Dschugaschwili

Walt, the problem with your suggested setup is that you'll have trouble finding a BX based board. There aren't that many of them aroung anymore. Plus the BX chipset has the disadvantage of allowing only 100MHz for the memory bus and not having AGP 4x. You can build a stable Athlon based system today, and if you look at it, The Athlon is even cheaper than a Pentium III at the same clock speed. Plus you can have a motherboard without all the drawbacks that all the Intel chipsets have nowadays (ok, there is a good VIA chipset for PIIIs too now). If you look around a bit, there are more than enough sources on the net where you can find what to do to make your Athlon a great platform. I actually think that the Athlon 600 is about the best you can buy now in terms of price/performance (regarding the future too) ratio. Dschugaschwili

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Kettle Black: To Dschugsomething and others. Just to clear up a misconception I myself was guilty of. You do not need a credit card to buy Combat Mission. Go to your local bank/post office and send an IMO (International Money Order)to Battlefronts address. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Thanks for this info. I remember having seen something like that on the pre-order page some time ago, but didn't remember until you posted it. I still won't order the game at least until the gold demo comes out. <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> I do have a credit card (now, not when I ordered) but I am reluctant to send that kind of info over the net. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Glad to see I'm not alone here. To Username: I won't continue this debate any longer, but what I said here still stands. I'm just talking from my experience. Yours may very well be quite different. Dschugaschwili PS: By the way, what's so difficult about my name? Nobody seems to be able to spell it.

Go to www.battlefront.com , scroll down a little and you will find a link where you can pre-order CM. Dschugaschwili

Heh? I thought DirectX 7 uses T&L on the GeForce (if the game uses the Direct3d T&L routines). And I doubt you'll only get FSAA with OpenGL. Don't know though, I still only have a Voodoo2. Dschugaschwili

Fionn, your setup sounds quite reasonable. There are some things to take care of, though. 1. The Athlon CPU has a pretty high power consumption, so you should check your power supply. If it says anything less than 250W, get a new one, preferably with 300W to be on the safe side. 2. Get a good motherboard. Visit www.anandtech.com and/or www.tomshardware.com for reviews. The Athlon 600 is one of the best CPUs you can buy today, especially considering the price/performance ratio. Almost all Intel solutions have at least one drawback. The GeForce is a very fast card, but not really overkill. You can always use the extra power for higher resolutions or better image quality. Don't wait for 3dfx to release a new product, it will more than likely not beat the GeForce in real world situations. The SB128 is fine if you don't need 3d sound. 128 MB RAM is ok. Actually, I would probably select similar components if I would buy a new computer today. Dschugaschwili

Seeing your sniper change targets every 20 seconds thus not shooting even once for at least 5 turns. Having a Volksgrenadier squad in the same building as a bazooka team for over a minute without shooting them until after a StuG drives by and gets knocked out by this bazooka. Dschugaschwili

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Dalton: - It is VERY common today to have internet access. So ordering on-line is acceptable. - Ordering online avoids the problem where your local gaming store does not carry, or is sold out of CM. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I have to disagree with you on this point. I know quite a lot of people without internet access. Almost everyone I know does not know anything about CM (not even that there is such a game). If I see a game at my local gaming store and it looks promising, I might as well buy it. I can't do that if it isn't there. Just because few people without internet access visit the forum, you can't tell that there aren't any. And BTS will most likely not sell any copies to those even if those people would like the game. They just don't have a lobby. Plus, as I've stated previously, not everybody has a credit card nor is everyone willing to order a game over the net. (It's not unlikely that I will be one of them). That does not mean that I will pirate a copy from somewhere, but I will stick to my principles (As it seems, mine are more restrictive than Steve's). Raising my voice for those under-representated people on this forum, Dschugaschwili

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Username: Theres no easy answer but I would do the following. People buy CDROM games and the low upfront cost (lets say $9.99)covers the packaging expenses. They take the game home and load it and they HAVE to get online to register WITH a credit card. Every time they play they have to pay a small fee online (they can pre-order multiple games for airplane trips with laptops). Lets say 25cents a game. There is a "code of the day" that gets them playing. After they have spent 50 bucks (200 plays), they can play for a nickel a game. They can never change credit cards and the game becomes non-transferable.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Doing this has a couple of disadvantages: 1. There are people out there that have to pay their internet access by the time they spend online. That can get extremely expensive after some time. These people won't want to get online everytime they want to play a computer game. 2. Not everybody has a credit card (at least in some countries). 3. Not everybody who has a credit card is willing to send his number to some internet server every time he wants to play a game just because they think about the risks of this. *Stop speaking generally* *Start speaking personally* Actually, I don't even have internet access on my private computer for financial and security reasons. Also, I don't own a credit card and I don't want one anyways, also for security reasons. Don't tell me I shouldn't be so anxious, I'm studying to become a Master of Computer Science, and I know what can happen when too much information about you gets into the wrong hands (especially credit card numbers etc.). By the way, when I look at my friends, the more they know about internet and stuff, the more careful they are about using those technologies. Actually, the only thing that can (and perhaps will) keep me from buying Combat Mission is Battlefront's order-by-credit-card policy. For me, there's just nothing like going to a shop, grabbing something, paying some cash for it and leaving without having to worry about the whole transaction being traced back to you. Enough ranting, I just wanted all those technology enthusiasts to know that there are other people out there. Happy flaming! Dschugaschwili [This message has been edited by Dschugaschwili (edited 04-11-2000).]

