Schrullenhaft

One other note. If you intend on installing any of the modules, then the MODULE LICENSE KEY can activate the base CMSF game. The process would entail installing the base game, possibly patching the game to a certain level (depending on the module) and then installing the module and finally activating the game with that module license key. This will give you access to the entire base game and that module content. Here is the Knowledgebase article on the install process for CMSF.

I ran the same scenarios as Hister using my system with the following specs: AMD FX 8320 3.5GHz 8-core (4 modules totaling 8 integer, 4 floating point, up to 4.0GHz turbo mode) 8GB of DDR3 1600 (CAS 9) MSI GeForce GTX 660 Ti - 388.00 driver Asrock 880GM-LE FX motherboard (AMD 880G chipset) Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD Windows 7 Home 64-bit SP1 (latest patches) Running at a resolution of 1920 x 1200. Using the default settings in CMBN 4.0 (Balanced/Balanced, Vsync OFF and ON, AA OFF) and in the Nvidia Control Panel I typically got about 6 FPS (measured with the latest version of FRAPS) in "Op. Linnet II a USabn UKgrnd" on the German entry side of the map (all the way to the edge) and scrolling right or left looking at the Americans in Richelle. In "The Copse" scenario it measured around 28 FPS behind the allied armored units at the start (scrolled around the map a bit). Messing around with Vsync (both on and off), anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, Process Lasso (affinity, etc.), power saving settings in Windows control panel, etc. didn't seem to have a significant performance effect on the low FPS of 'Op. Linnet II...'. I overclocked the FX 8320 to 4.0GHz (simply using the multipliers in the BIOS and turning off several power saving features there too, such as APM, AMD Turbo Core Technology, CPU Thermal Throttle, etc.). With 'Op. Linnet II...' the FPS increased to only 7 FPS. Turning off the icons (Alt-I) did bump up the FPS by 1 additional frame (the option reduced the number of objects to be drawn in this view) to 8 FPS. There are some Hotfixes from Microsoft that supposedly address some issues with the Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture and Windows 7 involving CPU scheduling and power policies (KB2645594 and KB246060) that do NOT come through Windows Update (you have to request them from Microsoft). I have NOT applied these patches to see if they would make a difference since they CANNOT have their changes removed (supposedly), even if you uninstall them. A number of users on various forums have stated that the changes made little difference to their particular game's performance. I decided to compare this to an Intel system that was somewhat similar: Intel Core i5 4690K 3.5GHz 4-core (possibly running at 3.7 to 3.9GHz in turbo mode) 16GB of DDR3-2133 (CAS 9) eVGA GeForce GTX 670 - 388.00 driver Asrock Z97 Killer motherboard (Z97 chipset) Crucial MX100 512GB SSD Windows 7 Home 64-bit SP1 (latest patches) Running at a resolution of 1920 x 1200. Again using the same settings used on the FX system with CMBN and the Nvidia Control Panel I got 10 FPS in 'Op. Linnet II...' while scrolling on the far side looking at the American forces in the town. In 'The Copse' scenario the FPS went to 40 FPS behind the allied vehicles at their start positions. The biggest difference between the GTX 660 Ti and the GeForce GTX 670 is the greater memory bandwidth of the 670 since it has a 256-bit bus compared to the 660 Ti's 192-bit memory bus. So POSSIBLY the greater GPU memory bandwidth in conjunction with the Intel i5's higher IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) efficiency and the increased system memory bandwidth (faster system RAM) resulted in the higher frame rate on the Intel system, but only by so much. I ran a trace of the OpenGL calls used by CMBN while running 'Op. Linnet II a USabn UKgrnd' on the FX system. This recorded all of the OpenGL calls being used in each frame. The trace SEVERELY slowed down the system during the capture (a lot of data to be written to the trace file). Examining the trace file suggests that CMBN is SEVERLY CPU BOUND in certain graphical views. This is especially true with views of a large amount of units and terrain like that in 'Op. Linnet II...'