My engine won't run and I hope someone can help me.
I am running A6.31 Commercial, I just installed the updated drivers for my Graphics card (NVIDIA RIVA TNT2), I know this is just a generic card, but if I can't run my prog, my clients won't be able to either. I was getting a directx 9 failer error while running on 9b, I installed 9c, now I get "reference renderer" error.
So my specs are:

• Windows XP Pro
• A6.31 Comm
• Directx 9.0c
• Newest drivers for NVIDIA RIVA TNT2

I just formatted and installed XP, so I know that there are not any other progs screwing things up.
Please help me get past this problem. I have seen several listing for a similar problem or even the exact problem, but there was nothing there that was useful. Thanks in advance.

What are the other specs of your computer? I don't know a whole lot about that specific graphics card, but there's a good chance that because it is generic and very limited, that it will not be able to run the engine in DirectX9. (I experienced this when Conitec upgraded to A5 with DirectX8.1 on my old ATI Rage Pro, another generic card).

Why not go with the previous version, which is very stable with DX8, for your current project?

Nicholas,

I have the exact same problem when I try to run a level in WED. Can you run it in SED? That is my current workaround.

CBuilder

What other specs do you want?
Before I installed Directx 9c and my drivers for my card I had it running on the older versions with all the other stuff the same except I was on 9b and older drivers.
I tried setting my options in SED to run, but even after I direct it to the bin folder with acknex.exe in it, it says it can't find it, besides, I need to run it from WED without any scripting too. I was thinking of reinstalling previous versions of DX to try to get it to work. If anyone can think of anything else, such as settings maybe in the dxdiag please let me know.
By the way, thank you both for the timeley response.

3D GameStudio A6 6.31 requires DirectX 9.0c.

Also, in SED, you can set the directory that the bin directory are located in. So you should have it as:

C:\Program Files\GStudio6\

instead of:

C:\Program Files\GStudio6\Bin

since SED looks in the Bin folder from the GStudio6 directory (or whether you install 3DGS in).

I hope this helps.

I believe A6.31 requires a video card that supports T&L to run in A6 mode. However, as far as I know A6.31 still has a A5 compatible mode which the engine should use automatically for non-T&L cards (like the Riva TNT2).

See:

d3d_transform
Selects whether vertex transformation and lighting shall be done by the engine A5 , or by DirectX A6 . At start, this variable indicates whether the 3D hardware is T&L capable or not.

Range:
on - T&L by DirectX ( A6 , default on T&L hardware).
off - T&L by engine ( A5 , default on non-T&L hardware).

var d3d_transform = on; // always A6 mode
var d3d_transform = off; // always A5 mode

@Grayson I'm pretty sure I was running 3.1 on 9b before I updated, not 100% though. Thanks for the SED help that did work (at least to get it to find acknex.exe)

@Cellulaer I'm not sure if my card supports T&L, but it was running on the 6.31 update before. I tried setting the d3d_transform as a variable as the first line in my main wdl and as the first line in my main function, but neither worked.


Good news is that playing around with a bunch of stuff I could get some things to work, I'll post what I found out when try it out a bit more and once I get back from work at about 8:30 (central US)
I will still need some questions answered though.
Thanks guys

It's ATI Radeon and probably gForce2 that supports Hardware Transform and Lighting (Hardware T&L, for short), but this excludes Intel Graphics chips like the 845G graphics chipsets that don't support Hardware T&L.

The really neat features of Hardware Transform and Lighting is that unlike Software Transform and Lighting is that the vertex processing (since a polygon were made up of 3 vertices--no more or less) are done by a video card's Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) and not by a CPU. The other features for which the hardware T&L supports have a support for shaders, materials, etc. What I mean by "material" is let's say that you have a sphere that are "metallic" and that can reflect light.

But since you have an nVidia Riva TNT2 video card, your card only support Software Transform and Lighting. And so the "Software Vertex Processing" are done by your CPU (but the Hardwre T&L that I'm speaking of which the vertex processing were done by the GPU are called "Hardware Vertex Processing"). And so in this case, a "Software Transform and Lighting" were done by the engine like A6, and you won't be able to experience the features which were found in new "Hardware T&L" video cards that support materials but keep in mind: If you buy a new video card like a gForce5 5200 or ATI Radeon 9600, etc., make sure you buy the video card that support shaders like Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.4 or higher. Not all Hardware Transform and Lighting video cards support shaders; some video cards might support Vertex Shader 1.1 or 1.2 but not Pixel Shaders.

Hope this helps.

@Grayson. Thanks that explains it quite a bit better. I do plan on getting myself a new graphics card when my wallet can support it, I am looking at the GeForce FX series that has both the pixel and vertex shaders at 2.0+. I'm not sure if I should go for the 5800 vs the 5600 though, the 5800 looks better at everything except memory, or should I move that to a different thread?
Anyway, to let you guys know what's up:
I was running before:

• TNT2 driver version 2.x.x.x (not sure exactly, just know it was 2 something)
• DX 9c
• A6.31 Comm

worked fine.
I think the problem was with compatibility issues between the new TNT2 drivers (4.5.2.3) and Directx. I am saying this because I uninstalled my Directx, rolled back my driver, and uninstalled 3DGS. I wanted to start from scratch. With DX9b, 2.x.x.x, and A6.0 comm. Worked fine.
I installed the updated drivers for my card, tried again and it worked fine. I installed A6.2 worked fine. I tried installing DX9c, but it didn't even d/l anything, but it did work fine before I tried installing the drivers for my card.
Since A6.31 won't work on anything lower than DX9c I am currently running on:

• TNT2 4.5.2.3
• Directx 9b
• A6.22 Comm

seems to be working ok, once I need to go to 6.31 I'll contact nVidia or get a better card.
For some reason it gives me an error running a level with a model I made in ms3d, weird, oh well, I can upload it for you guys to check out, but I'll save that for another topic or just work on it myself.

I guess my main problem all along was that I was running A6.31 but since my video driver would not recognize DX9c it was giving me the error message. By the way, when running A6.31 with only DX9b installed it gave me the exact same message as when I was running DX9c on my new drivers, so I am assuming that if there is a "cannot use reference renderer" error and they are running DX9c, there must be a compatibitily issue with the drivers (at least that's what it looks like to me). If this is the case I think this info could help many people on the site. I have seen this prob a few times.
Thanks again guys for the info and the timely responses.

Hmmm... Seems like Conitec might need to downgrade the requirement down to DirectX 9.0b or 9.0a...

Just my thought...