Since this is my first post here, hello to all!
I´m glad I found the Comanche Gold Win7 fixes and graphic mods here since I always loved the series.

Background:
As most of the CG fans here will know this game runs in directdraw-mode and therefore bypasses hardware rendering of the graphic card. That means activating antialiasing in the graphic card's driver doesn´t work. I found a way to get a sort of antialiasing to work, improving the image quality even further together with the graphic mods posted here by Reticuli and MixedupJim! It´s all done with a nvidia card, so I don't know if it works with ati cards, maybe someone could try it and post the results.

Workaround to get Comanche hardware rendered and antialiased:

1. Download and install DXGL wrapper by William Feely.
This program will translate the directdraw calls into opengl. It´s in an very early stage of development but seems to work fine. You have to create a profile for the WC3.exe file and that´s it. I experimented with some of the settings in a hurry to get it into fullscreen, the built in filtering options seem to have no effect by now but I didn't look much into this. A quite nice side effect is that I got completely rid off the weird colors bug which I still got randomly.

2. Download and install the latest nvidia driver 301.42, there is an option for a new postprocess antialiasing mode called FXAA. Just make a profile in the driver panel for the WC3.exe and activate this option. The other FSAA and filtering options seem to have no effect, only FXAA does the trick for me. They may work with other systems, give it a try and post your results.

3. Enjoy an even more good looking Voxel ride

Here are 2 screenshots to compare the effect. It's quite nice particularly on the models as you can see on the cannon for instance, but the edges of the landscape do also look better. Everything gets a bit blurry but not too much. There´s a noticable drop in fps but still runs smooth at my system with a Core2Duo E4500 @ 3.1 ghz + Geforce 9600GT.
It was a bit of a hassle to get screenshots, the normal methods didn´t work so I tried some capture programs. There are no artifacts ingame and no black bars, couldn't get rid of that in the screenshots.




Hope you enjoy it.

Hello and welcome to the forums, S3ti! Wow, what a way to make an entrance!

It's always cool when new people come out of the woodwork with new mods after they have been experimenting behind-the-scenes.

I really like the look of this, but can't test it myself as I have an ATI card and it doesn't look as though I have anything like FXAA in my settings.

Really nice find though! I'll add this to my Comanche Gold website if that's OK, where you will be fully credited.

Thank you, ofc you may add this to your site!

After looking a bit deeper into this it seems that there is more to discover.
There are so called FXAA injectors around with more settings, apparently I couldn't find one which works with opengl, only direct3D 9/10/11.
I have no idea about programming such stuff, maybe someone who knows more about coding these things takes a look at this.

Regarding AMD/ATI cards, there should be a equivalent setting called MLAA (morphological-antialiasing) which works the similar way like FXAA. The setting is called 'morphological filtering'. Though I don't know if that is also officially available in their driver panel for all types of cards I think it should be possible to make it work. Can't test it myself, maybe you give it a shot and post your results here

Hello again!

I have a relatively old ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 graphics card, but am now downloading the latest drivers so I'll see if I have this MLAA option after updating.

EDIT: Nope, still no option to enable MLAA. And after doing a quick Google search, it seems that this feature is in the 6xxx series of ATI/AMD cards and upwards only. It can be hack enabled in 4xxx and 5xxx series cards but not the 3xxx or earlier.

Amazing. I thought Comanche Gold was a kernel-level software rendering system and not Direct3D or DirectDraw or anything like that. Is everything in Windows technically DirectDraw?

in Catalyst control Centre there is an opion for morphological-antialiasing



also
The ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Graphics Series now supports the new Catalyst™ AI user interface that was previously only available on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Graphics Series
The ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Graphics Series now supports Morphological Anti-Aliasing
Fixed cases where Morphological Anti-Aliasing was intermittently not being correctly applied to games.
OpenGL 4.1 beta support
Support for the new Morphological Anti-Aliasing feature
Dead Rising 2 – AMD CrossFireX™ profile (Resolves negative scaling)
AMD CrossFireX™ Performance Improvement for:
o Metro 2033
o F1 2011 - (Direct X9 version)
o Fallout New Vegas
Performance optimizations for systems with an AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 and AMD Radeon™ HD 6850 series of graphics products installed
o Aliens versus Predator performance enhancements
o StarCraft 2 performance enhancements
o OpenGL performance enhancements for Prey, Quake Wars: Enemy Territories, and Heaven v2
Support for additional Stereo 3D-capable displays:
o Viewsonic V3D241wm-LED
o 3D Projectors

I don't really know tbh, maybe there are even differences between the original Comanche 3 for DOS and Comanche Gold. I just noticed that Comanche Gold somehow utilizes the ddraw.dll. I always wondered why it was not possible to apply any advanced graphic effects like Antialiasing and that stuff. Though, even with DXGL this doesn't work except FXAA.

According to Wikipedia DirectDraw is a 2D API that does not support 3D hardware acceleration.

I'm trying to get in contact with the creator of DXGL, maybe he can help us out to get this game even more shiny!

@ufolev: Did you try the morphological-filtering and does it work for you?

Hmm... ddraw.dll. I wonder if that's the same one used by Win3D, DirectZ, and VR Caddy stereoscopic drivers. CG was stereo for some devices.

Positive feedback about ATI users

with these adjustments:










with some limitations you can get this result:





you can compare this wideo with other videos about comanche gold in my youtube channel made without MLAA


some screens from the above video:

Ufolev those screenshots and the video don't look like antialiased at all. You can see very clear steps at the horizontal and vertical stabilizer
I've read that this postprocess antialiasing isn't always visible on screenshots depending on how the screenshots are grabbed off the system...Or it's just not activated, try it with all other settings off and only activate morphological-filtering then compare it with everything at default. But after all DXGL seems to work too for ATI cards!

BTW how do you get this screenshots ingame?

Edit: I've tried to do a video and screenshots with fraps and guess what FXAA doesn't show up for both, it just looks like it is not activated but ingame it is antialiased!
I've taken the ingame screenshots in my first post with snagit, a screen capture program. It seems that does the trick and grabs exactly what you see on the monitor...