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Bad Pilot

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Posts posted by Bad Pilot

  1. Posted

    I run a dedicated server and have noticed that the 2nd beta for 1.07 crashes to desktop at least once a day. Previously, it was fine on 1.05 Beta and then on 1.07 first Beta.

    I've set my server to reboot at 04h00 every day because of this.

    Anyone else have this?

    My system: -

    Athlon XP 3000+

    2GB RAM.

    XP Pro SP2.

    No display, keyboard or mouse attached.

  5. Posted

    I love it.

    I'm incredulous at people's complaints about graphics in ArmA. They're brilliant and evocative. The environments are lifelike and challenging. The skies, landscapes, weapons effects, weather and lighting are awesome. Loads of times, I've just stopped en route somewhere - even during a firefight - to look at the rising/sinking sun on the water or colouring the clouds.

    Playing ArmA immerses you in the authentic atmosphere, sights and the sounds of modern warfare isntantly recognisable from contemporary TV news reporting.

    It's buggy as hell but I'm glad I'm playing it instead of BF2142 or Red Orchestra. Each patch (anyone not using the beta patch needs to wake up and install it) brings significant changes and improvements. All future patches will also do this.

    Linux should be supported. VoN should be fixed ASAP. Graphics whingers should be shot for missing the point, after they've installed the beta patch and/or tried the US demo and still complain.

    F

  6. Posted

    In the past when my PC's rebooted it's been due to one of the following: -

    1. Overheating.

    2. Lack of power.

    3. Starforce copy protection on a racing game.

    I'm always having to ramp up the PC cooling and room ventilation in the warmer months in order to prevent the computer overheating.

    Your PSU looks fine and should cope with you system OK. One area to think about is the video card: I have an identical Sapphire card and I've been amazed at the amount of discussion on their forums about powering the thing...

    Firstly, you have plugged two molex connectors into it haven't you?

    Secondly, you're advised to give thought to which molex connectors are used on the video card. It's got two power connectors because it needs loads of juice. It won't get that juice if your primary hard-disc and both video card sockets are fed off the same wire. In my system, two hard-discs are fed from one wire. Another wire goes into my DVD-RW and then into the Radeon (the thinking is that I'm never going to be hammering the DVD whilst hammering the Radeon). A third wire only plugs into the Radeon.

    F

  10. Posted

    Well, I press SPACE to talk on VoN and I tap it and the microphone icon appears until I tap it again. Presumably, that means it's an on/off switch. What command is your CAPS-LOCK bound to?

    I'm really very bored of VoN not working. Very, very, very bored indeed. It's essential in Veteran mode for exchanging info with people who are with you when you don't know who they are. You can even prevent TK's by using verbal challenges. Did I mention how bored I was with this feature being broken? No? Well, I'm very bored.

  11. Posted

    I find it hilarious that people might be confused by the floating zone, or that they'll think it's a lag bug thing.

    I like the idea of the game coming with all keys unbound. First thing I do with every fps I get is to delete all the bindings. It's tedious to assign something and have the game say 'that key is already in use' whilst I'm setting it up.

  12. Posted

    Corrupt data isn't a good sign and clearly needs to be removed before you continue. You've probably got SATA which I know nothing about but IME, IDE drives can corrupt if the PCI bus is overclocked.

    Overheating can become an issue as the days get longer now (Northern hemisphere) and I'm a perfect example of that - my study has very poor ventilation and as summer

    I have a thing on my game where I start to get spear-like graphical glitches coming out of players' necks. When that happens I know it's time to take the lid off my PC. If I do, it calms down; if I don't, the game eventually crashes.

    F

  16. Posted

    It can take a long time to join an Evolution mission. Several times, I've given up waiting myself on SuicideSquad and others. It's a feature of the mission that it requires so much work by the server to get a new connecting client singing off the same hymn sheet.

    Any time you think the PC has frozen connecting to a server, press escape a couple of times to fairly quickly return to the game browser.

