Eder
Mr. Standoff
This is the latest version of the FAQ thread, as per Ep 4's release. I'll update this with new questions as they arise in other forum threads, but this one will be kept closed in order to be easier to read.
As of now there are no new Ep 4 questions here, because nobody has had any.
General:
Question: When I try to use the launcher's options menu, I get a missing file error.
Answer: Download and install the VB6 runtimes form Microsoft's website here. We should have an easier solution for this in future releases (such as including these files with the installer by default).
Video:
Question: What's the difference between openGL and D3D modes?
Answer: OpenGL mode uses a new graphics library, developed by our very own Alex Barnfield. It lets us add new graphics effects to the game, and should also make it faster and offer better compatibility than D3D mode. There are some known problems with D3D mode that we can do little or nothing to fix. Therefore, it's recommended that you only use D3D mode if you have problems running the game in openGL... and by all means, report such problems so that we can improve our new recommended mode!
Question: Why is openGL mode running really slow?
Answer: It should be at least as fast as D3D mode on any video card that has openGL support. If you are using a nVidia card, look for the "Image Quality" setting in your drivers or nVidia control panel, and set it to "Performance". The "High Performance" setting is known to be much slower than the other three settings on at least some nVidia cards. If you are not using a nVidia card: please let us know what your system specs are so that we can try to find out what's going on and update the openGL renderer in the future.
Video - Direct3D:
Question: Why can't I get 32 bit mode to run?
Answer: Our 32 bit patch doesn't work with most ATI video cards, and with nVidia cards it seems to depend on the driver version (newer drivers being less likely to work). You can try this file and see if it helps: http://standoff.solsector.net/files/gl_0000x.zip (Backup the existing gl_0000x.dll from your Standoff folder, and unzip that file there). It only seems to work for some people, though. If that doesn't help, you'll just have to run the game in 16 bit color.
Question: When I try to run the game in 16 bit mode, I get the following error: "Please re-run the install program. Gl::loadDLL load failed 6, 126=The specified module could not be found"
Answer: We're still not sure what may cause this. First, try uninstalling Standoff and then reinstalling it. If that doesn't help and if you have Unknown Enemy installed, try uninstalling both Standoff and UE from your system, and then re-installing Standoff.
Question: Whenever I get a lens flare, there are crosshairs in each flare, like positioning points. Is there any way to get rid of this?
Answer: That is a texel alignment problem that the engine has with Direct3D. There is a fix for this on some (specially older) graphics cards, but it might corrupt the graphics in other games. Search your graphics card's control panel for a "texel alignment" slider or an "alternate pixel center" checkbox, and experiment with different settings for those. We're still hoping to fix this problem in the future, so that such tricks won't be needed anymore.
Question: When I enable anti-aliasing, my game starts bluring massivly - Difficult to describe: it's like ghosting, but previous pictures don't disappear. That is mainly for videos, HUD and such. Was not the case for real fight (except the HUD). When switching off AA, the prob is gone.
Answer: This is an uncommon problem whose cause is still not clear to us. Standoff must not like your video card or your drivers for some reason. However, with ansiotropic filtering set above 4x, some graphics may indeed get blurred on most systems. Mostly, it's just the stars on the background and some minor HUD blurring. This is probably due to the fact that all our textures are too low-res.
Question: My screen flickers during cutscenes.
Answer: Enable all subtitles in the Options menu.
Question: Sometimes, my target VDU goes crazy - it either displays garbled graphics, or the wrong ship type, or a hull/shield display that doesn't match the damage levels of the ship I'm targetting
Answer: This is a bug that we haven't been able to fix (since Unknown Enemy, even!). Thankfully, it's quite harmless. It only happens when new ships are spawned, and if you switch targets, then switch back to the original target, the VDU should refresh itself properly.
Question: Have there been any major problems noted for NVidia cards? ATI seems to be the people with card-specific issues, so it's worth checking.
Answer: Current drivers for NVidia cards have also lost the ability to run Standoff in 32-bit color mode, just like ATI. Older versions didn't have any significant problems with Standoff, however, besides the fact that some driver versions wouldn't let you adjust texture alignment to fix the lens flares problems.
Question: The videos seem to be playing too fast, and the sound is just unintelligible noises.
Answer: Turn off sound hardware acceleration in DXDiag (Start->Run->type "DXdiag" and press enter, then look in the sound tab). If that doesn't solve the problem, try using the anti-sound-skipping option in Standoff's launcher. If enabling that option solves your problem, you can try turning hardware sound acceleration back on to avoid problems with other games.
Input:
Question: When I activate rudder-controls, the rudder is reversed. I change it and in the next mission or sometimes in the nav-point, the ruder-control is reversed again.
