Subset Games Forum

At first i thought it was my computer acting up, however after extensive(correct word?) work at finding the reason, i confirmed that FTL: Faster Than Light is one way or another connected to the strange noise my computer makes, only whilst playing FTL. I can play games that are both equal, more and less demanding than FTL, never heard this strange noise before, and it stops the moment i quit playing FTL.

This saddens me greatly as i really like playing FTL, but now i'm afraid since i have no idea what might happen if i play for too long... Of couse, it might not be anything serious, but i have very little knowledge about computers in general, so i hope someone, ANYONE, can help me fix this issue as, even if the sound isn't indicating a problem, it's at least creepy...

I apologize if there is a topic about this somewhere, or if i posted this in the wrong section, but i am too lazy to search for it...

FTL generates and displays as many game images as it can per second. This makes FTL more responsive to mouse and keyboard, but consumes more CPU and is more demanding of the graphics card. This can also make the computer a bit more hot than usual, which makes the computer fans spin more than usual.

So, the noise could be (not exhaustive list):

- Noise from the fans (CPU fan or graphics card fan) - most likely
- Noise from the graphics card (voltage convertors for example) - less likely
- Noise from the screen - much less likely, now that we all have LCDs

What you can try is enable V-Sync in the game options (and maybe also in your Graphics Card Control Panel, this depends on the graphics cards). This makes FTL only create as many game images as needed by the screen (typically 60 per second). It should be much less demanding on the CPU and graphics card, at the cost of less responsiveness from the mouse and keyboard (but this might not be even noticeable).

i'll go test that immediately(correct spelling?), hopefully it works as i find FTL really fun(altho frustratingly difficult at the last battle...)

EDIT: Yes that seems to have fixed the problem, the creepy noise is gone! ^_^