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fcc56

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  1. Although I only have experience with the demo, I have found that half-tracks are useful for towing captured field guns to useful locations, once the guns have been "occupied" by infantry. In the demo German mission, I chose two mortar half-tracks and the one with the PaK gun (251/10), so they could multi-task.
  2. If you are using a Radeon-based video card, you will need the Radeon text fix patch, which is just three replacement bmp files. You will also occasionally need to ALT-TAB to the desktop and then maximize the game again to get certain text to display correctly (the mission-selection screen, the mission briefings, and/or the scorecard at the end of a mission). http://www.battlefront.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=4&d=1215645837
  3. To use the widescreen display, you will need to choose the best-match resolution the game will allow, probably 1400x1050 (this is what I am offered for my 1680x1050 monitor). After that, you have two options: 1. Run the game in wide-screen mode at 1680x1050, with stretched models ("wide-body" tanks, etc.). Note that the image is only stretched horizontally, because 1050 in the vertical plane matches your monitor's native resolution. 2. Run the game centered, at 4:3 resolution. You do this by either adjusting the appropriate settings in the video driver (which causes the image to be scaled by the driver and/or video card), or by changing the settings for your monitor itself (which causes the monitor to do the scaling). Which method to use depends on which is easiest for you and produces the best result. With my Dell 2209WA, it is easiest to just change the monitor settings. With this method, the image displays with black bars on left and right, but the screen is filled top-to-bottom because 1050 pixels matches your monitor's resolution. Of course, you would change this back to normal wide-screen once you were done playing the game. Note that running at 4:3 instead of wide-screen does not reduce your field of view. Although the wide-screen image is wider, your view of the battlefield is no different from the 4:3 view—just the same view, stretched. To be honest, the game does not look very good on the LCD monitor. Up close, the vehicle skins look good (I've applied mods to almost every vehicle), but at a more normal playing level the vehicle textures tend to "swim" when the vehicles are moving, and the terrain and vegetation has a harsh aspect to it that makes it difficult to look at for long periods, or to see some units. I think this is probably a product of the inherent higher contrast (or poorer gradation scaling, if you prefer) of LCDs vs. CRTs. I may try running the game on my second monitor, a 19-inch CRT that runs at 1280x960. Being a recent model, it isn't very sharp, but game graphics usually look better on it than on an LCD. (I lament the disappearance of high-quality CRTs from the market in the wake of the sharp decrease in LCD prices of a few years ago. My old Eizo had outstanding image quality, but over time it lost sharpness, as CRTs tend to do.) It would be nice if the display options were stored in an editable ini or prefs file, so that we could just go in there and set our preferences, rather than needing to click through a seemingly endless list of resolutions and refresh rates only to find that the combination we want isn't available (either that, or an industry-standard options screen that lets us choose from a list).
  4. For what it's worth, I had this problem in the German mission in the demo. Even when I finally beat the scenario (cleared the map of all Soviets), the scenario did not end. I demolished the building at point 2 with tank fire and then walked through the rubble with infantry, but the game just kept going. Perhaps I needed to capture the building intact? OTOH, the scenario did end correctly in those cases where my force was mostly wiped out. And the Soviet scenario ended in a victory for me on my first try, when I did not know what I was doing and my positions were being overrun by German tanks.
  5. This is definitely present in the demo; I experienced it multiple times in the German scenario, to the point that I stopped sending infantry into trenches until all the Soviets were cleared out by armor. Anywhere between one and six German soldiers would be engaged with one Soviet, swinging guns in the air, and fifteen minutes later either they would still be at it, or all the Germans were dead. Trying to get infantry to fight effectively in the trenches is a most frustrating task, in the demo anyway. They only want to use their weapons if set to free-fire mode (sometimes), even if you manage to get some separation between them and their target. I've seen that at least the self-grenade problem has been addressed in the patch.
