Schrullenhaft

Now if there were only a way to change the "unknown" locator icons (cross for Germans, etc.) to little smilies.... Peng would see all these little smilies in the forests just waiting for him... what a bloodbath it would be.

der Bob - You have it correct. You should be saving a .cmb file. Instead of loading the text to the screen it is now saving it to a file. I believe, though I'm not sure, the .cmb files for the scenarios are fairly small. Look at the scenario file sizes in the Gold demo. The scenarios I downloaded from Moon's site were between 15Kb and 25Kb in size.

Thanks Moon. Downloaded what you had up. The "Counterattack at Carentan" is not active yet. Is it not finished or have you not had the time to get the links all activated ? Thanks again. It looks like you put a lot of effort and time into your scenarios/operations and your website. It all looks outstanding ! [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-16-2000).]

Cpl Straw MALS-24/HMM-265 (? God, I can't actually recall ?) MCAS Kaneohe, HI 1985-1989 A year stint in the Reserves at NAS Alameda, but got out to go to school. I know you ground-pounders and canon-cockers don't look at us Air Wing types as actually being in the Corps.... Semper Fi !

You may want to take any advice here with a... huge dose of laxatives. Are you planning on going to college ? If so then the Army Reserve may interfere with school. Especially if you get assigned to a unit that gets called up for duty (which more and more are these days). Your MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) may be determined by what billets are available at Reserve units within reasonable driving distance. You may find many of these billets to be unexciting and downright boring . You will also have to go to your "specialist school" sometime after bootcamp. Depending on your MOS this may be as short as three weeks to almost a year (though that is very rare - the technical ones can take almost that long). So bootcamp isn't the only thing you will need to consider time-wise. While I assume that you aren't a recreational drug user, you will DEFINITELY have to not be one in the military. So even if you experiment with some drugs, you may find yourself in trouble if your unit has to have a urinalysis that month (or next). This can cause serious problems for you. Be aware that most Reservist billets are often dull. You may just find yourself doing useless things. This isn't always true, but it often is (unfortunately). This can vary depending on the Reservist unit in your area. And the final caveat I already mentioned. If your Reservist unit has special equipment that few active-duty ones have, then your chances of being deployed grow exponentially (this is often true of Reservist Air Refueling units in the Air Force). Depending on what you're doing with your life you can find this an incredible burden to bear as it can interfere drastically with your plans. Well, these are the negatives... It's the recruiter's (unenviable) job to sell you on the positives. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-14-2000).]

Which platform are you running on - PC or Mac ? A number of users on this forum have claimed certain bugs with the ATI-based video cards. The higher end ATI's I've used (based on the Rage Pro 128's) have worked fine with the Beta and Gold Demos (with the latest drivers). If you are considering getting an "ATI Expert" you may want to refine that a little. There are a number of models with different chipsets. In the ATI Expert line I would recommend the Xpert 2000 AGP 32Mb (if you have an AGP slot and a PC). If the "Xpert" you're looking at has less than 16Mb of RAM it probably isn't really worth buying (if you can afford something more expensive).

You may want to reduce your resolution (I believe the iMacs can do this) to 800x600/832x624 or 640x480 and delete the "prefs" file. On a Mac I'm not sure where the prefs file is, but it is probably in the CM folder. When you start up CM you should eventually get a black screen listing the resolution. If you don't get this, then you may have a driver problem with the video or a corrupt installation of CM. I believe the iMacs have a 4Mb built-in ATI card. Go to Apple's website and download the latest video drivers for your iMac. I'm not sure if your OS version makes a difference or not. If you're running 9.0x you probably have the latest Game Sprockets. If not download those too (though I believe CM is only using them for sound). There are plenty of other iMac owners on this forum you can give you additional advice. As for a 3D card... I'm not sure what is available for an iMac - probably nothing. If you had a Mac with PCI slots then I believe your choices are usually limited to ATI and 3dfx. Due to the need for Rave compatibility ATI would be your best bet. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-14-2000).]

