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Rogue Squadron "far away camera" problem

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First post, by maximus

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I keep running into an annoying problem with Star Wars: Rogue Squadron... perhaps someone here knows of a solution?

The problem is described in detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKHn8PLEJBs

Basically, the ship will move farther and farther away from the camera until the game is unplayable. As the video shows, you can sometimes trick the camera into behaving, but the problem always comes back eventually.

Contrary to what the guy in the video says, this problem has nothing to do with Windows versions. I'm currently seeing it in Windows 98SE with a Pentium III 1400S and Voodoo 3 3000. I've seen it on several other systems as well. The only way to avoid it entirely is to play in cockpit mode, but that affects weapon accuracy and makes the game a lot less fun.

I think what this game needs is a frame rate limiter ala GTA 3. This camera bug isn't the only timing bug in the game; there's also one that I call the "jittery tie bug" where tie fighters will appear to bounce around wildly while still moving at the correct velocity. Seems like the game's threads get out of sync when the frame rate gets too high. However, aside from vsync (which doesn't help), there doesn't seem to be any way to limit FPS in the game.

Any ideas?

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Reply 1 of 10, by maximus

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This is interesting: both timing problems go away when I enable temporal AA on my Radeon X850 XT PE. Anybody know how this filter works and why it might have that effect?

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Reply 2 of 10, by Mau1wurf1977

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Tried on a slower machine?

Wiki tells me it is a 1998 game. That means Pentium MMX, Voodoo 1...

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Reply 4 of 10, by Dominus

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Probably the AA slows down enough 😉

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Reply 5 of 10, by maximus

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That was my first thought, but the game appears to be pegged at 85 FPS no matter what I do. That's with the X850, of course. On the Riva 128, it just scrapes along at 30-ish FPS, and that doesn't stop the camera from going bonkers 😒

A very strange problem indeed. I guess that's what we get with N64 ports.

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Reply 6 of 10, by VirtuaIceMan

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Old bump time: one of the keys (Z perhaps on my keyboard) drops the camera, meaning your ship flies away. The top-left key (left of number 1) with ¬` on it swaps back between the in-cockpit views. Maybe the drop camera is somehow triggering?

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Reply 8 of 10, by SpeedySPCFan

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MrEWhite wrote:

For modern systems, you could try using dgVoodoo 2 or use NVIDIA Inspector to cap the FPS.

I've tried capping the FPS, it worked for a few minutes before promptly returning to a broken state.

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Reply 9 of 10, by MrEWhite

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SpeedySPCFan wrote:
MrEWhite wrote:

For modern systems, you could try using dgVoodoo 2 or use NVIDIA Inspector to cap the FPS.

I've tried capping the FPS, it worked for a few minutes before promptly returning to a broken state.

Try capping it to a lower interval until it works.

Reply 10 of 10, by maximus

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Testing on a fast Windows 98 SE system with a GeForce4 MX420 (ForceWare 45.23), I found that enabling V-Sync, either in Rogue Squadron or through RivaTuner, is enough to fix the camera bug. This was definitely not the case with the Voodoo3 system referenced in my original post.

I think the fact that Rogue Squadron enables V-Sync by default is telling. Unreal Gold does this as well, and both games suffer from timing issues with V-Sync disabled. Enabling V-Sync was probably a stopgap measure that hid the timing bugs during development, which led to the underlying problems never being solved. In Rogue Squadron's case, the game must depend on graphics hardware or drivers to implement V-Sync in a particular way. Sometimes the fix works, sometimes it doesn't.

Wish we had access to the game's source code. This would probably be an easy fix.

PCGames9505

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