Schrullenhaft

I believe that would be the case once a 5.0 Upgrade comes out.

With the latest 'Upgrade' installer it is typically assumed that you will need to provide the license key for that particular upgrade and the previous one. So in the case of the 4.0 Upgrade you would need the 4.0 AND the 3.0 Upgrade license keys. The exception to this depends on when you purchased the base game and what version was released at the time of purchase. So if you purchased CMBN and the 3.0 version was current, then your BASE GAME license key is version 3.0 and you would need that AND the 4.0 Upgrade license key if you are to use the latest installer. If you purchased the CMBN base game and 4.0 was the current release at the time, then your CMBN base game license key is sufficient to use the latest installer (a 3.0 Upgrade key would be unnecessary in this situation). Uninstalling and reinstalling the games should NOT make the license key activations disappear. As long as the OS remains the same (i.e. - not reinstalled from scratch) and your hardware remains fairly the same (some hardware upgrades will trip the copy protection system - especially if there are a number of them at the same time or cumulatively). So uninstalling a game completely and reinstalling it should NOT require relicensing the games/modules. If the reinstallation includes new content (an Upgrade or a module, etc.), then you would need to activate the appropriate license key to see that new content. Otherwise it is present, but unusable. With Upgrades though, you'll need to activate that new license key to play the game at all (since the all-in-one installer will now be based on that particular Upgrade). The full installers simply make it easier to distribute the game with all of the content and the latest patches. So there is no painful reinstallation of the games in any particular order (which confused a lot of people when it came to a game like CMBN). In CMBN's case if you purchased the Commonwealth module after having updated the game to the 3.0 Upgrade, then you would have to REAPPLY several patches and Upgrades all over again to get back where you were previously, but with the Commonwealth content now available (whereas before it wasn't present at all). There was also confusion as to what patches were necessary and which ones were a 'rollup' that included everything before it. Customers would be missing .BRZ files if they didn't get all of the correct patches installed. The all-in-one installers do away with this problem.

Correct. CMBS and CMFB do NOT have a 3.0 Upgrade. Both games were Engine 3.0 at release. So only the 'base game' license key is necessary to get them working, if you have installed just the original game. If you have installed the 4.0 all-in-one installer, then it should need both the 'base game' AND the '4.0 Upgrade' license key to get it running.

I made my purchase of the 3.0 Upgrade around October 2014. I can't recall if I was a little late to that release (i.e. - it had been released earlier than that). I believe CMBS and CMFB were originally released as Engine 3 games and thus only had the 4.0 Upgrade. With CMBN, CMFI and CMRT they had 3.0 Upgrades and would need those license keys too if you were doing a fresh install of the 4.0 Upgrade 'all-in-one' installer. So: CMBS, CMFB: Base game license key + 4.0 Upgrade license key CMBN, CMFI, CMRT: Upgrade 3.0 license key + Upgrade 4.0 license key This licensing should get the games to run the 'base game' content. Modules and Packs would, obviously, also need their license keys activated for them to work.

If you have the 4.0 Upgrade for CMFI, just download that link (the 'all-in-one installer'). It will simplify things quite a bit. I can't recall exactly what version 1.20 is. I would think it is Game Engine 3.0, but I'm not sure. The original base game for CMFI is Engine 2.0, so there are 3.0 and 4.0 Upgrades for it. If you purchased CMFI at release, then you would need the 3.0 and 4.0 Upgrade license keys to activate your new install fully (for the base game). R2V should require the 4.0 Upgrade to run (2.10). The latest patch/version is 2.11.

Uninstalling and reinstalling with the full installers should NOT require you to reactivate any of those games and modules that you have already activated. For example, if you delete your install CMRT and reinstall it with the full installer that includes the Fire and Rubble module, you should be able to just run the 'Activate New Products' shortcut to activate the Fire and Rubble module and you should be good to go. You should NOT need to activate any other license keys. However if you're installing on a new computer (for the first time) or you have significantly upgraded your computer with different hardware (CPU, motherboard, possibly the video card, etc.), then you WILL need to activate with all of the license keys again. A reinstallation of your OS can also trigger the need to reactivate.

