X2 The Threat, fps drop when voice plays (W10)

[Scoob]

Hmm, a further thought that it might not be audio at all. Is the lag whenever anything causes speech, or just when you have the cartoon character little dynamic face windows open for comms? It might be more a graphical issue to do with displaying those dynamic mini-windows if the latter case.

I was actually thinking the same thing, though I did check the regular Monitors (F5) and having something displayed there gives no issues at all. It's *only* that little comms window / audio that causes quite major stutter for a fraction of a second - enough to knock you off course when dogfighting, when the game catches up.

Game experience is otherwise perfectly smooth - I've limited it to 60fps - so these anomalies are very obvious during a fight. I really don't know what else to try at this time. I installed from the original EUR/AUS CD's I have, then applied the appropriate updates. I don't know if there are any other updates available at all that might help. As mentioned, trying Windows XP SP3 Compatibility mode - an older suggestion for those with Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.n - just causes the Launcher to partially lock-up and the game won't launch.

[Alan Phipps]

I did some further forum searches about X2/X3 comms window problems and the bad news is that in the threads I found talking about similar issues and with links to tools or articles that helped posters to fix them, the links are expired and dead.

There was some talk about reinstalling Windows Media Player and other even more radical reinstallations, but that may seem problematic for a small gain.

[Scoob]

Thanks for looking anyway.

I had been playing a little Farham's Legacy (X3) a little while back, and experienced zero issues similar to this. I suspect X2 is simply too old and the fixes are outdated. I'm not sure what else I can do at this point.

[Scoob]

I had some time to play around with this again. I thought I'd try to get the *EXACT* driver version you have, either though a slightly newer one (.2342) is available. I did initially try that newer driver, but the installer refused to update from the much older (2017!) driver the "latest" files directly from Realtek applied. I've now installed those exact same drivers - exact version match - an it's basically broken things even worse. Windows Device manager now says "High defininition audio devices" rather than "Realtek". It's also added the dreaded Sonic Studio crap back in...gonna purge everything!

Driver version 6.0.9088.1 appears to be the only version that will install, newer versions it just exits the installer saying my current drivers (said older ones) are the best. Weird.

Edit: btw, I did see your comment on trying a different audio device - such as the one on my monitor - as a control test. Not done that yet as, I didn't see your edit until later, but I will try it. It's tricky to rock the boat on a machine that's perfectly fine for everything else, indeed, I've caused myself a headache just trying to update the drivers...had total audio fail after the last attempt - not just silent, an actual error when trying to play any sound - that was fixed by just "turning it off then back on again" in terms of uninstalling and re-installed the exact same set of drivers.

[Scoob]

Thought I'd post an update. I've not solved the issue, but I have some additional observations that suggest it's *not* the sound, but the video that pops up - as speculated earlier in the thread.

To test this, I asked my ship to attack a Pirate Ship that I'd already stripped the weapons off using the Ion Distruptor. I then set in the ship menu, while my ship autonomously attacked The Pirate Ship - still using Ion Disruptors. It didn't take long to get the usual dialogue from the target, but this time of course *just* the audio - the video wasn't displayed as I was in the ship scree. I did not notice any judder, the spinning ship animation remained smooth while the dialogue played.

So, it does indeed appear to be the videos that are the culprit, but I don't know what I can do about that. My DX is all up to date and I cannot apply anything older of course - such as that which came on the CD - as windows block the process. If there's any way I can get this annoying fps drop when a video plays to go away, I'm open to it. I understand I can delete the mov files in the game's folder, but that will prevent other things working too.

Does anyone understand the video codecs used by X2 to play these videos?

[Skeeter]

https://www.videoconverterfactory.com/t ... codec.html

Tho i think u can also find out the codec info on vlc player.

Then u should be able to find it tho i think it was mmpeg 2 or something tho it could be quicktime which ull need to find a really old version maybe to install like qt 3 and it might fix it who knows (find out the version of the time the game came out) tho might not even install these days. Tho could be wrong, pm cbj maybe to find the right codec tho tbh windows should these days have all needed codecs.

U could try setting the game/mon to 60hz since its a old game, and use vsync. Dunno if that would help but maybe worth a go.

A dirty fix is to disable the videos by renaming the mov files, the videos wont play but the audio should, but half the fun is seeing those characters imo but up to u.

Here is quicktime 6.x info and dl which is 2002-3 ish, might be helpful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#QuickTime_6.x http://www.oldversion.com/windows/quicktime-6-3-0

edit removed klite stuff from post, just incase makes it worse.

[Alan Phipps]

Klite codec pack is often very bad news with older X games. It doesn't just install the codec(s) you want; it installs all of their pack including some known to have older X game issues. It will keep reinstalling them if you manually delete any for as long as klite is still installed.

[Skeeter]

Hmm i only brought klite up cos thought i saw u saying it was one way maybe to fix it, personally id avoid using such a pack. was more of a last ditch effort. I also wouldnt really personally have anything to do with quicktime stuff either but i think that the mov files are using codecs from it.

Anyhow spend most of the evening trying to find help for this issue and posted some stuff for OP. Hope it helps.

Maybe ego one day can do a little bit of touching up for the game with the source code and update a few things like fix mouse control, fix the mov files etc so its more compatible with modern hardware and os.

[Alan Phipps]

Thanks Skeeter, but that bit about klite sounds about-face to what I would have said. Anyway, the real advice on codecs as provided in Sticky threads is copied at post 2 of this thread.