Obviously, try reading the tools guide first.
Failing this, there have been four sample game files supplied: Fountain, Quick
Start, Shower and ToolsDemo. The name gives a pretty good indication of what's
inside. You will find these sample files inside the game's home directory
(usually x:\program files\ned Productions\Flow).
Do you have at least DirectX 3 installed? You may download this from
http://www.microsoft.com/directx/
for Windows 95 machines (Windows 98 should already have this). Windows NT 4.0
users must install Service Pack 3 or later (available from
http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/). Windows 2000 already has
DirectX.
Versions previous to v1.11 did not always work correctly on Windows XP,
nor when the user was not an Administrator.
Flow always internally uses 256 colour DirectX surfaces as each liquid
molecule can be plotted as a single eight bit byte for speed. However, if your
desktop is in a non-256 colour mode then Flow must convert this 256 colour
surface into a surface with whichever number of colours your desktop uses before
it can be displayed.
<techie> Flow does this by retrieving a Windows Display Context (DC)
for its eight bit surface from DirectDraw and using Win32 GDI call BltBlt() to
plot it. In theory, your graphics card does the conversion for you </techie>
Now as far as the author can make out (this is his first DirectX
application), this is legal and is supposed to work as intended. However, it has
been found that some video drivers do not support this, and hence nothing or
screen corruption appears in Flow's window. Hence you should take the following
steps in this order:
Try ticking the option Preferences=>Use GDI Blitting Only.
Download and install the latest drivers for your video card. You can find
these at the website of your card's manufacturer (try
http://www.drivershq.com/ if you don't
know what video card you have)
If it still doesn't work, try switching your display to use 256 colours
If that doesn't work or is undesirable, the only choice remaining is to
always use full screen mode. This can be activated from the menu bar or Alt +
Enter
On Windows NT 4, some video card drivers refuse to permit access to a 256
colour surface unless the current display is also using 256 colours. Flow checks
for this and will alert you if this happens (Flow gives you the choice to
temporarily switch to a 256 colour mode).
This error seems to appear at random intervals on some people's machines. The
author's machine doesn't have this problem, so it's somewhat hard to know what's
going wrong. Try following the same advice as for answer 1
Here are a number of tips if the game runs slowly:
Change your screen resolution to use 256 colours. The game will then use
DirectX to utilise the optimised video performance features of your video card
Decrease the number of molecules (use Ctrl + M)
Use smaller screen areas
Use the full screen capability of the game (use Alt + Enter)
Use an AGP video display card (PCI ones are much slower for Flow)
If you have tried all the tips in answer 3, then usually this is a video
bottleneck problem. Exactly what might be wrong could be anything, but these may
be ideas:
Your video card may do some things much more slowly than other video
cards, despite how fast/high-end they may be. An example is scaling a
palettised eight bit surface to a thirty-two bit surface - some video cards
may do a 1:1 conversion relatively quickly, but go extremely slowly if doing a
2:1 conversion. Effectively, it's best not to use Double Size if your video
card is affected this way
Your video card is incapable of performing DMA transfers from system
memory (or else is disabled). This will limit speed severely.
You may have a PCI or AGP interfacing problem. Your BIOS or AGP drivers
may be faulty
