[Trivial Psychic]

Howdy All:

Long story as short as possible... I used to use WinME, then it had an anurysm (sp?) of sorts.  Fortunately, by Girlfriend's brother is adept with PC servicing so he allowed me to retain all my old data, while setting me up with Win98SE instead.  Now, I find that FSO won't run as fast on my system as it did before, with the arrival of an Orion in mission resulting in a drop in frame rates to single digits (x.x).  I then tried OGL for the first time, hearing that it is much faster.  The speed improvement was phenomenal, but I noted the lack of spec lighting.  That was something I'd heard about, so I wasn't surprised.  I did note later, that there appeared to be no colored text... not in briefings, not in the escort list, nowhere.  I then noticed that Lightspeed's weapon effects (PromS was the one I was using), weren't being displayed.  Does OGL have something against using .ani or tga in these instances?

With the exception of the Spec thing, I didn't find any reference to the other OGL bugs I mentioned on Mantis, so I thought I'd test the waters here before Mantising them.

Later!

[Bobboau]

OGL still has a few issues, but there minor

spec mapping is being worked upon .

I am somewhat saddened to hear that d3d isn't working as well for you though, have you updated to the latest version sence your reformat?

[Trivial Psychic]

I didn't end up reformating.  He (my GF's bro) created a 2nd partition as c:\ and installed the new os on that.  He was gonna set me up with a dual boot into XP, but XP didn't like my system so that plan was aborted.  Since FS never insisted on running from the "C:\program files" directory, I'm just running it from the d: partition where it was originally (when it was C: ).  To the last part of your query, I tried it using your 5-23 build, but since I'm not using decals, I switched to that 3.6 build you linked to once.  I hoped that the environment mapping or decal code might be slowing things down, but it made little difference.  It was this build (3.6) that I used for OGL.

Should I have tried reinstalling and running FS from the C: partition?  In your builds, is environment mapping on by default, or is there a command line to activate it?

[Edit]
Sorry, I didn't realize that by 'latest version', you were refering to D3D.  I checked and I'm using DX9, though my GF2 MX doesn't actually support it.
[/Edit]

Later!

[kasperl]

Well, 98SE is hardly any better then ME, really. I assume you patched it?

Also, C or D drive doesn't matter, I have 3 or 4 FS2 dirs right now, a couple on c, most on d.

Do you have any 'handy tools'  running in the background? ME does have quite a lot of stuff on-by-default....

[CP5670]

I am also using ME at the moment (wil be switching to XP in a few days); I leave only explorer and systray open, which seems to leave most system resources free. In the 5/3 version, D3D runs really well (almost always over 50 fps) except when a large ship explodes, at which point the framerate inexplicably drops to single figures for about a second and then goes back to normal.

OGL does run slightly better and but has various graphical and stability problems for me. I actually do get the specular lighting, but its effect is localized to only the polygons directly facing the light source, so it looks much worse than in D3D. A more annoying problem is that the textures are not filtered at all and look pixellated at close range, as if the game was being run in software mode. I seem to also get a lot more random illegal operation CTDs on OGL than in D3D.

[Trivial Psychic]

I checked the auto update and its only missing an update for Media Player 9, so that's not realy an issue.  As for background programs, I usually turn off (control-alt-delete) as many other programs as possible, such as Norton, leaving Explorer, system tray, the Logitech game controller software, and whatever "Ccapp" is.  What I'm hoping, is that I can make enough $$$ over the summer to upgrade my core components (board, CPU, RAM) and possibly get a new vid-card.  That should eliviate the slowdown.

Later!

[Lightspeed]

Win98SE is the fastest reliable OS you could be using. So there's definately something wrong.

As for stuff not showing in OGL, was 32-bit ever successfully implemented there?

[phreak]

As a general rule
Radeons are better on d3d
GeForces are better on OGL

and yes 32-bit stuff works.