Hotel Giant 2
Jemima Torguson
The play of the game involves developing and managing a hotel. The user starts with a pre-made building to which they add rooms, place useful and decorative objects in the rooms, and set up hotel details such as advertising. Once this has happened, the user opens up the hotel to the public and starts to run it as if it were a real business. It is similar to the "Tycoon" style of game (Railroad Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, etc.), in which the player creates a system or establishment and then runs it.[1] Hotel Giant 2 offers improved graphics, more features and a new campaign.
The game received a fairly poor reception, with a Metacritic average of 54%. D+PAD said that any pros were "outweighed by some of the cons, most notably the repetitive and the non-engaging nature of the gameplay."[9] IT Reviews commented that the game "wasn't much fun" and you'd get "more amusement with an old, second hand copy of Sim Tower".[10]
it is about 'hotel giant 1', a game i recently downloaded and installed, but that doesn't start, either on windows 7 or windows 10 (two different computers), registers something of an Unhandled EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION on a log file, and, overall, feels kind of strange coming from what seems to be a gog installation and not having a single entry anywhere on troubleshooting sites (none i could find, at least)...so...do i have a corrupt installer? im also trying to find an alternate source still.
still without luck on my end, tried both 16 bit and dxwnd, and the log still reports Unhandled EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION at address 00427D06 (Module: 00400000). dxwnd also doesnt window the black screen
i got a setup_hotel_giant_1.0.0.0.(53531) gog one from two different sources, but it seems the file is the same. should you send me an inbox message on where i could get an updated copy? i d must highly appreciate it.
before seeing your message i also downloaded a bin version from _Giant_JoWooD_Productions , installed correctly, but failed to execute still. the game process shows on the task manager briefly before disappearing, no black screens this time.
i started downloading the one from the link you provided, but my connection is unstable at the moment, so it seems it may take a whle.
As I said, the CD version is copy protected with a protection that polls the SCSI CD-Drive connection, so probably it's not even supposed to work on every CD drive or CD emulator: see a log extract here below
The GOG release, instead, is supposed to work ...
P.s. if someone is able to run the CD version of the game from an emulated or real CD, please let me know. In my log the command IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT is probably repeated many times because it was unsuccessful, but if yoy cn run it, then it should be possible to emulate it.
@Alejandro Gomez
Now I tried the game from the link given here (web archive) and as I expected, the game cannot be run here due to SecuROM protection. I don't know how well DAEMON Tools can handle this protection, because I don't have it. Moreover, I think that the purpose of this forum is not to overcome such commercial protections, or to publish instructions on how to do it.
Oh, ok! i think that made me understand. i got a nocd crack (not sure if i can say those things out loud, but sometimes i read in posts someone saying 'solved' and not saying how and it usually only adds to the frustration) and i ran it with the gog version that was linked here -which didnt work in the beginning either- and it made me wonder if all the versions were able to work in the first place had they been cracked...
In most cases the Russian version is an extra file added to an English version. Since it's not easy to understand reading the Russian notes, a good method is to try to download everything but when you say the suffix "RU" in the proposed download you will know it's Russian and could decide to proceed or not.
I must say it's an excellent and very reliable source ...
Hi, I need some help configuring DxWnd to run Hotel Giant 2 properly. I tried using DxWnd to force the game to run in window mode because the cursor is out of sync with the GUI of the game when running in the default fullscreen mode.
If I run the game using DxWnd, everything works fine on the game menu. Problem appears when I start playing the game. When I move the mouse around, the cursor moves accordingly but the map also moves around. This makes it impossible for me to focus/click on anything because - lets say - if I move my mouse up, the cursor moves up but the map or my view also moves to same direction. The map should only move when the cursor is on the edge of the screen/window. There is no option to turn off edge scrolling in the game.
These are the current DxWnd input settings that I use to run the game, "Cursor Clipper - ON" and "Cursor Handling - Correct Mouse Position". Is it possible to configure DxWnd to prevent edge scrolling in game? Or is there any other solution to this issue?
Thanks for the reply. I have applied the v1.1 patch. Still having the exact same issues with the cursor being out of sync with GUI in fullscreen mode and edge scrolling being on all the time in window mode.
