Installed ETO – Lots of ‘stutters’ Ideas?

[Six O'Clock Shadow]

Hey all –

Due to the recent MP popularity of ETO,
and the feeling I’m missing out on many games by flying only stock CFS3,

I installed ETO a couple of days ago.

At first, it would not even fly – always crashed to desktop when ‘fly’ button was clicked.

Resolved this by deleting the entire CFS3 folder from Application Data and letting it rebuild.

Now, ETO flys, but it ‘stutters’ a lot. Like flying very high latency, even when off-line.

I do not have this problem with stock CFS3.

I fly 1024x768, thousands of colors, all image sliders at 5. Flies about 30 fps.

My machine is an emachines 6524, 2.2GHz Althon 64, 1 gig ram, 200 gig HD.

Anything I can/should tweak to make ETO fly smoothly? If not, I’ll have to stick to stock CFS3.

Thanks in advance for any/all ideas!

-=6=-

[noelberrier]

For my install of CFS3 and clones, I had to set clouds to level 1 and special effects to level 2, other at 5. Also I do not use shell casing effects or fog effects. I have 2 Go RAM, other carac less than yours.

The add-on objects may be at a higher modelling standard than stock, so you may consider to go level 4. I had to do this for MAW only.

Hope it helps.

[Pat Pattle]

Do you have the update installed as well? There was a fix in that to reduce the size of one of the main textures which will help.

http://www.aussiex.org/index/download.php?list.13

If you find Johnos original scenery release there's a low res version of all the textures too.

Pat :)

[grizzly50]

:kilroy:Six O'Clock Shadow, try this: Look into the ETO main game folder for a folder named "CFS3 ETO Expansion READMEs". Look for this *.rtf file: "CFS3 ETO EXPANSION FAQ.rtf". Open it and go to entry number 16. Follow these instructions and it should all improve noticeably.:d

[O-1Driver]

Quote
At first, it would not even fly – always crashed to desktop when ‘fly’ button was clicked.

Resolved this by deleting the entire CFS3 folder from Application Data and letting it rebuild.

Now, ETO flys, but it ‘stutters’ a lot. Like flying very high latency, even when off-line.
.................................................. ................................................

Did you tell the installer to create a new apps file for ETO, if you miss that manual step it will load ETO into your existing CFS 3 apps folder and cause many problems.

O-1

[Axenti]

Do you have the update installed as well? There was a fix in that to reduce the size of one of the main textures which will help.

http://www.aussiex.org/index/download.php?list.13

If you find Johnos original scenery release there's a low res version of all the textures too.

Pat :)

How do i know if i installed the newest? because i have alsow the problem of this latenancy.

[Six O'Clock Shadow]

Thanks for the ideas, grizzly and O-1!

O-1: I *DID* neglect that step with the initial install, then found myself wondering how the stock CFS3 and ETO would keep everything straight with only one data folder! I intially assumed that if I just clicked "yes" on all the default install options, it would work out best! ;)

I re-installed last night and gave ETO its own data folder.

And yes, I flew quick combat in Era 1, then exited and installed the 1.02 update as well.

However, I have done the low-res terrain switch recommended by grizzly, along with every other tweak recommended here for cfs3 in the "resources" section ... the only thing I have not tested yet is larger swap file. I increased the swap file size, but didn't reboot the computer last night so it could take effect.

That said, all the other config tweaks, setting all sliders to 1, and even manually unzipping all scenery and putting into folders named after the zip zarchives, had no effect.

ETO still stutters horribly on my machine, where CFS3 stock flies great.

I rebooted the machine this morning so the swap file size will take effect (I doubled the initial and maximum sizes), and will try that tonight to see if it's the "magic bullet" to get a smooth flying install of ETO.

Otherwise I'll see everyone in stock CFS3 multiplayer! ;)

-=6=-

P.S. I get the feeling, still, that it's the scenery / terrain that's causing the problem. Is it possible to swap the stock CFS3 terrain into ETO (just replacing the files of the same name in Terrains and Terrains2)? Then I could keep all the ETO planes and ability to fly ETO MP.

[rbp71854]

For ETO 1 Gig of Ram is below the min. Sliders set at 5 is too high, try 4 Have you defragged your hdd lately? Increasing the virtual memory should help. You didn't mention a vid card, are you using onboard vid which also may be a limitation.

[Axenti]

:kilroy:Six O'Clock Shadow, try this: Look into the ETO main game folder for a folder named "CFS3 ETO Expansion READMEs". Look for this *.rtf file: "CFS3 ETO EXPANSION FAQ.rtf". Open it and go to entry number 16. Follow these instructions and it should all improve noticeably.:d

16. I get alot of stutter and low FPS.. What can I do? In the assets/highres dds folder there is a dds file called scenerysheet01.dds. Rename it to highres_scenerysheet01.dds. There is also a dds file called lowres_scenerysheet01.dds, change that to scenerysheet01.dds. You should see an improvement. You can also switch the aircraft textures from high resolultion to low resolution.
You can also turn down your sliders in the cfs3config file.

will this alsow work on the origenal CFS 3 game and the CFS 3 Firepower instal that i have?

[Pat Pattle]

for those still having problems try fsautostart...

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/FSAutoStart.shtml

it will help!

One other thing is to reduce the scenery textures by half (ETO/assets/highres dds) ie. save them as 1024x1024 from the 2048x2048 that they are now.

Paint Shop Pro and paint.net http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
both have .dds plugins to enable you to do this. It's very easy :).