Hasn't been all that long since v1.3, however several key new features (pun intended) being added to D7VK warrant their own rollout. In addition to that, D3D6/D3D5 game compatibility has been expanded, with many other titles now being operable.
Color key transparency
The star of the show this time is color key transparency. "What is it?", you may ask. Well, in short, a cheaper alternative to alpha testing which was somewhat common in early D3D, and that could be applied on various color values (typically black) associated to textures. It had the benefit of working even on hardware that didn't support alpha formats (such graphics cards existed in those prehistoric times, alongside cavemen and dinosaurs).
Pictures are worth 1000 words, so here's a comparison of how N.I.C.E 2 looks between D7VK v1.3 and v1.4:
| D7VK v1.3 | D7VK v1.4 |
|---|---|
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Fixes/additions:
- Thanks to the efforts of @CkNoSFeRaTU, we now (finally) have support for color key transparency, which gets rid of opaque color artifacting in a lot of games, such as: Arx Fatalis, Messiah, Darkstone, Divine Divinity, Mortal Kombat 4 and many others.
- A lot of work has gone into consolidating legacy DDraw interoperability with all the supported D3D versions, which means Plants vs Zombies and possibly other PopCap Games titles of the time are now playable.
- Also thanks to @CkNoSFeRaTU, a bug related to DDraw instancing via IClassFactory has been fixed, and as a result Re-Volt and Sea Dogs are now playable.
- Thanks to some intriguing hints from @Trass3r, support has been added for DDraw initiated depth clears, which has fixed rendering in Star Wars Episode I: Racer.
- Preliminary support for depth write-back has been added, as of now only supporting D16, which has fixed light source occlusion, or rather the lack thereof, in Star Wars Episode I: Racer.
- Fixed a bug which caused a crash on startup in V-Rally 2 Expert Edition.
- Fixed various corner cases which caused hangs and crashes in older D3D and DDraw titles (the latter of which simply loaded our dll and crashed), e.g. Revenant, Powerslide, Slave Zero etc.
- Worked around a potential crash in GTA 2 on returning to the main menu.
I don't have much to showcase for this one, but maybe only a sneak peak at what working fog looks like in Star Wars Episode I: Racer and how it really contributes to the game's atmosphere on some tracks. Make sure you don't miss this gem, it's one of the best Star Wars games out there.
As always, enjoy and have fun!