------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Advanced Settings ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A description of each of the advanced settings and their operation is provided below. You should not have to change these settings unless you are experiencing problems running The Nightmare Child on your PC. "Disable Sound" - Checking this will disable all sound output in the game. You should only need to check this if you suspect that the sound support is causing problems. "Disable Music" - Checking this will disable all Direct Music in the game. You can get a slight speed increase (2% - 10%) by turning off the music. "Disable Movies" - Check this if you do not wish to see the opening movies each time you start the game. "Disable Lightmaps" - This will disable shadows on world surfaces. If you have a very slow 3D accelerator, or an accelerator with a low amount of graphics memory (less than 4 MB) this might improve your frame rate considerably. "Disable Fog" - Checking this will turn off all fog effects in the game. "Disable Beams" - This will disable the drawing of all beam effects. Beam effects are used extensively throughout the game, so turning them off is not recommended unless you have to. "Disable Skin Fullbrights" - Checking this will disable fully bright pixels that are on some textures (such as Blackwell's glowing eyes). "Disable Joysticks" - Checking this will disable joystick support. "Disable Optimized Surfaces" - Checking this can reduce the amount of texture memory required to run the game, but will also cause the game to run significantly slower when the Heads-Up-Display is active, or when any info is printing to the screen. You should never check this box unless you suspect optimized surfaces are causing problems. "Disable Polygap Fixing" - Also known as "T-Junctions", checking this box can improve framerate at the cost of visual quality. When polygap fixing is disabled you are much more likely to see "sparkles" at the seams where some polygons meet. "Disable Triple Buffering" - Checking this will stop the game from using three frame buffers for smoother and faster rendering. It is not recommended that you turn this off unless absolutely necessary. "Disable Multi-Texturing" - Checking this will disable single-pass lightmapping, where textured polygons and lightmaps are drawn all at once instead of separately. "Disable Environment Mapping" - Disables the "shiny metal" effect on some models. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Supported Graphics Cards ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KISS Psycho Circus supports all of the major graphics cards on the market today through DirectX. A 3D accelerator is required to play KISS Psycho Circus. The following is a list of the supported accelerators and any known problems that may occur with them. If you experience any graphics-related problems, first make sure you have the most recent drivers from the manufacturer of your card. If possible, try installing the reference drivers from the manufacturer of your graphics chipset, since these are often more reliable than those that are made by the card vendor. NVidia TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra and GeForce 256 Based Accelerators -------------------------------------------------------------- The only known problem occurs with TNT2 M64 based accelerators (MaxiGamer Cougar is an example of a card that contains this chip). These cards experience some problems in the pamphlet view and load/save menus which causes some graphics to appear is if they are skipping every other column and which causes the framerate to drop dramatically. We have not been able to find an TNT2 M64 driver that fixes this problem as the only drivers that seem to work the TNT2 M64 cards are the very latest Detonator 2 drivers. No other NVidia cards have any known problems when using the most recent NVidia Detonator drivers (version 3.68 at the time of this writing) or Detonator 2 drivers. Older NVidia drivers prior to the detonator series (dated 1999 and before) may causes graphics in the menu system to draw 1 pixel off, or cause frequent Matrox G400 ----------- No known problems. Matrox G200 ----------- No known problems. Voodoo 3 based Accelerators --------------------------- Voodoo 3 users may experience various graphical anomalies, or none at all. All these problems appear to be driver related. We have had the best results when using 3Dfx's latest beta drivers for the Voodoo 3. All Voodoo 3 problems have gone away with the knewest drivers available at http://www.3dfx.com Voodoo 2 -------- Voodoo 2's are now considered the low-end of 3D hardware accelerators. Currently, Psycho Circus tends to use more texture memory than a Voodoo 2 card has on board, which can cause unwanted texture uploading. This can be remedied by going to the Setup menu in the game, selecting Preferences, then Detail and setting Texture Detail to medium or low and then restarting the game. The most important thing to do if playing with a Voodoo 2 is to have the MOST RECENT DIRECT X DRIVERS. Older drivers have ALL SORTS OF PROBLEMS, including, but not limited to, screen flickering. The drivers we have found to work best is the Voodoo2 D3D Driver Build Number: 4.12.01.1151. These can be found at http://www.3dfx.com and are named v2-w9x-3.02.02.exe. Even with these drivers there will be a white box behind the mouse cursor in the menu, but that is the only known problem. Riva 128 -------- These cards may experience slow-downs due to texture swapping (see Voodoo 2 section for details). Riva 128's also do not support some of the blend modes used in KISS Psycho Circus (additive blending) so some of the effects may not appear as pretty as they would on other cards. S3 Savage 2000 Based Accelerators --------------------------------- The drivers for these boards appear to be very quirky, and while the card performs well the latest drivers produce erratic results, including menu surfaces being over-smoothed and drawing 1 pixel off. The most noticable is caused when mirrors are being drawn -- when the mirror is on the screen only the mirror view is drawn and the rest of the screen will go dark. If you still experience this problem with the newest Savage 2000 drivers, go to the Setup->Preferences->Detail menu and deselect the "Draw Mirrors" option.