Odd Flashing and Crash

Happens to me aswell. But i tend to ignore it... Unless the game Crashes, then i freak out.

happens to me also, on my laptop, which is also more powerful than my desktop. on the laptop i am running windows 7 64 bit. on the desktop am running windows 7 32 bit.
don't really know if there is any connection.

however, my solution was/is to land somewhere, then come out of the game and reboot the laptop and then reconnect. i have no such problems with the desktop.

try it and see if it temporarily resolves the situation. i woulld be interested in hearing about your results.

cheers

Ray OK

If I recall, Freelancer has always had problems working with laptop onboard graphics cards, especially if your video card settings have Vsync enabled by default. Try turning off your vsync in the video card settings.

Interesting point about Vsync, I never though it can bring such problems.

What I generally saw between games and laptops, is that the "Intel Mobile" integrated graphic cards are not compatible with opengl, has some fails at some directx games, and some more... no matter it had 8 GB ram. Is this the case ?

Well I figured since I had a similar problem on a laptop while playing TES Skyrim, with vsync turned on the game would blink and flash alot, then crash, but with it off, it worked fine with no crashes. I cant say the same will happen with CF but figured it was worth looking into.

Also if you installed CF with the advanced shaders active, mobile graphics cards hate that and tend to freak out. So maybe disabling that(Not sure if you can disable without reinstall or not) might help.

Only see that in my Soul Forge Train when turning. No Crash To Desktop btw.
W7 64bit and GTX 580

About laptops, the only piece having cooling on default laptops (with intel mobile cards or other onboard card laptops) is the CPU, the rest is up to burn itself... so the reason it only starts failing once in a while/after a while since starting to play the game, is that it starts to heat up, and in those cases it tends to lose bits and data before arriving at the safe limit of self shutdown due to overheat, or being in danger to burn (if there's some laptop with no self shutdown when overheated), so a crash is actually a good thing in this case.
It being intel just brings more issues to the list.

About the Train part at SilverFox, dunno, it's not supposed to be more... special than other ships. Try with capital ships too, maybe size (mass, more polys and load, etc) could be the reason.

Does it still gives crashes or random color flashes/shapes ?

With everything on minimum, including activating compatibility mode for Graphic Cards of 128Mb or less, no adv shaders and such, it should give no problems.

Yeah that deffinately looks like a video card incompatibality issue. So you might have to reinstall and set everything to their loweest options, and turn on compatability mode.

Also it might not help much in the grand scheme of things, but if you can find updated drivers for your video card, that might also help.

well this thread has certainly been educational.

i am going to give scorpions solution a try for my laptop, and hopefully that will resolve my issues also.

cheers all

Ray OK

Mine is very different. I have like a flash copy of ship (or parts) to the right or left for about 1/10 a sec.
I will also try then -dx parameter and report back. Does anyone know what the -dx parameter does ??

It forces DirectX, enabling Widescreen. Also, my flashings went away on laptop, just copy/pasted my solution xD

lol so you needed others to remind you your own solution ?

Anyway, widescreen and directx are supposed to be Enabled by default... I don't know how would other games work properly in another way.