Descent 3 with wine and OpenGL / Mesa

[Polytropon]

After I succeeded finishing "Descent" and "Descent II" on
a real DOS PC, I wanted to explore "Descent 3" on FreeBSD.
That system runs FreeBSD 12.0-p3 i386 and wine 4.0,1, which
is configured for "Windows '98" compatibility. After installation
from the original 2 CD set, the game refused to run even though
CD access permissions were all set as per the handbook (full
user control). I then decided to apply the "no CD patch", and
now the game works. After a little configuration for the
controls, it's partially usable with keyboard and mouse,
but of course that's _no_ comparison to the previous versions
that could be controlled with keyboard and analog (!) joystick.

However, I have a problem with graphics. The game menu runs
in a 640x480 window on a 1024x768 desktop, the game itself
runs in 1024x768 fullscreen. When using "DirectX" (the one
that came with wine), most textures are black, lasers are
invisible. Switching to OpenGL / Mesa, everything is visible.
The problem is: There is more stuff visible than there _should_
be, i. e., partially transparent textures. The rendering is
so ugly that I can look through walls, I see floating doors,
I see enemy bots behind the corner, I can see through the
mountains - "invisible walls" are terrible.

I've been playing with the various command line options as well
as with the in-game settings, but it doesn't get better.
All the effects and detail are displayed properly.

The graphics in that machine is an Intel Mobile GM965/GL960,
and the installed xf86-video-intel-2.99.917.20181203 works
very good with that. The game is old enough (published 1999)
to not require the newest and fastest PC currently available.

Does anyone have an idea what could be the problem here?



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...