. What appears to be happening is that some views in large scenarios of CM involve A LOT of CPU time in issuing instructions to the video card/'frame buffer'. The CPU is spending so much time handling part of the graphics workload (which IS normal) and sending instructions to the video card on what to draw that the video card does not have a full (new) frame of data to post to the frame buffer at a rate of 60 or 30 FPS (Vsync). At 30 FPS each frame would have to be generated between the CPU and the video card within 33.3ms. Instead this is taking around 100ms on the Intel system and about 142ms on the FX system (resulting in the 10 and 7 FPS respectively). Some frames in the trace file had hundreds of thousands of instructions, some reaching near 700,000 instructions (each one is not necessarily communicated between the CPU and video card, only a fraction of them are), whereas sections where the FPS was higher might only have less than 3000 instructions being executed. The low frame rate is a direct consequence of how busy the CPU is and this can be seen with both Intel and AMD CPUs. So the accusation comes up, is the CM graphics engine un-optimized ? To a certain extent, it is. There are limitations on what can be done in the environment and with the OpenGL 2.x calls that are available. CM could be optimized a bit further than it is currently, but this involves a HUGE amount of time experimenting and testing. Working against this optimization effort is CM's 'free' camera movement, the huge variety, number and size of maps available and the large variety and number of units.These features make it hard to come up with optimizations that work consistently without causing other problems. Such efforts at optimization are manpower and time that Battlefront simply does not have as Steve has stated earlier. Charles could be working on this for years in attempt to get better frame rates. While this would be a 'worthy goal', it is unrealistic from a business standpoint - there is no guarantee with the amount of time spent on optimizing would result in a significantly better performing graphics engine. Other, larger developers typically have TEAMS of people working on such optimizations (which, importantly, does allow them to accomplish certain optimization tasks within certain time frames too). When CMSF was started sometime in 2004 OpenGL 2.0 was the latest specification available (with the 2.1 specification coming out before CMSF was released). Utilizing newer versions of OpenGL to potentially optimize CM's graphics engine still involves a lot of work since the newer calls available don't necessarily involve built-in optimizations over the 2.0 calls. In fact a number of OpenGL calls have been deprecated in OpenGL 3.x and later and this could result in wholesale redesigning of the graphics engine. On top of this is the issue that newer versions of OpenGL may not be supported by a number of current user's video cards (and laptops and whole Mac models on the Apple side). As for the difference between the GTX 550 Ti and the GTX 660 Ti that Hister is experiencing, I'm not sure what may be going on. The GTX 550 Ti is based on the 'Fermi' architecture, while the GTX 660 Ti utilizes the 'Kepler' architecture. Kepler was optimized for the way games operate compared to the Fermi architecture which had slightly better performance in the 'compute' domain (using the GPU for physics calculations or other floating point, parallelized tasks). The GTX 660 Ti should have been a significant boost in video performance over the GTX 550 Ti, though this performance difference may not be too visible in CM due to the CPU bound nature of some views. It's possible that older drivers may have treated the Fermi architecture differently or simply that older drivers may have operated differently (there are trade-offs that drivers may make in image quality for performance - and sometimes this is 'baked into' the driver and isn't touched by the usual user-accessible controls). I have a GTX 570 I could potentially test, but I would probably need to know more details about the older setup to possibly reproduce the situation and see the differences first-hand.

