mono: how do I shoot?

[Zem]

playing mono:

mouse and keyboard is selected in the menu.

As far as I understand, my ship should fire / stop firing when I press the left mouse button, depending on whether I have autofire on or off.

I cannot see any shots comming from my ship, and the only way to destroy the blobs is to ram them.
Neither the left mouse button, nor any other buton or key has any effect on this.

Any idea why?

[donny]

try reinstalling, had that to after messing with the options

[fog]

Hi Zem and welcome.

Can't say I have any idea what could be causing that in both autofire on and off modes, as even if it was misreading the mouse button information somehow, at least one of those modes should result in firing.

try reinstalling, had that to after messing with the options

Hmm.  Maybe you could try that but TBH I can't even see how messing with the options could cause that.  Oh well, give it a go. 

[Zem]

I unziped it into another directory, but without change.
The first version was from the cd that was included with the c't magacine, but this time I downloaded it from the website

I tried playing around with the options afterwards, I noticed that changing the background to black does change the color of the ship, but not the background

I tried out echoes too: There is something that looks like exhaust comming from my ship, but no shots.
Which does not matter much, since there are no enemies to be found either.

The instructions are not particulary helpful in that case

I have directX 9.0c on windows 2003. I thried compatibility modus without change.

[donny]

then it's your hardware...

or: lol what is windows 2003?

[las6]

or: lol what is windows 2003?

a pretty good server version of Windows.

My first guess would've been that the ship does indeed fire, just that you can't see the shots. But if you're experiencing enemy-spawning issues in echoes it must be something bigger than that.

I noticed that changing the background to black does change the color of the ship, but not the background

that's another problem right there. When in the menu, is the background being colored over time or does it stay white?

Also, what is the graphics card / chipset in that computer of yours?

[donny]

i meant it could just be windows 2003
i bet thegamecreators didn't care for that one...

[Lyx]

I run win2003 and both games work fine here (however, thats with having installed all kinds of patches, service packs and various tweaks). It seems strange that you seem to describe that the shots aren't just invisible, but instead not there at all.

[Zem]

I am pretty sure there are no invisible shots. I circled a green blob slowly several times with pressed and raised left mouse button without effect.

When I click on the entry "black" in the menu, all menu entries become white with a black rounded bar behind them.
The ships changes from a dark circle with a black bar, to a white circle with a black outline and an outlined bar.

The overall background remains white the whole time, in the menu and in the game.

When I hover over a meny entry, it is highligthed in grey, that is the only change.


I use a nvidia geforce 6600 graphics card - so far I have not noticed any particular problems with it.

p.s.
While testing just now I managed to crash the game with the message
"runtime error 302 - sprite does not exist at line 7435"
but I think that was caused by accidentally switching to windows, so it is not neccesarily related to the problem.

[fog]

Well based on that extra info I kind of know what the problem is but I honestly don't know how to fix it or what on your PC could be causing it.

Both bullet and enemy creation in Echoes use the PC's timer to trigger events and that obviously isn't happening for some reason.  Maybe it's something to do with Windows 2003 or something unique to your PC. (The enemy trigger in mono has nothing to do with the timer so I would expect those to appear)

As it is the timer is used for pretty much everything else in the game too, so even if the objects did appear it would no doubt be totally unplayable anyway.

Sorry. I know nothing about Windows 2003 but it sounds like it's an issue I have no control over.

p.s.
While testing just now I managed to crash the game with the message
"runtime error 302 - sprite does not exist at line 7435"
but I think that was caused by accidentally switching to windows, so it is not neccesarily related to the problem.

Yeah that's just Windows losing focus and deleting all the media. Not my fault this time

[las6]

Do you by any chance have one of the first few dualcore systems? Cos that *could*, in theory, explain some timer issues. Easy fix would be to force the game to use only one core (from task manager), but since you can't alt-tab out of the game... I'm not sure how to do it.

[Zem]

No dual core, I have an athlon 64 3200+ single core, running 32 bit windows.
and (I think) an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe 939 mainboard with integrated soundcard.
I run rightmark CPU clock to throttle my cpu, but closing that did not change anything.

Sorry. I know nothing about Windows 2003 but it sounds like it's an issue I have no control over.

No problem, thanks anyway. If anyone has another idea I'll try that, otherwise maybe some other time.

[las6]

I've had the same motherboard, and I think the cpu as well and I think I was running binaryzoo games fine off of those... So I doubt it's the hardware then. hmm...

[donny]

drivers? service packs? paches?

[fog]

drivers? service packs? paches?

It could be anything really and without the exact same hardware, OS, drivers and updates it's not something I can investigate or test possible solutions for.

@Zem
could you run the attachment and see what happens?  If it's working properly then you should see two timers counting in seconds starting at zero.  Then we can confirm whether it's the PC's timer that's somehow causing problems.

Thanks.