dpaul

quote:Originally posted by Urza: I chose the Firestorm and Spacestar. I like big ships with lots of weapons. Oh, I forgot to mention. The Megaron is also physically larger than the Firestorm.

Megaron as well, here. For a number of reasons. Speed. The speed is rather high, for a carrier class. You can get up to 1250 mps. This means no problems chasing other carriers, and no problems leaving planets. Many a cruiser has dogfought me and lost, despite the general rule that cruisers can fly circles around carriers. You just have to know how to triangulate direction, where to feint, and when to "punch it." Shielding. The shields are quite strong on a standard Megaron (3750). Storage Capacity. With the Megaron's large cargo capacity (7500 each for cargo, 2500 each for weapons), you've got room to spare to repair any damage that actually does get past the superb shielding. With two day's research, I've made a spare parts acquisition plan that involves every kind of part required to repair any system except the logistics, nav, and tac computers, at least once. This includes the four FCs, the four SC, two of the four OCs, plus life support units for these ten craft mentioned, and all the myriad engine, weapons, reactors and shield CC components, some of which are quite large. And I can replace any CC system if needed, with the one exception of the solar reactor. {For some reason, the solar reactor, which is enormous, wants to be stowed in Cargo Bay 1. This is strange, I thought, since the nuclear reactor and most any CC replacement part would go in Cargo Bay 2. Go figure.} Cloaking. As a carrier, the Megaron has a cloaking system. {As a note, contradictory to the manual, the green end is by 100% and the red end is by 0% -- go figure.} Upgradeability. The Megaron is upgradeable to the highest possible standards, including to artifact level. Turrets. The Megaron has four very close together main turrets located just under the bow. Even a Stormcarrier will not last 10 seconds under a direct barrage by the main guns. The PTA turrets number 10 in the appendix, but 5 are clearly visible, including one directly to the stern. Facing any target and a little downwards, two PTA turrets fire simultaneously. At other angles, up to three PTA turrets will fire simultaneously at any target, so by the time you need to face that annoying fighter craft, he might just be almost gone already. FCs. Two super fighters and two heavy fighters will accompany you in your galactic crusade. I've not lost one yet, and the Zenstars haven't even been damaged. As a note, it seems that PTA turrets sometimes have a hard time firing on a Zenstar fighter craft. SCs. Two Mk2s and two Mk3s will be at your disposal for all your towing needs. They can go up to 2150 mps and 2200 mps, respectively. I've not found any craft that can outmaneuver the towing vengeance of these four shuttles, short of HJ'ing straight into a fluxfield (the AI doesn't like fluxfields), which hasn't happened yet. Even fighters inside stations aren't immune (bug?). OCs. If you play smart and keep your hiney low, you can sneak in one of these fast-moving HAV or LAV vessels behind enemy base lines to lay waste to installations and craft. No usable missles, but strangely enough you can load them up with missles anyway, or unload them (sell the missles that come with them!). Research. With a Research Engineer that you wouldn't have on a Cruiser, you can use artifacts. That's the best CC for me. As for the best caste, without a doubt Insurgent is it. All the benefits of Strategic Command without the hassles of Violations. Imagine -- a fleet with R.A.N.D.O.M. missles. Bowemeth [ 03-09-2002, 12:15: Message edited by: Bowemeth ]

Same goes for me here; I can screw things up rather ingeniously, without even knowing it. What's this about a Sygan Triangle?