This issue was CAUSED by AMD. They had a bug in their video drivers that prevented the games from working (an issue with the way Visual Basic or similar libraries handled video calls, I believe). Slightly older versions of the driver didn't have the bug, but newer video cards couldn't use those older drivers (there is a minimum version for each new video card). This happens every-so-often for games. The big AAA titles usually get a quick fix (within a month or two), but smaller game developers may not see a fix for a long time. I think I actually tried one of the 17.10 AMD driver releases and found that SC WW1/Breakthrough worked properly.

You may want to add an 'exception' within your security/anti-virus software for the CMFI Demo executable file. It's possible that it is being shut-down by your security software. However most security programs would also try to 'quarantine' such executable files, which would involve moving the executable file to somewhere else on the hard drive (possibly a hidden folder) and that would usually result in an error attempting to launch the file and for Windows to 'start searching' for it. The CMFI demo should be pretty much the same as the Normandy, Black Sea and Final Blitzkrieg when it comes to system requirements or permissions. However it is possible for security/anti-virus software to detect something different in each (leading to a 'false positive' - where a file appears infected but actually isn't).

No updates to shadows with the CM2 games as far as I'm aware. The 'sawtooth shadows' are a limitation of the graphics engine's implementation of lighting and shadows. To my knowledge 'softer shadows' would entail a significant performance penalty. You can look through the Performance and Quality Tips for Nvidia users thread and see if there are any settings that MIGHT help reduce some of the sawtooth effect of the shadows. However nothing gets rid of the sawtooth effect though.

The Alienware 17r4 is a laptop. It is possible that CM is running on the Intel integrated video rather than the GeForce GTX 1080, which could account for the blurry text since some of the built-in routines in the Intel drivers perform some strange AA functions on the text. In the 'Nvidia Control Panel' create 'profiles' for your CM games. This alone supposedly should have the GeForce recognize that it needs to run the CM game and not the Intel integrated video (since the system isn't recognizing that the CM games need the more powerful GPU to run).

17.7 worked for me and SC WW1/Breakthrough (a Win 7 install however).

As far as I'm aware the 'minimum' and 'recommended' specifications haven't really been changed/updated since CMSF in 2007. The engine has been updated significantly since then with regards to graphics. This is especially true of the 'version 2' engine that actually reduced the 3D model complexity and replaced it with bump-mapping to provide the missing model detail - with the idea of improving video performance. However there may be more calculations for the CPU to perform with the newer engines (more complex LOS/LOF, etc.). I would generally assume that an AMD FX 6300 should have been a decent performer for CM games. Admittedly newer Intel CPUs will have an advantage over the AMD FX series since they execute more 'instructions per clock' (IPC) resulting in better single-core performance (comparing at the same clock speed). To my knowledge the only code that is 'multi-core/thread' in CM is the scenario loading process. It was one of the few places in the code that could easily benefit from more cores/threads without having to significantly change the engine. Interestingly AMD GPUs suffer a huge hit in the scenario loading process for some reason. I can only assume that there is some weakness in the AMD OpenGL video drivers that is getting hit hard by the loading process (perhaps this is one of those processes that has to run on the CPU instead of the GPU for AMD as Steve mentioned earlier). Running a Nvidia GPU on the same system could potentially result in load times that are 2 - 3 times faster. Of course the issue in this thread isn't scenario loading times. As others have pointed out, you're running a huge scenario for comparison; something that tends to slow down even the fastest machines. This may be something of a CPU limitation/bottleneck, but I have no idea what is possibly being 'calculated' during screen movement that could result in lower FPS. In general CM video performance is slowed down by the number of units on screen, the number of buildings, the amount of trees and the complexity of the map (the number and magnitude of elevations). With a larger horizontal resolution ('2560') than the average '1980' your 'window' is much larger for what needs to be rendered on screen. The CM graphics engine tends to cut down on textures (their number and detail) after a certain range in order to maintain 'performance'. I don't know what the algorithm is for these calculations, but they may be a bit dated in their assumptions of GPU performance and memory capacity. However it is quite probable that those 'assumptions' may not be easily changed with the current engine. There are also fewer LODs for each model that other major games may have more of ('art' is expensive), which could result in somewhat smoother framerates if there were more LOD level models/textures. I have an FX 8320 which also runs at 3.5GHz (it just has 8 cores instead of 6 like the FX 6300 has) and a GTX 660Ti that I could test (on a cheap Asrock motherboard with an AMD 880 chipset). I'll have to install CMBN and see what I get, but I suspect the performance will be pretty much similar to what you are seeing already.

Hardware wise I believe you should be fine. You MIGHT need to contact support if during activation of your license keys you get a message about 'no more activations remaining'. In that case Support would need to add an activation to the license keys of products that no longer have any remaining activations.

