Madmatt

HOW TO REACTIVATE THE ESCAPE KEY Press and the following three keys at the same time to toggle the ESCape key function on or off: SHIFT Alt (Doh! earlier I said it was control, my bad!) ; Voilla! Madmatt [ November 21, 2003, 10:54 AM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

Any game purchased from us online is a native Battlefront.com product and would not have any of the former CDV (ahem) alterations. Madmatt

Gordon has said in the past that he would *like* to make a native version of CMMOS but a little thing called REAL LIFE seems to intrude on his available time. Madmatt

I understand what your saying about the decissions of other companies, but what they did is pointless to me, because our situation could not be changed. Irregardless of what company XYZ did with regards to OS-X support, we had to do what we did. What a customer feels is never pointless however, and thats not what I was referring to. But their personal feelings about how we conduct business is not something I can get to worked up over as we do the very best we can and the majority of our customer base understands and appreciates it. I am not one to sugar coat ANYTHING, to ANYONE. I tell you how things are. I wish more construction contractors would do the same. Also, Its not that we didn't try to change, we spent considerable time and resources looking to see if we could support OS-X and without recoding the game from the ground up, it just couldn't be done. You own a construction business, correct, what sort of position would you be in for example if one of your two primary customers suddenly, and unexpectedly changed their specs and left you with not only a current project but several future projects in jeopardy of no longer being completed without massive and costly retooling of your internal procedures, which would undoubtably throw your entire work schedule out of whack for years while you other customer (and a bigger one to boot) asked for no such spec change? Had we thrown ourselves into recoding the entire game it would have delayed CMBB and CMAK by at LEAST a year and that was something we simply could not afford to do. A messy analogy to be sure, but the point is that is very similar to the spot Apple put us in. Guys, we HATE the position we are in with regards to this whole mess, and no one seems to understand the monumental bending over Apple threw on us, and so unexpecetedly. We were and still are a Licensed Apple Software Developer. Combat Mission Beyond Overlord was FEATURED, not just displayed but FEATURED in a Apple/Mac developers conference just a few months before OS-X was unveiled and Apple never breathed a word that Rave3D was getting totally cut out and that their support of it in Classic Mode would be so shoddy. We were not the only software developer caught unawares of this move either. Look how long it took Photoshop to come out with a OS-X version, to see the difficulty in revamping an entire product line. We are now one of just a handfull of game companies that still tries, as best we can, to support the Mac gaming community. I know how it must look to you guys, that we don't care, that we don't listen, but this whole topic as been gone over and over and over and over. CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK were WRITTEN on a G3 Mac, hell Charles will probably code CMX2 on a Mac as well. To say we turned our backs on the Mac is ludicrious. I would say its about as insane as Apple deciding to drop support for a perfectly stable and entrenched gaming API...Oh wait a sec...they did. Now then, as to the color issue on your Mac, that is a glitch in the video extensions for that card. The problem is well known by Apple (god knows we have reported it enough times) and it seems to be a problem with how the extensions are reporting their available texture memory. The extensions are not freeing up the texture memory as effeciently as they should and the results are those multi-colored textures you see because the card doesn't think its frame buffer can hold the actual graphics it should display. We tried to code around this, but its a core level driver issue and one that only Apple or ATI can resolve. I am sure that's not the answer you want to hear, and its not the answer I wish I had to give,but thats simply how it is. The order page for all CM products state specifically that Mac's with Radeon 9000 cards will have problems and advises people to test the demo first to see if they are going to have issues. I can't really do more than that. Madmatt [ November 20, 2003, 09:59 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

