I will preface this by saying that looks are subjective.

But I have seen posts here asking for D3D support, or suggesting D3D enhances the visuals of Dungeon Keeper. It does NOT!

What the D3D patch does is obviously accelerate the graphics using your graphics card, but at the same time the game is old that this hardware acceleration does practically nothing for performance.
It also adds some blur to some of the game objects, most noticeable is gold. And this I even find to be a questionable enhancement.
Now what it also does is REMOVE visuals from possesion view. If you posses a dragon you will see smoke in front of the eyes, if you posses a fly you will see "hexagons" distorting the view. All of these effects are removed in the D3D version.

tl;dr: You will be disappointed if you think D3D enhances the graphics, it does the opposite.

As the administrator of Keeper Klan a dedicated Dungeon Keeper forum, I'd like to think I know what I'm talking about :p

The switch from 256 colors 64k would be what makes it most appealing to me :) Not sure if it's worth loosing the effects, but it would still be nice to have both options... and besides, it's not just DungeonKeeper... there are other games on GoG that really are inferior because only the DOS version can be used, so finding a solution for this will be necessary at some point.

Anyway, since you seem to know a lot about DK: Will the game accept manually reworked high-resolution sprites? The format seems to be simple paletted Packbits, so editing them wouldn't be difficult, but I don't want to waste time if somebody has already tried (very likely) and failed (don't know about that).

I should probably clearify, when i talk about D3D I'm talking about the original D3D patch made by Bullfrog.

As the textures remain at 256 colors, I'm not sure what you'd gain from an increase in colordepth, any gain would have to be marginal at best.

As for high resolution graphics, you can take a look at DKER, although i must admit i havent really worked with it at all, but if i recall correctly thats exactly what it does (i do believe its for the windows version unfortuneatly), code is here: http://code.google.com/p/wfto/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FDKER

Everything that involves shading... which is quite a lot. I'm not sure it looks better, but it certainly looks different.

Anyway, the project you link to seems to take the usual road, meaning that it loads the original EXE, patches a few DLL calls and redirects the texture drawing to its own handler... there are many projects like it, with TexMod probably being the best known, but the problem is that this only works with Windows, and very likely even there only with the D3D version. I was really asking about modifying the game data directly... I simply couldn't find anything about it.

WTF?? Seriously?

There's no way the D3D patch is bad. It changes the whole look of the game from pixels to wireframe model.. and does a great job of it considering it's age, it was a great patch.

Relax. And it doesn't change anything in the level-models (which are polygonal no matter how you look at them)... what he's saying is that many of the tricks that you can perform easily on a software renderer weren't available on Direct3D back then, so they had to be removed.

The character sprites are 2D in both versions, but they are filtered in the D3D version... which has some advantages, but it's no magic bullet.

I beg to differ.. I don't know if the gog version does it differently, but I still have my disk, And it changes from pixels to textured model and there isn't even a hit on performance.

Been a (long) while since I fired it up but I still remember the huge difference to the game it made.

edit.. hmm.. well maybe not textured models, but still a huge difference. (I guess it's been longer than I thought)

Maybe you're confusing DK1 and 2? The D3D patch really doesn't change anything there except enabling bilinear filtering on the sprites. No voxels or anything else...

Direct3D: http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/372/480qv0.jpg
Software: http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/750/400xh1.jpg

Look at the heart, its slightly blurry, which is about the only thing you get from this patch. Along with the removal of all the other effects. Look at the torches, they don't give off light anymore using the D3D patch.

yes, there is a pixel filter i assume. i don't know the technical details. i do know though that i much prefer the look you call "blurred" over the pixelation.

it is beyond me how someone can say the d3d version does not look better or improve the game's responsitivity. i also can't believe why this isn't per se the version gog offers.

dosbox ?!!? ouch.

I think the reason is pretty obvious... The Windows 95 version of DK is not able to run in windows 7 at all. Believe me I have tried. And that goes for both the D3D and the software version. They might be able to get it working if they worked on it for some time. But the DOSBox-version works out of the box...

By the way I would assume this could also be the reason why DK2 hasn't been announced yet... It works ok on my computer in software mode. But hardware mode is screwed up... I guess my dream for both these games is an engine mod like the ones we've seen for Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and so on.

Blurring pixel art is a form of murder and should be punished. It likes squinting your eyes at the Mona Lisa.

The visual filters when you posses a creature is part of the experience and fun of the game, another reason to stay away from 3d acceleration from this classic it seems.

The "technical" details per pixel blurring is probably bilinear filtering.

[url=]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_filtering[/url]

Just going to chime in here seeing as I've been messing around with DK D3D on a Windows 98 SE machine with a Voodoo 3500 and a PowerVR PCX2 card installed.

Using the Voodoo it does apply filtering to EVERYTHING, the worst part being the hud really messing up the icons.

As for the PowerVR PCX2 it doesnt apply any texture filtering keeping a nice crisp look with good colours, but it's a really weak card so the framerate really suffers.

If I could find some way of disable filtering on the Voodoo this could be a great way to play. (I'm not actually very found of the possesion filters)

I assuming here you just want to play on an old PC for the charm of it, which is fine.

For others though, I realize many people like blur. You can enable this in your video control center. First install KeeperFX Unofficial. Then, look for something called "Catylist Control Center" or "Nvidia Control Center" or "Radeon settings" or something else named after your graphics card. There go to gaming, add KeeperFX as a profile and change the settings to your liking. If you enable Anisotropic Filtering you'll get a prettier version of what D3D did.

If you don't want the lenses, in KeeperFX they can simply be disabled through the config files.