A false positive. I'm not sure what it may be in the patches that would trigger an 'adware' issue with Avast. As 'Sgt. Squarehead' mentions, disable Avast temporarily while downloading and installing the patch. When you re-enable Avast, whitelist the game directory and possibly the patch directory (so it doesn't get quarantined in the future). Avast is usually good about false positives, but I have seen A LOT of the Battlefront patches and installers get tagged as being infected with Adware or something to that effect (and they're not, especially the downloads from the official Battlefront servers).

The problem with that 'hope' is that, as you say, once the game updates, the file is no longer recognized as the same (I don't think they go by filename) and the problem occurs once again. For whitelisting, if you update the game, then remove the whitelisting and re-add it. This should hopefully get the security software to recognize that this new file is acceptable and not some sort of unwanted change that might suggest it has been infected. And whitelisting the entire game directory (where the main game executable is at) should also work, though some security programs may not have that option (most usually do though). Even with whitelisting I've seen some security programs ignore the lists and continually quarantine/delete the files (and those security programs are removed from my computers...).

Yes, per 'Kevin2k' in the thread Upgrade 4 on Windows XP SP3 he was able to run CMBN, CMBS and CMFB engine 4.0 Upgrades on Windows XP SP3. That would indicate that the copy-protection version used for the 4.0 engine/upgrades is compatible with Windows XP. You will likely want to temporarily disable your security/AV software will installing the upgrades and possibly during the license activation process. Afterwards you may want to update the exceptions/white-list within your security/AV software for the new executables when re-enabling your security/AV software.

I tested the CMSF 1.30 Demo with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (v. 1703) just to see if there were OS issues or something else going on. I was able to load it and played one scenario without issues (i5-2500k, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 770, Asrock Z68 m/b, Avast free A/V, Nvidia 376.33 driver or something like that from Dec. 2016 - it may have been offered through Microsoft with Windows 10 and updates). With the Ryzens and the AMD chipsets I know that there are issues with the memory timing and other details mostly related to memory that may be addressed with BIOS updates. I'm not sure what sort of issues there may be with the CPU drivers for Windows 10 and the Ryzens. A recent update to the drivers (17.10 chipset drivers) tries to push the CPU-based power management over the Windows-based one. In fact, if you haven't already done so, you may want to mess around with the power management settings and go for a 'high-performance' setting if it is available and see if that makes a difference.

If you're running the CPU overclocked, you may want to 'step it back' to stock clock speeds and see if that has any effect on the frequency of crashing. The CM series is single-threaded, so the game itself won't benefit from the 6 cores of the Ryzen 5 1600 (though the multiple cores should have nothing to do with the crashing that you're experiencing). The CM series uses OpenGL as its graphics API, rather than DirectX which is much more common. I'm not aware of any current driver bugs with the Nvidia drivers, but it is possible that OpenGL routines may be more susceptible to overclocking issues. If you are overclocking your GPU (core or memory), you may want to bring it back to stock and see if that makes any difference. Try to shut down and apps and utilities that may be running in the background. If necessary, temporarily disable your security software and/or add exceptions within it. Usually security software will prevent programs from initially running, rather than interfere later on. I don't see much software for the TurtleBeach headphones you are running. If you're running some sort of 3rd party audio software you may want to temporarily disable that too.

It would seem possible that if you change your IP address (it would have to be of a certain range), then it might not be blocked by the 'black list'. However some black lists may be based on country / ISP, so all ranges of IPs provided by some ISPs may be blocked. Proxying services MIGHT work, but a number don't. It's possible that most well-known proxy providers might be black listed too (as an option, rather than for known malicious behavior).

Open a ticket with the Helpdesk (click on the blue button '+new ticket' in the upper right). You may need to provide your IP address, ISP (internet service provider) name and the country that you're in. To be honest I'm not sure how quickly that this can be resolved or if it will be resolved at all. I believe Battlefront subscribes to a service that tracks the volume of attacks, spam and other suspicious behavior that comes from certain ISPs and 'black lists' them. I'm not sure what 'white listing' options that they have with this service. The reason that they went with such a service was due to some malicious attacks in the past that crippled the website and community.

