The FFED3D Thread

Hi loststargirl
Not sure what that error is, I'd imagine perhaps a visual-C++ runtime dependency might be missing...
But first of all - I've just had a look at the Elite-Forever bundle - if you drill into the AutoPlay/FFED3D folder you can launch the .exe's directly and bypass the launcher.
"FFE D3D.exe" is the original v1.12++ Dreamzzz build from 2008. Does that one work for you or do you get the same error?
And does running FFED3DAJ.exe directly work, or still the same error?

FFE D3D.exe works

FFED3DAJ.exe and FFED3DAJ_Anisotropic.exe doesn't. It gives the same error as the launcher.
 
It's probably the lua.dll then. Just used Dependancy Walker utility to load the game up, and it appears that dll has a dependency on the Visual Studio 2005 C++ redistributables. If you've got a fairly clean system, perhaps they've not been installed by anything.

I think you may be able to fix this without having to download/install any redistributables though:

In the game .exe folder, Rename lua.dll to something else (or delete it)
Then go back to the launcher folder - right click on the lua5.1.dll (the 319KB file) and choose 'Copy'
Go back to the game folder, right click in a space and choose 'Paste'
Finally rename the lua5.1.dll file to lua.dll

Fingers crossed that might fix it...?
 
It's probably the lua.dll then. Just used Dependancy Walker utility to load the game up, and it appears that dll has a dependency on the Visual Studio 2005 C++ redistributables. If you've got a fairly clean system, perhaps they've not been installed by anything.

I think you may be able to fix this without having to download/install any redistributables though:

In the game .exe folder, Rename lua.dll to something else (or delete it)
Then go back to the launcher folder - right click on the lua5.1.dll (the 319KB file) and choose 'Copy'
Go back to the game folder, right click in a space and choose 'Paste'
Finally rename the lua5.1.dll file to lua.dll

Fingers crossed that might fix it...?

That worked for me, although i already had a lua5.1.dll in my folder, renamed lua to old copied and renamed 5.1 to lua.
 
It's probably the lua.dll then. Just used Dependancy Walker utility to load the game up, and it appears that dll has a dependency on the Visual Studio 2005 C++ redistributables. If you've got a fairly clean system, perhaps they've not been installed by anything.

I think you may be able to fix this without having to download/install any redistributables though:

In the game .exe folder, Rename lua.dll to something else (or delete it)
Then go back to the launcher folder - right click on the lua5.1.dll (the 319KB file) and choose 'Copy'
Go back to the game folder, right click in a space and choose 'Paste'
Finally rename the lua5.1.dll file to lua.dll

Fingers crossed that might fix it...?

I replaced lua.dll. It works now.

There is something else I did not do I believe. I see no photos of people I talk with on the bullitin board system. AJ versions just show nothing and FFE D3D.exe mention "insert cd-rom".

What is the difference between this version and that of the torrent? a 300mb difference seems a lot
 
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I replaced lua.dll. It works now.

There is something else I did not do I believe. I see no photos of people I talk with on the bullitin board system. AJ versions just show nothing and FFE D3D.exe mention "insert cd-rom".

What is the difference between this version and that of the torrent? a 300mb difference seems a lot

That's correct behaviour, I've supressed the error message in the newer version when the videos are missing.
The original FFED3D package does not come with any of the video files in its DATA folder.
 
That's correct behaviour, I've supressed the error message in the newer version when the videos are missing.
The original FFED3D package does not come with any of the video files in its DATA folder.

I copied the DATA folder onto your version. It seems to work when activating the board system. Missions however show nothing.
 
Only certain points have those 'glorious' Full Motion Videos. The randomly generated missions don't. Bear in mind that FFE came out at a time when using CD's and video was an emerging novelty and not the norm, and 500MB was still considered as a large hard drive!
 
Only certain points have those 'glorious' Full Motion Videos. The randomly generated missions don't. Bear in mind that FFE came out at a time when using CD's and video was an emerging novelty and not the norm, and 500MB was still considered as a large hard drive!

Thanks a lot! I been played for several hours and it works :) Only thing is I can't alt-tab when playing in fullscreen but that's not really a big deal when your aware of that.
 
Only thing is I can't alt-tab when playing in fullscreen
I remember reading somewhere that switching in and out of fullscreen FFED3D is a non-starter, which is unfortunate if you're trying to run BUFFET at the same time, or access other programs on your PC.

