Will pay $$$$ to play Fighting Steel

[cj95]

Im so annoyed that none of the various computers I have laying around here can run this game.


ARRRRGH!

Im considering getting a new 'old' system just for this purpose.....expensive yes, but what other choice doyou have if you want 3d wwII combat?


What bare bones do I need to runthis will people suggest.

I already know XP and a video card NOT made by NVIDIA.

What else?

(Unless there issomebody out ther ewilling to sell an old system that they already know runs FS)


Geez I sound like a crack addict here. LOL.

[Scott Chisholm]

Amigo,

I know it will run on an XP (Home)/NVIDIA system as that was my last system, so don't dispair!

Eeek! I just realized I don't have it loaded on my current system.... Where's my pipe?! :eek:

[AlmightyTallest]

Hey guys, I found a discussion forum moderated by some of the people working on NVidia drivers, there's a thread I posted on in regards to Fighting Steel, if you guys are having problems, maybe you can post there and they might get the issue resolved if it's a driver issue.

I found that Fighting Steel plays fine with my BFG8800UltraOC if I use 163.75 drivers, but the sky textures are corrupted. The Sky textures are fixed in 177.79, but now the game crashes once you get into a battle.

Link to NVidia forum thread is here: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=74535

[cj95]

Ok....here's the rundown of my failures......



VISTA system....Will run Fighting Steel Great....except all the ships are invisible. This mocks me.



XP system.....crashes to desktop every time I even think about running Fighting Steel. Fatal Exception Error...blah blah blah


98 system.....Runs Fighting steel great.....Ships look great.....Guns work great......spotlights work great.......

Crashes to desktop every timeI try to make a turn. This really really mocks me.



95 system.....cannibalized for parts.....unable to test.




This tells me that the Fighting Steel Gods are not only mocking me.....but I need to clear out my room of old computer systems.


I guess I just have to wait for Jutland from Storm Eagle.......



Anybody want to laugh at my troubles?

[Saffron]

98 system.....Runs Fighting steel great.....Ships look great.....Guns work great......spotlights work great.......

Crashes to desktop every timeI try to make a turn. This really really mocks me.

Are you using the turn arrows to make a turn? This was an issue awhile ago and was subsequently fixed in one of the NWS patches.

[PDF]

ctdahlquist,
Your problems are odd : I have FSP running great on a former W98/ATI system, which became an XP/ATI then a XP/Nvidia (6600) system. I'd check my driver version, but it's rather recent.
The only problem I have is that movies must be disabled, else the game freezes at start. With this setting off (in the INI file) it runs in fullscreen (a bit blocky) and windowed mode (a bit too small window) :rolleyes:

[Glossza]

hi pdf

when you get a chance please post driver version for xp/nvidia, along with what is working and not

the last couple of months we have seen a lot of problems with Nvidia drivers, there is a lot of them around.

I may start a new post that shows what drivers work with what systems ( xp / Vista ), and what drivers give problems.

Haven't seen problems from other video cards yet

lets solve this

John

[PDF]

Hello, Here's what says my graphics properties tab, hope it helps ;)

http://pascal.difolco.free.fr/drivers.jpg

[AlmightyTallest]

For Windows XP, I have tried the following drivers over the past two weeks for my BFG Ultra OC 8800 card.

94.24- Won't Install because it doesn't recognize card
93.71-Won't install because of card, even with modified .inf file it looks for nv4_.sys and nvcuda.dll
97.02- Same as above
97.44- Same as above
97.73- See above all 9x.xx drivers won't install normally with the 8800 card


163.75- game will sometimes play though a scenario, though I can't find out what setting allow it to do so consistently. Sky textures are corruppted, and if you drag your mouse cursor over the sky textures it leaves long trails of your cursor in the sky.

177.79- Same as 177.83- See below

177.83- Crash after firing Torpedoes- Reinstalled game on C: Drive instead of D: drive patched game to NWP ran same scenario and now get the familiar graphics lock up minutes into a battle.

[AlmightyTallest]

Tried a few more drivers, each time I restarted the computer and selected the same single battle "Cape Esperance" to try it out.

97.95-Not Compatable Error
101.09-Not Compatable Error
158.27- Video corruption in Sky textures- got an Application Error in mid game that said Memory could not be read then a Blue Screen with nv4_disp.dll error
169.21- Sky texture corruption and game eventually locks up as it does in later drivers
177.40- graphics good no corrupted graphics- a complete and total freeze of the game a few seconds after firing torpedoes from 3 destroyers.

