Multiverse Mod

[Campeador]

There are so many science fiction universes out there that I would have liked to recreate. The problem is time and energy to do so. If it takes me a minimum of one year to do a mod, then to do five universes it would have been five years minimum, and this Star Fury game is not getting any younger.
So, in order to do so I came up with Multiverse (2 – 2.5 years).
If I were to create each universe with many ships classes as suggested, I would not be able to launch Multiverse when I did in Dec 07, but maybe in 09 or longer...
I am aware that other people are working on other mods, like the Star Wars mod, and I do not want to take their thunder. I do want them to make the mod with all the ships and glory that the Star Wars series deserves. (I really want to play a game other than my own!)The same goes for Star Trek and the others. That is why I only used no more than 6 ships max from each universe (and those were divided like 3 for each faction within the universe. Some universes I used even less). Also the ships I selected were the classics that every body knows, nothing new, so there is plenty of room for a full mod on each of the Universes where I just have a glimpse or cameo appearance, except the Star Blazers mod where I went in detail on the previous two mod series.

At least no one is giving me any complain because I put three laser beams instead of two, or I put it on the wrong place or something. I am not an expert on none of the universes out there.

I did some experimenting with some other ships that even thought I may not be using on the game may be together with the rest on the files. It is better to leave them there than try to go through five or six files, remove them and then having some type of error on the game because I forgot to remove something some ware. (Like all the ships from the previous SB Mod are still there.)
Anyway I am doing all this mods just for fun, so you can use any ships I created and try to do your thing. I did use the original Star Fury ships, and even recycled the Gamilon ships from my Star blazers mod to create the Illumidas and Iscandarian fleets. A little skin change can make nice variations. Anyway I am sure that someone other than me and with far more talent can create ships. All you have to do is to ask around.

[rstaats10]

I can respect the time you put into making the mods. I have been working on my SF mod for about 6 months and still working on it. I too mod for fun. I hope to be done with my mod in next month or two (wishfull thinking). I am making a Stargate Mod and have all ships configured for the game, maps done, components, etc. The mod will be 80% or so accurate to the Tv show but I wanted it to have it's own flavor too. That is why I have added some new race ships and what not to the Stargate Universe to spice it up a bit.

I will release the mod when I get done with it. One of many things I have discovered while modding is to keep the texture images resolution down to 256x256 or 512x512 for the most part. It saves memory and reduces file size.

The SF game engine is old and wish I had half the knowledge of my older brother and younger brother who have been programers at their jobs for years.

I will finish my mod though since my 8 year old son likes to play the game too and has given me the motivation to complete it.

[Campeador]

For three weeks now I have been trying to fix my pc. At last I was successful!

The problem was a repeatable one. The problem was happening on the “x-wing vs tie fighter “areas.

It goes like this: I land on the sector and fighters are engaging each other. It is going well until I get close then most of them freeze except like one or two. All the beams, bolts, missiles, smoke effects are frozen in space, yet the Rebel Cruiser is moving and my ship also…
I played the same scenario on three different PC’s and it runs fine in all of them except on mine…

A little background: A few months ago something happened on my pc and the monitor died. I replaced the monitor but as the months pass I was having some freezes and crashes until finally like 3-4 weeks ago my pc died. A new motherboard later I was running again. Played the game confident that that may have fixed the game bug, but the bug was still present.

My system:
AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 1G (2x512) of ram. ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128M of ram on an AGP slot. 300W ATX power. Previous an Asus motherboard now a PC Chips.
Possible causes: an AMD vs AGP incompatibility, a processor going bad, bad ram, insufficient power, and bad video card.

I did a memtest on the ram overnight, not a single error. I played with all possible settings on the motherboard and video card, nada. I went to all the pertinent websites for drivers, and forums looking for advice. Nothing works… Went to the ATI forums and everyone seems to be having some time of graphic trouble with artifacts, freezes, crashes etc. A lot of people were jumping boat and swearing that they will never buy another ATI product and so forth. Time to go shopping.

I bought a NVIDIA 7600GT with 512M of ram, and a 500W power supply. Installed and this for sure will solve my problem… wrong again, the same bug... I played with all possible settings on the motherboard and video card, nada. I went to all the pertinent websites for drivers, and forums looking for advice, again. Nothing works… Went to the NVIDIA forums and everyone seems to be having some time of graphic trouble with artifacts, freezes, crashes etc. A lot of people were jumping boat and swearing that they will never buy another NVIDIA product and so forth. Déjà Vu … I am done shopping.