SuperTed - about the S540 Extreme: there are comments about it in the "asking for help with video question" thread posted today. Basically S3 (which owns Diamond now and makes the video chip on the card) does not do a very good job with their DirectX drivers (they quite often have minor bug glitches that can drive you nuts). Performance-wise I'm not sure exactly where it ranks. I would GUESS that it is probably slower than the NVidia TNT2 Ultras, GeForce series and the 32Mb Voodoo 3's. Since S3 hasn't been known for vigoursly updating their drivers I believe most people here would recommend against getting one. Depending on what bus type you have available (PCI or AGP) will determine what cards you can pick (and even then there is a possiblity of motherboard/power supply problems depending on which card you get). If you need help in finding out what buses you have on your board you will probably have to open up your computer (though there are some utilities that can give you some fairly accurate info on this instead - but I can't recall them). If you're limited to PCI then your best bet would be a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI 16Mb. I've heard of, but not seen, TNT/TNT2 PCIs w/16Mb which may be a little better. If you have an AGP slot, then all the previous suggestions would probably work. If you're really concerned about graphic detail and and using high-res textures then you're going to want a card w/ 32Mb of RAM. Most of these cards are going to cost US$170+ for the better performers.

I had received confirmation from Steve that they had charged my card two days ago. However the charge still hasn't shown up on my account. But by subtracting my current debt from my credit limit and comparing against my available credit I came up with a US$53.00 difference. It hasn't shown up as "unbilled activity" yet on either the website or the phone system. It does take awhile for some credit card companies to register all transactions against an account (though you should get an almost immediate hit - at least within 24 hours of a business day - against your available credit). This can be several days in fact. If you are fairly sure of the activity on your credit card then you could probably just subtract your current balance from your credit limit and see if it matches your currently available credit. Yeah, a bit simplistic, but it worked for me. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-14-2000).]

Rick - here are the latest drivers from Creative: http://www.creative.com/support/files/download.asp?reg=0&OS=Win98∏=sb_ensq&select=Get+Files Be aware though that the number on the chip (ES1371) has to match. There are other versions such as ES1370 and ES1373. This driver doesn't have any wavesets (primarily used for MIDI) and it apparently needs a specific previous version to upgrade from. Here is the Ensoniq site driver: http://www.ensoniq.com/audiopci.html Again you may have to be careful about the chip version (though Ensoniq doesn't list it here). Apparently the Ensoniq AudioPCI is equivalent to the SB PCI 64, but I'm not sure of this. Other large manufacturer websites (Gateway, Dell, etc.) may also offer the drivers (some of them will have the full install versions with wavesets, but at 8 - 16Mb in size for the full download). The problems here though are that you may have to identify the card by the MFG's part no. rather than by the SB designation. These drivers are also not the latest most of the time. Mikester - as Kingtiger said: choppy sound can often be attributed to shared/conflicting IRQ's. Some shorter sounds may play fine, but longer ones may experience choppiness if there is an IRQ problem. Sometimes the startup sound isn't a good judge of a sound problem because of the various files that load up at the same time as the audio may be attempting to play. Play the "Microsoft Sound" in your Sound control panel and see if it plays w/o problem.

Mikester - DirectX DOES control the sound (if the game is using DirectX as its API - which CM is doing). The lastest major rev. of the Live drivers is Liveware 3.0. I would highly suggest upgrading to this (you may have it already, but quite likely you may have rev. 2.0 or 2.1). I personally had problems with sound in CM Beta Demo until I upgraded to v. 3.0. I don't know if there's any compatibility problems w/ DirectX 7 NOT being present on the system, but I believe it should work with your current version. Rick - it appears that your sound driver is having a problem with some of the .wav files that CM is playing (yeah, that's obvious at this point). It may very well be the drivers. Since your sound card company has been bought out you may need to do some digging around to find anything newer (if it exists). DirectX will usually identify the chipset on your soundcard (it won't recognize/update a lot of soundcards however) and ask if you want to update it (if it fits the numbering/version scheme of DirectX). If you have a PCI soundcard then you will most likely be limited to drivers supplied by the manufacturer since there is a bit of software emulation going on w/ PCI soundcards. If you can provide more info on your card then we may be able to point you to some possibilities for updating your drivers. If the card is an Ensoniq then Creative has purchased them and there may be a compatible driver available from them (though it is usually an UPGRADE driver and not a full install). You may want to tinker around with the settings for sound to see if it helps or not. Some people have mentioned that they had problems with the CM Beta Demo and changed a control panel setting to correct the problem. In Windows 98 go to Control Panel > Multimedia control panel > Audio tab > Advanced Properties button > Performance tab and adjust the Hardware Acceleration slider to the left (towards "none"). You may want to start all the way to the left and reboot. Start up CM and see if this helps or not. Some other settings related to sound can also be changed from your DirectX DXDIAG or SETUP apps (which can be found in C:/PROGRAM FILES/DIRECTX/ and either the SETUP directory or if may just be SETUP.EXE (depends on the version of DirectX you're running). [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-14-2000).]