I was just talking to Charles and he suggested something else to try. When you get that black screen, what is occuring, as I said above, is that the monitor is blanking itself because the DirectX test is trying to run in too high of a refresh rate. Now, that test will scroill through a variety of different resolutions and refresh rates, but it can take several minutes to go through them all. The next time you launch the game and you get a black screen and dont hear the music (which is important as it indicates the game has not launched yet) try and just wait for a few minutes and listen if you can here the monitor *switch* modes. It should eventually get to a mode that will be displayed (probably 800x600@60hz). When you can see the screen, click the ACCEPT button which should launch the game. If that works,I maybe able to hand edit your prefs file to allow you to run at a higher resolution and refresh rate but I want to see if just waiting to see if the screen modes changes works yet. Please let me know what you find! Madmatt

Yunfat, I have asked Martin to make special note of the OS specs in the followup press releases. Obviously we can not control what sites decide to post as they often truncate the full release and just copy the highlights. The original press release does state that the game is a 9.x app, actually says it in the first sentence! Now, I have gone round and round about the Mac issue before and I don't really have the time to do so again but I feel this is important to once more state our position on this. The simple truth is that recoding the existing games to support OS-X was simply not in our means before. You don't have to deal with the loss of income and sales from not having your flagship game support OS-X, we do, so don't try and lecture me about us being driven solely by money, you simply have no clue to what a massive pain in the ass this situation has been for us. CMX2 will be a native OS-X product, but CMX2 was only possible because of the sales of the games that preceeded it. It was simply impossible from not only from a financial but resource standpoint to stop all development of CMBB or CMAK to instead recode the core game engine to natively support OS-X. What other small companies have done with regards to OS-X is meaningless to me. Every situation is unique and in the genre of wargames, and gaming in general, the Mac installed gaming userbase is a fraction of the PC's and this is a legitimate concern for a gaming publisher, which is what we are. And how can you have less programing resources than us?!? We got one guy that codes all of CM! We looked at the situation when OS-X was released without the native Rave3d support we were originally told it would contain and we did the only thing that would guarantee we would still be around years later. That move was to continue with our orginal product schedule which called for the creation and developement of at least 2 additional CM titles (released on both platforms) beyond CMBO using incremental code improvements and changes. After that point, we figured we would be in a place to overhaul the entire game engine, from the ground up, and apply all that we learned about making 3D wargames into a new 3D gaming engine, supporting all the current technologies and OS's that would be out at that time, and thats what we are doing with the development of CMX2. So, you got a major chip on your shoulder about us and OS-X, hey fine, thats your choice, but you simply do not know all the facts, nor do you need to know them. All you need to know is, as it stands today, OS-X will not be natively supported until CMX2. Madmatt p.s. I have just uploaded an updated Radeon text file which should work with CMBO,CMBB and CMAK, see the troubleshooting guides for details and download link. p.s.s By the way, you might want to back off on your vitriolic wording on what you perceive of the truth. I will not continue to overlook it and its not appreciated. We do not give out "bogus" info and the games DO work on Mac's that run OS 9.X. So regardless of what you feel about our OS compatability, that is the truth. [ November 20, 2003, 07:09 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

Oour overall percentage of such damage is lower than 15%, I believe its lower than 10% actually but there are certain factors that you need to remember. There are more actions with armor played out in a single day in CM than probably ever occured in all of WWII! When thousands of players play battles with tanks against tanks, you are going to see %'s slightly skewed. As to overly penalizing the player, well I think we go too far in the other direction by being a little too generous on any of about a hundred different game elements related to vehicles so in the end everything pretty much balances out. Madmatt

You should have only gotten a single confirmation. Did each confirmation have a different order number listed? If so then the order system detected that either you pressed the order button multiple times by mistake (which can happen but there is java code that runs to prevent from occuring, normally) or perhaps the email for some reason got repeated/resent which can also happen as a normal network/internet glitch with SMTP traffic. If the order numbers are different in each email, please contact sales@battlefront.com at once! Give them the order numbers and they will cancel the extra orders and I will credit back the amount charged to your card for the extra orders. Madmatt

