[Droid803]

I've edited my post with more of my reasoning, nothing against you - I just feel the whole venture isn't necessary, and doesn't really fit my concept.

Oh, also:

The campaign in general appears to have been very poorly balanced for multiple levels of play, and on my second run through on the Very Easy equivalent I found all the missions pretty much exactly as challenging as they were on the Medium equivalent.

I guess this is the byproduct of homogenizing the AI classes across difficulty levels to prevent side effects. Honestly, I hate all of the difficulty-based scaling stuff in the game 'cause it breaks so many things, so I kind of gutted as much of them as possible. They are not coming back, as more things would break again.

Of course, now that I know that it results in little differentiation between difficulty levels, I have other ideas as to how to introduced highly controllable difficulty level adjustments.

[Legate Damar]

Okay. Are you going to answer in the questions thread?

[Droid803]

Okay. Are you going to answer in the questions thread?

When I get home tonight, or tomorrow...

[Spoon]

I for one find posts like these from the creator very insightful and interesting.

[MrTealTwo]

A quick review, in spoiler tags...

Spoiler:

Holy Shizels, such a great mod. The fast-paced high-speed combat really makes it feel all fresh, and the campaign is pretty hard, considering it managed to give me a decent challenge even on the Easy difficulty. Death comes in seconds if you don't pay attention. Most of the stuff looks cool and up-to-date and ridiculously flashy, even when compared to other new mods. Loved the style, humor, WoD references and so, tho it gets pretty absurd at times All in all, just awesome job, and props for Droid803 for making this happen. Dawn of Sol, for example, was an excellent campaign from Droid, but this almost manages to roflstomp over that Also, I'm in a complete vacuum regarding the development, and dialogue surrounding this project, so no external crap affecting my opinions here.

A couple of issues, tho:

1. In the mission "Cornered Beasts", I managed to let some of the fighters get away. The Belphegor was still around, so I destroyed it. Never got a directive to return to the docking bay or anything. Jumped out. "Failure. Did not have authorization to leave." Played the mission again, making sure no fighters escaped, getting the proper directive, and thus negating this problem.

2. In the final mission, I had destroyed the reactors, the Amaterasu was blowing up, and I was going "yay!". And just as the explosions were about to cease, um, well, the Exarchy made clear that they had run out of patience, and like 10 or so beam weapons appeared somewhat out of nowhere, and blew up the ship I was supposed to land on. Somewhat anticlimactic, huh? This could be fixed by making sure the beam barrage does not happen if the Amaterasu's reactors are destroyed, or so.

That's all. Magnificent work, I had a ton of fun with this ^)

[TerraMimic]

Just found this campaign a couple days ago.  So far, it seems to be pretty good.  A refreshing change from the normal style of gameplay, and the high speed really works on improving reaction times.  And that bait-and-switch at the start kinda ticked me off... and then I got over it, and it's kinda funny now.

But, I seem to have lost music once a mission starts.  If I exit FS and come back in, I'll get music in the lobby, and for the opening theme sequence, but then all the music cuts out.  I even tried replaying the mission with the theme song, but there's no audio for the vid sequence unless I exit first.  I know I've seen this posted earlier in the thread, but I haven't seen any solution for it.  It's possible that I may have missed it in the 20 pages I went through.

I even tried disabling the EFX in the sound options, but this looks like another problem with the realtek cards.  So, any ideas?

Thanks

[Droid803]

Hmm...all sound is cutting out? I don't even recall it having been posted in the thread before, though I might just be being forgetful...

[TerraMimic]

No, not all the sound.  Just the Music.  When I start the campaign, I can hear music during that first battle sequence.

Then I lose it after

Spoiler:

the self-preservation mode engages.

It comes back again for the debrief screen.  Goes away for the storyline sequences and briefings.  Had it for the first "real" flight to the ship.  Lose it for debrief.  Comes back for opening theme.  Silence for story and training briefing (sound effects only, no music).  Up to this point, I even have music if I go back to the lobby screen.

Then I have music for the training simulator right up until

Spoiler:

Gold 1 appears.

  After that, it's gone.  Even going back to the lobby screen does not bring it back.  Running the mission again gets me the opening them, but the video sequence does not have any sound.  And no music during the training mission.

All missions after that are the same, sound effects are there, but no music.  Even after exiting and coming back in.  All I get for exiting and relaunching is that there is music in the lobby until I enter the campaign.



Hmmm... odd.  I was doing some testing to confirm what was going on, and now I'm sometimes getting music during missions.  It seems to be sporadic and whenever an even occurs that would probably cause the music to change, it seems to cut out the music entirely.

I've even run other campaigns and mods on the same version of of FSO that I'm using for this one, and they don't seem to have any problem.

[Legate Damar]

What build are you using? Maybe try updating your sound drivers?

