[PsykoDragon]

Hi everyone of the FreeSpace community.

I happened to get my hands on a retail version of FreeSpace 2, which I enthusiastically installed. Things were perfectly smooth: the game installed, detected all my hardware... except I'm not sure. my vidcard didn't seem to get detected, as the only options listed were "No 3D acceleration" & "Direct3D". When my card gets detected, it usually says "Primary Display Drive/Adapter", right?

Anyway, I headed on into the game & started the tutorial missions, which started smoothly. Everything seemed to be running fine. But then the 3rd tutorial started (where you kill 10 drones), & things slowed down to the point that it was unplayable. I would estimate an average of 1 FPS.

I lowered all the settings to see if it would make a difference, but it didn't. I finished the tutorial anyway, & went into Mission 1. Slowed down tremendously again mid-way, & mission 2 started practically frozen 

My specs:
CPU: Intel Pentium4 3 GHz
RAM: 1GB
GPU: nVidia GeForce FX 5500 (256MB)
OS: Windows XP sp2

I found out about the FSO installer just today, & am in the process of downloading it now, hoping it runs better. Even so, I'd appreciate it if you can help me solve this, as internet here is really crappy, & even if FSO has better quality, I'd like to avoid having to wait another, oh, 2 weeks to download it.

Thank you!

Edit: Well, so much for that. Everytime I try to run the FSO installer it either doesn't load or freezes up after a few seconds. HELP!

[Jeff Vader]

If you don't want to download the graphical updates and usermade campaigns, just download the FSO executables and the Launcher. Those are enough for playing FSO. I'd recommend at least giving a shot.

[PsykoDragon]

I would except for some reason the installer either doesn't load or freezes after a coupla steps.

[Jeff Vader]

Things can also be done manually. The latest Launcher is available here. A trustworthy 3.6.10 build is linked in my signature as the Recommended build for Windows users. Download both, extract to your \freespace2\ folder, run Launcher.exe, fiddle with the settings in an appropriate way, Run the game and see how things turn out.

[Colonol Dekker]

You can download the executables from this very forum, without using the launcher Installer. it's in the sourcecode project sub-forum. Stickied near the top.

Yarr, don't mislead the new ones! --Lobo

[PsykoDragon]

Well whaddaya know. Everything's running extra-smoothly, just like it should. Thanks guys!

[Marcusqc]

if my memory is good the problem is the retail version was optimised for Pentium 3 and the executable wont deal whit p4 and xp to ^^

[FUBAR-BDHR]

It's not the P4 or XP.  P4/XP worked fine at least for me.  Now when you get to Hyper threading and dual cores, etc then it starts having problems for some people but not all.  It seems to be machine dependent.  I never had any problems running retail or open or any of my machines all the way up to a Core2Quad.  One of the few problems I haven't had.  Vista may be a different story.  My copy of that is still in the box on the floor.