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: You need to use the Detonator Destroyer and remove ALL traces of the nVidia drivers. Then install a driver that works.Don't do it! Just do what I said before with the patch in the BCM dir and you should be set. Bowemeth

Sweet, I got it working. Many thanks to Gallion for his simple yet easily overlooked instruction. Those instructions are cleared highlighted in the FAQ and in a topic located in the forum thread archives. Uninstall. Then delete the BCM directory off your harddrive. Reboot. When Windows is back up, reinstall BCM and copy the whole patch file to the BCM directory, and run the patch from there. It should immediately recognize where BCM is installed, automatically. Then run BCM, and the station rendering (or whatever) should work. Oddly enough, though, by Backspace function is no longer working in FP mode. I'll try remapping it to something else in bcmconfig.ini. There you go again. This is with default settings to everything regarding video properties. Have phun! Bowemeth [ 03-05-2002, 08:49: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]

Fractux or someone with BCStudio and a homepage, could you make it so I could download a copy of BCStudio, please? I've got something I want to try as a test, and it's too complicated to explain in the time allotted me this morning. Thanks, Bowemeth

Alright, I tried the UC-to-USWC thing from the BIOS, which I think was in Advanced Settings --> Chip Configuration, or at least near there. The way Xierxior put it, it sounded like a good idea, but it didn't fix the problem. I have some questions on how to set certain things that were mentioned so far, namely: 1. the Z-buffer settings, that the SC mentioned. This problem has NOTHING to do with Z-buffer settings. The Z-Buffer problem during DX7 was a driver problem. 2. the AGP aperature RAM size, that Duncan Idaho mentioned. 3. the video adapter RAM size, that Xierxior mentioned. Also keep in mind that about the only similarities that Fractux and I have in our systems are that the vid drivers sound to be both Nvidia Det XP drivers (though different versions and made for different OSs), and our BIOSs are both Award type. Cheers, Bowemeth [ 03-05-2002, 09:00: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]

As a note, I'm getting the same bad rendering thing with the starstations. It's even misrendering the same exact way and we have different cards (but similar drivers, looks like). I'm at a loss there. Turning off or altering antialiasing didn't help. Basically everything else including starbases and ships are okay. I was playing around with just about every option in the Nvidia toolset, including the texel alignment and such, and none of that's it. Everything now is back to defaults, DirectX compliance, etc. As per SC's suggestion, though, the Z-buffers or some such thing like that might need adjusting away from the defaults, considering the nature of the stations and their hugeness, etc. But, where is this set? Might this have anything to do with the fact that 90% of the time, I can't successfully restart BCM after quitting normally without rebooting first? Admittedly this also makes it tough for me to test BCM with changed video settings, but I have patience. Or rather, for BCM I can make an exception to my general lack of patience. Much sincerity, Bowemeth

quote:Originally posted by KreKol:

quote:Originally posted by KreKol: I have a dead prisoner in my detention hold again. I know it was fix several patches ago but it will not clear when I dock at a station. The body is starting to smell up the place. Yeah I had that prob too, and I had patched BCM to 1006 on top of 1005. Later I uninstalled, deleted the BCM path, reinstalled and reapplied the full 1006 patch, in an attempt to fix another problem (which I won't get into in this thread). I'm not sure if that fixed the dead prisoner problem or not, since I kind of a hard thing to check on, but it's conveivable to me that something's whacked with the way my 1005 ver went to 1006. I figured that it's possible that something went blammo back when I was cold booting left and right from crashes. You might wanna try that. I think you can even preserve your savegame while you do. Bowemeth

SC, you worked with the 27.70 drivers a lot yet? Upon suggestion from Gallion, I went hunting for the latest and greatest NVidia Det drivers, even though my vid card is kinda old. Warp2search.net has shown me an INF fix for 27.70 drivers (dated feb 13) here so that they (allegedly) work on all Nvidia cards. Now, I have a GF2 GTS myself, an old beast, as you could also see if you had the positive energy enough to click on my profile link and scroll, so it's not listed there in the original driver INF. But it works. And I can get lightning FPS at max resolution. Oddly enough, the max resolution for me (1280x1024) doesn't show up anymore in BCM's Configuration, but I dealt with that problem by keeping my desktop to 1280x1024 and changing the bcmconfig.ini file in the BCM directory (oh, I can just see it coming -- be CAREFUL with that thing, and hell no your poor arse ain't covered in the EUA if you screw it up) to reflect 1280x1024 (type CAREFULLY). Now, that resolution won't show up (it changes back, so if you hit Save, it'll flick back), so you gotta make what changes you want in the game's own configuration (all those effects were what I enabled after the new driver installed) within the game first, and change the resolution last of all from Windows, assuming that you want that high resolution, which is more than feasible even with my slow-poke 733 and these new drivers. In that URL I posted above, there is outright listed a Win9x/ME INF fix, but if you scroll to the discussion below, you'll see that someone has posted a similar INF fix for Win2K/XP. Have fun. Bowemeth [ 03-03-2002, 17:19: Message edited by: Bowemeth ]

