Battlefront

Try the late 1944 model of T-34/85 and you'll see much faster turret rotation. The earlier models do not have the electric motor. Charles

Uhu, I think there is a typo in what you posted about the Panther dates, as they seem to be reversed or something. When should the Panther be available to the Hungarians? Thanks, Charles [ January 03, 2003, 08:04 PM: Message edited by: Battlefront.com ]

Fixed for the upcoming v1.01. (No ETA yet, we're working on it...) Charles

The Sturmtiger has already seen more action in CMBB than it did in all of actual WW2. :cool: Great movies, guys! Charles

Hmmm... well as for the "what kills what"... there will be a CMBB strategy guide! :cool: Charles

Guys, if the tips presented above don't work for you, please check out this message thread for the latest info and a temporary fix. :cool: CMBB Installer Fix Message Thread Charles

Bam65, Please try to be patient with us. Matt's suggestions for copying files, etc., are only workarounds to give immediate help. Hopefully these techniques can get at least some people up and running while we work out a better and more permanent solution. And we are working on that right now. Charles

My disembodied head is kept in a temperature-controlled fluid-filled jar over at Madmatt's place. It's hard to type out code with no hands, but I manage to get the job done. Charles

BTS (developer) and BFC (online publisher) are technically separate companies. However, in practice there's a lot of overlap so we mainly prefer to go with the BFC (i.e. Battlefront.com) name. It's less confusing that way. Charles

I will check into this. Charles

Guys I will check into this. Expect some tweaks in v1.01. Charles

This is the funniest thing I've seen all week! Charles

"Expect some news about this very shortly." :cool: Charles

Redwolf: Yes, they copy protect all their products. Including a nice little game called Combat Mission - Beyond Overlord which has been on the market in Europe now for almost a year. See Munter's first hand account. Treeburst, you are correct about that being the purpose. However, my understanding is that the CD must be present only when the game is launched since it decrypts from the CD itself. But after that, there should be no problem. Think about it logically... the protection is there to ensure that a CD is used, which is what happens during boot up, so what is gained by checking during run time? The only thing that would eliminate is a LAN party using one legit copy to start up two games, which is such a minor concern I doubt they would even think of that being a problem. Michael, I already did that before. It doesn't work. When someone wants to make a mountain out of molehill, pretty much nothing we can do will avert it. Steve

And if anybody is interested, there is (yet another) discussion about the Waffengrenadier issue in the General Forum. Of particular note are my posts as well as the one from M. Hofbauer on Page 2. http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=003654 Steve

I think I can answer this one... I am pretty sure that the copy protection only checks the game during the initial boot proceedure. After that it is like any other CD. Since Combat Mission doesn't look to the CD for information at all (i.e. everything should be on the hard drive), I don't think there will be any problem with the removal of the CD after the game is booted. Also keep in mind that this is not "CDV's" copy protection software. They are using a product called SafeDisk, which is rapidly becoming a standard for protecting software. If there are problems with this software the only fault CDV has is that they use it, not that CDV itself screwed things up. Steve

And Mike, you might think of each post as being seperate from another. We do not. Patterns of behavior are of critical importance. The pattern shown by Commi18 is not at all positive, which is why he had better knock it off or find himself barred from posting to this Forum. Steve

Commi18, You are now on notice. Either grow up or take your postings to another forum. The choice is all yours, but I can promise you that if you continue to post like this you will be shown the virtual door. And if you have NO clue why you are being treated this way, then you really shouldn't be here. Steve

Commi18, some advice... think about it. Steve

Me thinks BTS could use better customers... 'cause some of them really stretch that $45 purchase price to include some sort of ownership of our souls. Look... take your pick. For every minute that one of us spends answering questions that probably don't even need to be asked or answered, something gets cut from CMBB's release. Yes folks, we do not have unlimited time to spend chit chatting at the moment. And yes folks, Madmatt does not sit around all day twiddling his thumbs waiting on pins and needles for something to do. After the game is released we will have more time for sure, but right now there is a push and a shove. If you shove, something gets pushed. To give you guys an idea, if I spend one hour of my time on this forum I either sleep only 4 hours insted of 5, or an entire vehicle model does not make it into the game. Sorry if some people don't understand the real world that surrounds them, but we do not revolve around the whims and desires of each individual customer. So if Matt says he doesn't have time to chit chat with you, perhaps you might keep in mind there is a tiny bit of a reason for it, and it is called Combat Mission - Barbarossa to Berlin. Steve