You can try running the game by right-clicking on the icon and selecting "Run as administrator" from the popup menu. However I somewhat doubt this will get the game running. With upgrades (hardware or operating system) I usually expect an error with the activation that prevents re-activating the game. In such cases you would need to open a ticket with the Helpdesk (click on the blue '+new ticket' button in the upper right) where they can provide you an utility to delete the current activation and then allow you to reactivate the game. However your case seems a bit different in that you are getting prompted to activate the game (the previous error does not do this). Was your game a 'bundle' of SCWW1 and Breakthrough or did you purchase them as separate titles ? If they're separate titles, do you know which license key it is asking for, SCWW1 or Breakthrough ? Are you copying and pasting the license key from your Battlefront account or manually typing it in ?

Yes, you can uninstall your current Radeon driver and install a driver version BEFORE Catalyst 16.3. However if you're using one of the latest 'RX series' of video cards, then it will NOT be possible to install a video driver that doesn't have this problem (the 16.2.x and older drivers do NOT support the RX series).

Sorry I didn't see this post earlier. This is an old problem that cropped up on occasion. There doesn't appear to be any concrete way of resolving it since it appears to possibly be related to reading the real-time clock of the PC itself. These two threads mention the issue: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/8997-strange-problem-with-cmbb-and-cmbo/#comment-61082 http://community.battlefront.com/topic/6977-attn-dell-owners/#comment-50106 The second one has the closest thing to a solution. You may want to reboot your machine (i.e. - don't have it go to 'sleep' and simply wake it up) - possibly even shutting it down and powering it back up - and possibly wait for as long as 45 minutes to make sure that the real-time clock is fully sync'ing/stabilizing with Windows. Since this problem goes to back to much older PCs, I'm not sure if waiting for the clock to stabilize is necessary or not. My guess is that it MAY have to do with the computer not accurately tracking the real-time clock if it has been woken up from sleep mode (rather than being booted/powered up 'cold'). I assume that you're running CMBO 1.12, is that correct ? Was this a Battlefront purchased version or something you got from another website or a CDV distributed version ? The distribution version itself may make no difference, but I'm curious.

Is this on a laptop or desktop ? What video card do you have ? It sounds as if you're running on Intel integrated graphics (which could be the reason for the 'atrocious' graphics). With some laptops you may have to set some sort of 'profile' for the game within the control applet for the video card drivers to tell it to run on the 'dedicated' video rather than the Intel integrated video.

I tried this out (installing CMSF and modules under Windows 8.1) and this is what I did: 1. Followed the Knowledgebase article on I need to reinstall CMSF and one (or more) modules. How do I do that ? 2. I disabled my anti-virus (Avast) and then ran the base CMSF installer (v. 1.11). The anti-virus remains disabled throughout the entire install and licensing process. 3. I installed the Marines module (v. 1.11). 4. Ran CMSF, but it would NOT run until I right-clicked on it and selected "Run as administrator" from the popup menu. 5. This brought up the licensing dialog box for the Marines module. The activation was successful (both the base game and the Marines module are now activated). 6. I ran CMSF (did not necessarily need to use 'Run as administrator', but probably did). The game ran and the Marines module showed up. The game was at version 1.11. 7. Installed the British Forces module. 8. Ran CMSF (again with a 'Run as administrator' option) and licensed the British Forces module. 9. Ran CMSF and both Marines and British Forces module appeared (game at version 1.20 now). 10. Installed the 1.21a patch. The default selection was for the base game and both modules (top one). 11. Ran CMSF and it was now at version 1.21 and both modules were present. 12. Installed NATO module. 13. Ran CMSF (again, with 'Run as administrator') and all three modules appeared and the game was now at version 1.30. I didn't get to finish, but the 1.31 and 1.32 patches would need to be installed to get CMSF fully up-to-date. You need to make the correct selections with each patch to make sure that all of the modules are getting patched. If you make an incorrect selection, then you either get prompted for a license key for a module that you don't have or one or more modules disappear. If this happens, then just re-run the patch and make sure to make the correct selection. CMSF uses eLicense as its copy-protection system. During the license activation process a few files are downloaded and installed to run the license service. Prominently this is the 'Runservice.exe' file that gets copied to the 'C:\Windows' directory and gets installed as a service. It is possible that if security software is running during the initial license activation process that this installation might get interfered with, preventing CMSF from running. The Knowledgebase article Missing or not working Runservice.exe file mentions that the Helpdesk can send you the files if they are not present. However there are registry settings that may not be in place to allow it to function properly (if licensing got interfered with by security software). In the past DEP (Data Execution Prevention) needed to be set for the game executables and the Runservice.exe eLicense service file. I did NOT need to do that with my installation, but it is possible that some installations may need to do this. The Knowledgebase article When I launch the game nothing at all happens ! (or I get a 0xc0000005 error) deals with making the DEP settings that might be necessary for some users. Another Knowledgebase article that MIGHT be applicable mentions 'BEX' Problem Event: BEX. This involves permissions on the 'elicen40.dll', which MIGHT be the issue behind the error you reported of 0x0000142 Doing a google search on your original error of 0x0000142 I come across a number of mentions of performing some registry editing of an entry for 'AppInit DLLs'. I suspect that this MIGHT be related to the 'elicen40.dll' file or possibly the launching of the Battlefront logo video file as mentioned in the Knowlegebase article CMSF won't launch (you would need to rename the file to something other than 'intro.wmv'). I suggest renaming the intro logo video file and performing the permissions settings mentioned in the 'Problem Event: BEX' article BEFORE attempting the editing of the registry for the AppInit DLL setting (which might be reset back to the value before editing once some programs are run !).