Answer: We haven't touched the game's joystick input routines, so this is probably a bug in the engine itself (meaning we probably can't fix it).
Question:I get a fatal error which says DInput::fetch2 fell out of loop and it kicks me back to windows. Any ideas on how to fix it?
Answer: It's a joystick related issue. Make sure your joystick is plugged in and that windows recognizes it (you can check this in the Control Panel). If it does say that your joystick is working, but you still get this error in Standoff, let us know.
Gameplay:
Question: I just got an amazing score in the simulator, but it doesn't show on the scoreboards! What happened?
Answer: A number of things may cause this:
-You need a crius.net username to use the scoreboards. In the launcher's options menu, make sure you've checked the option to allow Standoff to upload your scores, and that you have entered your username in the text box (scores sent from usernames that don't exist are discarded).
-You need to be connected to the internet while playing. To avoid cheating, simulator scores are only sent at the end of the mission (they're never stored anywhere to be sent later), so if for some reason you have gotten disconnected while playing, your score will be lost forever.
-You can't cheat. That means you can't use the in-game invulnerability option at any time during the mission. Also, the simulator regards any alteration of Standoff's files as cheating. If you have "modded" anything in Standoff at all, your score will not be sent. The ship's computer will inform you at the start of a sim mission if it has detected a cheat or cannot verify the integrity of your files.
-There is a bug in the original release of Ep 3 that sometimes sends garbled scores to the server. This is relatively rare, but seems to happen more often with higher scores. This will be fixed by a small patch we're about to release.
Question: Some missions are taking a very long time (minutes!) to load. Is this normal?
Answer: It's normal for some missions, specially if they have a large number of objects to load (for example, asteroid belt missions). This doesn't necessarily happen only on older systems, either.
Question: Everything seems to work fine, until I am about to start a mission - then, after loading the mission, the game just crashes! What's going on?
Answer: This may happen on older video cards due to some high resolution textures we have in the game. You might be able to solve this by going into the game's options menu and disabling most of the detail options - but you might run into a mission that crashes no matter what. Your video card needs to support 512x512 resolution textures to run the whole game properly... I think nVidia's first TNT cards already had high-res texture support, but 3dfx's cards up to the Voodoo3 won't work.
Question: On some missions, my computer locks up completely or suddenly crashes at random times during a mission.
Answer: This is a rare glitch which we haven't been able to track down too well, but turning off all detail for the mission in question might help you play through it without lockups. That includes reducing the detail sliders found on Standoff's launcher options as well as turning off all settings in the in-game options menu (disabling comms, special effects, etc.) and closing programs that might be running in the background. Sometimes these lock-ups are mission-specific, so you can try turning the detail settings back on for the next mission.
Question: How do I scan ships / retrieve pods / use my jump drive? I forgot how to do it and the key isn't listed in the Controls menu!
Answer: The ship's computer tells you which key to press whenever you need to do some special action. If you've just missed these computer instructions, you can press CTRL+M to check the Message Log, the messages are saved there. Just search for a message from "Computer" telling you what to do.
WCP-mania:
Question: When i press P to adjust my power settings I can't see any graphic - is this a bug? The S key (shield settings) works ok.
Answer: Power management was removed on purpose as a design decision, to be true to the feel of earlier games (where such a thing was absent). Shield management wasn't removed because we couldn't figure out a way to remove it.
Question: TWO missile decoys? come on...
Answer: All ships have WC2-era quantities of both decoys and missiles, so it really shouldn't matter. This is not WCP where you're supposed to gun down whole fleets while evading another whole fleet.
Operating Systems:
Question: What are some dangers of running Standoff on Win ME? Right now I'm using ME, and have had few problems with the exception of the Blue Screen of Death if I've got too many applications running at the same time
Answer: WinME is always dangerous… Seriously, if you can get SO to run on it, so must probably Standoff will run too. But take a friend's advice: change that damn operating system.
A Guide to Windows 2000:
This is how I managed to get Standoff working on my Windows 2000 SP4 rig. Your mileage may vary.
1. Make sure you are running SP4 with the latest version of everything (drivers and directx).
2. If you have not yet, run this command in start > run: regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
3. Create a shortcut to standoff.exe (*not* to the launcher)
4. Bring up the shortcut's properties (right-click menu) and enable Windows 95 compatibility mode (which will now be enabled from the above step)
5. Run dxdiag in start > run, go to the Sound tab, and completely disable audio hardware acceleration (slider all the way to the left)
6. Run the game *using the shortcut to standoff.exe*. Use the launcher only to bring up the options menu.
To reduce crashing even more, one may also try:
-Limiting comm traffic to Plot-Critical
-Turning off cockpit struts
As of now there are no new Ep 4 questions here, because nobody has had any.
