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PC Bioshock Demo Now Available
Dr. Eggman writes "Valve announced today that their digital distribution system, Steam, is now hosting Irrational Games-turned-2K Boston's soon to be released title, Bioshock. The game will appear on Steam and the US August 21st and in Europe on the 24th. If you don't enjoy pipes, perhaps you'd like to utilize the tubes at 3DDownloads, Worthplaying, FilePlanet, or Gamer's Hell."
Actually, the demo is important for ensuring that the game will run properly on one's computer before laying out $50 for it. For example, the system requirements claim you have to be running WinXP, but is it possible to coerce the game to run under Win2k?
Irrational has been pretty sensitive to the plot-relevant details of their game being ruined by spoilers, so I'm hopeful that the demo won't spoil the full game.
The torrent has been around longer than the links in TFS
e mo
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3778797/BioShock_PC_D
According to my eyewitness report, it runs on XP, with a 7600GT, 2 GB of RAM and a 3700+ processor.
This is probably tied into highstreet store release dates and sales deals. For reasons connected with the distribution chain, most US games releases happen on either Mondays or Tuesdays, while pretty much all UK (the most important European market since Germany effectively closed its borders to many games) releases happen on Fridays.
Obviously, retailers would kick up a fuss if online vendors were selling the game in their region before they had it in their stores. For this reason, they tend to insist on contractual obligations ensuring that "online" releases don't pre-empt titles hitting their stores. Of course, given how easy the region-checks on most online sales of games are to defeat, I'm not really sure that this policy is getting them very far, with the generally technically savvy PC gaming scene.
I was pretty skeptical about the game before I tried the demo, I thought it looked like Doom 3 meets Half-Life 2 meets F.E.A.R, but I was wrong. I really like the 1950s theme mixed with an underwater world. I like the fact that you can loot corpses among other things, it gave the game more of a RPG feel than a straight FPS to me. Of course there's also the plasmids which is a nice touch. Before playing the demo, I thought it was just another over hyped FPS, but I now see what everyone else was talking about.
I was a bit worried about performance before hand, but it ran very well on my year and half old system (AMD X2 3800+, 2 gigs of ram, Radeon X1900XT 256mb). I had it running at 1680x1050 with maximum detail settings and 4xAA/8xAF and I only noticed a brief frame rate slow down at one point near the end of the demo.
The demo was good enough that I plan on buying it tomorrow (PC version of course). I think this is probably the first demo that I've tried all year where I actually want to buy the game instead of just uninstalling the demo and being thoroughly disappointed afterwards.
I've been working on getting it run under win2k for a while now:
'Release' folder == Progra~1\Steam\steamapps\common\bioshock demo\Builds\Release
1. dbghelp.dll must be downloaded from 'dll download sites' on the internet and dropped into 'Release'
2. You must hex edit xinput1_3.dll in 'Release' and replace the String 'TraceMessage' with 'GetUserNameA'. It simply forces the debug messages to be dropped on the ground, I think anyways.
Thats where I'm at so far. Right now I can load up and start the demo, but I have two issues:
1. The mouse is not drawn
2. When you start the actual plain crash sequence, textures are missing and it looks like a big pile of crap. Since I have really old drivers installed, I'm going to attempt one of the 'non-ati' bundles or maybe the hotfix driver (if it works with 2k) to see if any of them work out for me.
Good luck
Bye!
Thanks for the info. The hex edit of xinput1_3.dll (which, coincidentally, works to get any version of the XInput DLL to at least load under Win2k) causes that DLL to call the wrong function if ever it were to happen to try to call TraceMessage. The results would almost certainly be a crash, but since I've played other games with this hack present with no problems, I suspect that it would require unusual circumstances to cause this to happen (and that's assuming that the XInput DLLs actually call TraceMessage anywhere at all). Keeping the DLL in the individual game's directory greatly reduces the chances of this hack being used as a security vulnerability.
The demo ran fine for me under Win2k taking the steps mentioned in the parent post. I had installed the nVidia drivers that were also released on Monday. The only problem I had was an annoying tendency for the game to momentarily freeze up when loading new textures, resulting in a disorienting turn to an arbitrary direction if I happened to be turning at that moment.
Anyway, the ease with which a person can get these games to run under Win2k (Overlord was the same way, minus needing dbghelp.dll) makes one wonder why it's not supported directly out of the box. Having the game decline to load the XInput DLL, for instance, unless you're actually using an XBox360 controller on your PC, would eliminate one source of seemingly arbitrary incompatibility that was introduced by Microsoft. The dbghelp.dll file is a good bit different between the two versions of Windows, but the new version seems to function as a drop-in replacement if you add it to the executable directory for whatever game you're playing. Is the incompatibility purely unnecessary, created artificially by Microsoft to induce sales of XP or Vista (perhaps as a strategy that took longer than they expected to start working, due to game manufacturers being reticent to abandon Win2k users for several years)?