kingtiger - Yeah, you gotta love NT. For some reason (obviously there is a programming/compatiblity one) the first partition has the 4Gb and under limitation due to some FAT-BOOT like compatibility and 1024 cylinders. I tried to make sense of the MS documentation on it, but came away still confused - so much for New Technology. Mark IV - You may not be able to boot off of an external drive unless you are running SCSI. Most of the external drives are probably going to require a device driver. If you opt for an "exchangeable" hard drive I suggest looking at manufacturers that specialize in "drive replacement kits" geared towards certain brands of laptops. It will cost a bit more, but if you're lucky you'll have a hard drive that you can swap out easily (which isn't always the case). If directly swapping your hard drive out isn't possible or too much of a hassle then you are looking at a dual boot solution. I believe that you may have to get a 3rd party product to do this or modify some of the "boot files" in NT to have the Boot Manager point to another partition as an option to boot from (I believe it can be done, but don't know the settings). I don't know how well this works if you get an external drive that operates off of a parallel, PC Card or USB port since a device driver will be needed (and NT's Boot Manager won't recognize the partition to boot from). Aaahhh... annoying details left and right.

As DEFBUNGIS mentioned... No way AT ALL you will get CM to run with NT 4.0. DirectX 3.0 is the latest and LAST version of DirectX that NT 4.0 will see. CM is completely dependent on DirectX 6.x or later (it won't draw the screen properly otherwise). You say that the drive was partitioned. Do you mean that it was partitioned into two or more logical drives or as a single drive ? If you have a second partition what file format and OS are on it ? If there is no OS on it (meaning that it isn't set to boot OS/2 or another copy of NT, etc.) you could possibly use a partitioning utility like PartitionMagic to set it up so that it could be a Win98 (there's possibly a manual method to do this, but I can't recall the exact steps). If your drive is currently partitioned as a single logical drive and it is NTFS file system, then there is no way to install Win9x on that particular partition (if it is a FAT16 then you possibly could). It may be possible to use a utility to reduce the NTFS partition (if the free space is available) to allow for a second partition, but I'm not sure if this can be done with the utilities available. A W2K upgrade would be nice, but your IS dept. will possibly have qualms if there are any custom apps that you are running, etc. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-13-2000).]

Although I'm not using the NVidia reference drivers (Creative actually updated to the latest rev.) you may want to check for overclocking. Specifically you may want to check for "memory" overclocking since this is the most common cause for a program to lock up. I believe, though I'm not sure, that the newest drivers have an overclocking page or something to that effect.

Hmmm... almost no knowledge whatsoever on ballistics. As for the question about the Swiss developing the "ideal" small firearm... I read an article a year or two ago that dealt with the subject. Apparently the Swiss had developed a very effective round (with the attribute of causing severe flesh wounds). However there was a public outcry about such an "inhumane" developement in small arms that further developement and deployment of such weapons was stopped in favor of something that caused more "clean" wounds. Admittedly I forget where I read the article... it primarily dealt with the lead scientist who was developing the "clean" round.

Oooppss... double post. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-09-2000).]