General:
Question: When I try to use the launcher's options menu, I get a missing file error.
Answer: Download and install the VB6 runtimes form Microsoft's website here. We should have an easier solution for this in future releases (such as including these files with the installer by default).
Video:
Question: What's the difference between openGL and D3D modes?
Answer: OpenGL mode uses a new graphics library, developed by our very own Alex Barnfield. It lets us add new graphics effects to the game, and should also make it faster and offer better compatibility than D3D mode. There are some known problems with D3D mode that we can do little or nothing to fix. Therefore, it's recommended that you only use D3D mode if you have problems running the game in openGL... and by all means, report such problems so that we can improve our new recommended mode!
Question: Why is openGL mode running really slow?
Answer: It should be at least as fast as D3D mode on any video card that has openGL support. If you are using a nVidia card, look for the "Image Quality" setting in your drivers or nVidia control panel, and set it to "Performance". The "High Performance" setting is known to be much slower than the other three settings on at least some nVidia cards. If you are not using a nVidia card: please let us know what your system specs are so that we can try to find out what's going on and update the openGL renderer in the future.
Video - Direct3D:
Question: Why can't I get 32 bit mode to run?
Answer: Our 32 bit patch doesn't work with most ATI video cards, and with nVidia cards it seems to depend on the driver version (newer drivers being less likely to work). You can try this file and see if it helps: http://standoff.solsector.net/files/gl_0000x.zip (Backup the existing gl_0000x.dll from your Standoff folder, and unzip that file there). It only seems to work for some people, though. If that doesn't help, you'll just have to run the game in 16 bit color.
Question: When I try to run the game in 16 bit mode, I get the following error: "Please re-run the install program. Gl::loadDLL load failed 6, 126=The specified module could not be found"
Answer: We're still not sure what may cause this. First, try uninstalling Standoff and then reinstalling it. If that doesn't help and if you have Unknown Enemy installed, try uninstalling both Standoff and UE from your system, and then re-installing Standoff.
Question: Whenever I get a lens flare, there are crosshairs in each flare, like positioning points. Is there any way to get rid of this?
Answer: That is a texel alignment problem that the engine has with Direct3D. There is a fix for this on some (specially older) graphics cards, but it might corrupt the graphics in other games. Search your graphics card's control panel for a "texel alignment" slider or an "alternate pixel center" checkbox, and experiment with different settings for those. We're still hoping to fix this problem in the future, so that such tricks won't be needed anymore.
Question: When I enable anti-aliasing, my game starts bluring massivly - Difficult to describe: it's like ghosting, but previous pictures don't disappear. That is mainly for videos, HUD and such. Was not the case for real fight (except the HUD). When switching off AA, the prob is gone.
Answer: This is an uncommon problem whose cause is still not clear to us. Standoff must not like your video card or your drivers for some reason. However, with ansiotropic filtering set above 4x, some graphics may indeed get blurred on most systems. Mostly, it's just the stars on the background and some minor HUD blurring. This is probably due to the fact that all our textures are too low-res.
Question: My screen flickers during cutscenes.
Answer: Enable all subtitles in the Options menu.
Question: Sometimes, my target VDU goes crazy - it either displays garbled graphics, or the wrong ship type, or a hull/shield display that doesn't match the damage levels of the ship I'm targetting
Answer: This is a bug that we haven't been able to fix (since Unknown Enemy, even!). Thankfully, it's quite harmless. It only happens when new ships are spawned, and if you switch targets, then switch back to the original target, the VDU should refresh itself properly.
Question: Have there been any major problems noted for NVidia cards? ATI seems to be the people with card-specific issues, so it's worth checking.
Answer: Current drivers for NVidia cards have also lost the ability to run Standoff in 32-bit color mode, just like ATI. Older versions didn't have any significant problems with Standoff, however, besides the fact that some driver versions wouldn't let you adjust texture alignment to fix the lens flares problems.
Question: The videos seem to be playing too fast, and the sound is just unintelligible noises.
Answer: Turn off sound hardware acceleration in DXDiag (Start->Run->type "DXdiag" and press enter, then look in the sound tab). If that doesn't solve the problem, try using the anti-sound-skipping option in Standoff's launcher. If enabling that option solves your problem, you can try turning hardware sound acceleration back on to avoid problems with other games.
Input:
Question: When I activate rudder-controls, the rudder is reversed. I change it and in the next mission or sometimes in the nav-point, the ruder-control is reversed again.
