Problems with Rainbow Six Black Ops mod

[Lrflx]

Black Ops is a compilation of missions from all old R6 games based on Rogue Spear engine, as I understand. It could be downloaded for free here:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/rainbow-six-black-ops-20

First problem is that preformance drops whenever text appears on screen in-game. I had similar problem with Requiem Avenging Angel and there I managed to fix it by checking Disable8and16bitModes in CAT, but with Black Ops it didn't help, guess it's a different problem.

Also this game appears to be sensitive to forced resolution and aa, cause 2d elements get corrupted immediately. I expected these types of problems from forcing aa, but I thought forcing resolution should be more compatible and glitchless? Maybe it could be tweaked somewhat?

[dege-diosg]

Yes, 2D elements seems not to be compatible with MSAA or resolution upscale. I don't think it can be tweaked on the wrapper side. Why not set a large resolution inside the game instead? As far as I remember the HUD scales relatively well.

I can't test the game now, but I released a WIP version this week and it contains a fix for Urban Operations problems.
Doesn't it help in regard of the performance problem?

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1008529#p1008529

[Lrflx]

Ok, tried it again with newer version and performance problems are still there. They're easiest to catch in training missions, cause game immediately starts to spawh hints there.

UI sadly doesn't scale in-game at all, only in menus, though it's not that big of a deal in the end, the only things affected are some fonts, and maybe they're even could be modded, like for Drakan.
Performance is the sole problem remaining now

[dege-diosg]

Ok, I can't try it now, but I think tomorrow I'll install the compilation and check it out.

Till then, doesn't enabling option DirectX\FastVideoMemoryAccess help?

[Lrflx]

Ok, tried with that option enabled, also did more experimenting with other settings for good measure, but still no difference on my side so far.

[dege-diosg]

I installed the mod, but cannot launch the game. I run R6BOConfig.exe and then R6BO.exe but nothing happens, I get a log:

OPTIONS: Working Directory is: g:\Games\OldDX\Rainbow Six Black Ops
OPTIONS: Reading registry key Software\Red Storm Entertainment\Black Ops
GAME: Could not read options

Am I missing something?

[Lrflx]

Hmm, I don't remeber exactly all the steps I did when installing the game, but there should be a config folder in the game root with files for registry setup, also to change compatibility layers, maybe it'll help?

[dege-diosg]

Thx, indeed, XP SP2 compat mode helped.
So, yes, I can see the fps drop. This is the same problem that I made some modification for, in Urban Operations, but it isn't enough then.
The underlying cause is well known for me, it affects/affected other games too (for instance Icewind Dale 2, AvP 2), which is partially solved. But it seems I have to re-think it carefully and try to come out with a more generalized solution.

I don't want to quickly tamper with the current related code before releasing the next version, to not break something accidentally, but I'll ponder on another solution after that.