Getting the most out of Freespace 2 (Woo freespace 2)

Farout Foolio

So after 5 or 6 years I decided to install this again. (Good idea, I say.)
Doing a bit of searching I discovered this awesome Open source project thing, and after looking at the videos, I was pretty stoked to play, and since I have a widescreen monitor, I was not looking forward to 1080x768.
Unfortunately, even though I thought I followed the steps pretty closely, (executed open installer v 3.6.12, it downloaded aaaaall that stuff, etc) I'm definitely still running vanilla FS2.
Any idea what I missed?

Space Pickle

If you mean you aren't getting fancy graphics, you need to download the mediavps. Also you need to select all the options you want in the fsopen launcher.

Farout Foolio

I selected everything, I guess I'm just not sure I got it all to install properly. What are the steps after the FSopen launcher does its thing? Do I need to run anything else?

Zxerol

Did you select the mediavp as the current mod? Go to the Mod tab and make sure you select the mediavp folder, and then launch the game.

Farout Foolio

There's no way to ask this without sounding dumb, but... mod tab? >.>

Zxerol

Yah, should look like this in the launcher:

Farout Foolio

Heh, I guess I missed a step, it looks pretty now. Thanks so much!
A couple follow-up questions:
1) Which is easier to play with? Gamepad or mouse? (Sadly no Joystick for me)
2) How can I make it fit my screen? Both resolutions leave the tops and sides of the screen cropped off a bit.

Again, thanks for the help.

Zxerol

Gamepad over mouse, definitely. The sheer amount of turning you have to do makes the mouse pretty tedious to use in a traditional space combat sim (outside of things like Freelancer).

Set your resolution from the Video tab in the launcher, which should support a wide range of resolutions supported by your video hardware (including widescreen, although the HUD will be stretched -- they are in the process of creating special widescreen huds for new mediavps). Although, I'm not sure about the screen-cropping thing since I've never actually seen that happen on my machine, so you may have to play around with some stuff. Make sure to use OpenGL over Direct3D there also, it's actually the preferred rendering path for FS2Open.

One last thing is to make sure you select the correct fs2open executable to launch as well (and of course, not the originally freespace2.exe obviously), you want the want that ends in 'r' instead of 'd'. The d version is debug, which you don't want and I'm not even sure why they include in the end-user packages (although they may not using the autoinstaller -- I usually do my installs manually).