[O2Jam (2003)] Poor performance, color keying issues, Alt-Tab rendering break, and missing DDraw hooks in UI

[red-crate]

ddraw_log_with_dxvk_conf.zip

I tested the original O2Jam (2003 release, not a recent remaster/clone) with D7VK 1.9 on Windows. The game seems to utilize both DirectX 7 and Direct3D 7 (running it via dgVoodoo2 requires both ddraw.dll and D3DImm.dll).

I encountered the following main issues:

1. Focus Loss (Alt-Tab) Breakage:

• If I Alt-Tab to the desktop immediately after launching the game and then return to it, the rendering completely breaks. The screen goes black, and only the mouse cursor and a few random text elements are visible.

2. Hooking & Rendering Issues in UI/Lobby:

• When launching the game normally, the intro brand logo is supposed to fade in and out. With D7VK, it just stays at a fixed, bright opacity.
• Performance in the lobby/rooms is extremely poor.
• The D7VK/DXVK HUD does not appear in the lobby at all. It only starts hooking and displaying once I actually start playing a song (entering the 3D gameplay phase). This suggests D7VK's ddraw.dll might not be hooking the 2D UI properly.
• After a song finishes, it should return to the room UI and render it, but it fails to load properly (I can only hear the audio, no visuals).

3. Missing Color Keying for 2D Objects (and Mouse Cursor):

• The game renders 2D note images and uses color keying for transparency.
• O2Jam specifies the transparent color individually for each object file (.ojt and .ojs custom formats). It varies slightly from file to file, not just a single hardcoded color.
• D7VK currently fails to drop these transparent colors, showing the background boxes on the notes (Likely related to your colorkey tracker).
• Additionally, when the Alt-Tab bug (mentioned in point 1) occurs, the mouse cursor is also rendered with corrupted pink backgrounds (color key failure).
• 3D objects (like judgement effects) are rendered perfectly fine.

4. Severe Performance Drop in Gameplay:

• During actual song gameplay, the framerate drops to around 12-20 FPS. Given my system specs (5900X + 7900 XTX), this seems to be an API translation bottleneck or an error loop.

Software information

• Name of the game: O2Jam (2003 original version)
• Settings used: Default (dxvk.conf attached)
• Mods/Addons: None

System information

• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X)
• Driver: Adrenalin 26.5.1 but whatever
• Wine version: N/A (Native Windows 11 25H2)
• D7VK version: 1.9

Log files

I have attached a .zip file containing:

1. OTwo_ddraw.log (Around 16kB, generated after playing through the issues and closing the game normally).
2. dxvk.conf

Screenshots

1. After Alt-Tab (Rendering Break)

2. Missing Transparent Colors (Color Keying Issue)

D7VK 1.9 (Issue)	Windows XP (Expected)

[WinterSnowfall]

First off, kind reminder Windows isn't technically a supported platform and native DDraw + D7VK will probably perform a whole lot worse than on Wine/Linux.

When launching the game normally, the intro brand logo is supposed to fade in and out. With D7VK, it just stays at a fixed, bright opacity.

warn: validateGammaRamp: ramp inverted or flat ... the game is apparently setting a gamma ramp that doesn't pass validation

Performance in the lobby/rooms is extremely poor / The D7VK/DXVK HUD does not appear in the lobby at all.

That is normal, because we don't present for DDraw, only within 3D scenes. The hooking works just fine, I assure you, but we don't handle exclusive 2D content, so if there are no actual draws, we let DDraw do its thing. If you maybe want circumvent that, you can try ddraw.forceLegacyPresent = True, however that might end up being even slower.

After a song finishes, it should return to the room UI and render it, but it fails to load properly (I can only hear the audio, no visuals).

Probably (expected for Windows) WSI issues. Not much we can do about that unfortunately.

Missing Color Keying for 2D Objects

I have no way to test, but Windows AMD drivers have always been problematic with DXVK in general. Since color keying on Linux is generally fine, I'm not even sure this is an us problem.

4. Severe Performance Drop in Gameplay

Not much we can do on that front, certainly not on Windows.

TLDR: I'm surprised this even works on Windows at all, and most issues are either expected or not actionable from our end. I don't recommend D7VK use in general on Windows, to be fair. Simply keep using native DDraw if that works fine with the game.

[WinterSnowfall]

@red-crate Could you give it a retest with D7VK v2.0 please?

[red-crate]

@red-crateD7VK v2.0으로 다시 테스트해 주시겠습니까?
Thanks for following up.
I retested the game with D7VK v2.0 and went through each of the issues described in my original report.

Unfortunately, I could not observe any noticeable improvements on my system.
The Alt-Tab rendering failure, 2D/UI rendering issues, missing color keying, and severe performance problems all remain unchanged.

[WinterSnowfall]

Unfortunately, I could not observe any noticeable improvements on my system. The Alt-Tab rendering failure, 2D/UI rendering issues, missing color keying, and severe performance problems all remain unchanged.

No worries, thank you for retesting.

If there are no improvements at this point at least with regards to color keying, even after we've reworked the color keying precision handling and it's known to work just fine everywhere else, then the problems you are seeing all happen because of D7VK's interaction with the Windows/native DDraw implementation. It would be interesting to know how the game behaves on Linux/Wine, but if you don't have access to test that, I guess we'll have to live with the mystery.