Quick Questions

[TJD]

A couple of quick ones:

--Can the game be windowed like FoG?
--Can I turn off music while retaining sound?
--I have an excellent system but the game is a bit sluggish. I've turned off shadows. Any other tweaks I should know to improve performance?

Thanks!

tim

[junk2drive]

When you start the game there is the setting of your screen size and checkboxes. One of them is Full Screen. Uncheck it. It won't be truly windowed but you can alt tab to see your other apps.

Once in game press esc key and you can adjust music and sound or turn them off with the sliders.

Turning off sound may help performance too.

[pipfromslitherine]

If you have a very high end system but the mouse is laggy, it could be that your video card has the 'buffer frames' or something similar set too high in the vendor specific video card control panel.

Cheers

Pip

[khill9702]

I run Battlefield Academy on an Alienware M17x gaming laptop, and I have come running to tech support a few times because of opponent replays in MP being sluggish, I dunno if this will help you but I have found that when you run BA, run it at the best video resolution of 1920x1200 32bpp and DO NOt check Full Screen. Game will still run full screen for me, but replays wont be sluggish. I dont know why that works, it just does lol

[khill9702]

Didnt realize junk2drive beat me too it with the unchecking full screen thing, that i hope fixes the sluggishness for you, your question reminded me of my issues. Hope it was the fix you needed for sluggishness!

[pipfromslitherine]

That's exactly the behaviour you would expect to see when drivers are buffering too many frames. There is usually a toggle to turn it off/down, but it can be buried in their custom control panel.

Cheers

Pip

[khill9702]

Pip, ian and junk2drive, this isnt technically a Battlefield Academy issue I am having, but you are kind enough to give advice anyway. My Alienware m17x gaming laptop has been overheating. If I play Battlefield Academy or any other game that kicks up the heat, my computer will shut off. A few months back I had the overheating issue occur and someone suggested that I update my BIOS, and that worked like a charm! As soon as I did that i think my fans started functioning properly. I had a few good months and now its giving me the same issues. I asked someone at the wargamer.com website what it could be, and I gave him my specs(below) and right away he told me that I have dual graphics drives but somehow something screwed with their settings and disabled Crossfire. Im thinking that my fans on my graphic cards are now malfunctioning or something. I went to open ATI Catalyst Control Center to get things back to normal and the Catalyst Control Center wont open. I click it under the the advanced tab in my display settings and nothing. I typed the problem in, of CCC not opening and found a ton of other people complaining about the same thing. I went to look on some forums for possible fixes, but most of them involved editing things in the registry and I dont feel comfortable doing that. Have you ever heard of this problem before? Any advice you could give would be appreciated, because I have been playing Battlefield Academy in spurts so I dont have it overheat again and shut down. Also, I have ruled out dirty clogged vents, i keep on top of that, and even have it on a cooling pad. If any of you can help thanks, even if its pointing me in the right direction about my issues with the graphics cards. Thanks

Operating System
MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 720QM @ 1.60GHz 41 °C
Clarksfield 45nm Technology
RAM
4.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 664MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
Alienware (CPU 1)
Graphics
Generic PnP Monitor @ 1920x1200
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 (Dell)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 (Dell)
CrossFire Disabled
Hard Drives
488GB TOSHIBA TOSHIBA MK5056GSY (SATA) 43 °C
Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GA31N
Audio
IDT High Definition Audio CODEC

[pipfromslitherine]

Laptops are notorious for having driver foibles - my guess is that the vanilla video driver install is just slightly incompatible. If it's any concillation I have the same issues with almost anything 3D (e.g. WoW) on various laptops - with cooling pads etc too!

The next update does actually have a small tweak I made to limit the framerate the game will attempt to maintain - and that might help somewhat with the cooling, as it will not be working the video card quite so hard.

Sorry I can't be of more specific help.

Cheers

Pip

[khill9702]

I appreciate, like I said, aint your job. I have had dell techs here to replace my motherboard, another time for my hard drive, and now my graphic cards are giving me issues. Ill figure it out, but if I cant even get ATIs CCC to open to adjust anything with my cards, something is up. For the amount of money I dumped on this thing its been a love hate relationship, mostly hate! And I dont ask much, Battlefield Academy MP and internet lol I am going to look into buffer rates, that might help me if I can figure out how to get my cards to run best. Thanks again.