My solution was to run the game in a window the same size as my screen and set the taskbar at the bottom of the screen to auto-hide. Then whenever I needed to access Windows - or whatever - I just moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen to bring the taskbar back :)
 
I remember reading somewhere that switching in and out of fullscreen FFED3D is a non-starter

The existing DirectX9 code doesn't cope -at all- with lost devices, which happens when alt-tabbing out of full screen. If you were lucky you could alt-tab out and back in once or twice but there's a massive memory leak if you do and it crashes more often than not. This is why it's currently unsupported.
I did start looking at the issue when adding the resolution switching (it didn't switch screen colour depth/resolution before) but good documentation on dealing with lost devices is quite difficult to find - and it was looking like turning into a lot of work for a small nicety, so that's on the backburner for now.
Running in a Window doesn't seem to affect performance and you can switch focus between apps without issues - if you've a second monitor, Buffet can then live quite happily on there.
Running up another DirectX app (e.g. media center) at the same time can still cause a lost device so the issue is not entirely avoided and is still on the 'to do' list. I believe that DirectX10 resolves the whole issue though, so refactoring to that would probably be a better way to take the game assuming that it's not at the expense of compatibility with older hardware.
 
I think I found the best way for the russian mod was alter my windowed resolution to be just the right size to fit in the monitor window without overlap, that way I had the essence of full screen without the crashing issue.

I must say Andy... Your starting points are very hard... One of them you got a cracking ship, but not enough money to even buy fuel, can't get rid of atmos sheilding for cash as its started on a planet :s

Might take off and climb at a couple of hundred KM/H to break the atmosphere... have done that manually before, and entered... took hours of gameplay thanks to timelapse.
 
I must say Andy... Your starting points are very hard...

I'm guessing that you're trying the build which includes the Anisotropic mod?
It's not my doing, and not a mod I'm familiar with - so I took a quick look & see what you mean! I like position 3 that leaves you with a whopping 15.2 credits to start with ... I'm assuming that the original mod author forgot to multiply some of the credit values by at least 10 when the created the new starting points!
I can easily change the two stingy starts to 1000 if people want that.

I also noticed that 2 of the positions have ships with negative cargo space. "Uh Oh" I thought. I've also had a report of cargo values going crazy during gameplay, and thinking that this could be related...
Unfortunately the original homepage for the Anisotropic mod is long gone, so I've little to compare it against code wise. I've found a version included within Nic's mod and compared it to the FFED3D version - and they look the same, only that the ship/missile names have been reverted back to match the original game for some reason. (something else to fix, grrr)
But I've also found an original executable and readme document on the russian elite-games site which now confirms that ship cargo values aren't what they should be for the mod. (you can find it here described as "Anisotropic 0.9s (553Kb)"
Without the original mod source, there's not a great deal I can do if there are other discrepancies. Fortunately, in the case of ship data, Nic's mod included a dump of all of the values from Anisotropic - so I load those by default in the next build. Doing this now seems to correct the cargo values to how they were intended in the original mod. (They do seem a little excessive though)

By all accounts the original mod was quite unstable, so don't be too surprised if it crashes (it seems to hate thargon systems) and I'd not load saves from standard FFE into it, but start afresh. I managed to spend a Sunday morning playing from the default start doing food/tech shuttle runs to build up funds without issues - but that's about the extent of my playing time with this one.
 
AndyJ v1.01

New version of AndyJ's build coming soon.

  • New options to Enable Multisample Anti-Aliasing to smooth model & line edges.
  • Enabled support for global model shaders. There is now a ships.fx, asteroids.fx and models.fx within the Models folder to provide a generic shader for ships, asteroids and everything else. Individual model shaders will be used where they are available to permit customisation.
  • Added multiple skins support for objects. Each can have up to 10 different skins and in the case of Police Vipers, they have their own dedicated skin. Implementation is via new shader variables. Use the 'Buffet' utility to tweak the colour/name of your ship if you want it to use a particular skin!
  • Improved the atmosphere shader so that the sky and clouds obscure the stars during the daytime and then fade to reveal them at night, with just a faint cloud layer visible in the night sky.
  • Reworked part of the rendering code so that when inside an atmosphere, the sky is now drawn before the sun, which in turn is drawn before the planet - so the sun can now be seen in the sky of a living planet.
  • The current sun colour was being applied when drawing your ship in the Equipment view and when viewing other ships in the ship yard. They are now correctly lit with a white light as per original FFE.
  • The "1st Encounter" Quest ship now displays throughout the intro sequence.
  • Chasing Quest ship at end of intro sequence is swapped to be the expected police Viper when using models.



:)
 

Sir.Tj

The Moderator who shall not be Blamed....
Volunteer Moderator
Nice one, I'll keep an eye out for that.

Andy's build looks pretty nice :D
 
Just in cases there's any confusion, I've quoted AndyJ's updates file; my involvement is pre-release bug spotting and the like, which I'm more than happy to do :)
 
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