quote:Originally posted by Gallion: First - remove Str Cmdr from your Publicly Displayed Name: in your profile. Yeah. Ok. quote:Originally posted by Gallion: Second - Update your video drivers. The 6.50s that you indicate in your System Profile are very old. I've had success with both the XP 27.42 and the XP 27.70 beta drivers.I'm having difficulty locating either one. Any specific suggestions? ----------------------- Ok, I think I found the 27.70 one with warp2search. Says it was leaked. Since I have but a lowly GF2 GTS vid card, I'm also downloading the also-leaked INF modification. Apparently someone thinks it works, so I'm giving it a try. Now if I can just find my old un-RAR'er util. Bowemeth [ 03-03-2002, 14:12: Message edited by: Bowemeth ]

Ready for BCO, anytime now. Good thing about the fast servers and I've already heard lots of cool stuff that would be included. But first, a gripe of sorts. quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: But, as they say, even the best laid plans..... Funny you should mention that. Since the transition to 1.0.06 from 1.0.05, while the stability factor has skyrocketed, I've been seeing some rather bizarre changes in StarStation structure, not including GalCom which for some reason or other which looks and acts just fine. The other stations, like the wheel station Type 1, looks all smashed to bits, walls flung every which way with hangar doors and turrets hanging out there all by their lonesome. Type 2 X-formed stations as well, and probably much more -- and after hanging around such a station, all I could do to stop the eyeball pain was blow the crazy madhouse to bits. Too bad it was my main base. The walls seem to be there physically, as I'll bump into invisible walls with my CC, but the polygons are scrambled. This is some draining on the fun factor now for CC'ing, but it ain't impossible to deal with. The problem is that it basically makes SF tasks near impossible and space-piloting tasks quite difficult, too. It's those invisible walls. Anyway, like I said, all these finely designed stations worked just fine when I first got BCM and subsequently installed the 1.0.05 patch, and were quite the eyecandy pieces especially at high resolutions. But now, they're eyesores at any resolution. Any; and you can bet I checked on each one myself, CTD/crash, or whatever. I didn't care -- whatever it took to unscramble the starstations. This game is just too damn cool to give up on. I have proof of all this. Oh, yes, proof I have. I wouldn't ramble on with much ado about nothing, to the SC of all people with his you-got-one-shot-only-mister temperament (hey, I'm not knocking it, really, I'm not -- pretty good way to stay focussed) without something serious to back it up. Just give me an address and I'll send some pix yer way. Oh, and, I like to use Wordpad to save the pix in, using the Prntscrn button to copy them to memory. Ctrl-G, while a novel idea for things such as formulating the ideal cargo hold layout, is just way too finicky and uninformative to be useful anyway. But I don't care about Ctrl-G; I care about the scrambled starstations. I wanna do some more neat-o flying around the walls and stuff! God that was cool -- in, out, through, around, over, under. If v1.0.06 wasn't so much of a stupendous improvement making the game more stable, I'd immediately go reinstall and stick with v1.0.05 just for the cool fast intra-starstation flying I was doing in the pilot careers. Anyway, that some fine work you've done with v1.0.06, but could you look into this, please? My monitor bill is going to make me go broke at this rate if I keep smashing my screen in reflexive self-defense of my eyeballs everytime I see a scrambled Station! Much sincereity, Bowemeth