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I've been playing the new patch for several days and have noticed a consistent "anomaly." If I hit "escape" it minimizes the game (always has, still does). When I click on the taskbar to reopen the game, though, the screen redraws except for the taskbar portion--so the MPP values for Italy and USSR are hidden under the taskbar. I have to save the game, exit and reenter. Then everything's fine.

This didn't happen in previous versions. Any ideas? [PS I have Windows 98/IBM Thinkpad]

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I just ran a test on Windows 98 and while it did not happen each time it did happen a few times.

This is a new issue and does have to do with the recent DirectX/driver changes I made for compatibility with newer video cards. Some newer cards were causing much worse problmes such as killing and restoring focus with the screen flickering and going black each time you navigated through a game window.

I'll look into it to see what can be done programmatically since it is a real challenge to have a consistent setup for each flavour of Windows, fortunately does not happen in XP, but when it happened to me in Win98 I was eventually able to restore the window by either clicking on the game window again, or the taskbar or by minimizing and restoring without having to restart the game. Let me know if that helps or even works.

Thanks,

Hubert

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==============================================

UPDATE: I tried the new 1.07beta and all seems well... It corrected all 3 problems... You can sleep well and forget this post... ;)

==============================================

I also saw the "Escape/Taskbar" bug...

- If I press Esc in the main screen and return, I have the taskbar hiding the 3 bottom countries MPPs... To counter that, I click an other screen, like 'War Map' then return back to the main screen... Now most of the taskbar is gone, except where the MPPs are displayed, but now I can see the numbers with the Taskbar in background...

- If I press Esc in a popup-menu screen and return, when I close the popup, the Taskbar disappear completely...

- Now the Big Bad Bug: If I press Esc when in the 'War Map', when I try to return to SC = CTD!!! (Crash To Desktop)...

Note: I used the Old 1.07beta... downloading the new beta now ;)

[ April 21, 2003, 02:35 AM: Message edited by: Minotaur ]

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I run windows XP without the patch and when I alt-tab out of the game and come back in often I bring unwanted pieces of Explorer or my desktop into the background, so I try to avoid doing it. I'm not complaining too much so few games allow you to step out and in without hanging!

Usually if you alt tab a few times and remove the background windows it seems to fix itself the graphics filter what was interfering

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nothing to do with anything of import here, but.....

i used to be greeted on the forum with an acknowledgement that i was still logged in, and my name was used as "disorder is logged in" or similar.

recently ive noticed that after i log in it still shows me as "not logged in" at top left. i can still post, so i must be logged in right? just wondering if this is just me.

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Originally posted by Liam:

With any and all Versions of SC...Same issue

I also run XP<without the update package>

Yeah this is a strange issue, it all depends on each system sometimes and like I said, on mine it seems to work most of the time but then the odd instance I get the graphic mess on the bottom of my screen. Sorry that I can't say more than that at the moment but I'll see what I can do.

Hubert

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Originally posted by disorder:

nothing to do with anything of import here, but.....

i used to be greeted on the forum with an acknowledgement that i was still logged in, and my name was used as "disorder is logged in" or similar.

recently ive noticed that after i log in it still shows me as "not logged in" at top left. i can still post, so i must be logged in right? just wondering if this is just me.

Strange... try contacting webmaster@battlefront.com and see if he might have something to add. For me I'm pretty much on the outside looking in on these forums as well... well other than the fact I get to move the rowdy threads once in a while ;)

Hubert

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  • 4 weeks later...

I am having a different display problem: Whenever the program changes screens (such as occurs when pressing the Options button when on the main screen) the screen goes blank for a couple of seconds and then redraws. When it redraws it looks fine, but the delay is annoying.

I am playing the 1.04 Demo (waiting for my purchased copy to arrive).

I have tried on three machines all running Window XP Professional. The problem occurs on two machines (a P4 2.4 with a 32MB Radeon Mobility 7500 and a P4 1.3 with a 64MB Radeon 8500 LE but not on a P4 1.7 with a 64mb Nvidia Ti200. All machines are running the latest drivers although the Mobility uses Dell drivers which are a couple of months old.

Has anyone else had problems with ATI Radeon cards? Is a problem that was fixed in the full version?

Thanks in advance for any help.

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I have had a problem with the display screen shifting permanently about 1/4 inch from the bottom to the top when I leave the game. Only rebooting fixes it. It used to be a 100% of the time issue, but it has greatly improved under the 1.07 beta patch.

