RT3 on GOG

[Cash on Wheels]

This thread is dedicated to those that have trouble with the GOG version of Railroad Tycoon 3.


I got a new rig a few months ago with no disk drive. (not sure where my external disc drive is!) So I decided to download RRT3 from GOG. The first thing I noticed was there were No water reflections, so I unchecked "disabled Hardware T & L" restarted the game as instructed and the game crashed @ the main menu. So I came to this site & got nothing definitive on how to restore the water reflections without disabling Hardware T&L.

Any Ideas:

PS if you have the GOG version and your game crashed due to unchecking Disable Hardware T&L , download this to----Data-->configuration--> & replace engine.cfg with this one.

engine.zip

(202 Bytes) Downloaded 254 times

This gets the game running again with everything restored to default without resorting to uninstall. It works for 1.05 & 1.06.

[Gumboots]

VooDoo. It works. Game will run with Hardware T&L enabled and groovy water reflections. Works with the CD version of the game. I don't have the GoG version so I can't test that. You might as well try it though. It's free, and you can uninstall it just by removing a few loose files from your RT3 directory. Easy.

[RulerofRails]

dgVoodoo works beautifully for me with the GoG version. But there is an extra step/trick needed, 4th paragraph here: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=43925#p43925

PS. I sympathize. It's not fair that GoG doesn't warn you not to turn off the "Disable Hardware T&L" switch or the game will fail to start.

[Gumboots]

Speaking of VooDoo, one thing I have noticed is that it makes the editor far more tractable. Graphics degradation on WIP maps is not nearly as much of an issue as it used to be. They look acceptable even after a couple of dozen saves, whereas without VooDoo they'd be rooted after four or five.

[Cash on Wheels]

I have had the GoG version for awhile. But, I only installed it properly (have many installs with various executable etc. files) on my old machine that doesn't need the Vista Fix . . . Until NOW.

So, I wasn't using the GoG executable file with dgVoodoo.

Turns out that when patching the blurry texture issue, GoG includes a custom dll file (d8tx.dll) that is called by the GoG version executable. Thing is that dgVoodoo also includes dll files (not an expert, but I believe that only the D3D8.dll (DirectX) one is actually needed, the other two are for Glide and DirectDraw) that need to be placed in the same folder as the RT3 executable.

There is some conflict between the two: d8tx.dll and D3D8.dll, and deleting d8tx.dll results in crash of "failed to find ...". What ended up working was deleting d8tx.dll, taking a straight copy of "D3D8.dll" that dgVoodoo 2.54 (latest version at time of writing) uses, then renaming the copy to "d8tx.dll", and the GoG executable is working under dgVoodoo.


Please be aware that the GoG version is the most up-to-date version that is ready to go (major issues have been patched successfully) which is why I recommended it over the Steam version, just that the dgVoodoo** solution is better than the "Vista Fix" ever was (solution used by GoG) and this is currently the way to get the best possible game for people who don't want to fiddle a little (dgVoodoo is pretty easy setup).


Note: there are rare machines which use graphical solutions that will run the game out of the box with Hardware Transformation & Lighting un-checked, in those cases price maps should be normal already, however sometimes dgVoodoo will allow water reflections. dgVoodoo seems to help performance, but so far nobody has attempted a test on machines with benevolent graphical solutions.

Did the d8tx copy & here's the results: Drumroll (I have a Nvidia G1080X, w/6 core I7, DirectX12)

This picture is running @ 15 FPS. oh and its black because the game will not take Sshots. (same shot as below)

15 FPS.jpg (9.65 KiB) Viewed 13529 times

This Photo is running @ 95! FPS and the water reflections are back!

By an Ocean with waves, a station & some trains are about as slow as you could get! In the latest autosave version(which is gone) of the Africa & Middle east which is fully built & has 200+ trains running on a 1024x1024 map this same shot would only render 7 FPS!

Out in the Indian Ocean it was 800FPS & 2200FPS!

