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A quick note for those with collision issues:

Firstly, changing cycles does almost nothing to fix collision. You need to slow the game right the way down to the 486 era and that means a stupidly low number of cycles. Emulating older CPUs can be done in DOSbox 0.74 and later, so make sure that's the version you have, then go into the dosboxShatteredSteel.conf file and make the changes to the following:

Change the line that reads "core=dynamic" to "core=normal."
Under core=normal add a new line that reads "cputype=486_slow"

To extrapolate, your [cpu] options should look similar to the code below, assuming you had a default config file to begin with:

[cpu]
# core -- CPU Core used in emulation: normal,simple,dynamic,auto.
# auto switches from normal to dynamic if appropriate.
# cycles -- Amount of instructions DOSBox tries to emulate each millisecond.
# Setting this value too high results in sound dropouts and lags.
# You can also let DOSBox guess the correct value by setting it to max.
# The default setting (auto) switches to max if appropriate.
# cycleup -- Amount of cycles to increase/decrease with keycombo.
# cycledown Setting it lower than 100 will be a percentage.

core=normal
cputype=486_slow
cycles=auto
cycleup=1000
cycledown=1000

Cycles shouldn't really matter because the emulated CPU should be trapped to the performance of a slow Intel 486.

Afterwards, go into Launch Graphic Mode Setup and under basic settings change the "Graphic mode" option to read "Overlay". This was an earlier fix I tried that did less than I would have liked but it's late and for now the game is running fairly smooth on an i5 750 @ 2.66ghz. I'm suggesting you make the change as well so that we both try the same thing on different systems, which should benchmark how effective the fix actually is...

These are the settings I changed so if you good folks would like to try them and post your results in the forums, please feel free, ideally on this thread so we can get some idea of how effective the changes are, but for me collision detection has been very solid since the tweaks and I would experiment more but it's 1am here and I have an early start.

So tired...
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XandreUK: *snip*
I think you may have fixed the collision issues with this game, these settings seem to significantly reduce the collision issues. I did see a very few missiles I fired not hit enemies, but those may have been legitimate misses rather than the collision detection failing, not sure as i'm not that familiar with this game.

My PC specs are as follows:

CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K
GPU: Nvidia GTX 670 (2 GB VRAM)
RAM: 8 GB (2 X 4 GB)
OS: Windows 7 64 bit Professional
Oh excellent! It's great to know my tinkering fixed something for once. Usually it's a case of fix one thing, break three others...
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XandreUK: Oh excellent! It's great to know my tinkering fixed something for once. Usually it's a case of fix one thing, break three others...
Like I said, i'm not familiar with the game enough, but collision does seem better if not eliminated entirely on my end compared to the default settings.

You may want to try and get others here to test it (maybe post a link to this thread in the General Discussion forums?) and then request a sticky for this topic if all goes well.

And thanks for figuring this out, I had avoided playing this game because I heard about the collision issues, but now I can play Bioware's very first game thanks to you.
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XandreUK: Oh excellent! It's great to know my tinkering fixed something for once. Usually it's a case of fix one thing, break three others...
Your tinkering helped me out as well - some types of enemies were basically invulnerable before I found this thread! Thanks for posting this.
Post edited April 11, 2015 by discojustice
Yeah, I don't think I'll link this in the general discussion hayden. The general discussion thread shouldn't really be used for this kind of thing and any Shattered Steel players needing a fix would probably be looking here to begin with. I will, however, be posting a link to this topic in the reviews section for now, which should get a significant amount of players to make the fix.

Although a sticky does sound like a good idea, especially if it's for a fix that resolves a game-breaking issue.

And as for those who have tried the fix, did taking the graphics options off of overlay make any noticeable differences? It's been a while since I played this game (GTA Online. Love it and hate it so much...)
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XandreUK: Yeah, I don't think I'll link this in the general discussion hayden. The general discussion thread shouldn't really be used for this kind of thing and any Shattered Steel players needing a fix would probably be looking here to begin with. I will, however, be posting a link to this topic in the reviews section for now, which should get a significant amount of players to make the fix.

Although a sticky does sound like a good idea, especially if it's for a fix that resolves a game-breaking issue.

And as for those who have tried the fix, did taking the graphics options off of overlay make any noticeable differences? It's been a while since I played this game (GTA Online. Love it and hate it so much...)
Well, this poster seemed to notice a difference when trying something other than overlay: https://www.gog.com/forum/shattered_steel/collision_detection_tweekfix

Me personally, I tried both overlay and opengl and I didn't notice much of a difference if at all, so I would say change output= at one's discretion.
Post edited July 31, 2015 by haydenaurion
I tried this fix, and the collision is now much better. The problem is that my frame rate has also taken a major nosedive. Anything I can do about that?

Edit: Also, the conf file now looks completely different and is pretty much unreadable.
Post edited April 19, 2018 by Praetorian815
Thanks! it worked flawlessly, thanks a lot man, you are a lifesaver