You will need BOTH. This will be true for CMFI (which had 3.0 and 4.0 Upgrades). CMBS and CMFB were originally released as 3.0 Engines, so the base game license key and the 4.0 Upgrade license key will be necessary for them.

The Warsaw Pact officially disbanded in mid-1991. The Soviet Union itself dissolved at the end of that year.

If your purchase of the base game occurred AFTER the 4.0 Upgrade was released, then you only need that base game license key. If you purchased the 4.0 Upgrade, then you would also need either the 3.0 Upgrade or the base game license key (if your purchase of the base game was AFTER the 3.0 Upgrade was released). This just confirms that you're using the 4.0 Upgrade legitimately (i.e. - you have purchased the base game before and NOT just the 4.0 Upgrade, which costs less).

Do you need the '3.0 Upgrade' license key to get it fully working ?

So the issue you're running into with the CMBN install is that it doesn't bring up the activation window and therefore you're not seeing any of the modules ? I'm not sure why the game would come up without bringing up the activation window (especially on a new computer that never had the game installed and activated on it before). Have you tried launching the 'Activate New Products' shortcut (which you may have to find within the main CMBN game directory) ? Activate with the 3.0 or 4.0 Upgrade license key (or the base game license key if you purchased a 4.0 version of CMBN). Hopefully this works and you can see the 'success screen' with the green boxes listing what has been successfully activated so far. You would need the following license keys for a 4.0 install of CMBN with everything (though 'bundles' may provide more than one activation with a single license key): 3.0 Upgrade 4.0 Upgrade Commonwealth module Market Garden module Battle Pack Vehicle Pack

Unfortunately there is NO way to scale the UI or text. They are all fixed-size bitmaps that will not independently scale from resolution.

If the games are all on the same engine, then this isn't really a thing. The difference will typically be in the complexity of the map and what is on it. On average a CMBN map is likely to have a lot of foliage and possibly a number of buildings, while a CMSF2 map may have a lot of open ground with some buildings spread around (or in a built up area). Buildings in CM are definitely frame-rate killers. An Intel integrated video (or almost any 'integrated video') is likely to lag with larger maps. There are fewer 'cores/execution units' and a much lower memory bandwidth with the Intel integrated video compared to a dedicated video card/GPU. This memory bandwidth is noticeable when it comes to moving textures around on screen, which is what is happening when you're scrolling around a map in CM. When it comes to playing CM I DEFINITELY recommend getting a decent video card. If it is the only game that you play, then you don't need to spend a lot of money on getting the very best since the performance difference between a mid-ranged video card and a high-level enthusiast card in CM probably won't justify the price difference. A new game engine may change that in the future (a few years from now, possibly), but the current game engine really won't see that significant of a difference. So a RTX 2060 would likely suffice for many users and a RTX 3080 would generally be overkill. However prices on video cards right now are insane with so many being used for crypto-currency mining. A GeForce GTX 1660 would also be good, but even prices for those are really high. If necessary you can go all the way down to a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or 1650 and you should have fairly decent performance. I would consider a plain GTX 1050 as probably the lowest you should go on the Nvidia side. You start getting into models that lack memory bandwidth and it will show while playing CM. On the AMD Radeon side I would go with a RX 560 (as a minimum) or better.