I am running Windows XP, with a 17-inch Viewsonic flatscreen monitor which has a native screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels and which is what I normally run. I run 16-bit colors on my GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card with 6.13.10.4109 drivers. I am running at least DirectX 8.1.

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Originally posted by Rouspéteur:

I am having a different display problem: Whenever the program changes screens (such as occurs when pressing the Options button when on the main screen) the screen goes blank for a couple of seconds and then redraws. When it redraws it looks fine, but the delay is annoying.

I am playing the 1.04 Demo (waiting for my purchased copy to arrive).

I have tried on three machines all running Window XP Professional. The problem occurs on two machines (a P4 2.4 with a 32MB Radeon Mobility 7500 and a P4 1.3 with a 64MB Radeon 8500 LE but not on a P4 1.7 with a 64mb Nvidia Ti200. All machines are running the latest drivers although the Mobility uses Dell drivers which are a couple of months old.

Has anyone else had problems with ATI Radeon cards? Is a problem that was fixed in the full version?

Thanks in advance for any help.

This problem has been fixed with the v1.07 beta so this could be downloaded for the full version when it arrives or you can for now temporarily turn DirectX off by changing the line directx = 1 to 'directx = 0' in your SC.ini file which can be found in the SC installation directory. The only downside to this is that it might distort your desktop icons when you exit the game so if it does it may just be a choice between which two evils is worse.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

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Originally posted by Dan Fenton:

I have had a problem with the display screen shifting permanently about 1/4 inch from the bottom to the top when I leave the game. Only rebooting fixes it. It used to be a 100% of the time issue, but it has greatly improved under the 1.07 beta patch.

I am running Windows XP, with a 17-inch Viewsonic flatscreen monitor which has a native screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels and which is what I normally run. I run 16-bit colors on my GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card with 6.13.10.4109 drivers. I am running at least DirectX 8.1.

Not sure about that one, might be related to your monitor but probably not as it only seems to happen once in a while. Perhaps try running at a different refresh rate (maybe the maximum supported at 1280x1024) and see if that helps.

Hubert

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  • 2 weeks later...
This problem has been fixed with the v1.07 beta so this could be downloaded for the full version when it arrives or you can for now temporarily turn DirectX off by changing the line directx = 1 to 'directx = 0' in your SC.ini file which can be found in the SC installation directory. The only downside to this is that it might distort your desktop icons when you exit the game so if it does it may just be a choice between which two evils is worse.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

I received the game Wednesday and applied the 1.07 patch.

It did fix the problem. (At first I thought it hadn't but I had inadvertently installed the patch in C:\Games\Strategic Command\Strategic Command.) Sorry for any confusion the original version of this post might have caused.

Rouspéteur

[ June 06, 2003, 05:40 PM: Message edited by: Rouspéteur ]

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I tried disabling DirectX and the monitor problem did not occur when I exited the game. However, most all of my icons moved on my desktop. This would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

However, I now have a suspicion of what might be causing the issue. I truly love the interface 1.1 version interface mod that I downloaded. When you added the Suez transit arrows, I had to use less of that mod. When I installed the 1.07 Beta, I could not install the entire mod, because the game would not run. Over a long period of time, I added a few files of the mod at a time to determine what caused the game to not load (main_menu_buttons.bmp). During this time, I noticed that I seldom had monitor screen shifting problems. I initially attributed that to stated video improvements from the 1.07 beta patch. A few days ago, I added the last of the working mod files. I started having consistant screen shifting problems again.

I suspect that either certain 24-bit mod bmp files or a certain critical mass number of 24-bit mod bmp files are causing something to shift my screen upon exiting the game. I would like to keep as many of the interface mod bmp files as possible. As the game designer do you think that these 24-bit bmp files are the problem and if so, what is would be the most effective compromise of standard 8-bit and 24-bit files?

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I think you might have narrowed it down with respect to the mod files. This is a known issue I've seen first hand with a high number of 24-bit bmp files and precisely why the original game files are mostly 8-bit. To be honest I'm not sure of the critical mass numbers here, but what I've done and seems to work well is to convert finalized 24-bit files to 8-bit using a graphics editing program. Most will allow you to do optimized conversions where very little detail is lost.

If you don't have access to high end stuff, there are trial versions of some pretty good editing programs available like Paint Shop Pro etc. which should do the trick.

http://www.jasc.com/

Or if you are familiar with programs like ACDSEE, it will allow you to do this type of conversion quite easily as well.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

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