Never tried the demo tho since I own a digital copy of the game. Also, bought it on Steam to check if their version is playable since the dev released an HD update on Steam in 2015. The HD update does not fix the cursor issue. Apparently, a bunch of other people are having the same cursor problem but no one have found the solution.
Definitely, the demo shows problems too, very likely I won't have to get myself a full game version.
The game links DirectInput8 and so far I got the best results by checking the "Hook dinput8" flag, together with "Correct mouse position" and a few others.
This is where the game starts to puzzle me: for sure the game uses a mixed approach to the mouse coordinate detection, in fact the initial clicks don't need dinput8 hooking, a clear sign that they are handled by user32 calls. But then I don't have the impression of getting the same results on different run of the game, even with identical DxWnd parameters. It is simply too early to give a feedback, but there's something bad in the mouse handling.
Thanks a lot for looking into it. When you said you got the best results checking "Hook dinput8" flag, together with "Correct mouse position" and a few others, did you manage to prevent edge scrolling while moving the mouse around?
I never saw an effect like "edge scrolling while moving the mouse around". If you move the mouse close to the window borders the game scrolls in the border direction, but this is the normal side-scrolling effect of many games, so I doubt you meant something like this. Probably the full game (or Win8) are cousing some more weird effect. Could you describe more precisely what you see? In any case, I'll do more research ...
I found a possible culprit. The game uses DirectInput8 and mouse input in relative axis mode.
This mode is typically used for scene scrolling in FPS games and needs no coordinate scaling, so DxWnd doesn't scale this type of input. Here HG2 seems to use this input for GUI pointing (!!) so that the targeting of the GUI elements (buttons, menus etc.) is highly imprecise. This also could explain why the error is variable in time, first clicks usually precise and becoming more and more impossible to make a target hit.
Let's hope this hypothesys is the correct one.
I'm pretty sure about it: the culprit is the relative axis mode used to calculate the absolute mouse position. This method is more complicated than absolute mode but can work in a reliable way under some conditions:
1) you know where you started from
2) you never miss a coordinate update
3) the coordinate updates are exact values
If it seems complicated, it's not: while in absolute mode you get a coordinate value, let's say xy=(20,50), in relative axis mode you know that you started from (0,0) and you got a series of relative position updates like (+10,+30), (+5,+30), (+10,-10) that summed each other give the final identical result of (20,50).
Now DxWnd introduces two problems in this scenario:
1) when you Alt-Tab you can return in the window in a different cursor position
2) when you scale the coordinate updates you make roundings that cumulated give an imprecise position
The first problem should exist also without DxWnd, but it seems that the game intercepts somehow the gained focus event to restart its calculations. Somehow, DxWnd seems to interfere and misses this reset, so it will be necessary to investigate and recover this mechanism.
The second problem could be managed by a proper scaling method that takes in account all roundings.
On the overall, I think it can be done. It's only a pity that I don't think anybody else was so foolish to use this crazy scema to develop another game.
No, but it's not the first time I've heard of such a successful attack. If you read it carefully, you will notice that there is little technology in there, no cryptographic deciphering technology or star wars: a good knowledge of privileged information, some fake e-mails, a bank that does not care too much about the account name and a stupid employee who stupidly follows email instructions for a payment of 2 million euros. Incredible but true!
Too bad I'm not a soccer fan .... :(
Progress: a cumbersome algorythm with coordinate scaling and rest compensation is ready, but something is missing: it works almost perfectly for a couple of clicks, then it becomes inaccurate and you can't make some of the tiny buttons to become pressed.
Mumble mumble ....
Uhm.... after too many attempts, I discovered that the game has some specific problem while in tutorial mode. Instead, once running in normal mode, my coordinate compensation seems to work much better.
In any case I don't want to delay a possible fix: this leaked beta could fix some annoyance. I tested it with the game demo, but the full game seems almost identical. When in the tutorial (in the demo you can't skip it) you press ESC and from the menu pick the skip tutorial option. From there on, the game seems to work much better.
The good settings for the demo are included in the archive, and hopefully they should be ok for the full game as well. This release implements the new input flag "Scale mouse relative movements" to help fixing HG2 problems.
Please, let me know if that fixes (or just improves) the situation.