I read in the article that you had problems installing under Vista and 7. We had considerable problems with another game and found out a few things.

It may help to install and play the game in admin mode. Even better to install the game in a folder other than Program Files. I don't remember the default install path for Longbow 2, but if it's C:\Program Files\Longbow, try it in C:\Games\Longbow instead. I don't know if this is general knowledge already, but it certainly gave us problems.

One of the problems was that Vista and 7 didn't like programs writing to the Program Files folder. This included any data written by the game. We were finding the game's files in one of the user folders. Installing in a different folder solved all the problems.

Let me know if any of this helps. I'm still on XP so I can't test it myself.

Hook

No, unfortunately nothing like that.

Elf

Another solution is a Windows XP dual boot on a separate partition (I don't trust the MS Boot manager, esp if it tries to install multiple OSs on the same partition). I dual boot Vista x64, along with XP x86, using Boot It NG. It is the slickest boot program I have ever used. I do my day-to-day stuff in Vista (along with FSX and anything that can chew up gigabytes of RAM), and switch to XP for JF-15, LB2, EF2000, and other legacy software.

This has already been discussed and considered, but all my problems are with installing to a 'C:\Games\...' folder. Thanks anyhow!

Nice read, thanks.



'Me too' reply--

I keep telling myself I'm gonna sell my old Win98 legacy system, an old P3-600 256MB Ram with 10gb HD and voodoo card. It's hooked up with a crt and kb/mouse/speaks.

Every time I'm going thru the 'cleanup' phase, I play a few rounds of LB2, enjoy the sounds and gameplay, and then put it away until the next time. Got an old MS Sidewinder Gameport stick on it.

If I ever do get rid of it, I'm gonna ebay it as a 'Longbow 2 Legacy System.' It just works great. Nothing else installed on it.

Many hours of flight time with this sim...

Thanks again.

Oh, and that last screenie is sweet!

Hey Scott,

Since this thread has been well and truly hijacked anyway, I thought I would ask you a question that has been on my mind for some time regarding you evil AI programmers and your foul deeds in oppressing the poor human pilots.





In just about EVERY SIM, in my usual ham-fisted and myopic way, I spend most dogfights sliding and stalling around the sky depleting all my cannon ammo on hopeless spray and pray snapshots. THEN magically when my cannon is empty I manage to saddle up in perfect position within point blank range of my supposedly stupid silicon opponent. My question is..do you and your diabolical ilk specifically program the AI to know when the Human is out of ammo so they can taunt us with the perfect shot knowing we cannot take it????? Perhaps I need to master the ego-less Zen state, of "it doesn't matter" in order to achieve the relaxation necessary to make the right moves (or resort to Infinite Ammo cheats) I am pretty sure it is the evil programmers, though..

LOL, hijacked and now the shock paddles have been used to bring it back to life. :-D

How did YOU find out about our mischievous scheme?

Excluding your Zen state, which I wouldn't rule out completely, I think there might be two factors in my code that I can remember.

At first I was thinking that it might be the AIs getting low on fuel. I know they behave differently in certain situations when they start getting low on fuel. I can't remember for sure though if I set up any of those in the combat code. I remember I definitely thought about it but I also had concerns that it would get triggered too often and they'd appear to have Artificial Stupidity. If I did this would have been related to afterburner usage and higher energy maneuvers which might require it.

Thinking about it more though you may have fought long enough for it to trigger my "bug out" code. I can't remember if it's tied to fuel state, time or both but eventually the AIs will try to disengage and head for home. I had read enough stuff that talked about not overstaying your welcome in a dogfight that it seemed like an appropriate and fair thing to do. This isn't to say that they're suddenly going to ignore the fight and just fly away but if they see an opening to break off and extend then they will. Of course if the other guy has missiles left, particularly longer range ones, then things could be... "bad" but in general it seemed to work well enough in testing. This would have been a fairly lengthy engagement though.

I'm pretty sure the AIs have no idea what the ammo state is of any enemy their fighting. Since you might have a chance to see missiles on the wings I could see allowing that but I don't remember ever finding out that was a factor and since you're usually seeing the top of the other plane that would make spotting the weapons a lot harder. Bullets would have been right out since you could never tell.

Elf

Thanks for the reply. Just to be clear, while it happens with your code too, (F/A-18, e.g.) the most recent case was in a sim you had no contribution to..though I don't discount the possibility of a Cylon hive mind at work.

I signed up as a user specifically so I could post my feedback from the last few days playing around - no-one seems to have mentioned this route to getting LB2 working.

Virtualbox.

I'm running WinXP in a VirtualBox virtual machine, and have:
- no crashes so far (apart from the helo)
- normal play speed, as far as I can see
- D3D (DGVoodoo is not working)
- no problems with RAM - you can specify exactly how much RAM you want the virtual machine to see
- the ability to run on modern hardware and modern OSs (I've run LB2 happily now on OSX Snow Leopard, Linux and WinXP host machines)

Some tips:
- turn off Mouse Integration
- set the host desktop res to 640x480 to get LB2 fullscreen
- don't use DGvoodoo
- use the PUEL binary version of VB, not the OSE edition, because OSE doesn't include USB sharing support - no joysticks.
- se WinXP compat mode for LB2.exe, set to Win95 compat.
- configure the guest to have:
--- 1 CPU only
--- <300Mb RAM (192MB is default for XP guests)
--- enable 3D acceleration

www.virtualbox.org

Good luck, and I hope this works for you as well as it does for me.