Well, as the title says, this is a really solution to the cannon aiming issue, i tried it and works; firts my computer hardware:

intel atom 1.6 ghz
intel gma 3150
1gb ram
windows xp os

As you can see, my computer is no really god, but runs call of cthulhu good, so i do this to fix the issue:

Firts, we need some things:

1.- A savegame rigth before the cannon aiming issue.
2.- The file that i upload to this link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OEYQS87A

Then we need extract the file in any location of your hard disk. Copy the files extracted to engine folder on the call of cthulhu installation folder and run call of cthulhu.
With this the issue is no more and you can see the "ligths on the reef".

Someone can asked: if this solve the bug, what the hell is it?, basically is a 3d software render, and if you play the cannon aiming part with this, the bug is no more.

Note: if you have a graphics media accelerator, the game runs slow, you can reduce the pixels of the game, and change the mouse sensitive to 1( to improve accurancy).

When you pass troughout this bug, you can delete the files that have to copy to the engine folder to run normaly the game.

Well thats all i can say, best of lucks to complete this part of the game, and see you later.

It makes the game really slow and impossible to play... (And graphics became suddenly awful) Or maybe I did something wrong. I copied the files in "Engine". That's what we're supposed to do, right?
It's been a month I didn't play this game because of that bug :'(

It's not working anyway... I still can't zoom and see the blue lights :'(

corguette, what is the os and hardware you own?

The fact that this mod is a software renderer is implicitly why it won't be able to run very well. Software rendering is very CPU intensive, and in video games today you really do need the hardware acceleration that hardware rendering provides. I think that instead of trying to fix this game, which uses Gamebryo and is buggy as hell, instead write something new using another engine or from scratch. Personally I think the best engine you could use for this would be the Source engine, id Tech 3, or id Tech 4. But if you go with id Tech 4, you're going to have to do a lot of fixing because ambient lighting is not a feature of that engine, but I think perhaps you could change the way rendering is done. Perhaps.

However at the same time, it's notable that id Tech 4 has the most realistic lighting in an engine to date, because lighting is based on actual lighting data and not ambient light. A good example of where this would work really well is in The Old Town where Jack walks through the poor section of Innsmouth. All the street lights will cast sinister shadows on the street. Where it might not do well is in The Windswept Tunnels.

Source could probably do some dark atmosphere with lighting as well, but it really did not leverage atmosphere in any of the existing Valve games. Left 4 Dead, Half-Life 2, etc -- there's no atmosphere to the games, because everything looks so bright and chipper. I'd really have to see some very very good work to consider it capable of adding the atmosphere to a scene that we get with say, id Tech 4.

Regardless, your software renderer isn't a bad idea, but do you think you could release the source code for other people to look into it? This could have an impact not only on fixing the blue lights bug, but also in improving the resources of the game, such as higher resolution textures, etc.

As an addendum... If you're running Windows XP, the Blue Lights will work for you no matter what. If you run Windows 2000, same deal. The only way to effectively attempt and/or solve the problem is to use Windows Vista or Windows 7.

The actual issue that users are having is that the shaders or scripts must be recompiled on Windows Vista or Windows 7, because Vista and 7 are blocking access to some of the files which are attempting to draw to screen, it doesn't block most files, but for whatever reason it blocks the dark voyage scripts. Headfirst made a very bad decision to utilize .bat as a file type, because bat (or batch) files are a protected file type due to their extensive usage in MS-Dos and even Windows operating systems today and thus the most likely reason that windows is blocking the files from being executed by the engine.

Adding to that is the way that Microsoft completely re-wrote the Direct3D code for the release of Vista, which further created problems in a large number of video games. They used this same version of DirectX for the Xbox 360 which is why it is that many Xbox games work poorly or not at all on the Xbox 360 (including notably Call of Cthulhu, and Knights of the Old Republic).

Were Call of Cthulhu an OpenGL game, it would be a somewhat easy task of retrieving the hardware context of the executable and fixing a number of things in the engine. However as I stated in the previous post, the game would most likely be better off written into another engine for a variety of reasons.