Webcam turns off and on while loading

[300Blackout-A2A]

Hello,

I just got this game the other day, and I'm really loving it. I have run into a small problem however that I hope someone can help me with.

I use a webcam to run Freetrack. While the game engine is loading up before flight, my webcam turns off. Before the loading is finished it turns back on. Most of the time this is not a problem, however every once and a while this process locks-up my camera and Freetrack. I have to quite out of the game, do a forced shutdown of freetrack and then restart it to get it working again. Sometimes I even have to do a complete system restart to free-up the camera again.

So is there anyway to prevent the game from messing with the camera? None of my other games seem to have this issue, and I really can't think of a reason for the BoB2 to be accessing my camera.

Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated!

My system:
WindowsXP sp3, 32
AMD Athlon 64x2 dual
2gigs of ram
Geforce 8800gt
Logitech Quickcam E2500

[Buddye]

Hi Dagon, welcome to BOBII and the BOBII forum and community.

WoW, after all these years, this is a new issue.

I have no idea that BOBII has code to turn on/off a web cam. In my six years of working on BOBII I have no idea what could cause this problem.

I will search around the code to see if I can find anything. I would guess that the OS controls the web cam.

Does any of our other players use a web cam?

[300Blackout-A2A]

Luckily the locking-up doesn't happen too often, but it is pretty annoying when it does.

Anyway, noticed something new. The camera also turns off and on when I start and exit the game. Also when I leave "3D mode" and go back to the game UI. So pretty much whenever a new screen is initialized. Except for when it's at the loading screen, the camera turns off and back on almost immediately. At the loading screen it is usually turned off for several seconds before turning back on (5-10secs I'm guessing).

I understand this is pretty unique problem, and there probably isn't going to be solution anytime soon; but thanks for any help you can give me.

[Osram]

A rough guess:
I don't think BoBII on purpose enables or diables a web cam, but it does on purpose interface to TrackIR. From what I understand the gag about FreeTrack is that to the game it looks like TrackIR? As a test, what happens if you disable TrackIR in BoBII (IIRC this is in the bdg.txt)? Does it still switch on/off the webcam?

[300Blackout-A2A]

As a test, what happens if you disable TrackIR in BoBII (IIRC this is in the bdg.txt)? Does it still switch on/off the webcam?

Thanks for the help, Osram!

I did as you asked, and got some interesting results. I disabled TIR (with the in-game ui, didn't edit the bdg.txt) and BoB2 still turned the camera off and on when freetrack was running in the background. Then I tried a different test. I turned off freetrack and started my camera with it's video software and let it run. Ran BoB2 again, and this time the camera stayed on the whole time.

So it does look like it is something specific to freetrack/TIR.