sbg2112

Is anyone using an ATI Rage Pro video card and is able to see the transparent smoke? I'm at the latest DirectX level, but I think my video drivers are a little dated; however, before I mess with an otherwise good CM system I wanna know if it's gonna be worth it. If it does work for you, please post the level of drivers you're using. Thanks!

If you're looking at a unit that's next to some smoke and you try to bring up the context menu on that unit, the smoke obscures parts of the menu. I would've expected the menu to always be in the foreground. Obvious workaround is to toggle the smoke, but then you gotta turn it back on..... Also, it looks like the setting for smoke is "global" -- if that's the case, which might be problematic if you're playing several scenarios contemporaneously. Wonder if other settings are also global....

Ohmygosh! I updated the chipset stuff, and managed to apply the USB patch, which resulted in DxDiag showing AGP as enabled. It was well worth it -- framerate went from being marginal to usually smooth. Fraps shows I'm getting around 15fps, sometimes as low as 10 or 11, and sometimes as high as 17 or so -- all during movies. That's not as much as I'd expected given how smooth it seems. Then again, CM ain't no flight sim.... Anyway, framerates aren't a distraction now.... (The only thing left of my original complaint list is that transparency still isn't working.)

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>It said your card wasn't AGP? Is this win95 or 98? Do you have the USB update installed if it is 95. Also is this an Intel based motherboard? I used to have a Rage Pro (have a Rage Fury now) so I am somewhat of an expert.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Sigh..... I've just spent some time hammering DejaNews and found some leads on this -- looks like I may need some updates from Intel (so that the OS can properly configure for the chipset) and may also need some updates from MS. I have Win95, but I'm not sure which level -- I just hope it's one of the ones for which I can get USB support (because that's apparently the one that has the AGP support I'm looking for). Anyway, thanks for the help -- since you're something of an expert, does this sound vaguely correct? Somebody claimed that this pain was well worth it -- assuming this works, will it really make a difference in framerate? [This message has been edited by sbg2112 (edited 05-11-2000).]

Okay, I did some tweaking last night -- pardon me while I respond to myself with the results: 1. Tiles are no longer blinking after upgrading to DirectX 7.0a. (I still get some narrow seams between tiles sometimes, but it's very minor and I had already learned to overlook this in the beta demo....) 2. Fire sound is still not all that great -- I noticed in the readme that the sounds had been downsampled for the demo, so I'll live with it until I get my CD on the remote chance it's better in the full release... 3. Framerate seemed ever-so-slightly better after upgrading DirectX, but I didn't try to measure it.... 4. Transparency still doesn't seem to be working -- I didn't upgrade my Rage Pro driver, but I'm kinda sceptical that'll make a difference. I'll try that when I get more time. I did manage to get it to behave the way the beta demo did when units entered buildings. 5. I discovered the same workaround for the mouse cursor that somebody else already posted -- