dieseltaylor Posted June 21, 2006 Share Posted June 21, 2006 I get irked that PbemHelper, which has the ability to sped up the scenario testing process so much is so often neglected by PC owners. OK it is a new program to learn but it gives back so much! Anyway as I had to write a little intro for a club I thought lets air my rant ; ) What is PBEMHelper? It is a Windows program invented by Harri Pesonen in 2000 to aid players keep organised multiple PBEM games. PbemHelper works with many games, nearly thirty,by a variety of publishers. The most important of these being the CM series : ). The program can be obtained here: http://www.nic.fi/~fuerte/ What does it do? An amazing amount of things but lets start with the basic: 1. It searches your hard drive for all games that it works on and lists them as available for use. When you start a new CM game it will appear and request details of the opponents e-mail address and your game password , or it can generate one for you. 2. It will send the turn with its own e-mail program or you can attach the file to your mail program. Either way it will record the time and date you sent it and the turn number. It will also show whether you sent in the standard text format, zipped, or in the native Helper PBM. format. The format obviously is something to suit your opponent but once recorded all future turns will automatically go in the requested format until you decide to alter it. Importantly it also shows whether you are awaiting a turn or you have one to play or send. 3. When you receive a reply and save it to your PBEM game folder . If you open Helper, or refresh it with F5 it will generate a game folder with the correct name and file the old turn and show the new turns arrival time and its status as Play/Send. Double click on the this new turn and Helper will automatically open CM game, load your password and take you to the start of the turn. That is the basic and if you consider I have 200+ game folders in my CMAK PBEM folder of which I have made perhaps 30 and filed personally less than 100 files out of several thousand files you can see the time saved and convenience ! Now you might wonder why I would save all my turns. If you have the space to store them PBEMHelper has a nifty movie file system which allows all your active turns to be played like a movie interrupted only by the press of a key and the virtual instantaneous loading of the next movie file. Very useful in those long long games where someone returns files erratically and you need a refresher. Other little things is it has is a gamma correction facility for those dark screens, and you can check your computers system information from the Help screen. Advanced This is the exciting bit. I mentioned that Helper has its own format – PBM. This actually adds much more functionality as if both players use it then Helper can open the game ready to play from your e-mail program. Useful but not half as useful as the ability to play in Fast &Trusted mode. This mode once started means each e-mail carries information that allows each player to watch two movies and to plot two turns. Neat huh! The Fast part is obvious and the Trusted is because the system can be abused by an opponent into re-plotting if he does not like the result before he responds. A slight risk to run for the pleasure of playing three times quicker and the ability to see more of the battle in two minute chunks rather than one minute chunks separated by the time for extra e-mails. And a couple of helpful guides are here: http://www.gregories.net/CMAK/PBEMHelper-Aprimer.doc http://www.gregories.net/CMAK/Unofficial%20PBEM%20helper%20tutorial%20for%20CM.doc 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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