First, I want to shout out a *huge* thanks and well-done to all the folks who've been working on this SCP and related projects... not too long ago I was lamenting the death of space sims, and then lo and behold, I find this. It's just awesome
However, I seem to have a bizarre bug that's keeping me from actually playing the game, and which has been kicking me around for a few days now. When I run Freespace 2, I get an odd problem that I've never seen before and can't figure out, and that's also hard to explain. I should mention first that this happens in the normal (patched to 1.2) version of FS2, as well as the SCP version (I'm using the latest installer version, FS2Open_3_6-Installer.exe), and there seems to be no real difference between the two. In the menu part of the game, the top 2 inches or so of my screen looks almost normal... but flickers (especially text), doesn't display any animated elements, and the cursor disappears when I move it up there. I could live with it (the menus still work if I can get the cursor where I need it, but there's more. In the actual game, I get the same sort of problem... only the affected area becomes much larger, and sort of filled with jagged black. Elements of he game can be seen up there, but they're flickery and distorted. The best way to show this is when I face a sun, the glare shows up normally on most of the screen, but is suddenly cut short by a jagged (but constant and predictable) line, above which it is not shown at all. During normal play, enough black jagged garbage and graphical corruption (mostly affecting backround graphics like nebulae) is present to make the game pretty unplayable.
But that's not all... if I turn on Antialiasing 4x (through control panel or the launcher, no difference) the problem changes. The menu issues go away entirely (tho I get those annoying blue lines you always get with AA), but inside the game I get odd jaggedness in background textures, almost af if it were a fill-rate problem... it only occurs if I am moving, when the screen is still the problem goes away. Any other AA setting other than 4X will give me the exact samer results as none at all.
I have tried everything I can possibly think of to solve this problem (and I'm no n00b to these things), and am coming up blank. I've played with every setting in the nvidia control panel, with no results. Likewise, I've played with every setting and parameter in the SCP launcher, with no change at all. The problem still happens in 800x600 and in 16 bit color, and with or without the Geforce 4 Fix (which I leave on, because I have a GF4 and need it =P). I'm quite sure by now that it's a problem my computer is having with Freespace 2 itself, and not the source port, but I figure that if anyone knows what's going on, someone here will.
*update*
2 things. I attemped to take some screenshots and movies of the problem using FRAPS and noticed something *very* interesting... the corruption was occuring as normal while I was recording... but when I watched the movies afterward, they were perfectly normal! Somehow, the problem is occuring during rendering, but does not exist when recorded... I don't know exactly what method FRAPS uses to record movies, so I can't figure this one out at all.
Also, I've found that the problem goes away completely when using OpenGL. This is an inferior solution, since the game isn't nearly as pretty when using OpenGL (can anyone tell me the exact differences between the two in this game? Maybe I'm doing something wrong), but at least I can play the game now. Also, is there a way to set a specific refresh rate in FS2, with or without the SCP? That's just about the only idea I have left. I also have one more question... For a Geforce 4 card, does anyone know what the optimal Detonator drivers are for this program? I've tried several (all newer ones though), with the same results.
Thanks a lot for reading this mess, and any responses are greatly appreciated! My specs are below.
Geforce 4 Ti 4200 (64 meg)
Latest Forceware drivers
AMD Athlon XP 2500 (1.8 ghz)
512 megs RAM
Windows XP SP1 with Directx 9.0c
Full retail version of Freespace 2 with 1.2 patch
SCP v3.6 Installer