You can also try this: Don't hit "done" when you have watched the movie. Instead hit ALT-Q and say "yes" to leave the game. To view another movie, just restart CM. Dschugaschwili

Steve, could you tell me how many iterations you made to the beta demo scenarios before saying "now it's done" (or just an estimation for that number)? Dschugaschwili

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by s bakker: I would just like to be the guy who assinated Hitler, preferably somewhere in the thirties .........<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> That's quite a sad story... Everytime a group of brave people had come together to do this, Hitler came home with a major political/military success and they couldn't do it anymore because they feared nobody would have understand them and Hitler would be known as the greatest politician/general of all time that was cowardly murdered by some insane terrorists after that. History can be very cruel sometimes. I really don't know what I would have been. But the idea of serving as cannon fodder in the Volkssturm doesn't make me feel any better about war. Dschugaschwili

24 in May. This forum really makes me feel young. Dschugaschwili

Also, turn the trees off when you're looking for units in woods. Dschugaschwili

Cybercam? I know of a program called Hypercam that works under Windows 95 and higher, but Cybercam doesn't sound familiar to me. Dschugaschwili

Ah, that explains a lot. You're just so busy mailing everybody how great CM will be that you don't have the time to continue overrunning Riesberg. Dschugaschwili

And yet another vote for FOW ON. I mean, where are the great surprises when it's off? Dschugaschwili

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by guachi: We could also include a section with TLAs (Three {or two} Letter Acronyms) and ETLAs (Extended Three Letter Acronyms, i.e. four letter acronyms). A section with abbreviations. Plus a section of military German. How many people knew what a sPzAbt was the first time they saw it, or even the tenth? Jason<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Having a section explaining all those abbreviations would be great. I can only guess far too many of them. And for this section of military German, I'd like to have one for military English too. Dschugaschwili

There IS tiberium in CM, at least in the beta demo. It's called "rubble" here, but it damages your infantry in the same way. Dschugaschwili

I think I'm allowed to level a building that houses one full platoon of US infantry including HQ and a MG team when playing LD. Sadly a several minute barrage of arty from all three spotters wasn't enough to do this. It just set it on fire. Dschugaschwili

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by SS_PanzerLeader: I don't really want ot have to divide my games when Im playing at a competitive level, I would rather focus on one game but not wait an eon to see the results <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> That's exactly the problem I would have when playing in such a ranking system. As some people know, internet access is still very expensive here in Germany, so I don't have a modem in my private computer (because I have free internet access at the university). Of course, this restricts me to sending one PBEM file a day (per game). For most people in Europe/US time zones, this means additionally that when I go home again, it's afternoon/noon respectively, so I won't get a response on the same day. So my current games run at about one e-mail a day. This of course leads to the problems I mentioned above. (Or it means nobody will play me because I'm so slow ) I am well aware that there is probably no good solution to get around these problems, but I want you all to know that these are real problems. Dschugaschwili

Oh, and I forgot another one. Will it be possible in CM to play a double blind scenario (possibly auto-generated) against somebody without having to trust the players not to look at the map from the other side? (That is, both players can only play this actual game on this particular map) Dschugaschwili

Some more questions regarding the ranking. First, I assume we're talking about PBEM games here. Correct me if I'm wrong. A game has to come to an end for a score to be calculated. Only then can we get the new ranking for both players. This leads to two problems: 1. If I see that I'm losing badly, I could "abandon" the game, ie. stop sending the PBEM files, so I don't get a low score. Any plans on this topic? 2. How do you distinguish this from a player pausing for a while because he's gone on vacations? 3. What happens if I HAVE to abandon a game because the game always crashes when I try to load it (like it sometimes happens in the demo)? Another topic: When does the ranking system look up the players' old scores? When the game finishes? Then there's the following problem: The ranking system is initialized. Everybody has 1000 points. I can only send at most one e-mail a day to any one opponent because of the particularity of my internet access, so a PBEM game with me will take a while. I start a game against a supposedly equally strong opponent that can play his games much faster. While our game is going on, he plays some games against other players with fast response times. So by the time our game finishes his score is significantly higher than mine (because I still haven't finished a game yet). So suddenly he looses a lot of points because he only managed a draw against a much lower ranked player (me), while I gain a lot of points, although our scores were the same when we started the game. Don't get me wrong, I like the system you propose, but I want to help making it better by pointing out possible weak points in it. Dschugaschwili

"Densely forested". Looks like the map generator takes your settings quite seriously... Dschugaschwili

Thanks for making my point clear Steve! I'm not a native English speaker, so I sometimes have trouble picking the right words... By the way, did you read the book I was talking about in my above post? Most points sound quite familiar to me. Dschugaschwili [This message has been edited by Dschugaschwili (edited 03-15-2000).]

I sometimes have this problem too. In my case it happens every time I try to load the file. When I look back to my windows desktop, there is an error message saying something like "unhandled exception at 24605", and when I click OK, the game ends with an "invalid page error". The point is, I'm not even sure if it's a bug in the game, because the file loads fine on the computer of a friend of mine. At the moment I'm suspecting a hardware error in my computer being responsible for this behavior (similar things happen in other programs too). Dschugaschwili