I'm obviously not Charles or Steve... I believe what you are asking for is limited by the OS. The file dialog box is the standard one defined by Windows DLLs (in the case of PCs). I highly doubt (but don't know for sure) that there are any programming tweaks that can be done to modify the dialog box's behavior. To change the dialog to have the features you wanted would require writing the code from scratch in order to customize it and plug into the file system. It would be a bit of a hassle to say the least. An unfortunate set of circumstances, but it does allow Charles to concentrate on the game mechanics. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-09-2000).]

We will need to know more about your video card (i.e. - what exact model or chipset is on it). Some of the older NVidia chips MAY not do transparency, but I don't know. The Riva 128 is a possibility in this case. The thing to do is to find out your chipset or video card manufacturer and get the latest drivers. NVidia has some reference drivers posted on their website and you can find even newer reference drivers on other sites like reactorcritical, etc. Reactorcritical's website: (you will need to know the chipset you have on your card to get the correct driver - if you have a TNT/TNT2 then I would recommend the v.5.08 driver) http://www.reactorcritical.com/download.shtml NVidia's website: http://www.nvidia.com/Products/Drivers.nsf ("accept" the license and you should be able to pick your OS and then the driver series, everything other than the Riva series uses the new Detonator2 drivers). Just in case there are problems you may want to keep your old drivers handy to reinstall.

Uh... I think it comes down to more of a matter of taking the time to change the 3D models of the jeep (an extrusion like Capt. Manieri mentioned would require new vertices... or something like that). The tools on the AFVs are only textures. You can make an AFV texture sans tools. Some Shermans had "Cullin's" devices (not sure of the exact name)in the front of their hull to help in breaching bocage. We MAY see that (unexposed feature ?), but more than likely not at this point. If a weapon system or tactical maneuver was consistently used in a practical manner (that fits within CM's scope) then it may be included in the future. Such decisions are obviously up to Charles & Steve as to whether it is worth taking the time to model or not. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-08-2000).]

Tres chic, Mad & Kwazy. How much do you both plan on modifying in CM ? Will you get to most of the textures & sounds or are you both just concentrating on a select few ?

While a "downloadable" version of CM is absolutely out of the question a PDF of the manual doesn't sound like a bad idea ! It would kind of placate us drooling idiots waiting for CM, which will probably arrive while I'm in the middle of a system transition at work (movin' to a Sun system) and won't have time to even think. Yeah... yer all cryin' fer me...

Both cards should work. Though the ATI Rage 128 Pro's I've seen had 32Mb of memory. Some people have claimed to have problems with the drivers, but the Beta & Gold demos both played fine on my computers with the latest drivers (transparencies and all). Between the two I would probably recommend the NVidia TNT2 M64, though the M64 is either a slightly slower version of the chip or is matched to slower memory (uh... that's a guess). The NVidias have good graphic quality and typically good speed. Video cards are always changing however; so you may be jealous of the latest generation of cards that seem to come out every 6 months. Although video cards don't die too often you may want to make sure of the warranty you get with your card. NVidia-based boards are assembled by many OEM manufacturers, some are better than others.

Elvis - Anzio & Monte Cassino are both south of Rome (south & southeast, respectively). There should be some battle-sites in the north of Italy where you are visiting, but they aren't as well known as these other two. I'm jealous of all you guys going to Europe for the summer (though I wouldn't want to face all the tourist crowds). If anyone is heading to Southern Germany/Austria there is the "Passion Play" in Oberammergau (uh.. something like that) just north of Innsbruck. It comes around once a decade, but the tickets are probably already gone.

I would suggest deleting whatever "pref" file there is for CM (I guess it is in the System Folder - Preferences Folder; I don't know w/ System 9.x). You will possibly have to reduce your resolution; I'd try 640 x 480 first. Launch CM and see if you get the black screen with the resolution listed on it as CM starts. If this works then you can possibly increase your resolution to 832 x 624 (or whatever it is that the Voodoo3 supports). If this doesn't work then you may have to remove/delete the control panels/extensions for your Voodoo card and install a fresh set.

I live in the Mountain Time Zone, but my body-clock must be in another... I live in Utah. Can't remember my ICQ number however... Now I recall, 26402051 (don't have it up much though). [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 05-27-2000).]