Strange flickering? Vista?

[Ascended Mermaid]

It seems to happen in rooms with high polygon counts (well, everywhere actually...) and lots of NPCs increase the frequency. The screen will 'flicker', momentarily only showing what I presume to be the primary polygon set for the map -- I could be wrong about that. I don't know what to do, I tried changing the compatibility settings to XP/etc., tried messing with the graphical settings (to a lesser extent), tried changing the refresh rate -- big fat zippo on all counts. Does anyone have any ideas?

[tancients]

I umm, obtained an iso of the game while waiting for it to go on sale, to test and see if I can help any.

The iso seemed to have an issue, as after install, it would mention a misisng file shortly after the falcom logo, so I was unable to test the unpatched (1.0.0.0) version of YsF. Patching it to 2.3 resulted in the same, but the english patch somehow bypassed this error and got the game up and running.

I've tested it on:
Vista 64 bit
8800GTS 512
Q6600

After getting stuck in the town and lost, I finally managed to make it to the mines. In the open shaft area, I got all the enemies to clump together on screen, but had no flickering of any sort. The only sub-option I ran it with was to run as admin so it could write to the config.ini freely. I did max out the settings in the config (Just chose the very high preset).

Did you also try updating video card driver? It sounds like it might be a framerate issue.

Also, specs, and maybe a screenshot if YsF does this sort of thing, and I can try and see what information I can dig up.

[Ascended Mermaid]

I'll attempt to get a screenshot sooner or later, as well as specs. I wonder if Vista has anything like a dxdiag?

// Maybe I'll get a trial version of Fraps for the laptop as well. The library can do at least that much for me.

[tancients]

Vista also has a dxdiag, as it runs directx as well. However I'm unsure as to how to get a log dump, but it should be the same as in XP, as these games aren't supporting DX10 from what I can tell.

[Ascended Mermaid]

Ah, the one day I forget to bring my pendrive. Ah well. I am running DX10, and Hardware Vertex Shading something isn't available. I tried recording the flicker via fraps, but it strangely stops flickering whenever I hit record or printscreen. It seems highly prominent during dialogue boxes especially, such as while speaking with Gardner. I've watched the flicker closely (but it's only there for a short time, so getting a screencap would be practically impossible without some kind of superpowers) and noticed that the castle walls disappear, as well as the water, trees, grass; anything that's not 'ground'. I will investigate further and return with whatever I have available.

[tancients]

Do you know the hardware you run it on? I can search and see if there is any specific video card or whatever issues. I remember seeing a falcom site listing different brands of laptops that seemed to have issues with one of the games, for instance.

Direct X 10 is just the version installed, games can still run in DirectX 8, 9, 4 or whatever they actually support. It is like a backwards compatible console for all direct X versions.

You could try 3dmark's vertex shader test to see if the flickering happens there too, however it is a large download, but is the only easy findable tester that I know of.

It could be related to the issue with the vertex shader, as it is possible, but looking at the data files, I would think if the castle walls flicker the ground should too. Updated drivers for your video card? There also might be some now-unused dll file for directX that YsF uses that normal DirectX installs don't have. Try running the directx setup from the YsF cd in case this is one of those times.

Some of this might be redundant, as I should have gone to sleep a couple hours ago, so I might clean this up later after a good rest. haha