Luigi Auriemma

I want to draw something on a directdraw game's screen.
So i find the proxy dll project here.
http://www.mikoweb.eu/
And i find the directdraw proxy dll ,but it has no own stuff to show how to draw something to a directdraw game's screen.
I sent a mail to the author,but the author also have no solution of it.
Can you take a look of it and find a way to draw something to a directdraw game's screen? Or can you make a new ddraw proxy dll?


This is the mail from the author
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Hello there,
thanks for the kind words. I did have a look into the code. You did a lot of good work creating the myIDDrawSurface7 !

Please have a look at ???myIDDraw::CreateSurface???. Here, I added the creating of our own ???myIDDrawSurface7??? object and passing the new pointer back to the caller. So that the proxy code gets called afterwards. For testing, I used a free game that needs DX7, downloaded from the internet: ???BoXiKoN.exe???.

As you can see (picture attached), DebugView now reports the creation of a ???myIDDrawSurface7 object???, but I ran into an endless loop of lock/unlock/blt afterwards.

So, this solution might not be complete yet (or it is a problem in ???BoXiKoN.exe???).
The project is here for download. Gmail wouldn???t let me send it directly. Bah. http://www.mikoweb.eu/tmp/work_ddrawproxy_1.1_mod.zip

You could test this with your target application and see if there is the problem, too.
Sorry for not having a solution ???out of the box???. I did think about it some time now, but couldn???t find a solution yet.
Please tell me about your findings.

Greetings

Michael

the problem is that personally I have really zero experience with directx, I don't know where to start too for showing the object on the screen.
sorry

Very thanks!

uhmmm other than having just no documentation that project doesn't seem to do what stevenx needs

I want to draw text on game's screen beacuse i want to translate it.
I want to recognize the english subtitle in backsuface and draw chinese subtitle in frontsuface to translate the game.

The DX9 Window Overlay DLL 2.0 is not for DirectDraw,it is not a proxy dll ,but anyway thanks for you, Sethioz .

then as far as I know almost no games use the overlay method, usually they convert each character in the string to an image (the font version of that char) through the GetGlyph* function and then each image is pushed on the screen.
this is only an example obviously

You may wants to modify directly the string in the binary, but you may have troubles if your string is bigger than the actual one. Try to use a hex editor and take a look into the binary or game resources files. It may be more cleaner to do that than filtering the messages.

Thanks for all the advices!
I know the way you said above,i just want to find a way when all above the methods are failured.
My language is chinese, two byes language ,so just edit subtitle in the resource file is difficult to translate them.

So,I want to find another way,for example.proxy dll.
I already have working dx3d9 proxy dll,but no ddraw one.
I just know a little of OD,so this way maybe easier for me.

wait, it's 2 bytes in UTF-16 but you don't have this problem in UTF-8 which should be the default charset used (if the english text occupies 2 bytes for each char it's UTF-16).
for example some games use the windows fonts to generate the bitmap chars to put on the screen (the GetGliphOutline thing about I talked before) and they decide the needed font and the charset using the CreateFont function.

for example a japanese game will set the charset of CreateFont to SHIFTJIS_CHARSET (128), an english one to ANSI_CHARSET (0) and I guess the chinese one is CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET (136).
well I have had experience with this stuff only on a series of japanese games made by the same developers (Ys) and worked so I don't know if it's the same also in your case.