Since I only ever see this problem on Nvidia cards I think it is related to refresh rates. A good utility to try out (even though the latest nvidia drivers allow you to configure refresh rates) is NVRefresh Tool which you can get from www.guru3d.com What you should do is run that utility and set a safe (60hz) refresh rate for the resolution your desktop is set to at 16bits. Then launch the game. If it works, then delete the Prefs file and you can continue to raise the refresh rate a little at a time until you get your maximum accepted rate. What I think is happening is that most people have their desktops set to 32bit color mode, but they have never configured their desktop for 16bit mode (which is what all CM's run in) so when they launch the game or demo, the desktop switches to 16bit color depth and the refresh rate, which was never set, jumps up to a level unsupported. Some times this is caused by an old refresh rate bug in some Nvidia drivers. Other times its because windows is not properly ID'ing the monitor type and model and is thinking it can handle refresh levels that are beyond its capabilities. Whatever the root cause, forcing the refresh rates with a 3rd party utility is the next step to take in these situations. Madmatt

Nope wasn't me, I tend to only comment on things which I had a part to play in or was responsible for implementing and terrain tiles is someone else's department. Madmatt

I am working on making some in game movies in the very near future for posting to some game sites. Madmatt

Not that I am aware of, no. Madmatt

If you guys knew the combined military experience of some of the US voices, you might not think them so modern. As to the engine sounds for armored cars, those are from an authentic German PSW as I recall. The sample is a little short though so you hear it shift probably a little too quick so it tends to stand out more than the other vehicle sounds. The main tank idle sound is a US engine in a Stuart or Sherman but it *might* have been from a recording I have a Panther and StuG driving around, sorry but I made those almost a year ago and its hard to remember which one was used. As to the Booya, I think he is actually saying "Hooya!" but that actor is from the South and I can't understand much of what he says even when I talk to him today. The "reload" sound was probably uttered from either a gun or weapon crew. I don't belive infantry uses that sample, at least it wasn't originally meant for them. Now, the one sound that I tried time and time to replace, but could never find something appropriate, I speak of the bogging sound. Currently its this thick gooey muddy gurgling sound, which I guess is about right, but I never liked it as it has no mechanical component to it, which I think it needs. Maybe I will give it another stab sometime in the future. As to the weapon damage, actually its below historical averages. Studies I have seen and reports I have read showed that the average of units pulled out of combat or disabled due to damage to the gun systems was about 15%. I believe Belton Cooper in his Death Traps books also makes such claims, but I would have to check the book again to be sure. Its an awesome book, if you havent read it, you should. I once asked Charles about the gun damage/hit %'s and one thing he pointed out was just how large a porportion of a units visible/targetables area is actually taken up by the weapon system. On an average armored tank, the visible weapon barrel itself takes up about 11% of the total size of the vehicle. That doesn't even account for mechanisms contained within the armored hull or turret and the fragility of all the interconnected systems that are needed to function the weapon. Everything inside is bolted, welded or somehow fixed to the metal structure of the vehicle and when a incoming shell strikes the armor at hundreds/thousands of feet per second that shock is transfered throughout and secondary damage to those systems is quite common. Of course, like everything else in the game, we will continue to refine and advance the internal modeling of damage in future iterations. Madmatt [ November 20, 2003, 02:04 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

Guys, time to retreat to your mutual corners and cool off a bit. I won't allow thinly veiled nit picking at one anothers character any more than I will allow an all out flame war. Legitimate qustions were asked and Steve has replied answers, thats how things work around here. There is lot to talk about in CMAK and people are going to have vastly different opinions, those that are expressed with maturity and basic civility will be replied to in kind, as best we can. Those that are not, well they can help themselves to a nice warm glass of "Shut the hell up!". Understood? Madmatt [ November 20, 2003, 01:22 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