177.83- tried using a desktop resolution of 800x600 and setting refresh rate to 60Hz. Still same eventual sluggishness and lock up a few minutes into the battle.

[AlmightyTallest]

Tried a complete Windows Update, installed all the latest patches, rebooted and tried to play Fighting Steel. Game had the same crash, though I noticed it seems to bog down and crash right after a torpedo hits, either mine or the enemy's.

Giving up for now :(, can't think of anything else to do.

[PDF]

I've checked my drivers, they're 93.71 from May 2007. Didn't have to update them since, they work with everything I have ...Matrix games don't demand much, the latest "most graphics demanding" games I have are Civ4+expansions, HoMM5+exp, Theater of War, and Fantasy Wars !
CMSF demo did run also, but I didn't buy it - lack of interest, bleh.
So I did as it says, "'if it ain't broke, don't fix it" ! :D

[AlmightyTallest]

I'm really hoping that I could somehow install the 93.71 drivers on my 8800, I'm betting PDF that you don't have an 8000 series NVidia card?

I just wish I could play this game without crashes, I really enjoy the battles... Right up to the point where they crash :( And from what others have posted I'm not alone with this problem, I just hope there is some solution.

[PDF]

No 8xxx for me, I've a GF6600. Enough for my needs ...and avoiding many problems it seems, with that "new" but uncompatible drivers.

[AlmightyTallest]

lol, I know what you mean, but you should really see Silent Hunter 4, and Company of Heroes with the card I have ;)

Getting this card to go retro is going to be the challenge. :D

[AlmightyTallest]

Tested the following today:

169.21-same crash after a few minutes of play
177.66-see above
177.41-people claim it's stable, but it said it was incompatible with my hardware.

[jtechjdv]

I did not see, when describing your system and software, that you listed either the version of Fighting Steel, or The version of DirectX on your system (although for the individual using Windows Vista, we can be pretty sure that it's DX 10.x)

These issues, particularly the ones about crashing when you initiate a turn, sound like DirectX issues that we encountered back when Microsoft updated it from dx8 to dx9.

Run dxdiag (in XP, start> run, then type in "dxdiag" and click "OK.") On the first tab, the version of direct x will be displayed In the "system information" box (it's the last item on the list.) If the version is greater than, or equal to, DirectX 9.0, you MUST run one of the last 2 versions of the Fighting Steel project (Like the one you can download here.) It will ALWAYS crash on turns in the game as purchased at the store, or earlier versions of Fighting Steel Project.

Check the system requirements in these forums to be sure the rest of the system meets the standards, and you could be up and running in no time. The alternative would be to download an earlier version of DirectX from Microsoft.com, but who knows what that would do to your other software.

[Glossza]

Check out the preferences in the game.

You mentioned that one of your drivers worked, but the sky textures became corrupt

You can turn off sky textures in the game , see if that works

[AlmightyTallest]

Hi guys,

Well, running dxdiag gives me the following version:

Direct X 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

It passes all of the tests I tried. I have been using version 10.43 of the FSP to play. I also had tried version 9.5 of FSP but for me all versions are crashing in the same manner.

I also never crash while making turns in the game. But after the shooting starts for a few minutes, eventually all graphics will flash and leave trails and lock up, execpt the sound which continues to play out the battle.

My system seems to meet all of the other specifications for playing.

I have also tried turning off the sky textures with v163.75 drivers and others, but the crash still happens. Also tried turning off all game textures and changing NVidia control panel configs to various settings to accomodate older games to no avail.

The 163.75 drivers will sometimes allow me to play through a game, though it too sometimes crashes on me the same way described above, including a new one, a BSOD on game exit that gives me a STOP: nv4_disp.dll error that forces me to reboot. Version 177 drivers fix the sky textures and the game looks good, but still crashes the same way.

I have also tried running the game .exe in windows 95, 98, compatibility modes as well as without any compatibility modes only to have the same crash. I have updated my audio drivers, updated to Windows XP service pack 3 (From SP2) with the same results. I am almost certain this is just an issue with My video card being an 8800 series coupled with drivers that won't support this older game.

One other option I am trying is I recently purchased an origional Fighting Steel game which is version 1.0 The version of FS I recieved from NWS came already patched to v1.1 and it didn't have any option to just install v1.0. The 10.43 FSP install recommends v1.0 to patch to 10.43 so I really hope it's just a simple problem like that, though I feel it's a video card driver issue.

