Multiverse Mod

[Baron Munchausen]

Campeador said:
Ah yes the second part of your post. I have played the game in four computers. My laptop (HP Pavilion zv6000 2G ram, AMD Athlon 64, 2000Mz) tends to overheat and freezes from time to time on this game only (well it is the only game I have played in the last 3 years). Other than that nothing, no slow down or anything, just that the fans are at full blast and eventually overheats... annoying. It's ram was 512, I increased to 2G, still behaves the same.
My regular desktop pc, another Athlon xp 2167mz 1G of ram. It runs fine until recently. It started to have very erratic video problems especially during this game until it died. I think that is the motherboard so I just order a replacement one for $35. I hope that this fix it.
My brother’s pc, a Pentium 4 3000Mz, 1G of ram. On his there are some slow downs and the mouse gets erratic... This cannot be the game? Maybe he has conflicting software or maybe he needs drivers since his pc behaves worst than some of the other slower pc's...
On the four pc another Pentium 4 3000Mz 1G of ram it runs fine. All this four pc's are average pc and they were my ruler as how many ships to put on the screen.

I can tolerate some slow downs but so far nothing that have prevented me from enjoying the game. But yes if I would have experience the problems you have I would have put less ships on the screen. I do not know why so many other games far more complex like Homeworld for example runs so fine with no problems... To think that I would have liked to have more ships instead of less...

I could decrease the graphics by speeding up the weapons effects, or having fewer ships, or decreasing something, but that will be unfair for the people that the game runs fine.
At least you know the work around to make it work. You can also play the game at 16 colors instead of 32 colors. Now that I think about it there is the setup were the "Sight distance", "Stellar Detail" and "Background Detail" can be set to medium or low (by the way on the 4 computers I mention before all was set to high).

If more players are having this problem please let me know.

I guess I am suffering from my choice of video hardware. I was never very interested in ATI and nVidia cards because Matrox always wins the image quality comparisons on the review sites. They have decent 3D as far as quality, but the performance of Matrox 3D is always a generation or two behind the contemporary ATI and nVidia stuff. Since most people seem to buy ATI or nVidia these days, their cards are probably picking up much more of the actual graphical rendering work than mine. Between having 'only' a 1.2 Ghz CPU and 'only' a 32MB Matrox video card, I guess there is just too much for my old system to handle. When I get a newer system (soon, I hope) I'll get much closer to the common specs of the 'average' PC... for now. And in another 5 years I'll be way behind the times again.

[Campeador]

Ha, yes the pirates chasing Harlock... It was no challenge at all until I decided to give the pirates stealth armor on the last minute... That single detail transformed a mediocre group into a fearsome one!

Thanks for the info rstaats10, I stand corrected about the sounds file. I still do not get why we have to transfer the music while not the sound nor any other file, from any particular mod. It would have been really nice if no transfer was needed, but who can argue with the game gods?

About the video hardware, I am very aware that I am pushing things on this mods with the amount of ships, but the problems with the graphics seems to be the mostly fighters, and some fighters more than others (especially the ones from Epsilon system). This game by now is old, and I remember running the original game on an 800Mz with a video card holding 32Mb, barely the minimum requirements for the game. But it ran! (Writing this post just now I realized that I did surpass the original game requirements, my bad!)

On my mods one of the problems is my lack of knowledge on the graphic department. I am sure that there are artist out there that can make all my models with half the polygons I used or even less. A feat that would have fix most of the slow downs. By the way that is why most of the systems were battles take place have very little space objects.
I will still try to remember those with slower systems on the next campaigns 'if' possible.

[rstaats10]

I really like playing your mods and you do a really good job making your ships. (Hard to make them in my opinion) I have made about 6 ships. However most I have to use from other mods. One tool I have used is Polygon Cruncher. Works well to reduce polys. You can get a free 1 week trial, which is what I did. It's a plug in to Lightwave (and 3DS max I believe). I got a free 30 day trial to Lightwave then added the Polygon Crucher as an Plug In and away I went. I took some really high Poly ships down over 70% and they are playable in SF.

[Baron Munchausen]

Just an extra thought: when you do any 'optimizing' of ship models, how about adding a few more for some of the empires/races to flesh out the selection? If we had a couple more Fed ships it would then be possible for someone who doesn't have ship modeling skills make a nice Trek campaign using material from your mod.

A decent 'destroyer' class vessel like the Saladin/Hermes single nacelle design, and a 'heavy' class like the Nebula or Galaxy would make the Federation ships complete enough to use in a full campaign of some sort. The Miranda (USS Reliant from Wrath of Khan) would be very cool to have, as well. And maybe the Akira class. Various science vessels could wait for a full-scale dedicated Federation mod. Oh, a Fed-style starbase is also needed.

The Klingons need at least one 'heavy' ship. The K'Vort might be a good choice. And a unique starbase design for them, also. And I see you've got one Romulan model even though they don't appear in this campaign. The original Romulan 'Warbird' would be really, really cool to have and then of course a unique Romulan starbase. Hmm. Seven or eight models. Got any helpers with all of this?

The Millenium Falcon as a Rebel freighter would be very nice. The Imperial Super Star Destroyer is out of bounds, though. It'd take up half a system all by itself!

[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.

[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.