Gabriel Knight 2 No Interlace Patch

[Endroz]

I have made a game patch for Gabriel Knight 2 to remove the interlace occuring in videos when playing the game.

You can find it here: http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlace.zip

Right click on the link and choose 'Save As...'

I'd like to hear feadback from you about this patch


Gabriel Knight Forever!!!,
Enrico Rolfi

[Wintermute]

I Just tried out your patch and it worked great. Thank you very much!
At first I thought something went wrong, because for same reason the introduction movie is still played interlaced, while the rest works fine. Is this movie being treated differently by the game?

By the way, the English patch works for the German version as well.

[Endroz]

Thanks for the support Wintermute.
Then I'll write that the German version works in the next release.
I'm aware of the problem with the introduction movie still interlaced, apparently that happens even with the english version. I have tested this patch only with the Italian version of the game, where the intro movie works fine. I'll try to figure out what's the problem and will release a patch as soon as I'll have the chance to put my hands on the english version.

[Wintermute]

I'm aware of the problem with the introduction movie still interlaced, apparently that happens even with the english version.

Yes, I know. I tried the patch with both the English version from the 'Gabriel Knight Mysteries' Edition and the German version. The only difference patch-wise was, that the English version had already installed the files "11.scr" and "11.hep" which you had to overwrite.

I have no idea how you technically did realise the patch. But would it be possible to use your graphic card for stretching the video instead of just line doubling? This way the graphic card (if DirectX is enabled) would automatically apply some blurring filter to the video which would reduce the visual artifacts and pixelation.
Or would it be possible to otherwise include such a filter? (All other and more complicated filters don't make any real sense for FMV).

By the way, did there really exist an official Spanish version of GK2? I though that it was just an unofficial patch for the English version which was released some time ago by 'Aventura y C

[Endroz]

I have no idea how you technically did realize the patch. But would it be possible to use your graphic card for stretching the video instead of just line doubling? This way the graphic card (if DirectX is enabled) would automatically apply some blurring filter to the video which would reduce the visual artifacts and pixelation.
Or would it be possible to otherwise include such a filter? (All other and more complicated filters don't make any real sense for FMV).

Mine is a game script-level patch, it does nothing more than asking the SCI executable to play the movies doubled and without interlace.  
These are the only two graphics modes supported by the game engine. Badly enough, it is not possible to apply any runtime filter unless you make some serious modification into the SCI executable itself. Which is rather old. Besides, I'm not aware of any filter that could made these movies look like better. The real problem with them is that they're compressed in 256 colours, so lot of arcifacts appear.  

By the way, did there really exist an official Spanish version of GK2? I though that it was just an unofficial patch for the English version which was released some time ago by 'Aventura y C

[Wintermute]

Mine is a game script-level patch, it does nothing more than asking the SCI executable to play the movies doubled and without interlace.  
These are the only two graphics modes supported by the game engine.

OK, in this case, adding extra filter would be too much work. I thought, that you maybe changed the playback routine itself.
I remember that it was possible in Phantasmagoria 1 to choose between interlaced and non-interlaced movies. I don't know why they skipped this option for later games (e.g. GK 2, Phantasmagoria 2, Shivers etc.) It may create the illusion of better sharpness (of which I am not really convinced), but I find the constant change from normal non-interlaced mode to movie interlaced scenes somewhat distracting.

Besides, I'm not aware of any filter that could made these movies look like better. The real problem with them is that they're compressed in 256 colours, so lot of arcifacts appear.  

The problem isn't that the movies are compressed in 256 colours, but rather that the display engine renders the graphics in 256 colours. If it could be rendered in true colour with a "blurring" filter that interpolates the pixels, the quality could be much better. Of course it would be even better, if the movies had been made with true colour in mind (like Phantasmagoria 2).

[Endroz]

OK, in this case, adding extra filter would be too much work. I thought, that you maybe changed the playback routine itself.

This is a fragment from a script that I had to change:

pushib     12                      ;distance top
pushib     15                      ;distance left
pushiw     0x95                ;FLAGS
pushib     25                      ;distance bottom
pushib     16                      ;distance right
pushiw     256                    ;number of colours
callkb      PlayVMD().config

FLAGS contains one of the following values:

0x20 = small movie
0x21 = doubled movie
0x24 = small interlaced movie
0x25 = big interlaced movie

...which is ORed with other values such as brightness boosting strength.

I find the constant change from normal non-interlaced mode to movie interlaced scenes somewhat distracting.

That's another reason that brought me to create this patch.

The problem isn't that the movies are compressed in 256 colours, but rather that the display engine renders the graphics in 256 colours.