[PDF]

CORRECTION to my previous posts : in fact my drivers are newer than I thought, a Nvidia scan just told me it is indeed 163.71, not 93.71 as i wrote ( I've confused the installed current drivers with old ones still on the HD ...).

[Glossza]

Hi PDF

I have a 7100 GS card with driver 93.71 - works fine with FS

I updated to 163.71, game works no problem, but when I exit FS, computer reboots with a fatal error - I rolled back my driver to 93.71. Do you get the same problem?

I was hoping this driver would because I've tried all the others and has many problems with them, not only on FS but other programs.

There has to be a reason the game is crashing the computer on exit

John

[PDF]

Hmmm, this reminds me of a crash I had once, when I quitted "abruptly" FS recently (w/o going back to the main screen).
Maybe the 163.71 drivers are the culprits indeed.
I'll check with a TAS game - but last I tried was a Graf Spee hunt that yielded nada, so I had no FS battles ! :eek:

[AlmightyTallest]

Hey guys, I recently got an origional v1.0 version of Fighting steel and installed it with the FSP 10.43 patch, and I'm still getting the same game crash. I installed the game on my grandfathers Dell and it works flawlessly though. The problem has to be related to video drivers for the 8xxx series NVidia cards.

I'm out of ideas fellas, and desparate to play this fine sim. Can anyone tell me how to make my BFG 8800 Ultra OC accept the 93.71 video drivers for Windows XP? Because by default, my card simply says that the 93.71 drivers are incompatable with my card.

[AlmightyTallest]

Just tried NVidia 177.92 beta drivers for Windows XP 32bit, same random freeze up problem as before... :(

[Antonin]

I really says something for the potential of this game that some of us have tried over and over and over to get it to run without freezing or crashing. FS crashed continually on my old Win 98 machine. It crashes or freezes on my latest machine, a 3 year old Win XP system. Even though I have installed FSP and disabled movies.

I appreciate all the hard work that went into FSP, but the problem is obviously the fact that FS *itself* is deeply flawed.

For those of us who like naval combat games, this is very frustrating. There are about 125,482 shooters out there. Serious naval combat sims aimed at history lovers, however, are hard to come by.

If somebody came out with a "gold" version of FS that does not crash after just a few minutes of play, I would gladly pay full market price for it.

[Warship NWS]

Just some notes,

I have an AMD 3Ghz dual CPU, SB Fatality, ATI 3650, XP SP3 system.. I can run FS/FSP v10.43 with no problem, I do turn the videos off however as Indeo technology is obsolete but you can find codex drivers to run the videos. Now, with FS being nearly 10 years old now DirectX and Windows have been updated many times over so I cannot say that FS/FSP will work on every system. Unfortunately, 3D graphical environment engines are the fastest to be rendered obsolete in the rapidly progressing PC gaming market, that is the nature of the beast. We ran into 2 choices.. try to overhaul the engine code for FS or move to a far more advanced combat engine with our upcoming Navies at War design - the choice was obvious.

Yes.. there are buckets of shooters out there and their typical life span is usually no more then 2-5 years at best. After that, they are replaced by updated 3D game engines. The competition in that arena never sits still - a lot more money is involved with the productions and sales.

At NWS we no longer officially support FS/FSP due to our focus on NAW/WCDB/SAS, however, I will try to put aside some time to post a FAQ/Tech support section on these forums to help gamers that are still trying to play Fighting Steel.

Thanks.

[Warship NWS]

FS/FSP FAQ posted here;

http://forums.navalwarfare.org/showthread.php?t=494

[Warship NWS]

Naval combat 3D style.. here at NWS.. we may have something of interest coming soon. ;)

[Warship NWS]

WCDB v2.0+ 3D news,

http://forums.navalwarfare.org/showthread.php?t=143

[cj95]

If somebody came out with a "gold" version of FS that does not crash after just a few minutes of play, I would gladly pay full market price for it.


LOL...That was the whole point when I chose the title of this section. I have no naval games to play that work other than Sub Command and SIlent Hunter, but I want surface combat!!!!!!.

I'd gladly pay $100.00 or more for a decent 3d surface combat game!

[Warship NWS]

LOL...That was the whole point when I chose the title of this section. I have no naval games to play that work other than Sub Command and SIlent Hunter, but I want surface combat!!!!!!.

I'd gladly pay $100.00 or more for a decent 3d surface combat game!