Answer: We haven't touched the game's joystick input routines, so this is probably a bug in the engine itself (meaning we probably can't fix it).
Question:I get a fatal error which says DInput::fetch2 fell out of loop and it kicks me back to windows. Any ideas on how to fix it?
Answer: It's a joystick related issue. Make sure your joystick is plugged in and that windows recognizes it (you can check this in the Control Panel). If it does say that your joystick is working, but you still get this error in Standoff, let us know.
Gameplay:
Question: I just got an amazing score in the simulator, but it doesn't show on the scoreboards! What happened?
Answer: A number of things may cause this:
-You need a crius.net username to use the scoreboards. In the launcher's options menu, make sure you've checked the option to allow Standoff to upload your scores, and that you have entered your username in the text box (scores sent from usernames that don't exist are discarded).
-You need to be connected to the internet while playing. To avoid cheating, simulator scores are only sent at the end of the mission (they're never stored anywhere to be sent later), so if for some reason you have gotten disconnected while playing, your score will be lost forever.
-You can't cheat. That means you can't use the in-game invulnerability option at any time during the mission. Also, the simulator regards any alteration of Standoff's files as cheating. If you have "modded" anything in Standoff at all, your score will not be sent. The ship's computer will inform you at the start of a sim mission if it has detected a cheat or cannot verify the integrity of your files.
-There is a bug in the original release of Ep 3 that sometimes sends garbled scores to the server. This is relatively rare, but seems to happen more often with higher scores. This will be fixed by a small patch we're about to release.
Question: Some missions are taking a very long time (minutes!) to load. Is this normal?
Answer: It's normal for some missions, specially if they have a large number of objects to load (for example, asteroid belt missions). This doesn't necessarily happen only on older systems, either.
Question: Everything seems to work fine, until I am about to start a mission - then, after loading the mission, the game just crashes! What's going on?
Answer: This may happen on older video cards due to some high resolution textures we have in the game. You might be able to solve this by going into the game's options menu and disabling most of the detail options - but you might run into a mission that crashes no matter what. Your video card needs to support 512x512 resolution textures to run the whole game properly... I think nVidia's first TNT cards already had high-res texture support, but 3dfx's cards up to the Voodoo3 won't work.
Question: On some missions, my computer locks up completely or suddenly crashes at random times during a mission.
Answer: This is a rare glitch which we haven't been able to track down too well, but turning off all detail for the mission in question might help you play through it without lockups. That includes reducing the detail sliders found on Standoff's launcher options as well as turning off all settings in the in-game options menu (disabling comms, special effects, etc.) and closing programs that might be running in the background. Sometimes these lock-ups are mission-specific, so you can try turning the detail settings back on for the next mission.
Question: How do I scan ships / retrieve pods / use my jump drive? I forgot how to do it and the key isn't listed in the Controls menu!
Answer: The ship's computer tells you which key to press whenever you need to do some special action. If you've just missed these computer instructions, you can press CTRL+M to check the Message Log, the messages are saved there. Just search for a message from "Computer" telling you what to do.
WCP-mania:
Question: When i press P to adjust my power settings I can't see any graphic - is this a bug? The S key (shield settings) works ok.
Answer: Power management was removed on purpose as a design decision, to be true to the feel of earlier games (where such a thing was absent). Shield management wasn't removed because we couldn't figure out a way to remove it.
Question: TWO missile decoys? come on...
Answer: All ships have WC2-era quantities of both decoys and missiles, so it really shouldn't matter. This is not WCP where you're supposed to gun down whole fleets while evading another whole fleet.
Operating Systems:
Question: What are some dangers of running Standoff on Win ME? Right now I'm using ME, and have had few problems with the exception of the Blue Screen of Death if I've got too many applications running at the same time
Answer: WinME is always dangerous… Seriously, if you can get SO to run on it, so must probably Standoff will run too. But take a friend's advice: change that damn operating system.
A Guide to Windows 2000:
This is how I managed to get Standoff working on my Windows 2000 SP4 rig. Your mileage may vary.
1. Make sure you are running SP4 with the latest version of everything (drivers and directx).
2. If you have not yet, run this command in start > run: regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
3. Create a shortcut to standoff.exe (*not* to the launcher)
4. Bring up the shortcut's properties (right-click menu) and enable Windows 95 compatibility mode (which will now be enabled from the above step)
5. Run dxdiag in start > run, go to the Sound tab, and completely disable audio hardware acceleration (slider all the way to the left)
6. Run the game *using the shortcut to standoff.exe*. Use the launcher only to bring up the options menu.
To reduce crashing even more, one may also try:
-Limiting comm traffic to Plot-Critical
-Turning off cockpit struts