Jane's F/A-18 with G400 MAX...problems...

[Chump]

I guess that would bite if I bought a better processor and still had the same results....time to uninstall and get falcon 4 back on my drive.

How 'bout them Warriors, eh? (Yes I'm the biggest Golden State Warriors fan that you will ever know.) Don't ask why.

[paulcs]

I believe people expected that Jane's/EA was going to kick the 3dfx-only habit. This is really bad. There's a thread in the Soap Box about exagerated hardware claims. Maybe there's room in that thread for some game exagerations.

I still think Chump should upgrade his processor to get the most out of that Max. Of course, it's not my money.

Maybe a polite letter to Jane's, explaining why you guys are so disappointed and why you returned the game, would be appropriate.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[stevenscott]

Hey! ExGman,,,dude,,, I posted some info in the news groups for flight sims about my experiences and F18. I wil repost it here. It may not help you, but here it is:
-------- I run Jane's F18 Flight Sim on my Matrox Marvel G400. I use 600x800 res 17" Shamrock Monitor. on my Abit BE6, PIII 450, SBLive sound card, on Win98. I have to adjust my Gamma on my Display properties because the scenes are just to dark without adjustment. I am using the 5.30 drivers and Powerdesk. I also tried the 5.41 drivers, but decided to go back to the 5.30. I use an MS Prec Pro Joystick. I still am trying to resolve a few issues, but so far it seems to work pretty good. it does not even come close to working as good as EAW flight Sim, but as I work on it gets better.
-------------------
it still has many problems, but it is playable for now. But, it has way to many problem to be called really good. Maybe with some patches and some goodies, it can be fixed. Like the wonderful sim EAW, which works great and many people have created tons of addons, planes, skins, mods, etc.
------
if anyone wants to chime in with info to help us with F18, please do. TIA.
-----------------------

[cutterslade]

I have the following f/a-18 problem:

Running win98 sblive c400@450 128mb g400dh32 I get the game running very nice. When the game finishes I get a frozen 640X480 black screen in my desktop. That I abdolutely in no way can get rid of. Tried different resolutions, new matrox drivers etc. etc.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Chump]

cutterslade: what is "running nice"...does that mean you are getting better than 10 fps???

[exG-man]

Cutter Slade,
Cutter Slade?! THE Cutter Slade?! Hey, I loved Outcast. Very deep game. I'm not a bug fan of voxels, however.

It sounds like you are yet another victim of the disease "J3adnfexs". It's an insidious viral menace that strikes sim-lovers of all ages. The bad news: there is no known cure. The good news: you're not alone. If you were really getting good framerates with your set-up than I'm REALLY confused because I can draw an entire scene by hand faster than my system can draw one frame, let alone say 30 or so a second. Your symptoms are new by me but it doesn't surprise me in the least. The game was optimized for 3DFX cards. I know this to be a fact, because I have both a Max and two Voodoo2's in my box. Read my rant above if you haven't already. Jane's (EA, actually) is very much aware of the problems. When I called them up, the tech just stammered and stuttered when I told him what video cards I have and how they perform with this game. It must have been the first call he got from a Max AND a Voodoo2 SLI owner. Do you want some REALLY shitty news?! EA is not going to be releasing or even investigating any problems with F/A 18 any time soon because they're still working to fix the performance problematic USAF. They are working to resolve the "strobing" problem with USAF right now. F/A 18 is very much back-burner because it was just released recently and Jane's is notoriously late with patches. Like Kookstick said, "Get Mig Alley". It's an amazing game.

Hey Kook,
It's too bad I only have a 21500 bps, I'd like to take on a couple of MiG's with you. Someday I'm going to get DirecPC. And then all of my peers at MURC can wave to me as I go down for the umpteenth time in a ball of flames. Chuck Yeager would roll over in his grave if he ever saw me fly....oh, yeah...if he was dead I mean....
Good Luck and Good Hunting,
Bud

P/S New patch out today for USAF. I hope this is a step in the right direction.

[This message has been edited by exG-man (edited 19 January 2000).]

[This message has been edited by exG-man (edited 19 January 2000).]

[Kookstick]

exGman- 21k huh, man that sucks. I recently got cable modem(not trying to brag)WOW what a difference it makes.Download speeds of 400 kb/sec and online gaming is pretty much lag free. Anytime you want to play just post here and we can hook up, i'm enjoying the game more everytime I play.Playing on mplayer is very frusterating to say the least tho so prpbably need to do the IP thing.Sounds like you have a pretty killer machine from another post I read somewhere else. Take it easy

------------------
Asus P2b(1010),P3 500,256 mb pc133,Matrox G400 DH,Asus 50x,Iomega zip,Mitsumi CDR,Ibm 10 gb hd,Sb Live,Win 98

[fragman]

Hey guys I got the same thing with Janes F/A-18, I used to have Diamond Viper V550 and it works fine but as soon ass I upgrade my vid card thing goes wrong. I even format and reinstall everything. My problem: Mouse point flashing during game, losing texture (the whole deck of the carrier go invisible, control tower disappear), etc. Anyone who know something about this?

