Intro video changes to slideshow after install

[[Mad]]

Hi everyone!

Well, Tyr's sound problem made me curious to try out TFTD again. I prefer EU, but I though, well, give it a try again...

The problem: As long as I start Terrorcd.bat within the unmodified original CD directory, I get a wonderful intro video - wothout sound, of course. As soon as I try to have sound, either by installing and setuping the game (and yes, I tried to just copy the anims directory to the installed game), or by copying just the sound folder into the CD folder all I get when start TFTD is a slide show with subtitles.

I remember having this problem back in the days on my DOS PC, but I never thought about it anymore. But now it really makes me curifurious...

 

Anyone a good idea?

Edited March 25, 2006 by Mad

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

Argh all these wierdo freakish problems!!

First of all, are you installing the game from another folder, or a CD?

After you get the slideshow with the subtitles, when you get into the actual game and play, do you get in-game sound, or does the game act like you don't have any sound setup at all?

[[Mad]]

Argh all these wierdo freakish problems!!

First of all, are you installing the game from another folder, or a CD?

After you get the slideshow with the subtitles, when you get into the actual game and play, do you get in-game sound, or does the game act like you don't have any sound setup at all?

I installed from a Folder, if I get a slideshow, I do have sound. If I get the video, I don't have sound.

 

Edit: I'm a curious man, so I installed from CD now. And guess what? I don't even get the slideshow now. Only black screen...

Edited March 25, 2006 by Mad

[Guest Tyr]

Hmm... are you running this with dosbox or on real hardware?

 

Its been a long time since I installed it on my 486, so I cant entirely remember what I did (add to the fact that I started off with a hd install, and only later on decided to copy the contents of the cd over to it (dos-rar and about 40 floppy disks ) and set it up as a fake cdrom (the case only has 1 3.5" bay and thats got a pair of internal speakers installed in it).

 

My suggestion would be this: Set up your dos (real or emulated) environment to have a cd-rom (real or emulated), and a working sound card (real or emulated), then insert the tftd cd (real or emulated) in the drive, and install it in the normal way. It should then set itself up properly, I hope, and when you run it (my machine just calls terror.exe as the last line in autoexec, not using the supplied batch files at all, seems to work nicely tho I dont remember why I did it that way), you should get the intro movie and sound and be happy. In theory.

 

Good luck.

[Guest Tyr]

Gah! what is it with this forum and its dodgy smilies?! I cant even write without it transforming it into some hideous blob beating the ground *cries*.

[[Mad]]

My suggestion would be this: Set up your dos (real or emulated) environment to have a cd-rom (real or emulated), and a working sound card (real or emulated), then insert the tftd cd (real or emulated) in the drive, and install it in the normal way. It should then set itself up properly, I hope, and when you run it (my machine just calls terror.exe as the last line in autoexec, not using the supplied batch files at all, seems to work nicely tho I dont remember why I did it that way), you should get the intro movie and sound and be happy. In theory.

Thanks tyr! But I already tried this (with dosbox) Oh, and yes, I do remember the 40 floppies TFTD had... Those were the times...

 

(You can uncheck the "Enable emoticons" checkbox, then you will be able to write L O L . But You'll get used to the smileys. Actually they're not that bad, are they? )

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

Troll advice:

Delete your folder, copy CD contents, re-install the game, see what that does.

Also, again, when you get slideshow/animation, do you have in game sound?

[[Mad]]

Troll advice:

Delete your folder, copy CD contents, re-install the game, see what that does.

Also, again, when you get slideshow/animation, do you have in game sound?

I think both I have answered before. I tried reinstalling the whole thing. Several times. In several ways. And yes, I do have sound. That includes in-game sound.

[Guest Tyr]

Random thought. You've probably already done this, but have you tried running cdspeed.exe? If the game thinks you only have a single speed cdrom, it wont show the video. If you run cdspeed from the install folder it should test the speed of your emulated cdrom, work out that it's faster than anything even the designers had ever dreamed of, and write a file which say's that its more than fast enough to stream the video from.

