- Joined
- Dec 6, 2023
- Messages
- 2
Hi all,
New here
(not exactly: I've been visiting The Hive Workshop to download custom single player campaigns and gather info for a personal modding project in The Frozen Throne, I am delighted this place exists)
Context: I own Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne expansion (Battle Chest edition), years ago I registered my CD keys on my Battle.net account to download the games from there before Ref***ed was a thing.
Now for old school gaming I use a:
(Out of curiosity, I did download on my Macbook Pro the Reforged version I'm entitled to - no new high res models in-game because I didn't buy it but all the data dumped onto my disk nonetheless - I'll stick to the originals)
The problem (tl;dr it's in the title of the thread):
I use my old school gaming PC for preservation purposes, also for when my brother comes around and we can play the games from our youth and in view of sharing them with my children (not quite ready yet!). The W3 games both work perfectly on my Windows 7 64 bit except:
the FMV cinematics are bleached out / washed out colors
I'm sure there is a solution (you'd think a minor issue like this would be easier to solve!): before asking for help here, I found the following:
- here on the Hive, a (genuinely recent) solution to black screen during cinematics:
www.hiveworkshop.com
@Ravager16829 many thanks for the detailed post, I did not suffer from the black screen problem but I am glad to have found and installed the K-Lite Codec Pack as now I can also easily open the MPQ files in the "Movies" folder using MPC-HC; first I also tried the "little tricky thing with LAVFilters" but the cinematics remained washed out, getting the K-Lite Codec Pack (default settings) also didn't help (I understand this solution was meant to solve the black screen issue rather than the bleached out issue, but worth a try)
- some older posts on the Web do refer to W3 CGI cutscenes that are all completely washed out (in my case and as sometimes mentioned by others, there's also a narrow grey "bar" at the bottom of the cinematics in Reign of Chaos, funnily enough this bar doesn't exist in the FMVs for The Frozen Throne):
Using alternative codec instead of Mpeg Decoder DMO (didn't help)
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/any-way-to-get-warcraft-3-to-run-perfectly-in-windows-8.730276/ (didn't help solve the issue, but does detail other on-screen artefacts)
- closest solution so far to fixing bleached out FMV cinematics on Windows 7 64bit (originally posted as a solution on Win8 64x):
following this procedure to the letter which actually means disabling DivX in the FFDShow settings (and I hadn't installed K-Lite Codec Pack yet, I suppose I can't have both so I uninstalled FFDShow before installing K-Lite which apparently includes FFDShow anyway - but I didn't tamper with K-Lite's default settings yet), I found that the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes indeed no longer suffered from washed out colors, but then I had another problem: very dark (but not exactly black!) parts of any given frame would be "unrendered" to default pure blackness with ugly jagged borders and, e.g., for the expansion intro with Illidan, there'd be little fluctuating blue and purple artefacts all around the "Blizzard Presents" text... and for the Reign of Chaos cinematics, the grey bar at the bottom is only ever "almost" gone into blackness, instead hinting at its presence with faint fluctuating blue and purple artefacts... all heavily distracting!
For now I'm back at the stage of bleached out cinematics, with the K-Lite Codec Pack installed.
I hope this post is detailed enough, and hope someone can help with solving this issue!
New here
(not exactly: I've been visiting The Hive Workshop to download custom single player campaigns and gather info for a personal modding project in The Frozen Throne, I am delighted this place exists)Context: I own Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne expansion (Battle Chest edition), years ago I registered my CD keys on my Battle.net account to download the games from there before Ref***ed was a thing.
Now for old school gaming I use a:
- Windows 7 64 bit, processor AMD Ryzen 3 1300X Quad-core with NVIDIA GTX 1050 graphics card
- 17 inch 1280x1024 monitor (I care about the original aspect ratios)
- and for W3 games, I have deliberately stuck to v1.26.0.6401 (I don't want the widescreen BS that shows how the game was not built for it, like in-game cutscenes where you can see the edges of the map, characters "pop" into existence etc.) and set compatibility mode for Windows XP (SP 3) with Disable Desktop Composition (though not using these compatibility modes doesn't seem to change anything...)
(Out of curiosity, I did download on my Macbook Pro the Reforged version I'm entitled to - no new high res models in-game because I didn't buy it but all the data dumped onto my disk nonetheless - I'll stick to the originals)
The problem (tl;dr it's in the title of the thread):
I use my old school gaming PC for preservation purposes, also for when my brother comes around and we can play the games from our youth and in view of sharing them with my children (not quite ready yet!). The W3 games both work perfectly on my Windows 7 64 bit except:
the FMV cinematics are bleached out / washed out colors
I'm sure there is a solution (you'd think a minor issue like this would be easier to solve!): before asking for help here, I found the following:
- here on the Hive, a (genuinely recent) solution to black screen during cinematics:
Cinematics not playing.
Hi all, I believe im using the war 3 and TFT versions that are RIGHT before reforged. When I play the game everything works fine EXCEPT the cinematics. the audio is there, even the subtitles... but the video itself does not play... any ideas?
www.hiveworkshop.com
- some older posts on the Web do refer to W3 CGI cutscenes that are all completely washed out (in my case and as sometimes mentioned by others, there's also a narrow grey "bar" at the bottom of the cinematics in Reign of Chaos, funnily enough this bar doesn't exist in the FMVs for The Frozen Throne):
Using alternative codec instead of Mpeg Decoder DMO (didn't help)
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/any-way-to-get-warcraft-3-to-run-perfectly-in-windows-8.730276/ (didn't help solve the issue, but does detail other on-screen artefacts)
- closest solution so far to fixing bleached out FMV cinematics on Windows 7 64bit (originally posted as a solution on Win8 64x):
[WC3] Bleached out movies, cinematics "too bright".
I finally managed to fix this **** in Win8 64x with Warcraft 3, when the cinematics play they are just too bright. My steps: 1. Install WC3 + EXP 2. Patch to latest patch 3. [-]Rename / delete blizzard.ax [/-] ( I see this came back with the EXP ) 4. Download...
mybroadband.co.za
For now I'm back at the stage of bleached out cinematics, with the K-Lite Codec Pack installed.
I hope this post is detailed enough, and hope someone can help with solving this issue!
