It's possible the game is configured for mouse flight control. Once you're in space, hit ALT+O and click on Joystick Flight Control. Let us know if it helps!

...and a simple config change was all it needed.

I'm working! I'm flying!

I'm getting shot at! ... Must do something about that. If you'll excuse me...

Thanks to mbrito for suggesting the all-too-easy settings change (which I really should have figured out on my own) and to Silver83 for pointing me in the right direction. Apparently I have a habit of making things too complicated.

Now - off to trade! (once i'm NOT being shot at.)

I'm willing to give you guys my babies.

In fact, you should thank mbrito for making the patch ! :)

Thanx a lot for the patch. It really did work on my XP-machine, while the older Win95 patch didn't.
And the speed-adjustment is great.
Only the videos are a bit jumpy, but that might be a problem of my older computer...

But, since you did a great job with removing the black bars from the videos... is there a easy way to get them back to "original", with bars, if I wanted to? (and keeping the patch?)

I'm looking foreward to further updates!
Best,
Topper

Thanks for the feedback!

The current version of the patch doesn't give you the option to toggle the video interlacing back on, but there should be an option for that on the next release. The patch is currently work in progress :-)

I'll see if i can reproduce the video "jumpiness" issue on one of my slower machines sometime during the weekend. Could you post the specs of your older computer, please? In any case, i'm digging into the EXE and looking for ways to tweak the patch a bit, in order to make it more lightweight, so the issue you describe should hopefully improve as things evolve.

Thanks!

The "no-cd" hack used by the patch basically works as virtual cd changer: whenever the game determines that it needs a new CD, the "change cd" screen pops up briefly and the patch informs the game that the correct CD has been placed on the drive. So, the game continues with the correct "CD" and the missions occur exactly as they did originally, no worries.

Other attempts at working around the CD change logic, for example by hacking the CD references on the movie list file, had indeed problems, and messed up the triggering of the various side missions... but those problems are avoided by our approach.

How did you get around the issue that some missions would only appear if you were already running from specifix cd? This goes back to the cd version were you have to intentionally load from different CDs to find the other missions.

Assuming knowing this fact you go hunt down those missions after the game switches to another cd. But what happens if you use up all the regular points in te game that switch the cd and want to then go look for missions that are held on another cd?

The game logic around mission selection remains unchanged: some missions are still only available at certain points on the story, which are determined by what CD you have in the drive.

This used to be problematic in the earlier days because, when you copied all the CDs to the hard drive, you ended up overwriting CD.DAT, so the game was "stuck" with whatever CD number was in that file (usually CD1, because the game wouldn't start otherwise).

A few older hacks tried to work around this (ex. by editing the movie files) but that ended up messing up the mission triggers, since the game still held on to whatever CD number was defined on CD.DAT.

The no-cd hack in our patch fixes this situation: whatever CD number is defined on CD.DAT does not really matter anymore. If a different CD is needed, the no-cd patch changes the CD number internally according to whatever CD the game is expecting to find. For example, if the game reaches a point where it expects CD2 to be in the drive, it requests that a new CD is placed in the drive (you should see the "insert cd" screen briefly), and the no-cd patch basically tells the game "ok, CD2 is now in the drive", letting the game continue normally.

Since the CD number the game gets is updated at different points of the story, all the missions are triggered as originally intended.

In order to understand this more clearly. When you talk about missions being on specific disks. Are these counting the 100 or so missions you can pull off the mission computer throughout the game (that are mainly for making money, and give 'emails' for universe background fluff)?

Or is this only refer to the main missions, and the side missions that have movies tied to them (obviously movies would definitely have to be fit across several disks)?

Or are those 100 text-based missions always on every disk, so accessible at 'anytime' (or randomly or when random events are triggered?).

As such the only issue which is cleared up by the patch is related to the movie and side events? With as you explained, the proper trigger will always be accessible, and in the right order now!

Also how and when do the side missions trigger (how do you know you have one to do)? Do you receive an emails or such after the game switches to the proper disks? Do you get contacted, or do you have to go hunt down and find the NPCs on planets?

Are there points of no return for some missions? If you fail to go out to do them, and then end up following the main mission line and switching cds?

Seems to work great!
I still had the problem of my mouse making troubles and it looks solved now!

Setting compatability to win95 is a must! Without it i only got a steady ~15 fps i think

Thanks again!

Knetterkak: glad to know it's working fine!

Baggins: Well I was referring to the FMV missions in particular, both the main missions and side missions... but it doesn't really matter, since the no-cd patch is not specific to them :-) The no-cd hack fixes one thing and one thing only: handling the transition between CDs automatically, so that any logic the game has that depends on a given CD being on the drive remains unchanged.

The rest is the usual, unchanged, game logic. Some missions are offered to you on the booth (the text missions you mention), some arrive to you via e-mail when you're in space, etc. Some tend to appear randomly while others tend to appear when you're at certain stages of the plot. This behavior is not altered in any way.

All that the no-cd patch guarantees is that whatever logic the game has in place is not affected by having all files in the hard drive instead of in individual CDs. This means that mission triggers and behavior will work just as well with the GOG release as it did with the older CD-based releases, when you had to physically take one CD out and put a new one in.

This might happen, yes. Some missions may only be accessible when, for example, CD2 is in the drive, so if you reach a point in the plot where the game switched to CD3, it will not be triggered. But, again, this is normal game behavior. If you want to revisit optional missions that tend to appear at earlier parts of the plot, just load an earlier save game and go back to an earlier point (the CD will change back again automatically if necessary).

Wow! Will be looking foreward to that. This initial patch looks great though, I thought I was going to have to look at the game through blinds forever. Thanks to your patch I can play this game thanks!

Works nicely. Awesome. Thanks !
On a side note, is it possible to run this in Windowed Mode ?
I'd like to be able to browse the internet at the same time for Trade Routes or where to go next ;P