Do you know if your laptop has a 'discrete GPU/video' ? Most laptops using Intel CPUs will typically be using the built-in Intel GPU (on the CPU), but some laptops have a dedicated ('discrete') video chip/GPU (often Nvidia GeForce, but possibly AMD) which provides MUCH better performance than the Intel GPU. Often CM games may actually run on the Intel GPU even if one of these dedicated GPUs exists in the laptop since the drivers may not detect that the game could benefit from the dedicated GPU. In this situation typically adding a 'profile' within the GPU driver's control panel for the game will often get it running on the GPU rather than the Intel video. With Windows 10 there is a control panel option to tell programs what video chip to run with (outside of the GPU's control panel). However a vast majority of laptops out there typically only have the Intel/integrated video/GPU. I don't have a specific build recommendation, but the following guidelines should work well: CM benefits the most from a fast CPU. For a majority of its tasks it will mostly only use a single core, so more cores don't really help it (at least with current versions of the games). So get the fastest CPU you can reasonably afford with good 'base' and 'turbo' clock speeds. I'm not specifically aware if Intel or AMD works better with CM. Intel tends to have a somewhat lower memory latency in their CPUs than the AMDs, but either manufacturer should work fine with the game. Nvidia GPUs tend to do the best with the CM series. AMD drivers usually work well in most situations, but the game still loads a bit slower with AMD GPUs. The amount of video RAM (VRAM) that the video card has shouldn't be too much of a big deal. Some people who may load up a lot of graphics mods might push some video memory setups, but anything with 2GB or more should be absolutely fine. The CM series are 32-bit games, so they don't directly benefit from memory over 4GB. The game is 'large address aware', so it will technically use up to 3GB of memory/address space. 8 or 16GB of RAM would be fine for most systems (though, again, the game won't use those larger amounts). Anything above that would only benefit other programs or general use of the computer. Windows does utilize unused RAM in a caching mechanism, so sometimes more RAM could help general performance if you run a lot of apps, etc. SSDs will be common for most computers and the games will typically benefit a little during loading and game saves, but other than that they typically won't affect CM's performance. You will probably hear/read a number of posters complaining about video performance in the game, low frame-rates, mediocre shadows, etc. The current CM series utilizes the OpenGL 2.x API for programming graphics. This was the current/newest version of OpenGL at the time the game engine was originally designed (2003 - 2007). There have been some improvements over the years, but the game engine still primarily utilizes OpenGL 2.x which involves the CPU a lot when drawing the screen. Newer, 'faster' video cards may only marginally improve the speed of the graphics in game. So the latest and greatest video cards will not miraculously improve the speed of the game's graphics. However most video cards should be a significant improvement over the Intel integrated video/GPUs (they have more memory 'bandwidth' and 'processing cores' than the Intel built-in GPUs).

What exactly did you change ? Have all of these settings been reversed to what they were originally or just some of them ? Typically the most notable difference between running on the Intel integrated graphics and a discrete GPU was the text quality in the initial menus. These will usually be splotchy and somewhat blurred by the routines in the Intel drivers (texture compression or anti-aliasing, I don't know what). I don't know if all Intel drivers experience this issue or not (it might not happen on Macs), but it is often a quick indicator of running on Intel graphics. Once inside the game I'm not sure how much of a difference there may be in 'draw distance' between the Intel and discrete GPU. There likely may be very little difference between the two (despite the obvious advantages that a discrete GPU may have). Did you notice a difference in the past before you made the changes to the system ? When you measure load on the GPU, do you do it with a dual display setup or do you minimize the game to view the measurements ? Are you using the Task Manager or some other app to measure load ?

Correct. Spotting and target acquisition would be the more common difference between victor and vanquished rather than actual missile speed (in an ATGM vs. ATGM engagment). But a bullet or small caliber gun shell can be quicker than many of these man-portable ATGMs and a long flight time for the missile can be interrupted by some quick spotting infantry or IFVs, etc.

As a guess, I believe that missile speed is modeled in the game. So there's a mild possibility that a faster ATGM could knock out the gunner for a slower ATGM and disrupt the guidance of that missile. SACLOS was the dominant guidance type for ATGMs of this period, but I don't know how distinct the modeling is on the various systems, other than their imaging (thermal/IR or optical).

These are PATCHES that require a copy of the game to be already installed. If you want the All-in-one installer for each game you will need to go into your ACCOUNT. Login from the main Battlefront page (upper right) > 'My Orders' link > look for the order that has your latest version of the game (reviewing each order by clicking the 'Click to view' link); this can be either a fairly recent purchase of any of the games or (most likely) the 4.0 Upgrade for each game. This will have the link to the all-in-one installer for that game. If you didn't purchase a 4.0 Upgrade for a game, then the 3.0 Upgrades typically should have the fully patch 3.x version of the game. Anything earlier than this will NOT have an all-in-one installer. Typically you shouldn't need to patch or install anything else for the game, all patches and modules (if there are any) should be included in this installer.