The 'license error' may indicate that something has changed about the computer since Breakthrough was activated. Are you possibly using USB headphones or have something else about your computer that is different/new ? If you're using USB headphones, then unplug them and see if the error still continues. It's interesting that the base SC WW1 game is not getting this error, but Breakthrough is. If nothing has changed or it isn't possible/desirable to change it back, then you may want to open a ticket with the Helpdesk (click on blue '+new ticket' button in upper right). You may need to download and run the gsClean utility (which the Helpdesk can provide) to wipe out your current activation and reactivate.

The CMx1 series (CMBO, CMBB and CMAK) do NOT support widescreen resolutions. Typically the resolutions that they support (with some exceptions) are about 4:3, standard aspect ratio. 'Stretching' the screen to have the game fill out the entire screen can possibly be done by the video drivers (there are often ways of doing this especially with Nvidia drivers). However this will result in items that have a 'stretched'/distorted appearance (not their normal aspect ratio). With your display I would assume that CMAK is actually running at 1024x768 and the drivers and display circuitry display this at the standard aspect ratio (pixel for pixel) on the screen. Some displays will 'stretch' non-native resolutions to fit the screen, but as I said this results in stretched items on the display since this is not 'pixel for pixel'. Instead certain pixels are being doubled/duplicated at some point in order to stretch the 1024 horizontal resolution out to 1366.

You have the CMSF base game now with the NATO module and it will not work ? You may need to check you security/anti-virus software and make sure that there are exceptions for the game executables AND for the 'Runservice.exe' file in your Windows directory. Runservice.exe is the copy-protection system which can get interfered with or quarantined by some security software. The game executables can also get quarantined by some security programs. This Knowledgebase article on 'CMSF won't launch' also mentions the possible need for DEP (Data Execution Prevention) settings. The link within the first article goes to this Knowledgebase article on DEP. Also here is another Knowledgebase article on reinstalling CMSF and its modules.

Was this install of the CMSF NATO module over a fully patched CMSF 1.21 installation ? CMSF NATO does NOT operate by itself, but requires the base CMSF game to run. If you DO have a CMSF install that's been patched to 1.21, then it is possible that the NATO module got installed to the incorrect directory (or possibly its own directory within the game). That would result in a game executable that wouldn't run fully since most of the game files would be missing in that installation. You may want to double-check where your CMSF installation is at and attempt to run that (just to check that it is still functioning). Run the CMSF NATO installation again and double-check the installation path to ensure it matches the actual location of the working CMSF game.