Thanks

Reply to wilfred@dsuper.net

[cutterslade]

exG-man,

you can always visit my site at www.outcastcorps.com, this is one game that runs smoothly wether I use my 4 year old mystique or G400, you can see I am a big fan of Voxels, polygons aren't yet capable of drawing the lifelike outdoor scenery as displayed in Outcast.


My framerate is actually very good at 800X600, I'll check the numbers later today.

What actually happens to me is that I exit a mission, I get the after mission screen and a second later the game returns me to my desktop with the frozen 640X480 black screen. There is no possibility to get my system stable again (ctr-alt-del etc etc won't do the trick.)

By

[cutterslade]

Well, my problen went away. I disabled the dual head features in powerdesk. That did the trick. When I turned itback on again, the problem didn't reoccur. So there is no 100% guerantee. With the dual head zoom feature enabled I did however see some texture corruptions around the mouse pointer during game play.
So I strongly advise to disable the dual head feature.

Now back to framerates, they are very jumpy, a framedrop from 50 to .5 is common. I'll some it up after I have given my machine specs:

Celeron 400@450
128mb sdram
sblive
aopen ax6bc
promise ultra ata66
7200rpm wd 18gb

reso detail rate
1024 4 5
1024 1 8-10
800 4 10
800 1 25
640 4 10
640 1 25

What happens is that when you are strafing an object the framerate drops to an unplayable level. This problem wont occur if you are dogfighting, cause there are not many complex objects nearby.

Depending on the mission you should set the options high or low. You can always change the graphics options from within the game using the alt-F3-12 keys. That'll give you a 5fps increase.

Now my 5 cents to this discussion. I have been playing sims for a very long time, the first one was did's ef2000. That time I owned a p60, I couldn't play the game in the highest resolution till I got a p120, then I bought did's ADF-F22 and my p120 again wasn't up to the highest resolution, till I bought a diamond 3dfx monster add on. When I upgraded to my k6-233 thigs got even better. Now I'm getting into f/a-18 and my processor isn't capable of handling the highest resolution, well if I upgrade to a PIII 800 in about 5 months, yes then I'll be able to play f/a-18 in all it's glory. Till now I'll just have to do with 800X600 low res.

It has always been the case that software is one step in front of mainstream affordable hardware.

You can also try to use a patched f18 exe that allows you to play the game without a cdrom, all the copyprotection stuff may be slowing down the game.

check www.gamecopyworld.com for the link to the patched f18.exe

Cheers

[cutterslade]

Yep, it definately is the dualhead feature in powerdesk, disabling it decreases a lot of game frustrations.

[mmassara]

cutterslade,
I have the problems above described (not the freezing, but the disappearing 3d objects and the stuttering AFTER the first mission) and I have my dualhead disabled from default.
From what you said, seems that you resolved only the freezing (by disabling the dualhead) and not the stuttering/disappearing: can you confirm this ?

Second question: do you think that if I enable and then disable the dualhead I could resolve my problems (sorry, but I'm really a geek with hw) ?

[Kraigman]

C'mon, get your 'facts' straight, Ex-G! F/A-18 wasn't optimized for 3dfx cards or else there would have been an option to select Glide as opposed to D3D. There isn't. There are significant and alarmingly similar issues with Voodoo-3 cards running the latest 3dfx drivers. There are two potential answers here: F/A-18 has issues with the G400. Or the G400 drivers have issues with F/A-18. Let's let the two parties figure out just what the problem is before we start throwing out 'facts' which are really not facts at all but emotion-driven speculation. For your information, I'm running F/A-18 on my GeForce DDR and have absolutely no graphics or framerate issues. Does that mean then that the developers optimized the sim for the GeForce? Probably not, but it is very likely that their testing included at least one GeForce card. Did they test with a G400? Hmmmm...evidently not - a big mistake as they include it prominently on the box in their list of recommended cards. But let's remember that the G400 drivers aren't exactly perfect yet, either. None of the Looking Glass games/sims work with 5.30 or 5.41 as far as I know. I moved the Max into my other machine until a solution is found.

[Kraigman]

Sorry - perhaps a bit harsh there. I sympathize and share your frustration. But I think it's a bit early to blame Jane's for this problem. It could be a Matrox issue. The issue with V3 cards is apparently a 3dfx issue. The G400 problem could even be a Microsoft issue - specifically Dx/D3D - as F/A-18 uses some of the more advanced features of the API (lighting effects, etc.). They have been quiet about this, though...

[mmassara]

Found some workarounds, and I'm really enjoy this sim now, with good framerates:

1) disappearing cockpit/carrier and related stuttering: disable the "shadow" option in the graphic preferences,

2) as mentioned above, disable the "dualhead" function and no more CTD/freezing,

3) get 5.50 beta drivers: fix some texture corruption and better framerates.

Hope this helps you as it helped me in really enjoying this sim.