Per this Wikipedia article on the Semovente da 47/32 the HQ tanks had additional radios and an 8mm Breda MG that is disguised as the 47mm. I'm not looking at CMFI at the moment to see what the actual model and specs are in the game, so I'm unsure of CMFI's depiction in this case.

... and another post, to mostly satisfy my occasional OCD about such matters and beat a dead horse about wishes for this game. My prognostication on possible future modules in the European theater (modified from my original post to suggest a model that would work with the game licensing): 1. Update TOE for US/Soviets to '91 (now '79 - '91). Include US Airborne and Soviet VDV ('79 - '91 TOE), these formations/units would be unique to this module (along with the US '83 - '91 TOE). Add winter textures for terrain and units (base game and 1st module). Future modules would have a TOE from '79 - '91 for their respective additions, have corresponding winter textures and include/activate the expanded Soviet TOE to '91 that originally came in the first module. This would satisfy the requirement that modules don't have content that require anything beyond the base game. 2. West Germany / East Germany 3. Britain (BAOR) / Poland / Czechoslovakia 4. Canada / Netherlands / Belgium / Denmark / Austria (?) Modules that would probably be unlikely to be made, but would be cool if they did show up: 5. France 6. Italy / Yugoslavia / Romania / Hungary 7. Norway / Finland / USMC / Sweden (?) 8. Turkey / Greece / Bulgaria Modules that would be HIGHLY unlikely to be made, but could possibly be 'constructed' by modders to some extent, assuming the first four modules listed above are actually made: 9. Gulf War '91 (though the data wouldn't match for the Iraqi export versions) 10. Iran - Iraq War '80 - '88 (same as above regarding 'export' models and Iranian customizations along with an inaccurate small arms list) 11. India - Pakistan War '71 (probably too far of a stretch and would still lack quite a few units - assuming Centurions ever make it in) The Arab-Israeli wars ('67 - '82... earlier conflicts may be too much work) would seem to need enough additional models and weapons data that it probably would require a Battlefront-created module to do it any justice. However past statements by Steve suggest that they wouldn't want to touch such content due to the negative politics that can surround such subject matter (even if they are only historical conflicts). I have no clue as to what may actually be possible when it comes to further content for this game. It has unfortunately taken Battlefront much longer than expected to create modules for many of their games and the same situation can easily (and quite likely) repeat here. The 'Fire and Rubble' module for CMRT should be released BEFORE CMCW gets released (in my estimation), while work on the final module for CMFB and CMBS would be on the table in this time frame. However with the 'sandbox/non-historical' nature of this particular game, some content may be easier to produce (scenarios and campaigns) and the TOEs may be easier to research (to a certain extent).

The CM series uses OpenGL 2.x as its graphics API. The reference to the 'atioglxx.dll' in the Event log is the AMD OpenGL video driver. In the past AMD/ATI drivers have had occasional issues with CM, but I wasn't aware of any specific ones lately. The AMD drivers do result in a slower load up time for CM (when you initially load a scenario/campaign), possibly due to some OpenGL calls being executed in a less optimized manner compared to Nvidia. But within the game I don't think that there's a too significant a difference in performance between Nvidia and AMD on somewhat equivalent hardware. I'm awaiting a new Ryzen 7 5800X CPU to test with my computer that has a Radeon 5700XT and see if I experience the same issue as you did with the HQS mod. I don't know the exact AMD driver version you're running (27.20.14535.3005), do you know what the version is ? 21.2.3 appears to be the latest and 20.11.2 is the latest WHQL driver. In your particular case I'm not sure why the crash may be happening with the HQS mod, but the Event log seems to indicate an issue with the AMD OpenGL video driver. Do you use HDMI pass-through for your audio (something that might happen hooking up the computer to a TV via HDMI, etc.) ? Even if it was HDMI pass-through I would assume another driver (for the AMD HDMI audio) would be listed. Perhaps there's an issue with the AMD OpenGL drivers and the resources needed for the high-def audio files that ends up crashing the AMD video drivers. I'm not sure at what point the audio file may get called up to be played back (though I would assume it would be at the time you've finished all of the steps for calling artillery). Is there a specific point in calling for artillery support that the crashes happen ? Does it consistently happen while defining the target graphically on the screen or do you get further into the process before it crashes ? I assume this will happen with the very first plot (in other words, not random), is that correct ? I'll need to test this with an Nvidia system too and see if the problem is at all similar or if it is strictly limited to the AMDs.

