Komat's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow Wrapper.

[Ambient_Malice]

For some years, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow has been unplayable on PC due to severe graphics bugs including missing shadows and light beams, which is kinda fatal in a stealth game revolving around hiding in shadows. This year, a coder named Komat created a wrapper, which is still WIP, which fixes many of the issues.

When taking advantage of shadowmap textures supported since GeForce 3, there is a difference between DirectX8 (used by the game) and DirectX9+ in how the API expects the Z/W value at input of the texture sampler with shadowmap texture. For DirectX8 the application is supposed to provide the value in <0;2^bitdepth-1> range where the bitdepth is bit depth of the depth texture. For all other APIs the value is expected to be as <0;1>. For more info see here. It seems that starting with some version of the driver or HW, the DirectX8 path no longer comply with the original behavior and instead expects the DirectX9+ behavior.

You can download it here:
http://www.jiri-dvorak.cz/scellpt/

Sadly, it's highly unlikely we'll see an official re-release of the game for PC, but at least it's playable now.

 

[SweetShark]

Interesting. I remember I bought an original physical copy of the game many years ago. I don't remember why I didn't bother to finish this game, but I think it didn't had any kind of bug with the shadows.
This problem is only apply for the digital copies through Steam?

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Interesting. I remember I bought an original physical copy of the game many years ago. I don't remember why I didn't bother to finish this game, but I think it didn't had any kind of bug with the shadows.
This problem is only apply for the digital copies through Steam?

The game was broken when GPU driver behavior changed after the game's release. My impression was Pandora Tomorrow was designed with the Xbox's Geforce 3 in mind. The Xbox used an API very similar to DirectX8.

 

[Ronald Nand]

I played PT a few years ago, either I had the magic hardware configuration needed or I was extremely thick, because I never noticed any issues with the shadows in the game.

 

[StatusNil]

This problem is only apply for the digital copies through Steam?

Pandora Tomorrow is not on Steam, the only PC Splinter Cell that isn't.

 

[SmugFrog]

Is this the one where Sam choke/interrogates the guy and asks him, "Are you gonna say monkey?"

 

[sageoftruth]

Is this the one where Sam choke/interrogates the guy and asks him, "Are you gonna say monkey?"

I think that was Chaos Theory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zwuGMLdeW8

This was my favorite line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkc3Ivk7EyQ

 

[Doom972]

Thanks for letting us know. I thought nobody cared anymore. I'll definitely try it out as soon as I can get my hands on my old copy of the game.