The only thing I have not changed is the RAM and the processor… The ram was tested and it is good. Luckily I found my previous processor, a 2000+. Slower than the 3000+ but it should work. The problem persists. By the way all the other programs work fine even other games like Oblivion runs fine, all but this one. OK, downloaded “3dMark06” and did a test. It passes, even thought that in some parts the frame rate were down almost to ‘0’ (still using the 2000+ processor), shoppy, slow, but did not crash or freeze. What the heck? On my game while the fighters are freezing the frame rates were from 20 to 30…
I decide to decrease the enemy fighters from 30 to 3… still happen! I went to a friendly rebel base, no battle any ware, but when the rebel fighters were nearby, my ship freezes then moves and then freezes again as they fly close to me. On the middle of the battle there was a lot of noise from weapons and explosions, but now I do recall not hearing the annoying noise of the Tie engines… Time to play with the sound. The sound on my motherboard is integrated an “onboard AC97 audio controller”, so was on my previous motherboard.

I replaced on the scenario the Ties for Illumidas fighters, but the problem persist (I did forgot to replace the x-wings). I replaced the engine sounds from the empire and rebel fighters to standard “Earth fighter engines” and THE BUG WAS GONE!!!

Anyway I decided to investigate what makes those SW sounds caused problems while the stock sounds do not. It turns out that the stock sounds are 16bit with a frequency of 44100 while the SW sounds that I was using were 8bit with a frequency of 8000 to 11025. Now how come it works fine in other three different pc’s – 2 pentiums and one an AMD laptop? Also none of the people playing have reported this issue other than slowdowns? Obviously I have a sound driver/hardware conflict or something. Special note: I aded the different sounds on the game after all the scenarios were made. At the time I was ussing my laptop to finish the mods since my regular pc was acting up and it was running fine on the laptop.

Instead of going again into another quest to solve the sound I went the easy sure way to fix this: I converted the sounds into “16bit with a frequency of 44100” just like the stock sounds and problem solved! So for the benefit of those who may have this problem I will have the “fixed “sounds included on Multiverse 3.

I am sure that after reading this a smart *** is going to tell me how simple it was to diagnose…

[rstaats10]

Wow I never would have guessed the Wav files were to blame. I believe that sound drivers are usually updated from your pc manufacturer website. Did you update that as well? I notice my problems with slowdowns occur when I have too many ships or too many weapons effects firing. I always thought it was a game engine "overload" problem. If I had the source code for SF my brother said he would look into helping me improving the SF exe files. I don't think I would be able to get the source code for that game.

My pc has the nvidia 7600 Gt as well and it plays oblivion just fine as well as other games. I will check my sound files as you have mentioned above Campeador. Thanks for the insight on this.

On another topic Campeador: Have you used Doga before? I have a fighter attachment to show you what I made. it's easy and quick. It took a few minutes to make this one.

[Q]

Campeador I had this sound problem too.
But for me the fix was to download and replace the campaign files again. Did you change the sound files in the Multiverse campaign 2 now?

[Campeador]

Q, there are no sound files on Multiverse 2 but music files, and nothing was change on the music. The music files are not a problem. The issue for me was the sounds on the 'Sound' folder inside the 'Music' folder of 'Multiverse_Music-1'. 'Multiverse_Music-2' only contains music.
But for Multiverse 2 you were supposed to use the music and sounds of 'Multiverse_Music-1'and 'Multiverse_Music-2'.
On Multiverse 3 you will use all of them in addition of 'Multiverse_Music-3' (not yet released).

To answer rstaats10, I did have the latest sound drivers from the motherboard manufacturer even thought their latest is an 05. Apart of my mod the slow downs on this game seems to be normal, I get the same in all pc's. For example every time there is a nebula or asteroids in front of you the game slows down a little. Naturally this is depending on the power of your pc, the stronger the pc the less noticeable. On my mod all this is far more pronounced since I am always pushing the boundaries of this game trying to create the biggest battles possible
About Doga, no I have not used it before. Your ships look cool, and if the polygons count is small then it will be ideal for this game. I will look into it as time permits.

[rstaats10]

Campeador I found something to help prevent slowdown when I have lots of fighters (about 20 or more fighters) firing their weps. I took the effects bitmap of a torpedo bitmap and reduced it by 50% to 128 x 128 with no real noticable game difference in quality. By doing this my wep effects were firing much better. There was no slowdown as there was previously when I had the effects file at 256 x 256. It was as if the fighters were on "steroids" or something.

Another thing I try to do is keep the texture images sizes down to 256 x 256 for fighters and most ships for the most part. I do have some higher 512 x 512 for ships and what not. I noticed a lot of the fighters in multiverse have texture size 512 x 512. Try it out and reduce it down to 256 x 256 and see what you think. It will save memory use in the game.

Something else I want to share with you that I stumbled upon is that you can use jpg instead of bitmap for landscapes and portrait images. Just reference the images in the files as jpg instead of bmp. Big-time savings on file sizes. You may not what to mess with this now since it would take too much time to convert but in the future it is good to know.

[Baron Munchausen]

That's exactly the problem I was having. Here I thought it was simply that my system was not powerful enough to handle so many fighters and bitmap effects at once. But it did work when I turned off the sound. Interesting that a 'mix' of 16-bit and 8-bit sound would have such a weird effect. I'll make sure to download the updated versions of all of the mods now.