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Falcon 4 Plus
by Bob "Groucho" Marks
Pick your ‘Pit
Even before Falcon was sent packing by its creators to the Great Bargain Bin In The Sky, Viper drivers of an artistic bent made cockpit enhancements available. Most of the early attempts were simply attempts at cleaning up the cockpit artwork, as prior to MicroProse patch v1.07 only the default 800 x 600 cockpit was available.
There are, however, several very nice window offices to choose from, all in 1024 x 768 resolution (although lower res pits are offered in some cases). All well and cool, but having a choice of offices raises some questions. Do precious frames-per-second need to be sacrificed at the altar of Enhanced SA? What features are offered? Which ‘pit is best? Does it come with a cup holder?
In an effort to answer these pressing inquiries, I ran a
controlled (as much as possible, anyway) test using the panels in question. All screenshots, with the included FPS counter, were taken at the same point above the FLOT at between 3500’ to 4000’ during the same BAI mission in the Iron Fortress campaign. Flying a Tactical Engagement can yield frame rates twice what I have here- but I think I’m pretty typical in spending most of my Falcon time in Campaigns. All other settings are as above.
One other thing to keep in mind is that no one has figured out how to modify the 3-d cockpit view- yet. Therefore, the new ‘pits in question are all of the 3-d variety, where most pilots F4 spend their time anyway. Now, the 2-d cockpit has long been singled out as a frame rate hog- comparing your FPS between your 2-d cockpits and outside views confirm that quickly.
A gentleman named Brett Sommers has just introduced an F4Patch-compatible program to help that situation, at least for TNT & GeForce / GeForce2 users running (obviously) D3D. Called F4Turbo, this little gem of a patch increases the frame rate, in my case anyway, 20-30%. Really. How does that happen? This from the F4Turbo v2 Read Me file:F4Turbo acts as a proxy layer between Falcon's DirectX 6.0 calls and the DirectX 7.0 runtime.
The performance increase is attained by intercepting calls to IDirectDraw::CreateSurface() and forcing images used to draw the cockpit into video memory. Out of the box, Falcon uses much slower system memory for cockpit texture storage. Previously, every single frame required that all cockpit textures (200KB-400KB worth) be blitted across the bus from system memory to the video card. This patch causes these textures to be loaded directly into video memory, very significantly speeding up screen redraws.
Whatever. But it actually works. F4Turbo is based on eRazor’s F4DX, a patch that for me all but eliminated CTDs while running F4. Unfortunately, the present version is only compatible with the Benhur/Skypat v2.10 and Xis’s Beta 6a 1024 x 768 cockpits. However, Bret says that he is working to make subsequent versions of F4Turbo compatible with all cockpits.
By the way, F4Turbo v2 may be obsolete by the time you read this- a new improved version seems to come out every other day.
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