Known issues and workarounds...


Performance

Game crashes with EInvalidOp error during spaceflight, or entering a star system
This is an issue revealed in Release Candidate testing, and it couldn't be completely eliminated. Only thing I can suggest, since crashes are a random and not very common problem, is that you save often.

Performance is absymal, especially in battles with explosions or smoke in the screen
If you get severe slowdowns in battles, you should consider the following:
- Reduce particle detail from options. This will make explosions and smoke look less spectacular, but it's a good tradeoff if you're playing on a lesser system (350-450 MHz Pentium II class CPU)
- Turn background and/or ship detail to LOW. This'll make the game look considerably uglier, but the speedup might be worth it if you really hate slowdowns.

Performance is unbearable across the board, even in the startup menu
This indicates your computer doesn't have the necessary memory bandwidth to play StarFight VI. Especially systems with AMD K6 and AMK K6/2 processors are prone to this behaviour. Only solution to this problem is to turn background detail to LOW and cinematic detail to INTERLACED.

Movie playback is jerky or slow
You should test whether your system suffices for the movie playback quality you've selected. In order to do that, do the following:
- Set debug mode on in SF6 launcher, and select desired movie playback quality
- Run the game, and watch intro. At the left-top corner of the screen you see a number indicating how much movie playback is "late" due to lack of CPU power. If number stays constant, and below 100-200 at all times, you should be OK. However, if it keeps climbing up everytime when something happens in an animated scene, you should switch to a lower movie quality setting.

Sound/Music

At a point of the game music stops and won't restart!
It is possible that this happens, if you somehow manage to cause too many music start/stop commands at once. Solution is to go to OPTION/JUKEBOX MODE and try to play a couple of songs. This revives the music subsystem.

Music breaks up badly during gameplay
If you get bad breakup, which is possible if you are running with low memory and have lots of HD access, enable USE LARGE SOUND BUFFER in launcher options. You might also want to try if USE STREAM MODE PLAYBACK setting has a positive effect.

Gameplay

Battles are too hard, I'm constantly getting my ass whipped!
You are? Well, what you do on your free time really isn't my business, now is it ;)
Seriously though, if you find a battle too hard, maybe you might want to consider a different approach to the situation instead of "brute force". Are you sure you need to fight whoever you're facing or can you avoid it alltogether? Or perhaps a ship weapon upgrade is in order; get some cash and burn it on weapon, shield or fusion generator upgrades.

It takes an eternity to move from one planet to another
Interplanetary distances are not short. This is what the time acceleration is for. Press numbers 1 to 4 to set time acceleration ratio (10x to 30x), and a trip from Earth to Jupiter for example will only take a couple of seconds (depends on your CPU power, though).

I'm constantly running out of money
There are several ways of making money. You shouldn't always to exactly what you're told to do. You can take a bit time off the mission, and...
- go on an asteroid field to mine some metals or radioactives
- probe planets for minerals, and sell the studies to MicroSpace
- register as a bounty hunter, and pick up all the fights you can get
- trade cargo across orbital platforms
- travel the universe. There are a couple of un-mandetory missions, which pay off quite well.

I can't see any solution to a problem in an adventure section
Your system might be having issues with picture being too dark. Apply some amount of gamma correction via your display drivers, here's a test image which should help you find the correct settings.



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