 

Oh and yes, the smilies are that bad, they're a plague on mankind (not just the ones here, but all of them in general) and their kind should be wiped from the earth. But thats just me hehe. I do think that ones which take normal bits of text like and transform them into random animations are particularly annoying, since they distort what the poster meant to say. If I put a traditional text-based smilie in, like then its not the end of the world if it gets turned into a little acid face, as long as the expression is clearly understandable (most of them arn't however), but ones which grab random bits of text, like the number (8) being turned into ( and a face with glasses on is most annoying.

[[Mad]]

Random thought. You've probably already done this, but have you tried running cdspeed.exe? If the game thinks you only have a single speed cdrom, it wont show the video. If you run cdspeed from the install folder it should test the speed of your emulated cdrom, work out that it's faster than anything even the designers had ever dreamed of, and write a file which say's that its more than fast enough to stream the video from.

Well, you earned yourself the title of a genius...

The game runs CDSPEED when it's installed, so I never thought about running it manually, but somehow, it must've not written the file properly (or it was overwritten, see below). I ran it manually AFTER configuring the sound (I think, if you configure the Sound, the whole "sound" directory gets overwritten, and that's exactly the directory where the game stores the cdspped result.) and voilá, after all these years, I could watch the intro video

Man, now I'm in deep trouble... I'll have to play the whole game again, just to see the finishing sequence...

Oh and yes, the smilies are that bad, they're a plague on mankind (not just the ones here, but all of them in general) and their kind should be wiped from the earth. But thats just me hehe. I do think that ones which take normal bits of text like and transform them into random animations are particularly annoying, since they distort what the poster meant to say. If I put a traditional text-based smilie in, like then its not the end of the world if it gets turned into a little acid face, as long as the expression is clearly understandable (most of them arn't however), but ones which grab random bits of text, like the number (8) being turned into ( and a face with glasses on is most annoying.

You mean like

Weel, I can understand how you feel. It was the same for me in the beginning. but somehow, I got used to the smileys around here. I think especially the "normal" smileys, like and my all time favourite are particular good ones.

Edited March 27, 2006 by Mad

[[NKF]]

Aha, the hard disk installation of TFTD uses the slideshow while the stupid partial cd installation leaves the movies on the cd. They didn't have much space back in the old days, so it's understandable.

 

I was able to work out how you can switch back and forth between the slideshow and the intro/outtro/losing cinematics (without having to use the cdspeed program), but I lack the time to write a proper explanation. I'll do so after I get back from work. It involved simply copying the movies over into your hard-disk installation and performing few minor tweaks.

 

- NKF

Edited March 28, 2006 by NKF

[Guest Tyr]

Well, you earned yourself the title of a genius...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hehe, can I get that in writing? Perhaps as a custom title under my avatar when I get a registered account?

 

Man, now I'm in deep trouble... I'll have to play the whole game again, just to see the finishing sequence...    What a shame...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Grr! One day I will actually see that video. One day I'll manage to actually get to t'leth, that in itself would be an achievement. So far I've never even managed to destroy a synonium site, and have only just learnt how to effectively deal with colonies.

My two main problems are lobstermen (which I hope to have more luck with in this game by using sonic weapons as opposed to gauss) and mc, which I'm still not too sure how best to handle. It really pisses me off the way you cant tell what your guys stats are for a whole month after they begin training, makes the whole process of getting a decent mc equipped squad (or even a squad who dont all turn round and shoot each others backs) really slow and time consuming.

Ah well, once I get registered I'll be able to hop over to the tips and strategy forum and perhaps learn a thing or two. Thats what I love about this game tho, its so f*cking difficult that there's always something more to be learnt, some new way to narrowly avoid being totally wiped out.

[[NKF]]

Right ho, just fired up one of my old PCs and had a look at what I've done. For some reason the full explanation has completely eluded me (i.e. I've forgotten the details)! Argh. Will have to rely on my fuzzy memory.

