Graphics Weirdness
 

I am playing RFB 2.0 with RSRDC. I run a Core 2 duo 2.6, HD5770, 3GB ram. I have already completed 3 succesful patrols and the game has run perfectly. On my 4th patrol some odd things started happening. Firstly, and I mentioned this in a previous post- my deck crew did not appear on the bridge after returning them there from Hogans alley after an encounter with a destroyer.

The next time I sat down to play the game, everything seemed fine. I returned to Darwin to resupply and headed back towards Borneo. During the journey, half of my crew, including those from the deck and those in the command room & conning tower, suddenly appeared dressed in black, all except their heads, which appeared correctly. I continued regardless (if it were pink I would have returned them to port instantly for a court-martial!).

Having approached Balikpapan for a sneak harbour attack, I hit the fire button and the game crashed. In addition to the 3 or 4 further crashes I experienced (it has never once crashed on me before), I had fired a torpedo at a tanker in the harbour- at the point of impact the boat simply disappeared- apart from the masts and funnel. The ship was 'still there' though as she was smoking away from the impacts and slowly sinking. Immediately after this the whole screen went bright green, then came back to the game, then green screen again. I pulled up the task manager to quit the game thinking it had gotten seriously dumped, only to notice that the game had gone back to normal again. It was at this point that I was beginning to think my graphics card was failing. Anyhow, thinking it best to end this bugged patrol, I headed for base, docked at Freemantle and saved and quit the game.

For the next 3 hours my son played BF2 BC online on the same machine- no sign of any problems with the PC....

My feeling is (and it's a guess at best!) is that something went wrong during the original problem with my absent crew, and deteriorated from there. I was wondering if by ending the patrol I might possibly be 'resetting' the game in some way when I start my next patrol. I really hope my whole campaign is not corrupted somehow... anybody got any ideas?

When I started modding this game, I got the green screen crash a few times. It stopped happening after I made the executable large address aware.

You lost me there! What exactly is the Executable large address and how would I make it 'aware'? Doing this obviously helped you and I am interested to know why.

sh4.exe in your main game folder is the executable, the actual program that runs the game. It was designed a few years ago, before we users tended to have computers with more than one gigabyte of RAM, so that executable only uses a fraction of your machine's available memory. Making sh4.exe large address aware means telling the executable to use more RAM. I always try it as one of the first steps in troubleshooting issues with older programs, along with running as administrator. If you have three gigs of RAM I don't think it can hurt, and may help.

Awhile back I found this little program that makes it very easy: link

I hope that helps. Anyway, it solved my green screen issues.

Thanks White Owl, I'll give it a try. :yeah:

Had the same issue with certain crew members turning "black". Also running RFB and RSRD. Graphics is 2x HD5850's, I7 Quad core with 12gigs of Corsair Dominator memory. The large address patch cured the problem for me. It also cured random crashes in other sims I play. Very simple to use, and very effective:yeah:

I don't have any real experience with ATI cards, but two things I would double-check in your situation are: your GPU temperature and your AA settings in the ATI Control Panel. BTW, how old is your card?

Wow. Never heard of that. :doh:

I checked the card settings, no apparent problems there. The card itself is only 4 months old, I'm pretty sure that it's ok as it works fine with other demanding games.

I ran a test to see if returning to port and starting a new patrol would clear the problem, but within 3 minutes of leaving Freemantle I had the dreaded green screen. So I quit, sorted out the large address, and also removed a couple of sound mods I had added my previous time in port. I then decided to test the last save in port before the problems began. I ran it thoroughly for around 3 hours and no sign of a hitch... it seemed stable again. So it looks as though I only lost one patrol, which I can live with.

In retrospect I strongly feel that something went awry with the crew coming back out of Hogans ally and back to their stations on the bridge, or not as the case may be. Whether or not that had to do with the new sound mods or it was just one of those things- from that point on I was playing a very unstable game. Their strange behavior continued- sometimes the watch would not sleep whilst their compatriots did, other times they slept when no-one else did. Their fatigue levels were also around 10 points higher than anybody else aboard.

Hopefully things will settle down again now! Thanks for all the tips, much appreciated.:salute:

I've never had that kind of experience with a mod, like you and Armistead have but I did have some milder conflicts when I went from RFB to TMO. I went into My Documents/SHIV folder and deleted all the files in my Saved Games folder and the conflicts disappeared. Apparently, I had been starting new careers w/o deleting my Saved Games and, for some reason, this seemed to be the source of the conflicts.

That's interesting to note. Sometime in the future I will try either TMO or OM (probably OM next) and I will now remember to clear all my old saves first. Cheers!