I have tried forcing the engine to display movies in TrueColour, but without success. As for the blurring filter, I'll make a mind note as for a possible future project.  

[Endroz]

Oh, by the way, I have made a new patch to fix the Prologue and the Chapters movie still being interlaced even after having applied the patch.

You can find it here: http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlacev2.zip

Right click on the link and choose 'Save As...'

Wintermute, please let me know if this new version of the patch still works with the German version of the game.  

[Wintermute]

This is a fragment from a script that I had to change:
...

Interesting. How did you come to this information, just by try and error? What happens, if you set the distance informations to Zero (fullscreen)?

The problem isn't that the movies are compressed in 256 colours, but rather that the display engine renders the graphics in 256 colours.

I have tried forcing the engine to display movies in TrueColour, but without success.

Even, if the screen is correctly set to TrueColour, without any different rendering algorithms (like interpolating pixels with different colours), I think you won't see a difference. But this is just guessing.

As for the blurring filter, I'll make a mind note as for a possible future project.  

Make that very far future, I guess  

By the way, I am unable to download your revised (and your original) patch. It just gives me a "Page not found" (Pagina non trovata) error message.

[Endroz]

Interesting. How did you come to this information, just by try and error?

I have made my own SCI32 Disassembler.  
I'm using it to fix bugs from Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers, and I'll (soon?) release a patch to solve almost all of the problems in the game.

What happens, if you set the distance informations to Zero (fullscreen)?

The movie just "moves" to another place of the screen. As far as I have found out, you can't freely resize the movie, you can only display it as normal or double sized.

By the way, I am unable to download your revised (and your original) patch.

Sorry my mistake, my latest archive was .rar not .zip. Now I have re uploaded it correctly as .zip so the link up there is working now.

[Plethora]

  Hey,
I can't seem to be able to download the patch. When I click
on the link it gives we a page like this:

This is the link it gives me:

http://www.tripod.lycos.it/error/referer.phtml?_siteRedirect=http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita&_siteRedirectFile=http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlacev2.zip

---

And this is the content of the page:

Lycos Tripod Homepage Building

Puoi provare a scaricare questo file da una pagina utente ospitata gratuitamente su Tripod :
http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/GK2interlacev2.zip

Per accedere a questo file, devi visitare la pagina utente :
http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita
(sarai reindirizzato in 5 secondi)

---

If I go to http://utenti.lycos.it/gkita/tools/ I can see this:

Index of /gkita/tools
Parent Directory
GK2interlacev2.zip
TraduSCI 1.1.2_update.rar
tradusci1.1.rar
tradusci112eng.rar

And I can download all the tradusci-files but not the
GK2interlacev2.zip.

What's wrong? I tried disabling referrer logging from Opera
and it didn't help (Sometimes some images referred from
outside tripod don't like to be shown if you have referrer
logging on but with referrer logging disabled they work fine).

[Wintermute]

OK, I downloaded the patch and now it works perfectly for both the German and the English version. Thanks again.  

Some suggestions: You should skip the example pictures from the archive, since they take up most of the space. People, who downloads this patch would probably know anyway, what the difference is. Maybe you can relate them to an example website instead.

Maybe it would be better to make two separate patches for Italien/Spanisch and English/German versions and skip the directory structure inside the Zip-files. So in this case you could directly unzip the necessary files into your game directory without the need of moving them later. (I know this is a simple thing to do, but from my experience, many people who often don't read instructions correctly get troubled with these kind of things.)

Once again, great work. I really like the non-interlaced movies much better than the default mode.
The only way to improve the video further would be to hack the VMD-player or write a new one, but this could be quite complicated.  

[Endroz]

Plethora:
Make sure that you right click and choose "Save as..." on the latest link which I have posted, not the one in the first post.

Moderators:
Is there any moderator listening? Would it be possible for you to edit my first post and change the link to the latest one?


Wintermute:
Thanks for your suggestion, I'm going to put up a whole web page dedicated to the Gabriel Knight subject soon. There I'll include separate archives and lots of other interesting things.

About the German version of the game, can you confirm me that the chapter movie player works fine? I mean that little movie tape button near the inventory in the game... I had to patch that in the English version too.
Also during the chapter movies is the text "Chapter One: ..." on the top of the screen shown in English or German with my patch?

[Plethora]

  Endroz,
I don't know what happened but now I could download the
patch. It's probably the order of the towels in the bathroom
Thanks anyway! Fixing the bugs in GK sounds great... thanks
for doing it!

[Endroz]

Should you ever find any problems using it, let me know.  I haven't tested the English version much.