 

But If anyone would like to help me walk through the steps with a fresh hard-disk installation (sans the intro), I'd very much appreciate it.

 

Step 1 - do the hard-disk install.

 

Step 2 - Copy the anims folder over into the hard disk install

 

Step 3 - If you run the game by way of terror.com, then you will probably be fine. If you run the game through terrorcd.bat, or any other *.bat file, the first thing you should do is open terrorcd.bat with a text editor like MS-Edit or notepad. If you see a line that looks like "terror d:" with d: being your CD-Rom drive letter, remove it and save. This will essentially run terror.com. If you've later installed XComutil, you needn't worry about this entire step.

 

If you're still getting the slideshow, rename flop_int to flop_in to hide it from the game.

 

If you ran cd-speed, you may have noticed a file call cd.rom created. This file does nothing and can be safely removed. All cd-speed really does is change the disk volume that terrorcd.bat points to so that the game can locate the proper game files that weren't copied over when it can't find it in the current directory (Hmm, I wonder if this could be used in mods? Never mind).

 

Now, if things are working, to switch from the cinematic version to the slideshow, rename the anims folder to something else and make sure that the flop_int directory is actually spelled flop_int. To switch them back on again, restore the name of your anims folder. If you want to switch off both the intro and slideshow, rename flop_int and the anims directories to something else.

 

As I said, the finer details have escaped me, so let me know if it's not working and we'll walk through it until it's fixed.

 

---

 

As for Lobstermen - you really do need sonic weapons to fight them with any reasonable amount of success. I mean, compare the heavy gauss against the sonic pistol stat for stat. Except for the price and the accuracy of aimed shots, the sonic pistol is better.

 

Their other achilles heels include drills in close quarter combat (any of them), M. C. (being the only main alien race with NO M. C. in all their ranks helps) and Stun. They simply fall over when struck with thermal shok bombs. A magna blast will kill it off instantly once it's down.

 

- NKF

[Guest Guest_Tyr_*]

But If anyone would like to help me walk through the steps with a fresh hard-disk installation (sans the intro), I'd very much appreciate it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Ah, I see what your doing there, I hadnt thought it'd be that simple, and didn't especially want to play about with my copy incase I broke it too hehe.

 

As for Lobstermen - you really do need sonic weapons to fight them with any reasonable amount of success. I mean, compare the heavy gauss against the sonic pistol stat for stat. Except for the price and the accuracy of aimed shots, the sonic pistol is better.

 

Their other achilles heels include drills in close quarter combat (any of them), M. C. (being the only main alien race with NO M. C. in all their ranks helps) and Stun. They simply fall over when struck with thermal shok bombs. A magna blast will kill it off instantly once it's down.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Indeed. I already knew about drills, and stun, but when you've got a large expanse of sea bed between you and them you cant really get close enough without being splatted, and shock launchers are a pain, all that reloading and the extra bulk and hassle of them. I only recently got hold of the OSG (in mint condition, for free, I love my friends), and my current game is I believe the first one since I got it. The realisation about quite how crappy gauss is came as quite a shock. I had thought them to be pretty useful weapons, and dismissed sonic because until then I had needed auto-fire in order to hit anything. This game however I've been rather lucky in that a lot of my guys have 50+ shooting accuracy when I hire them, and I've been making do with sonic pistols so far (only researching the larger sonics so I can get the oscilator), and even managed to kill one lobster with it (went down into a collony, lobsterman and two tentaclauts waiting in the doorway to the lift room: three sonic pistol shots killed the lobsterman, but the tentaclaut bagged one of my guys (shooting up a level is sooo inaccurate)).

 

Anyway, I'm in danger of taking another topic wildly off topic now, so I'll say that I'm vaguely hopeful about this time round, and despite some hideous losses I've now got mag ion (or at least, I will when I capture some more zrbite) and if I'm careful I might actually manage to get a squad trained in mc to a reasonable skill (got everything I need, just need to research a bit more, tho it'll be 2 more months until I can even get an mc lab built, plus another month before I can see my guys stats).