What is the resolution of your display that you're attempting to play the game on ? If it isn't capable of 1920 x 1080, then it probably won't actually display (this can be an issue with a laptop, etc.). Is this actually CMSF 1 (the original game) or CMSF2 (the update, using Engine 4) ? If you have an entry in the 'display size.txt' file, that may override what you might select in the 'Options' menu. The format here is typically something like this (with no additional 'invisible' formatting text, such as spaces, <Enter>/end-of-line, etc. - other than a space between each number): 1920 1080 60 This should be a resolution of 1920 x 1080 at 60Hz (vertical refresh rate). I believe this file should only have one resolution entry in it. Anything more and it may confuse CM or cause problems. Typically the 'Desktop' resolution selection is the most convenient one in the Options menu. This should use the same resolution as your display normally runs Windows at.

Maybe reverse some of those settings you made and see if that allows CM to work on the Nvidia GPU. You have done something that is preventing the use of the Nvidia GPU. CM doesn't dictate what the system should do, it takes what the system gives it and if the drivers decide that the Nvidia GPU isn't necessary, then there is little you can do about it. Typically profiles have worked in the past, but I'm sure it is possible to override what they may "suggest" to the driver and the changes you've made to the system favor using the Intel integrated video in most situations, including some 3D ones. I'm not sure what your Nvidia drivers list, but in the 'Manage 3D settings' menu > 'Global Settings' tab, there may be a 'Preferred graphics processor' setting near the top of the tab that you can set from 'Auto-select' to 'High-performance NVIDIA processor'. However I'm not sure if all drivers will have this setting. Setting it to the Nvidia selection here will definitely change some of the power-saving settings or simply conflict with them depending on what and where you've set them. In the 'Program settings' tab (where the 'profile' is created), once the program has been selected in the 'Select a program to customize' field, the second field ('Select the preferred graphics processor for this program') will have settings to force the game to use the Nvidia GPU (whether it is the 'default' set from the 'Global' tab or expressly selected here). It's possible that your drivers may not have this explicit setting, which may be limited to certain versions or a possible customization for some laptop manufacturers. I don't know what the limitations of the code are when it comes to determining the capabilities of the video card. CM uses OpenGL 2.x calls, which are considered 'immediate mode' (it was the current OpenGL spec when the CM2 engine was created). 'Immediate Mode' involves the CPU significantly in a lot of its calls, so it is possible that the "judgements" made by the software also take into account the CPUs load in drawing things on the screen in addition to all of the other tasks it must do for the game.

The 'display distance' is set within CM's code. It supposedly tries to take into account how much memory may be needed by the display and other details. Unfortunately there is no direct setting that affects this and you can't get it to draw out much further than what you probably see already. Supposedly the '3D Model Quality' and '3D Texture Quality' MIGHT have a small effect with settings toward 'Balanced' (less quality), but you can get a number of opinions as to what setting is better. Yes, you can force CM to utilize the discrete GPU by creating a 'profile' within the discrete GPU's control panel for 3D settings (I know that is true of Nvidia and I assume it is probably true of AMD too). This isn't the game's fault. The drivers, between Intel and the discrete GPU, determine when the discrete GPU is needed. If the game isn't a major title and it doesn't start out with some significant 3D display calls, then it may get 'skipped' by the drivers and assumed to only need the integrated video for mostly 2D purposes.

It's up to the driver software to discern when to swap over from the Intel GPU to the discrete video. With CM games most of the drivers that have this integrated/discrete setup often don't recognize CM as something that needs the more powerful discrete GPU. The more popular games have profiles within the drivers already, so they don't run into this situation. For Nvidia (and possibly AMD) setting up a profile within the drivers tells the driver that it needs to run the game on the discrete GPU.