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Advanced Settings
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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.
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Supported Graphics Cards
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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
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There are no known problems with NVidia based accelerators using NVidia's
most recent Detonator 2 drivers (version 5.22 at the time of this writing).
NVidia drivers Older than version 3.68 may causes graphics in the menu system
to draw 1 pixel off, or cause frequent lockups in the menu system.
Matrox G400
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No known problems.
Matrox G200
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No known problems.
Voodoo 3 based Accelerators
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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
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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
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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
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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.