Silent Warrior

Phew! History-lesson: A while ago I posted a thread about my computer behaving... well, wrong. Locking up pretty much everything related to 3D, including Catalyst Control Center. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it!) Since Eurofighter Typhoon: Gold Pack gave me a nice and sparkly blue-screen when I tried to open it, and while others suggested it, I went and bought a new hard-drive. Whee! All's well and good! And then my OTHER harddrive died: It misplaced the partition. That was a pretty well-crammed 120 Gb-HD... Luckily, I could excavate the most vital things (my music-collection :) and LO-campaigns), but the amount of lost gigabytes is, in my eyes, staggering. So, time to buy ANOTHER HD. This time a 180 Gb monstrosity, by the way, so now I'm up to 260 Gb total HD-capacity. And, lo and behold, 3D-games started locking up AGAIN! (It took a little longer until CCC froze this time.) AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! [Gratuitous Fawlty Towers-quote] Thank you God! Thank you ****** much! It seems that this time, it was my 9700 Pro going on a strike. My favorite computer-hardware-store said I most likely wore out the 3D-section of the GPU. (Is that even possible?? I thought that was the kind of thing that followed the mentality of 'if one go, we all go'!) When I bought this thing, it cost me about $600! Still, there's no way ANYWHERE I don't think I've had my money's worth of twinklies. So... Now, following a quick emergency-purchase, I'm a proud owner of a 9600 Pro with 256 Mb VRAM who can finally run FS2004 at full blast. Well, until TrafficToolbox made Simviation's archives an inconvenience, that is. Halved my FPS right off the bat, it did. Conclusion: NOW everything works as it should. It's harder to gauge performance-gains in LO (time for a new CPU, *perhaps*?), but at least the texture-load is easier to survive. Also, my machine is ASTOUNDINGLY less noisy than before. Reckon the 9600 not having a fan might have something to do with that? :D The HD that lost the partition was a noisy bugger too.

An epidemic, maybe? Typhoon r teh c00l! :cool:

bflagg: Ah well, mesa wrong. But you shouldn't call the X1800 obsolete...

I haven't had any problems in Lock-On related to Temp AA... an' I'm using a 9700 Pro. (2xAA, Temp. AA, varying settings of AF (app.ctrl/2x/4x), V-sync On unless app-specified) Heh, they don't make graphics cards these days like they used to, eh? :D (On a side note, I think I've somehow broken my DX8+-era capabilities. Freaky. Freaky galore. But that's another matter, I'm aiming for an upgrade come summer.) shamandgg: I think ED actually stated perfectly clear that we shouldn't do that. I have followed that advice and not used heat-blur. :p

Are you sure they have the right filenames? Have you compared to retail FC-sounds? Are you using the right codec and all that? I haven't looked at any sound-related .cfg/.ini lately, but I don't think they have anything to do with it... or do they?

I'm NOT on Hyperlobby! :bebebe:

I can't really decipher that... There was an issue found a while ago about if the mission takes place in days 8 or 9 there will be... trouble. But that can only happen in campaigns, right? And you're playing single missions outside of the campaign? If you have any mods active, do deactivate them and see if it helps. Do post those logs, too.

Listed in no particular order... F-18 (whichever variant, meh) JA-37 Viggen JAS-39 Gripen (*shrug* that flimsy thingy in Ace Combat 5 just ain't up to scratch) Su-47 (MWAHAHAHAHAha!) Tornado F-14D A-6 (nearly forgot this one) Personally, I think the F-16 has been sim-ed half to death already... Strike Commander, whatever that Amiga-thing was called, Falcon-series (and this is a BIG entry)... and whatever else there's been. I don't really want to mention Ace Combat HERE, though.

Regarding splash-damage, I (Su-25T) once dropped a FAE maybe 10-30 meters (looked quite close in-sim) from a couple of Iglas. Didn't kill a single one. Isn't that, like, unlikely to say the least? I can agree that splash-damage can do with a bit of a tweak.

Ice: Thank you for the confidence, but I'm really not sure I'll be able to handle the Ka-50 very well. :p If FS2004's choppers are any judge, at least. I think I only got off the ground safely enough once, maybe twice, out of a good dozen attempts... And then there's the matter of being shot at, to boot. I'm sure it's a bad-ass production, but it won't do me any good if I can't use it.

I hope this hasn't been posted already - did a quick little search and came up dry. Well, the title says it all, really - Is there going to be a BS-demo? (Note that I didn't ask WHEN; I expect to be well aware of it when/if it is released.) I think I'll have to try and see if I can actually fly that thing well enough to spend money on it...

1: Recommended installation is 1.1 over UN-PATCHED 1.00, as I recall. Not that it gave ME any problems, but that is what I've been told. 2: I don't know what the mod does and doesn't do to the LOMAC data-files, but you can bet your butt the stock tutorials weren't made with it in mind. 3: Lock-On has changed so much from 1.00 that the training-tracks don't work as they should anymore (since 1.01 even, I believe). Now, the navigation and such is ok, but anything that involves AI-work is unpredictable, to say the least. I once flew a F-15 track where an An-26 dodged an AIM-9, other craft did too and blew my toes off while the subtitles carried on like nothing ever happened. WHAT I WOULD DO: Deactivate this naval mod and try the training-missions. Reactivate the mod and do whatever else you had in mind.

