Hi all
I've been playing AH2 for a few days and really love it. But I'm having several highly annoying problems that are spoiling my enjoyment:
1. Graphical/control glitch.
Frequently when I start the game there will be a bizarre graphical glitch. On the opening menu, where it displays the clipboard, there will be a clipboard 'page' constantly rotating in the background. It rotates quite fast producing a kind of strobe effect.
When this happens, if I then go into the arena (or training), the whole screen will be rotating in a sickening lurch and is completely unplayable. Sometimes it also causes me to crash the moment I appear on the runway, and a HOST message says "Don't move your controls so fast." It makes no difference if I try moving the controls around.
Sometimes this is fixed by closing and restarting AH, but often I have to reboot to clear it. Then the game will work fine, but if I close it and reopen it the problem often reoccurs
2. Crashes.
The very first time I went into the Main Arena, the game locked up completely as soon as the Tower screen appeared.
Since then it has happend once or twice more. I've also had a lockup mid-flight.
When this happens, my PC still appears to be alive - numlock lights up if I press it, and if I Alt-Tab I see a Windows-style pointer appear. But it's impossible to get AH off my screen. I hit control-alt-delete and I'm fairly sure that Task Manager has loaded (I hear a HD whir and the mouse cursor appears), but still all I can see is AH. I've found no way out of this other than a reboot.
I've also had a crash on startup a couple of times - I load AH and it never gets beyond the opening splash screen. Fortunately in this case it was possible to Alt-Tab out and close it without rebooting.
3. Alt-Tab kills the game
It's impossible to alt-tab out of the game and return to it. I alt-tab out, but when I try and go back (either with an alt-tab or by clicking AH on the taskbar) the game just vanishes.
Ironically this happens even if I choose "Online Help" from the AH clipboard menu. I click that, go read the webpage help, then when I try to get back to the game it just closes.
My setup is as follows:
AMD dual-core X2 4800 on Asus A8N-SLI Premium Mobo with 4gb ram
NVidia 7800GT 256mb PCI-Express graphics
Logitech MX Laser mouse, CH Flight Yoke, CH Pedals, TrackIR 4 all connected to the USB hub built into my Dell 2405FPW monitor
Aureon Firewire external 7.1 soundcard (used with headphones)
Windows XP SP2 with all latest fixes
DirectX 9.0c
Latest 91.36 NVidia drivers (problems also happened with earlier 8x.xx drivers)
I run AH at 1920x1200 (same as my Windows res) but the graphical glitch also occurs at 1600x1200. Background processes include Bitdefender antivirus, RealVNC, Quicktime, SnagIt Clipboard. I also have ffdshow for DVD upsampling but I don't think this is being activated by AH (it did cause a problem with Falcon 4)
Any help much appreciated. I currently have to reboot my PC pretty much every time I want to load AH in order to clear one or other of the major problems. I have numerous other games installed (FS2004, Lock On, IL2 Stumovich, Falcon 4 Allied Force, XPlane, Age of Empires 3 and many more) which all work faultlessly every time.