Because space was so limited on the CD (and the demo) both the Panzerschreck and Bazooka use the same sound. They did in the other two games as well but at least now rifle grenades and Panzerfausts have unique sounds, which they never did before. I believe the sound that we ended up using for the schrecks/zooks was that of a Panzerschreck though. The real sound of a bazooka is VERY odd I might add, so I used the one that sounded more appropriate to the weapon system. I will be collecting all my sounds that weren't used into several alternate sound mod sets no doubt. Madmatt [ November 19, 2003, 11:52 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

The demo's sounds need to be 22hz, if you put a 44hz sample in it will play back too fast as I recall. Also, you said you wanted to replace the sounds in the demo from CMBO-SE...Um, why? Let me explain. The rifle sounds in CMBO-SE were actually the same rifle sounds from CMBB (I know I recorded them). CMAK also uses that rifle sound, but only for the Germans since it was the sound of a 98k to begin with. In CMAK, there is one set of rifle sounds for all allies, which is a M1 Garand, and one for the Axis which is the Kar. Why would you want to replace the newer M1 sounds with the same sounds the other side uses? In CMBB, since both sides used bolt action rifles (Mosin Nagant's and Kar's), they in reality sounded pretty similar. In CMAK, obviously the US uses a semi-auto rifle which has a distinct sound (anyone hear the metal clip getting ejected yet in one of the M1 sounds?). Due to limited space I was not able to give the Italians and other allies separate rifle sounds, they either use the Kar or M1 sounds. they do have unique sounds for some of there other small arms and MG's though of course. So anyway, long answer to short question. You will need to downsample any sound you want to use in the demo. In the full game, you will not need to downsample. Madmatt [ November 19, 2003, 10:15 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

They are right where they have always been, one level below Elite. It does look like Martin made a slight booboo though. There are 6 experience levels, not five. Conscript Green Regular Veteran Crack Elite Madmatt [ November 19, 2003, 10:03 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

And you think SMTP traffic of that size won't get interrupted halfway through either? Heh! With a total of ten active mirrors running right now (that I have listed, I know there are others), I think anyone will be able to find a quick download site. Madmatt

One of my early, and deleted, versions had the persistent buzzing of fly's and other insects. It got, how to put this, INCREDIBLY ANNOYING, after a while though. So, what does everyone think of the new distant arty sounds? I spent a lot of time on those and am pretty proud of how they turned out. Madmatt

Turn off any programs that may be running in the background, espicially instant messengers. See if that makes a difference. Madmatt

Guys, use the Opponent Finder Forum for this type of stuff. Thats why it's there! Or come into the CMHQ chat, everyone there is playing the demo right now! Madmatt

The dirt roads are considered to be hard packed enough not to raise obvious dust clouds in dry conditions. Thats not to say some dirt and such wouldn't get kicked up but since the dust clouds in CMAK can be spotted from any distance regardless of LOS we decided to not show then unless they really kicked up a big cloud. Of course that changes in VERY DRY conditions. Dry ground is considered the normal type of ground condition. The prfile pics will continue to be a mix of full face and shoulder. It depends on where the rank insignia is displayed and also the availability we had of good quality pictures for us to use. Madmatt [ November 19, 2003, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

Yeah, they are new birds actually but birds all the same. You know, they do have birds in the desert and in the oasis. Originally, we had many different background sounds but we had to cut a few out in order to fit all the data onto one CD. In time, I will post some alternate background sounds (and some other sound effects I have) as a Mod Pack on CMHQ. Madmatt

Just a reminder about the demo. The sounds are downsampled from 44100Hz to 22050Hz and we also put in only a bare minimum of different sounds and textures to keep the download size to a minimum. Also, if you want to talk about the demo scenarios, please be considerate to others and post a "POSSIBLE SPOILER" warning message at the top. Now, go and have some fun while I get **** faced drunk! Madmatt p.s. Oh, that "10 day" thing I mentioned last week? I LIED! [ November 19, 2003, 12:50 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

Actually, Harv was one of the beta testers and he does know, he was just leaving it to me to answer you. No, that bug is not in CMAK, it was fixed. Madmatt