homepage Forums Read Only Forums Read Only Forums Red Baron (Read Only) FCJ no joy for me.

Well, I got my copy of FCJ. Installation was a breeze. Went into a fly now, and it looked wonderful. I have an AMD K6-2 500 with 196 ram and a voodoo 4 4500 card. Frame rates in fly now were good. But when I went into campaign to play, the slide show began. Over the lines I was getting 1-2 FPS. I'm afraid I can't play FCJ in campaign, which is the only mode I play, so I went back to WFP and OTE terrain. What do they mean buy a low end machine? I would love to try to just install certain parts of FCJ, like the sky and the wonderful clouds, and see if that would work fine, or the sounds, or just the plane models, and see what I can salvage out of this.

You don't say what your settings are in the FCJ control panel. In Gameplay, turn Sun Glare off. In Graphics, turn off Shadows and Props. If FPS are still unplayable, lower the setting for Ground Density. If you are playing at higher than 800x600 screen resolution, try switching to a lower setting there. If none of this helps much, reinstall FCJ and choose the low res terrain. And you can also have FCJ remove the sun and moon entirely to boost FPS.

Oh, and do you have V-Sync turned off on your Voodoo card? If not, turn it off.

I'm trying to figure out how to turn off the vsync. Can't seem to find it.
as for the others, well, I didn't order it for dumbed down graphics. I love the atmosphere that the clouds and stuff make. Maybe I'll try it again this weekend.

Almost everyone turns off sun glare, as it's a big hit to fps. Shadows and props are too. I don't miss them at all.

As for V-Sync, Open your monitor's display properties, click on the settings tab, then the Voodoo tab, then "Advanced", and select the OpenGL tab, if I recall rightly.

Trust me Dwitt it wont dumb down the graphics much at all, try selecting the low-res terrain option in the control panel (i use this) also slide the object density all the way down. those two things alone will pick you up alot of frames. there are dozens of preference settings along with the external low res terrain install (different than the lo res check box i mentioned above) the low res fx will boost framerates, even installing the no moon/sun set up will help. if your an openglide user, try disabling the sunglare (lots of openglide users cannot run with this on).

The important thing is that there are alot of preference adjustments in the control panel alone, every person should be able to mess with those and dial in their game to their systems needs.

also remember, with some setting (like object density - the amount of objects on the ground) when these are set to 100% they are more than doubled (if not tripled) the amount of ground objects in the standard game, and some of these slider go up to 250% and even 512, so when you set the object density at its full 250% your probably seeing more like 8x the amount of stuff that would be on the ground in a stock rb game.

You cant take all the settings in the FCJ CP litterally.

You're RAM is low. 256 is the bare minimum these days, and I strongly reccomend 512.

Am running FCJ fine in 800x600 with all sliders maxed except shadows and prop off, even glare on. FCJ. 125 Land Density.

P3 1000 single Voodoo2 512 MB RAM.

Getting better fps then dwitt, much better, often in the 30s in campaign although it can get down close to 10 rare occasions , but never single digits.

Think 512 RAM is the key.

I have no Vsync switch in Dispay Properties but an ofboard tweak util that came packed inside the "fastvoodoo2_3.5.exe" Glide drivers (I forget which 3dfx site they're at) allows me to turn vsync off).

Actually I cannot really notice much f.p.s. change since upgrading regular RB3D to FCJ but probably there was a small hit.

I would vote for more RAM as well. You can never have too much memory. (Except if you try to run Longbow 2.)

CK

Hmm, does the prop really change much? I remember playing RB in 98 and the prop had no effect on the fps rate and i had to play with P1 166Mhz computer. Btw, the sun glare is only a problem for the ATI guys right?

Do you know I've never actually tested the benefit of turning off the props. Just assumed. As to sun glare, these days it is a real fps killer for those of us who are using the OpenGLide wrapper.