Now I can play & create maps more often! Thanks RoR!

[RulerofRails]

Glad that trick worked.

Yeah, screenshots don't work. I'm using FRAPS. Also, you may want to set dgVoodoo to "Force vSync". This will stabilize frame rates at 60fps. If not, you may have some jitter when following a train etc. when you have a smaller network. When loaded up this jitter will go away. I posted that somewhere, but can't remember exactly where. Might depend on the system, but if you see some jitter that's the obvious thing to try.

[Gumboots]

I haven't been using the vSync on my box and haven't noticed any problems, but I'm on W7 64 bit, 8 gig of RAm. 1 gig native VRAm. Quad core i5 @ 3.3 gig. nVidia card too, if that makes any difference.

The only thing I have noticed on the Latvia map is that sometimes it will start to struggle a bit when I'm running over 150 trains. This usually happens after the medal event fires, even though I'm running the same number of trains before then. Odd, but I thought it worth mentioning.

Otherwise frame rate seems good on the 768x512 map. Haven't added trees yet, which may make a difference. Cargo cars are mostly my custom ones, so often have twice the poly count of defaults. Have been testing with default locos, so should try some higher-poly ones.

[Cash on Wheels]

2200FPS is awesome until you hear coil whine in the main menu! and it gets worse during the game! Force Vsync did nothing. What works to get rid of the whine is running the game windowed. Problem solved.

[Goemoe]

Since my Linux rig has no permanent CD/DVD drive, I decided to buy a GoG version of RT3. I tried to install it several times with all types of wine versions, with or without playonlinux. I installed the voodoo dlls found by the links in this forum but I can't get it working.

When the GoG version installs, I get three runtime errors at the end of the installation process. I tried the GoG version on windows and it runs fine. The game starts though, but I get texture and clipping errors making the game unplayable.

So I went to gamecopyworld but the only working mirror for a nocd crack reports possible virus/malware stuff. If someone knows/owns a working virus free copy of it, please pn me. Even better would be any advice what to do about the GoG version to get rid of the runtime errors during installation.

[Goemoe]

I installed the original version (cd). I found the link to the no cd fix. Thank you. It works, even with Linux, but my graphical errors remain. What makes me curious: the unpatched version found the USB disc drive and offered me no graphical error at all. The errors only showed up after patching the game. Version 1.05 did not find the disc drive any more after being installed.

After applying the no cd fix, it works, but my graphical errors are back.

[RulerofRails]

When using the dgVoodoo dlls, you need to make sure that the in-game graphics setting "Disable Hardware T&L" is disabled. This was one of the steps for install. The GoG version install has this enabled by default. It's either turn this off or don't use dgVoodoo. The game should look ok with it enabled and no dgVoodoo dlls in the game folder, but it will utilize far less of your graphic card's capabilities.

BUT, I only have Windows. Errors in the install process of GoG version I suspect are unrelated to dgVoodoo, not sure what to suggest for that. RT3 doesn't modify the registry, so you might be able to copy the entire game folder from your windows machine???

When using the game under Wine, you may not need dgVoodoo in the first place. Before Private Codex shared the dgVoodoo solution, I was using a wine solution to run with "DH T&L" unchecked (on windows), but definitely no performance gain and you should use the exe that was properly fixed for blurry textures. Here's the link anyway: http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=38902#p38902.

[Goemoe]

Un check T&L...

I can't believe I spend nearly two days to find a solution and unchecking the box solved it

Thank you very much

[RulerofRails]

Glad it's working.

[enjormann]

Just posted new subject on GOG version error message after attempting to update to Coast to Coast expansion. I may have to redownload and reinstall everything from scratch. I currently am using an Acer Nitro 5 with 1050 ti video card.

18Mar23 - Used GOG Galaxy to uninstall and then reinstall. Game comes up no problems and says it is Coast to Coast v1.05. Game now loads properly, etc.
Now, to get some more maps...