[Droid803]

It might be related to pecenipicek's Music Script which I am using instead of play-sound-from-file because I occasionally use that for something else, since I think this is the only (released) mod that has used it so far. That would explain it not appearing in any other mods.

Though I do not believe that all those cases are from no music. During some Briefing and Command Briefing sequences, the BGM is purposely set to "Silence" (this is actually the case for most a lot of the text-heavy parts).

But if the MainHall music is gone then that is definitely a bug to look into. I recall having a music dissapearing bug back when I was playing BP:WiH, but SCP claims that had been fixed (and I never encountered it since) so I don't know...

[TerraMimic]

I'm using build r8688 SSE2 from the link that was provided in the first post.

And I could have sworn I was using updated drivers, but after I checked, it seems that they are 5+ years old!  I'll install the new drivers when I get home and try it again.  Hopefully that fixes the problem.

[Droid803]

Sorry for the late reply, but has updating drivers solved the problem? Or should I contact a CodeWizard?

[z64555]

I'm getting occasional errors in DE, where first the skybox and models go black, and then the hud. I think it may be related to music/state changes, because it usually happens when it's time to go after the "big-bad boss."  If I restart the mission and take out enough AI controlled craft, then it doesn't happen...

Other than that, good stuff.

[TerraMimic]

Sorry about taking so long, RL got in the way, like always.  I put the new drivers in, and now the problem seems to be worse.  The music cuts during the training mission, and doesn't come back. 

I also lost it for the opening theme this time.  I had to exit and restart the mission to make it work.

Also, as a side note, I don't get the TTS voice reading in mission text.  But I don't think that's your mod as it seems to be spotty for other mods and campaigns as well.  Not sure if it is related, but considering it's also a sound issue...

[Droid803]

I specify the "beep" noise for in-mission text, so tts is disabled. Intentional. Or rather, an unavoidable byproduct. I figured having a beep for the people that don't use TTS was more important.

...the other thing is worrying though... could I get a fs2_open.log file? (pastebin it or something)
Wait, I need to provide a debug build, one sec.

Try this latest nightly (9012)
Release
Debug

[TerraMimic]

Ok, here's the log file.  And the errors that debug popped up while I was running it (well, some of them anyway, they started repeating for the same error and there were just to many, although I think it's all in the log file too).  Apparently debug doesn't like gun drones and missile drones.  It crashed on me while running the training mission before the music could cut out.  Something about ani frames being to long I think.

Just to clarify, to make sure I'm getting the details correctly.  When I say exit and restart, I mean that I have to completely quit FS2 and restart the program from the launcher.

Yeah, I figured as much about the comms audio.  From what little I've seen so far, this is one of those mods/campaigns that just begs for voice acting.  It would add so much to the immersion and feel of it.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[attachment deleted by a ninja]

[Droid803]

The drone thing shouldn't be the issue.
Argh, why did whoever made the UV/texture edit delete the subsystems off of the drones? GAH.

[TerraMimic]

Here's a new log file.  I tried restarting the campaign and could not even complete the bait-and-switch mission before CTD.  The log is now showing a bunch of openAL errors.  I guess maybe this one should be more relevent to the problem?

http://pastebin.com/hT3sJ5Kh

[Droid803]

Did you mess with your ETS prior to the Supenova (like putting energy into engines from guns or something)?
I think that's what is happening is a case where the change-ship-class to the nerfed version without shields, when the ets adjusts it's "overfilling" one of the energy things...

Which would be an engine bug...
I'm trying to get some people from SCP to come look at this but they're busy/not willing at the moment...

[TerraMimic]

Did you mess with your ETS prior to the Supenova (like putting energy into engines from guns or something)?

Heh, oops.   Yeah, I did that this time.  And a couple other times with the release versions, but I guess the debug version is the only one that has a problem with it.

Umm... actually, I messed with it after the Supernova, and noticed that it behaves a bit weird.  Putting power to engines DECREASES speed.  I had already set it back to normal before the CTD.  What I was doing when it crashed was messing around with the cannon.  I was firing off rounds to see how often the gun would fail to fire due to damage to the system.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reran the campaign from the start.  I kept my hands off the ETS controls this time.  Made it up till Gold 1 shows up in training before the music cut out.  Completed the mission and successfully exited the program.  Hopefully this log file will help a little more.

http://pastebin.com/rRqVp4Fz

Also, I got this from the debugger during the test questions.

Code: [Select]

FT CG TNK-24Rk (TCT-Fuel.pof) has a null moment of inertia!
<no module>! KiFastSystemCallRet
<no module>! WaitForSingleObject + 18 bytes
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! <no symbol>
<no module>! RegisterWaitForInputIdle + 73 bytes
Is there any way to put the debugger into "silent" mode or something?  So it just logs the errors to the file, but doesn't halt processing?  With the number of errors on various models, it makes it very tedious to run it this way.