Well my mother board manual says it only goes to 384, 128 in two dimms and a 128 in a sim. Maybe that's because of the age of the board and back then they didn't have 256 mb dimm yet. Anyway, I reinstalled, low res terrain, turned off Vsync, no sun/moon patch, objects down to minimum. Flew a balloon bust. Frame rates over the front were at 12-14 instead of 1-2. So progress is made. I will look into getting some more ram. I wonder if that 384 is an absolute limit.

Vsync doesn't change your max or minimum fps rates much.

I have read the description for an older version of the open glide wrapper and it said that the bug with the sun glare killing all the fps was fixed, atleast to some extend. Is there a wrapper version which works best with the FCJ? Sometimes, the latest driver versions aren't the best. I have downloaded the v009rc5 due to Barkhorns recommendation. I guess that's the one to use?

Lord knows I'm no expert. I guess the best advice is see what works best. It's easy enough to swap out the two wrappers and do some quick Fly Nows to see what looks best. On my machine with OpenGlide 7.4 the terrain didn't load as fast, and had a sort of checkerboard look to it until I flew right over it. I didn't have this problem with 009rc5. With either version, in-game menus and messages had streaks running off to the right of any lines of text. When I set my GF 4 to V-Sync "off by default", the streaks went away. But numerous players have said they don't see any difference at all between the two.

Vsync off is no option for me cause the visual tearing will be too heavy. I have a TFT flatpanel and the low refresh rate rquires Vsync.

I'm currently running Full Canvas Jacket on the following system:

Windows 98(SE)
AMD 1.1 GHz
256 RAM
Voodoo 4500 PCI w/32 RAM
16-bit SoundBlaster

I started off by cranking all of the graphics options to their max numbers in the FCJ control panel; however, I've since backed them all down to 100. And Kess is right...turning on the "low-resolution" option doesn't do anything noticeable to the graphics that I can see. I have everything else turned on...glare, props, etc. I even have max detail during combat.

I discovered that the biggest hit to FPS was when I had my 2-sample Anti-Aliasing turned on in my Voodoo control hub. By turning that off, I picked up at least 30-40 FPS (not to mention getting rid of an annoying "wiggle" that seemed to be occuring at the edge of my screen).

I'm getting 40-50 FPS curing combat, 80-90 FPS while just flying around.

Btw, are the options in the FCJ control panel the same as in the game? What if you are one of the luckless guys who have problem with the conrol panel and have to manually install the FCJ. I guess they can't enter the control panel after the installation either? How can you change the settings there in case of that problem?

No, they are not the same. Kess and Capt. Darwin have added several tools to the FCJ control panel that were previously stand-alone utilities. Let's see... there's Capt. Darwin's Graphics Tweak utility, The Gunnery sliders and Bullet Mass thingie from Campaign Manager, and Capt. Royce's AI Enhancer. So if you didn't have the FCJ control panel, or just wanted to be able to adjust these things in a non-FCJ RB game, you could use these utilities. I believe they are all available at the Hell's Angels site.
http://www.jamrom.com/hellsangels/main.htm

Ah thanks, and what about the problem of not being able to use the FCJ control panel? Maybe that problem might only show during the installation progress and not after the game has been installed. I just hope that i wont be part of the 3 men club who couldn't use that CP during the installation.

What happens when you install the FCJ into a non english game version? Will it convert the whole text into english?

I have just installed my old RBII, patched it to RB3D and put the V009rc5 wrapper into it. The wapper works like a charm, even with sun glar. The only "problem" i have is that i can't get the terrain showing the full texture resolution at all spots. No matter which texture memory i use in the ini, the terrain looks always like a mix of low res and high res squares. Will that be fixed with the FCJ patch? I hope the terrain in the FCJ patch loads a bit faster.

Banks, I don't know for sure, but you might just be looking at normal RB stock terrain, which is really showing its age, having been made for graphics cards with only 8 or 12 mb of memory.

The language thing might be an issue. And at this point, I want to send you to the Promised Land forum, as Capt. Darwin has asked another player whether he is using a RB version other than english: http://forums.delphiforums.com/thepromisedland/messages?msg=249.3

Since your questions are so FCJ-specific, you really ought to ask them there, where Kess and the other SWWISA people can advise you. See you there...