Well.. with WCDB V2.0 going towards a 3D environment.. it will only cost you $29.99 for 400+ ship classes..;)

[cj95]

Dont think Im not watching that eagerly my friend.

I didnt meant to come of desperate but I really am.

My two fav sims...Fighting Steel, and Fleet Command I am both unable to run working versions for various reasons....Ive tried all the fixes listed, and have just resigned myself to the fact that it aint in the stars for me. :(

However eager awaiting WCDB 2.0 and Navies at War both.

(Also Storm Eagles 'Jutland' ...but I suppose I cant mention that here.);)

[Warship NWS]

NAW will not be 3D.. only WCDB is aiming in the 3D direction right now.

Fleet Command, that latest release of it, is available on our online store and does run with newer systems.. the older "Jane's" version is now problematic however. The updated version has a better D3D engine in it.

[Warship NWS]

Quick note, I do have plans for upscaling the division handling in WCDB to allow for battles such as Jutland. ;)

[AlmightyTallest]

Please let me know if WCDB will become a real time 3d simulation instead of turn based strategy. I'm very interested in this new title as well :D Until Then, I'm playing Fighting Steel on an old Dell with an on the mother board video card. I had to get my fix for surface naval combat! :D

[Warship NWS]

Please let me know if WCDB will become a real time 3d simulation instead of turn based strategy. I'm very interested in this new title as well :D Until Then, I'm playing Fighting Steel on an old Dell with an on the mother board video card. I had to get my fix for surface naval combat! :D

WCDB will always remain a turn based naval wargame, however, I am looking at possible features that will offer faster battle management if the player prefers a more continuous flow of combat.

[JMS]

What's the point of NAW if WCDB is capable of handling all?

[Warship NWS]

What's the point of NAW if WCDB is capable of handling all?

It is ironic that you ask that.. we have had a few discussions about merging the two projects as I already have plans for upgrading WCDB to higher levels of combat resolution anyways and we never planned on NAW going 3D. All of the work we have done with NAW in many ways could be used for WCDB through future upgrades to the engine. The whole 3D idea came about as I was messing around with the coding engine I am using for WCDB and there were features that I have been considering that are easier to implement in 3D then in 2D. The new 3D textures for sky and sea that I just finished testing are superior to the ones I used in 2D for example, and definitely better then the textures used in FS as a comparison. Another interesting benefit is that the 3D engine code is faster and more efficient then the 2D code for doing a lot of graphical work. In the end, it was a logical choice to move in this direction plus I can now look at multiple screen resolutions as a future possibility via auto-scaling.. something that could not happen without a lot of work in 2D.

So the big question we have discussed recently.. continue both WCDB and NAW.. or merge the projects? Tough question at this point with the future potential of the WCDB engine.

Thanks.

[Saffron]

Any chance of a screen shot of some of the models? I'm very excited about WCDB going 3D since I'm a very visual person ... I do much better when I see what's going on rather than reading what's going on (in the form of range bands and raw numbers).

I still liked WCDB quite a bit even without the 3D environment, but with it, all I can say is wow.

[Warship NWS]

Any chance of a screen shot of some of the models? I'm very excited about WCDB going 3D since I'm a very visual person ... I do much better when I see what's going on rather than reading what's going on (in the form of range bands and raw numbers).

I still liked WCDB quite a bit even without the 3D environment, but with it, all I can say is wow.

I already plan on it.. I'm trying out different variations of the battle and ship graphics right now to see which will work best. ;)

[Antonin]

Any chance of a screen shot of some of the models? I'm very excited about WCDB going 3D since I'm a very visual person ... I do much better when I see what's going on rather than reading what's going on (in the form of range bands and raw numbers).

I still liked WCDB quite a bit even without the 3D environment, but with it, all I can say is wow.

With my luck, I won't be able to run that either.

I have a 3 year old Win XP machine with 512 MB of RAM. My graphics card is...I think a 256 MB Nvidia GeForce 5500.

It's ironic that *some* older games like Age of Sail run just fine on my PC.

[Warship NWS]

With my luck, I won't be able to run that either.

I have a 3 year old Win XP machine with 512 MB of RAM. My graphics card is...I think a 256 MB Nvidia GeForce 5500.

It's ironic that *some* older games like Age of Sail run just fine on my PC.

I doubt you will have any problem. The 3D environment in the engine I am using is very efficient and not a PC system hog, especially the way I am working with it. ;)