I think it doesn't actually matter where is the real problem of missing health and mana bars contained. I think if Shiny pretends to be "good company" it should fix it. I saw lotsa games which shows health bars (last of them was HW:Cataclysm) and they work with my banshee just nice under both direct3d and opengl. I think there's surely a lot of ways these bars can be displayed and I just don't know why Shiny's programmers have chosen the way that leads to problems with voodoos. May be they haven't tested it with voodoos? I just can't believe it as in readme and in troubleshooting section of official website I've read the version of reference drivers I should use for my banshee. May be they know what they're doing, but NVidia paid 'em to make the game partly voodoo-incompatible? I don't know, but again I'm saying that people owning voodoo should have a remedy for problems with sacrifice. Does Shiny really want to loose money it could earn from people with voodoos? I'd like to hear form people from Shiny what THEY think about the situation and what THEY plan to do with it.

Silence is bad.

What are our options besides returning game to store? I've got ten days... would like to keep it if anyone is going to fix it, but I'll be damned if I'll keep a busted product from a company which is intentionally messing with me.

Well, yeah my bars are missing and it kind of sucks but I will still play. This Christmas I am doing a PC upgrade so I won't have to deal with those problems anymore HOPEFULLY! I have become used to putting my cursor over my creatures to see the health and healing them for good measure. That's the only answer I have been able to come up with since Shiny isn't saying anything about it.

To quote Sad Max:
"I think it doesn't actually matter where is the real problem of missing health and mana bars contained. I think if Shiny pretends to be "good company" it should fix it."


So, shiny should fix a problem that's not theirs? You said it doesn't matter where the problem originates, shiny should fix it to be a "good company".
To do that, Shiny would have to write a whole new set of 3dfx drivers, which they can't possibly do. All they can do is work with what 3dfx gives them. I myself have a voodoo 3500, and everything works fine when i downgraded the the 1.05.00 drivers released on July, otherwise I experienced the same missing lifebars problem. Shiny wrote the game to work with DirectX, which it *DOES*. 3dfx now needs their drivers to work with DirectX!! Please see what I wrote earlier about Microsoft and 3dfx being competitors. So bitch at them, Shiny can't do anything about it.

I have a problem with my mouse. It's DX8 related. But it's a logitech mouse. I'm sure a MICROSOFT mouse would work fine, but they're making it difficult for anyone who opposes them to remain compatible without doing updates theirselves. My middle button won't work with DirectX 8 installed. Should I bitch at Shiny? Should I want them to fix it? I can't use my middle button in their game, so should they have to provide a workaround when the problem is between Microsoft and Logitech? NO! Of course not!
Get real people!

[This message has been edited by Spriseris (edited 11-22-2000).]

Yep, Shiny should fix it because it is their problem. They didn't say ,"Don't get this game, all you Voodoo people out there, because you'll be missing key information which makes the game a pain to play." It is a bug, a programming oversight by Shiny, and bugs should be fixed. My computer runs fine by itself... it isn't an error in the way my graphics card is, it is a known quality for all graphics cards used by a wide number of people, and in interacting with that quality, Sacrifice is flawed. The answer should not be, "You want to play our $40 game... buy a $150 graphics card, and don't come whining to us if your widely used, pratically ubiquitous graphics card isn't supported by us." Nor should I have to install drivers which cause problems for other programs on my computer. The problem is Shiny's, it is their responsibility to fix it.

Further, the complete lack of response by Shiny moderators, no "Oh a patch will be coming, even if it takes us a month or two", no nothing, it extremely frustrating and leads to the conclusion that they don't care about us... which for me is pretty much a "no go" for further games from a particular company. In the modern era of buggy games, a gamer HAS to be able to depend on patches from a game developer... knowing that they will be required. In situations where a game developer is not willing to provide these to fix wide ranging problems with their games, then a gamer has to consider whether loyalty to this particular company is practical, and whether one's money is not better spent on a different product which, if not inherently as ingenious, will nevertheless function the way it is supposed to.

To Shiny's credit, they have been pretty helpful to me. Remember that there aren't all that many of them posting on these boards. I know alot of people have been pretty specific about their problems, but I have also seen some people get on here screaming the game won't work and Shiny should fix it at once. I understand the frustration of having problems with a game, but don't be so quick to damn Shiny, the game has only been out a few days. Shiny employees on these boards have been very helpful to me, and when the message board was being to cumbersome one of them even went out of his way to email me directly to help. Not only that, but we emailed each other back and forth several times within a 2-3 hour period to get things straightened out. Most companies wouldn't bother to try that hard, and that kind of involved conversation would have probably taken place over several weeks instead of just a couple hours. The employees of Shiny are only human, and they aren't an army. You can't expect instantaneous gratification in this kind of situation, and remember not to damn the entire company because they haven't solved every problem just yet. If you'll look at the message board they have fixed an awful lot of things, many of which weren't even caused by their game (my problem wasn't).

I now quote you, Jojo:
" Nor should I have to install drivers which cause problems for other programs on my computer. The problem is Shiny's, it is their responsibility to fix it."

You're admitting that *drivers* cause problems for other programs on your computer, and lay the blame on the *drivers* for every other piece of malfunctioning software on your computer. EXCEPT Sacrifice. That's Shiny's fault, not the drivers.
Don't be a hypocrit! The program uses DirectX. No glide, no opengl. It's a standard, and Shiny wrote Sacrifice to meet that standard. Just because 3dfx is a sub-standard company with drivers written by a three year old, it is now Shiny's fault?

Voodoo 2 banshee supports d3d in window mode.
Other voodooo 2 users can download a tweaking programm to enable d3d in window mode

Yes, we all understand (at least I do) that problem IS actually in 3dfx's drivers, which aren't fully support d3d. But haven't you heared about beta testing? Don't you think Shiny HAD TO test the game with all popular videocards? And Shiny probably did it as it wrote in it's readme.txt file included with the game what drivers should people use with their cards. It's absolutely impossible trying to release a good game without betatesting and further support (patches, addons, etc). But (I still don't know why) we're still having problems even with these very drivers Shiny told us to use. Moreover, I have tried all drivers for my banshee I have (four different versions) and I've got nothing. All I need for now is the answer from Shiny people what they actually do to make the game run fine with voodoos. If they're working with 3dfx to help them finding a bug in their drivers - it's good. If they're working on a patch which will for example make the game use other way to show health bars (please don't be a fool thinking that the only way to fix the problem with bars is to fix the drivers) it's good also. BUT SILENCE IS BAD SIGN. It's telling us that they won't do anything and we'll have to return the game to stores. Which is bad for both: us and Shiny itself.

Had exactly the same problem. Funny hting is, I had to disable the triangle strip to show the limbs and lots of other things. The thing I noticed is that all health bar and mana bar for all creatures are missing. And I can't see the video resolution I have selected in the option menu. So I guess it's something to do with translucency. Maybe translucent bars cannot be dsiplayed in the game? I think in the readme file they have actually included Voodoo banshee the said it's okay to use the latest driver and didn't mention this problem, so I guess they know how to solve this? no? And I really think they should release a patch. The game is playable without the health bar and mana bar, but it's really quite difficult to track the health and mana without the bars... http://www.veforums.com/frown.gif