I can't believe that many people responded to this post. All I wanted to do was ask a simple graphics question, not get advice on installing a new video card or inciting a riot over various display modes.
All of this is kinda moot anyway, as I downloaded FS_Open 3.5.5 (phreak's 10/04/03 build) and used RandomTiger's newest launcher. Everything worked fine, no apparent problems. There are a few glitches I noticed that I'll list here for completeness's sake, but certainly nothing that crippled my gameplay.
--Not a bug, a feature!
The "shinemaps" are all visually stunning, and make it much easier to make out the silhouettes of the Terran and Vasudan vessels. By contrast, Shivan vessels are unfairly hard to see when not cast against another, more visible object, but when you see them in the proper lighting, they're quite impressive. I thought one ship had pretty funky-looking maps, but offhand, I can't remember which one it was; it might have been either the standard Amazon drone or the Erinyes, as I remember thinking that those ships didn't look quite as "decked-out" as many others. The GTI Arcadia and the GTD Orion, in particular, look marvelous. All sparkly and shiny and WHOOSH.
-- FS_Open seemed to crash an inordinate amount of the time on the fourth mission, "A Lion at the Door", for reasons unknown. I'm guessing that the presence of the Knossos might have been a contributing factor, as I only have 128 MB hard memory and 188 virtual, but I don't recall any problems in other missions where the Knossos was present. I crashed when I'd hit afterburners and go after the Mephisto freighter "Maul"; after two or three crashes, when I focused upon the cruiser Behemoth instead, there were no problems.
--Another feature.
Enemy AI is insane. I'll never get over the "kickstand" maneuver of simply killing engines and firing from a stationary position, as a human player would do. The fighterbeams-eradicating-shields also takes a little getting used to.
--Whenever I try to access the Barracks in the Terran main hall, FS_Open crashes to desktop. I can remember this back from 3.5.3. I've never tested it in the Vasudan Main Hall.
--The "incoming missile" icon on the rim of your radar is gray. In the original game, it was a yellow-orange hue. This is such a small point of note, I wasn't sure if it was intentional or not.
--The old "telling one wing of fighters to ignore something causes all other fighters and capships to ignore it too" bug is still present.
--In the FS2 devdiary, there's a comment about how the Crystal of a Shivan Comm Node only seems to take damage when you fire around the "ends" of the Crystal. The devs claimed this bug was fixed, but every time I've played the game, both retail and Open, it's been present. Is this a render/texturing problem, or something in the source?
--Ship displays in the ship selection/loadout screen act wonky. The weapons displays still possess the nifty wire-frame-computer-texturing effect, but the ship displays have all been replaced by slowly-rotating models of the craft in question, like those seen in the tech room. In several missions, even these models don't appear, and the ship display is left totally blank.
A long-standing bug I've suffered ever since my initial purchase of the game has been missing tech room entries. The Terran and Vasudan sections seem complete, at first glance, but a
huge chunk of the Shivan section is missing. Virtually all of the fighters and bombers are gone, there are no entries for either the Demon or the Moloch, and the Shivan Comm Node is gone as well. This is all after I've already completed the game, so there's nothing left I'm supposed to "discover". I suppose this could be a corrupted or incomplete file on the CD (I purchased my copy from what is now a GameStop outlet; it came with the original box and CD sleeves, but no manual, leading me to think it was a used copy), but if that was the case, wouldn't the ramifcations on the game be wider than a few missing tech entries?
Oddly enough, way back when I played Derelict, the mod installed full and complete tech room entries. Go figure.
Sorry for not reporting these little things through Bugzilla channels, but they seem fairly obvious to me, and I imagine that anyone with a fairly astute eye has probably reported them to the coders already.
