Friday, December 17, 2004

Hardwar UIM.02 Released

Ian Martin has announced the release of his second Hardwar patch, UIM.02, at Captain Zedo's. From the thread:

Here is my second upgrade to Hardwar, mainly a cosmetic upgrade, with the principal feature being 32 bit display and 32 bit textures, and the concentration on Direct3D (3DFX and software support deleted).

This is a 4.81Mb zip file, please save on to your local machine. Please host and/or distribute as you wish.

As usual, it will upgrade HW F2.0 to UIM.02 - no earlier upgrade is needed.


Please see the thread for the direct link, along with Wez's mirror. Update: 3D Gamers also has a mirror on their Hardwar downloads page.

The readme is in a separate thread:

1.<< UPGRADE UIM.02 >>
----------------------

Welcome to Ian Martin's second unofficial Hardwar upgrade.

The main purposes of this upgrade are some fixes to UIM.01
and the addition of 24/32 bit support - a cosmetic update.


Requirements
------------

Hardwar should still run on a 1998 era PC, but DirectX9 is required. Please download
this from http://www.microsoft.com/directx. We detect the DirectX version, and report if
DirectX9 is not detected, but do allow the user to continue anyway, just in case the
detection code, which uses DLL file versions, shows a fault.

A Direct3D compatible 3D accelerator card is required from UIM.02 onwards.

Features and fixes for UIM.02
-----------------------------

1) 3DFX Glide is deleted. Any 3DFX users should select Direct3D. Users of an old 3DFX
pass-thru card should select Secondary Display.
2) Software rendering is deleted.
3) 24/32 bit display mode is introduced. If operating in windowed mode, it selects the
desktop's colour depth, where the desktop is 16 bits per pixel or above.
4) An option to select 32 bit textures is added. This should ONLY be where 64Mb or more
of texture memory is available. Hardwar does not use the automatic texture management
system, it shrinks textures until they all fit.

If texture memory is limited on your system, try some or all of these (in this order)

a) Do not use 32 bit textures.
b) Clamp textures to 256x256 (some older cards do not allow larger textures anyway, so
Hardwar shrinks them regardless).
c) Use the old explosions.
d) Disable mipmaps.

5) An option is added to revert to the old fog colours.
6) Hardman was not correctly reading the max number of network players - this is fixed.
7) The 'victim' modes introduced in UIM.01 are disabled in network games.
8) The clouds now use a new BMP texture, and are redesigned. They are still an option.
9) A missing building was re-added, Vacant 008.
10) A bug was found and fixed in the texture shrinking code (see 4 above) causing a fatal
crash where available texture memory was limited.



Compatibility.
--------------

DirectX9 required.

UIM.02 will only connect to itself in a network game. It has a new network GUID.

UIM.02 will load UIM.01, U3.04 save games, but not earlier ones.

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