Hi folks!
Just being on some severe “retro gaming trip” I also remembered Freelancer and dug out the CD again (German version). Unfortunately this seems to be my first PC having serious trouble with it…
At first, the game runs flawlessly, but sooner or later graphics get completely garbled, i.e. textures seem to be mixed up, graphical elements (e.g. UI related icons or text) appear in places where they are not supposed to, text fields are overwritten with game textures and the like. The effect looks quite similar to what has already been reported by people using Intel integrated graphic chipsets (recent thread: “Windows Vista graphics error” ).
This always happens after the game freezes for a few seconds, mostly when I’m docked somewhere and visit the traders, but sometimes also in free flight.
Although the menu becomes unreadable I still find my way to quit the game because I know where to click, and then any of the following may happen:
- I happily return to the desktop, everything normal.
- the screen turns black. No further interaction possible, reset required.
- the screen turns black, but then the desktop appears in 640x480. A message box says that nv4_disp.dll is not working properly.
- the screen turns black, but very slowly desktop icons start to appear one after another.
During the last 3 days I googled a lot and tried many things to get around this, but with absolutely no effect:
- pure unpatched vanilla installation
- QuickFix 1.0c
- Unofficial patch 1.4
- flconfigdatabase
- restricting FL to one CPU core
- a couple of things with NVIDIA 3D settings
- running FL in Win98 compatibility mode
I’m trying to play in 1600x1200. And of course, 3D audio is switched off…
Now here’s my system:
Asus P5KC
Intel Core2Duo E6850 (3,0GHz)
4 GB RAM
GTX285 (NVIDIA driver 195.62)
Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer (latest driver)
Windows XP Professional SP3 (32 bit)
latest DX9c
What puzzles me is that I can play all my other games without any problems, and even the oldest ones run perfectly (like Deus Ex or Fallout 2, with Hi-Res mods). Now I’m close to despair… during all my testing I managed to get through the first missions of the FL story and traveled to some of the Liberty sectors, but at the price of a huge lot of reboots.
As my GTX285 probably doesn’t have a temperature problem (because I can safely play things like Mass Effect, BioShock, Risen, Anno 1404 in 1920x1200 at highest detail for hours) I really don’t know what to do.
So is anyone out there who can help or managed to run FL with a GTX285??