1: 2 GHz Pentium 4 (btw, I accidentally misspelled it as Pantium, it sounds about right with the punishment Lock-On deals out to it), Socket 478 2: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 Mb AGP 3: 512 Mb RDRAM PC2700 (2x 256) 4: Two IDE-drives. :p 5: Depending on the mission, anywhere between 5 and 35. I've been everywhere between 3 and 62 FPS, actually. It all depends on the mission, but is generally playable. 6: No online play for me. You buggers always kick my ass halfway across the Milky Way and back.

Huh. Strange. For starters, try this: Copy whatever .exe this Register Lock-On wants to run, then make an empty file and give it the same name. With .exe-extension, of course. I don't know what could have caused it, though.

280 Mb, that's just the base stuff, isn't it? There are three files in all to download: Base install, Movie pack, Seasons pack. On my machine, those tallied 780-ish Mb, just too big for just one CD. So I burned 'em onto a DVD. :D Multisession can be a Good Thing.

Have you looked around for older topics? I sort of recognize it as a corrupted downloaded install, but since you have a CD-version... Are you running WinXP? No administrative restrictions on installing? CD-drive in good working order?

Su-30MKI. Covered in the Tactical Reference in various Falcon 4 post-1.08-versions. What paintjobs are they using? I remember downloading an IAF MiG-29 for FS2004 once, and it was all brown-like...

OK, HD and XP in place, testing X3 (I'll bother restoring the registry for my other games later...), result: SUCCESS! WOOHOO! But... I STILL get that *thunk* followed by excessive HD-activity. After playing X3 for a while (and I even got the chance to save and exit in an ordinary fashion, yeah! :cool: ) I wanted to go poking at some Flight Sim 2004 add-ons I had downloaded ("No internet-connection?!??" you say? USB-memorysticks r teh win, says I!). So, fire up Windows Explorer, click that little + next to my other HD, and WHAM all frozen over. Does this mean that second HD is faltering too? What are the odds for that? TWO harddrives, different brands and capacities, cracking down at the same time? (As a side-note, X3 v1.31 beta with Catalyst 6.1 runs REALLY REALLY well now. I'm even considering setting Shader and/or textures to medium. Will next patch get X3 up to a releasable condition? Stay tuned.)

I dunno... I'm not good enough with regular jets, particularly AG, and now I'd get stuck in a helicopter, which is supposedly tons harder just to stay in the air and keep it moving in the direction you want it to? If it means new campaigns for the other craft, I MIGHT be persuaded easily...

Heeeey! Have any of you guys checked out your Windows-directory lately? The SP2-files are all there! Neat! I'll delay the installation until I know I need it though, probably nets me another FPS or two. Heh, imagine what Windows Update will look like next time I go there! msvcrt.dll-thingy: That's a snazzy trick, that one. I'll try it myself when opportunity presents itself.

Now for Swedish... and I'll injure you if you don't see the relation to Danish. :p Lock-on är den bästa simulatorn!! Den är enastående!!! Och nu väntar vi på BS. (Black Shark => Svart Haj, fyi) The last tiny sentance doesn't translate well. Syntax-wossname.

EVIL_SCOTSMAN: Nah, I'll wait until I get the computer back home to an internet-connection, I'll take care of SP2 myself. If X3 goes bonkers without it, well, I have other games. :) Pilotasso: I'd like to know that myself. emenance mentioned it as a potential source of locking. I r teh confj00s.

emenance: :rolleyes: Aye, that looks to have been a quick post. I have no idea how to run sound through the videocard, by the way. Now, here's what I'm gonna do: with this new HD, I have at the very least a worthy back-up. This weekend I'll just go home and get that XP-CD (and it seems I'll have to live without SP2 until summer - MS won't mail SP2 on CDs anymore), come back here and work some magic, fire up X3 and see if it works. Well, LOMAC'll have to come soon after - bagged some new campaigns to tear through. :icon_supe Although my 9700 does smell kind of funky, I know the smell of burned electronics, and this is not it. I'm hoping to be able to upgrade this summer, so it'll have to hold together until then. I'm optimistic.

OK, got that new HD. Flashy little Western Digital Caviar :confused: 80Gb. So, now to Teh Gre4t Transf3r. In short, I've tried this the messy way - copy everything and export all registry-entries to the new HD and see if it works. And, well, it didn't quite work. The main catch is system32/config/, there are some apparently really important files there I can't copy because "they're in use by another service" - not that ever had any issue listening to my MP4s while defragging, but I sort of understand why you shouldn't move things like that around any old how. I have also tried RARing this, with the same result. I don't have an XP-CD in my possession at this moment - explaining would have to include translating something I don't know how to, so I won't bother - so I'd prefer it if this could be done without installing XP on the new drive. Um... btw, what do you suppose will happen when I hook up the old C:-drive with the new one to copy all the files and stuff? (The names of these crucial files are: system, SAM, security, default. I'll see if I can get something out of Microsoft as well, but I have a feeling you lot'll be quicker by a few magnitudes.) As for how it looks right this minute... I get a very XP-like screen declaring system32/config/system AWOL. It's a start, at least.

Well, don't use those F-15 skins. :p Perhaps that's not the answer you were hoping for? I don't know if LoMan 2.1 works well with FC (I'm using ModMan/LoMan 5)... Are the skins supposed to be compatible with 1.11? Have you tried not CDDS-ing them?