  18. Posted

    as this thread degrade more and more to various half truths and myths

    read section related to prefetch

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/

    http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html

    (don't throw in your personal opinions about what is prefetch and how it works) ....

    Had to do a lot of reading to find what your point was. you could have just posted the info.

    Quote[/b] ]Reality - The Prefetcher component in Windows XP is part of the Memory Manager, and helps to shorten the amount of time it takes to start Windows and programs. This is a new feature in Windows XP which improves application load times and Windows boot times automatically. The slower your system and the larger an application, the more Prefetching helps. Even high end systems benefit from prefetching with large, slow loading applications, such as large games. By default Prefetching is enabled in Windows XP and already configured optimally. The following list describes the different possible values for the EnablePrefetcher registry key

    I'm unconvinced. Microsoft Memory Managers have always been the worst. Even back in DOS, I never let the OS manage my memory automatically. No reason to change now.

    F

  19. Posted

    My Computer Properties

    -------------------------

    I don't have access to XP Home but this is how you do it in Pro: -

    1. Click 'Start'

    2. R-Click 'My Computer' & choose 'Properties'

    3. Select 'Advanced' tab

    4. Click 'Settings' in the 'Startup and Recovery' area

    5. Use the drop-down to change 'Write debugging information' to '(none)'

    After doing that, you can completely switch off Pagefile.

    Don't switch off pagefile unless you have enough RAM! If I had 768MB of RAM and I played ArmA, I would leave the Pagefile on.

    Prefetch

    ----------

    Prefetch has its uses - but none of those uses are useful to me. When I turn my computer on, I want it lean and mean; I want it the same today as it was yesterday.

    Prefetch 'speeds your system up' by ... slowing it down. Go figure. If you check your Windows\Prefetch folder, you might find 100+ objects with 5MB+. These are snippets of the top 100 (or however many) applications and system programs you use, and XP "helpfully" loads them ALL at startup in case you're going to use them.

    You can safely delete the contents of prefetch at any time. It'll rebuild its library as you use the computer. I disabled it in the Registry.

    Beta Patch

    ============

    Has anyone experimented with mem settings for the beta patch? The changelog mentions RAM optimisations for systems with >1GB phsyical RAM... I've wondered whether this meaens I don't need the maxmem=1280 I use so far.

    F

  21. Posted

    When I disable pagefile, windows creates a large hidden pagefile on its own, lol. That can be solved by making a small pagefile. Even if you make your main pagefile on a seperate disk, you need to create a small 2 meg pagefile on system drive or else windows XP will create a hidden one(probaly about 1.5x the size of your ram). Its just the way XP is coded.

    Maybe XP64 with its increased memory capacity is different.

    XP doesn't create hidden pagefiles if you turn off pagefiles. There's a BSOD memory dump setting you need to turn off in My Computer Properties in order to be able to negate the need for the 2MB pagefile. I'd do that anyway; you don't want memory dumps mouldering in your C:\ drive.

    My XP computer isn't very good and struggles with ArmA. To start with, I was playing with pagefile enabled on a separate hard-disc. Disabling the pagefile made the game run faster.

    After running like that for a day or few, I heard about and started to use the maxmem parameter because I have 2GB RAM. Initially, I made some mistakes by setting it too high: my AGP aperture was there hiding and when ArmA started using that RAM, it crashed.

    Now, I'm generally running ArmA with '-maxmem=1280'.

    Benefits of turning off the pagefile and increasing the game RAM include faster map screen switching and faster texture loads. The game just plain runs better.

    Turn off 'prefetch' too, and empty the windows prefetch folder.

    And upgrade Vista to XP :P.

    F

  25. Posted

    The problem I think is going to be that the pedals are Y and Z axes on my steering wheel - and both those axes are used by the joystick. The game requires something like "joystick2 X axis" rather than "joystick X axis".

    That virtual device driver... I'd be surprised and pleased if that worked at all but I still think you'd run up against the issue above: there're only 3 usable axes in the game whereas you need 5 if you're going to have pedals.

    F

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