MrWombat

Yeah I get this occasionally as well. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and more with the Zep than biplanes, for instance.

It's always a trade-off. Encryption slows down transmission. By not encrypting some of the imagery streams (presumably the communications controlling the flight and weapons engagement commands were encrypted), you trade off the risk of interception for increased responsiveness. Presumably as well the imagery streams had more volume of data than the command streams and thus benefited most from going in the clear. That doesn't mean folks didn't underestimate the opposition, of course. And yeah, it's kind of embarrassing. But at base it's the sort of trade-off you always have to make.

Thanks for the clarification.

If I buy this now (or going forward) will the version I get be the latest, or will I have to also download the patch(es)? Not that it matters much I guess, as the support seems really good and turnaround time on new patches rather rapid

Heh, yeah, years of simply clicking through dialog boxes have trained many of us to ignore everything being displayed. Hell, we could be agreeing to sell ourselves into perpetual slavery for all we know, when we click through those EULAs for instance. Having the choices is actually not a bad idea, it was just not something I expected. I'll pay more attention next time.

Never mind. I am an idiot. I missed the option to select what got updated. All is well, move along, nothing to see here!

Heh, I'm not angry at Battlefront; far from it. I sympathize--it's nasty trying to manage all the crap necessary to get games to run on PCs, and the brave new world promised by all these wonderful APIs has never really materialized. Not Battlefront's fault, necessarily, even though as customers that's who got the money from us. But it's PC gaming, so yeah, we have to understand that things aren't always peachy. And I also agree that it's not that relevant to discuss other games working or not working, though I will say that it could actually help if we found other games with similar problems (the more problems the better likelihood of getting ATI cracking on the issues I think). It's just that I was going to spend some time getting back into CMSF and now I can't for the moment. Not a huge deal--I have enough work to do, goodness knows--but a bit annoying. I'll keep watching this space and the ATI drivers to see what happens at any rate.

This would be more valid if there were other significant products not working with the newer drivers. So far, this is the only one I've seen, so it does I think call into question the technical decisions Battlefront made in coding their grpahics. Using OpenGL might not have been the good idea it seemed at the time--DirectX gets a lot more support these days and OpenGL is soooo 20th century

Yeah, it's frustrating. I bought the British module and now can't play CMSF at all, without downgrading to 9.3 and screwing up my other games. It's weird that the Vista patched CMAK works fine (once you fix the text issue) but CMSF now is inoperable. I sympathize with Battlefront on having to keep up with the changes in PC video card technology, but blaming ATI seems a bit daft, too. You have to assume that PC hardware manufacturers are going to improve their products over time. You have to assume that your development cycle is going to span several of those product improvement cycles in regards to things like drivers for video cards. And you have to try at least to make sure your game will work on your best guess of the hardware/software available when it comes out, not when it started development. As this seems to be the only real issue with ATI drivers, it's hard not to wonder whether the fault is more on this end than on ATIs. But truly, I don't care about "fault," I just want a functioning game.

NM. I found the file, and it works. heh.

I have the latest (7/22/09) Catalyst drivers, and no combination of AA settings makes any difference--the in-game menu and screen text is missing. I've tried alt+tabbing, etc. and nothing. Someone mentioned a ".bmp fix" for the text; what is that, where can I get it, and will that be helpful? I'd love to buy the patches for both CMAK and CMBB, but only if they, um, work with my system

And when they do join, it sucks (for the Japanese!) Bad enough to be dealing witih the KMT and the Maoists, as well as the Commonwealth and the USA. To have Stalin's boys join it really drives home the fact that, yeah, starting this war was a Bad Idea for Tojo and company. Those Soviet tank groups are mean.

No matter what you do, yeah, it gets slow if you're playing as the Japanese. It's a fair trade-off for a decent AI, I think, but it does make the attention deficit types among us (me included) antsy. No free lunch, I guess!

Doh, yes, with no problems. Well, except the Chinese are being much more aggressive than Tojo would like...

Oh, it's not a big deal...played a bunch of turns with trouble (game is quite nicely done, by the way--very polished, like the earlier SC games, and a big contrast to many games these days from smaller publishers/developers). I'll keep an eye on things and see what happens, if anything. With Vista, nothing is certain or predictable!