Ok, i think this deserves it's own thread. Some background info, i have been messing around with the Widescreen fixed (WSGF) rasters (rOpenGL and D3D) that were published back in august (also see the thread for it on this forum).
Interestingly, i just found out today that the D3D renderer (d3d.dll) has somehow been fixed by the widescreen author (the menu background text is no longer black for me, which was the main culprit with the d3d raster). Also he seems to have somehow (from within the d3d.dll) disabled Sun Flares, which is used for illuminating the sun (duh) but also to illuminate bonfires. This alleviates the FPS drop problem that was common with the D3D raster (everytime you looked at a bonfire or at the sun, it lagged), so now it's very fluid (however you won't see the nice flare effect anymore). P.S. he still also offers a DL with the Sunflare effect in-tact, but be warned it will be laggy.
Then i started playing a savegame that i had on Marakamda as the Amazon, and i started running in and out of the infamous crash location (at the entrance near the end of the level with many bonfires in sight). First with OpenGL to make sure it actually crashes, which it did, instantly. Then i tried the (non-Sunflare removed) d3d.dll from WSGF, and it actually crashes also (people always say the D3D raster doesn't crash near those bonfires, but if you walk in and out many times eventually it will crash like OpenGL). Then i tried the Sunflare removed d3d.dll, it still crashed when i walk in and out alot of times, but it seemed to occur less frequently and later. Then i was thinking, what if it isn't about the amount of bonfires at all? But about the player shadows being generated? I then turned off 'Character Shadows' in the Video menu and tried again, and there was no more crash! I then tried all 3 rasters again, and even with OpenGL the bonfire crash does not happen anymore! So there is now a new way to avoid bonfire crash, you don't have to get out of game anymore to switch renderer, you can now simply use OpenGL and just turn off character shadows for a moment. This also means that a map that has a lot of bonfires in 1 place, is now playable on OpenGL.
There is also one more thing, now that the use of the D3D renderer becomes valid again, it will also open up a new way to limit the game's frames per second. You can do this with many D3D wrappers that are out there, i just have to figure out how to make it work with BoD because most of them are made for D3D8. BoD is a DirectX 7 game (the .dll file that is called by the game is actually ddraw.dll). If i can find a wrapper that allows to limit FPS for BoD, then also the problem with the broken cutscenes will have been solved, and you will not have to turn on VSync everytime before you play. Then possibly you could also run the game at 120fps (potentially, it might not mess up the cutscenes at that amount) while still being able to progress through the cutscene. I already tried a wrapper called D3D7to9 (it translates all calls to D3D9 and also offers to limit FPS) but sadly this didn't work. Perhaps someone in the future will make a wrapper for D3D7 that can properly limit FPS.
Anyways sorry for the long rant!