  6. That's the idea. You want to have the least amount of page-file access you can get away with without getting warning messages or problems with apps running smoothly. Another way to look at it, is, what's the point of 4 GB of RAM if the OS never uses more than 2 GB? If you can get your maximum RAM usage up to between 3 GB and 3.5 GB without the OS complaining, that should improve performance for all your apps, even the OS itself, and certainly with 3D games (that is, 3 to 3.5 GB in your most RAM-intensive situations, not when you're browsing the Web). I would try setting the paging file to 1.5 GB min and max, and if you don't have any problems with your most RAM-intensive applications, then you might be able to back it down even more, to something like 1024 MB; or, if you are like me and 90% of your computer work is in "2D" then a range might be more suitable—500 MB min and 1024 MB max, for example. As I mentioned before, everyone's situation is different, so there isn't one "right" setting for every machine. But you can fiddle around with the settings until you find something that works and that you're comfortable with. Some folks like more headroom than others. Anything you can do to minimize hard-drive access will speed up your apps. Closing unnecessary applications can help too. Depending on what AV software you use, turning that off might make a difference, although you would probably also want to disable your Internet connection also, unless you're behind a hardware firewall (if you use a router, for example). If you want to get really geeky, you can go after the unnecessary services that Windows runs by default. For Vista recommendations, try here and here. For XP 32-bit, try here and here.
  7. Your installed RAM capacity is a likely culprit. For Vista 64, you should give serious consideration to doubling your current RAM to 4 GB. Vista's basic overhead is considerably greater than that for XP, and the 64-bit OS can use a lot more RAM than 32-bit versions (128 GB vs. 4 GB). With more RAM, I would then look to reducing the size of the paging file. The old rules of thumb, are just that—old, and outdated. The 2x RAM for the paging file is a relic of the days when 512MB RAM was a lot. These days,with 2–4 GB RAM being common, having a large paging file will actually reduce performance, because data is unnecessarily being swapped out to the (slow) hard disk. The optimal size of the paging file is a matter of much disagreement. The best course is to do some experimenting to find what is best for your PC and the way you use it. To start figuring this out, a simple memory monitoring application is helpful, something like Cacheman, that allows you to monitor RAM and paging file use in real time. If you find that the OS rarely uses most of the available RAM, reduce the paging file. Although not directly applicable to your case with Vista, as an example I have WinXP Pro (32-bit) set for a paging file of 400 MB minimum and 1000 MB maximum with 4 GB RAM (plus a small paging file on the boot drive because XP likes to have this). With these settings my available RAM rarely drops below1.5 GB and there is very little swapping out to the hard drive, which makes all my applications faster and more responsive. I can't tell you the exact settings that will work best for you. My settings were arrived at over time, beginning with a fixed paging file size (the same value for min and max) and adjusting as necessary to eliminate warning messages about low virtual memory. But if you allow Windows to select a paging-file size for you or follow the 2x or 1.5x RAM "rule," Windows will not use even half your available RAM, but will instead swap data out to the paging file (and then cache some of that data for faster access, and then send it to the paging file again, etc.). Note that in 32-bit Windows, with 4GB of RAM installed, the OS will show less than 4 GB of available RAM, because some of what is installed is used by the OS. This obviously is not an issue with Vista 64. Beyond that the E6400 CPU is not the speediest processor out there, although it was popular with overclockers. If you can afford to swap it for something like an E6600 (US$100) or E7500 (US$116) you would probably see a difference in 3D games like this one. The 8800 GTX is also rather old at this point (by graphics card standards), so an upgrade there would also be helpful. I would probably place this above the CPU upgrade in importance: 1. Double your RAM 2. New graphics card 3. New CPU For an overview of the best values in graphics cards, try here. Note that when you change your graphics card, you should delete all the drivers for your current card, especially if changing manufacturer (nVidia to ATi and vice versa). If staying with the same manufacturer, you can probably get away with just changing the card and then updating the drivers, since both companies issue their drivers in unified packages (one package for all recent boards). Nonetheless, it is still a good idea to uninstall the current drivers before installing the new board.
  8. Apologies if this thread is considered too old for new contributions. . . . I am fairly certain I saw recently in this forum instructions on modifying the behavior of the Smart Pause feature by editing an XML file, but I cannot now find these anywhere, and a forum search on 'XML' returns no results. I have not found a file in the demo game folders that appears to be the correct one. Was I hallucinating, or do such instructions exist? :confused:
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