No hybrid CD and compressed. Yeah, we'll fit everything on there, but only just barely BTW, we feel that many Modders go a bit overboard with the texture resolution. Over a certain size there is no significant improvement in quality but a HUGE increase in file size and VRAM footprint. Ours are much higher res than CMBO, but not as big as some of the mods we have seen. Not that these Modders will ever admit that bigger isn't necessarily better Steve

Hi guys, Glad you like the new stuff! Some quick answers: 1. Turan wasn't shown because it was to be the next bone. Guess that means we don't have to throw another one soon 2. No, the wheat is fixed and does not get crushed as vehicles drive over them. That would be pretty tough to do graphically, which I am sure will be evident why when you see the game for real. 3. Yes, the texturing of all these vehicles has been, and still is, a huge time sink. Dan and myself, along with a couple of hand picked Modders, have been slaving away on them for months now. With the list as long as it is... well... we're trying to get them all done before you guys faint dead away from the long wait 4. The Panther D (early) is the only vehicle with an asymetrical turret side. In general asymetrical turret sides are a huge waste of valuable CD space (which is a SERIOUS concern for CMBB) and VRAM. But the Panther D (early) left us little choice due to the side hatch which was removed when the turret was reconfigured. However, there are asymetrical hull and turret details in nearly all models. The difference is that these details are not part of a general surface, but rather something that sits on top of it (like a tool box or something). 5. Yes, Modders are going to have their work cut out for themselves Not only are the textures highres this time, but there are soooooo many vehicles to choose from. We have also taken the extra effort to make the vast and overwhelming majority of the textures "self contained". In CMBO we shared a lot of textures inbetween models when possible so as to save on VRAM. That means you could have 3 StuGs all sharing 90% of the same textures. In CMBB we have something like 9 StuGs each with its own unique texture assignments. We might duplicate some of the artwork to save on time, but the "slots" themselves are totally seperate and can be modded independent of other vehicles. OK, now I go back to work! Steve

hehe... I wasn't going to padlock this, but bowing to popular request... SNAP Steve

Scipio, Why? Because your government was at least particular about which nasty bunch of people couldn't be called their historical names. If the German laws said we couldn't how the Soviet Hammer and Sickle, guess what wouldn't be in the CDV version? ince you can not grasp the simple concept that this is outside of our control (and CDVs), and apparently are the only one still wanting to argue for the sake of ticking people off, I am closing up this thread. Steve

Appreciate the thoughts. I think that is a pretty good summation, except for this part: Tsk tsk... you think we do not know our audience better than we do our own wives? For shame sir We did anticipate this reaction. We also expected it would be directed at us personally and emotionally. We also expected it to be a minority position. But the day we let our business decisions be swayed by emotionally charged minority opinions is the day we should just pack it in. Businesses fail quickest when they lose sight of the Big Picture. As it is, we don't like the compromise either. But taken along with the other possible options and concessions that CDV did grant us, this is a tiny consideration. Even for our European customers. We would like to retain the direct sales relationship with our European customers. Honestly, there is nothing we would like more. We even have a warehouse in Ireland that was all set up to handle the big release. The CDV deal makes much more sense from a business standpoint as well as a European customer standpoint. For every one bummed out direct CMBO customer there are probably 10 people buying CMBB that would NEVER have even heard of it had we not partnered with CDV. So wouldn't it be rather selfish as well as foolish (from a business standpoint) to write all those people off for the sake of some emotional responses from a minority of a minority? Unfortunately, overlapping sales territory is simply "not done" in the software industry. At least not in my 9 years of experience in it. This creates competition with oneself and that is never a good thing. As I said, we will see what we can do about the censorship issue, but as far as we can tell nothing is going to change. As far as us selling a PC version (as opposed to the Mac version) into Europe directly, that is absolutely not going to happen. At least not for CMBB. Who knows what the future holds? Steve