_orig = (getTextWidth_t)0x481930;
getFontHeight_t getFontHeight_orig = (getFontHeight_t)0x4819D0;

We made a tool to convert the SOTHR sprites/banners/portraits to bitmaps.
http://www.bitpatch.com/sothr.html

SOTHR friendly unit stats are in the "MAXARMY.MRC" file.
Which is (mostly) a text file.

SOTHR makes heavy usage of the "resource" section of executable files to store text and images.
the "unit book" entries might be in BKTXT.DLL? You may be able to view it with https://cerbero.io/peinsider/
(I don't have windows or wine install at the moment...)


Dark Omen unit stats can be had using the wh32edit2 program in the download section.
The unit book descriptions are embedded in the game executable and can be viewed with IDA or hex-editor.

I think there are several options for viewing dark omen sprites/banners/models on this site.

correction:

byte offset 0x16 of the "HEAD" struct seems to control which KEY file is used during the "talkie" first cut-scene...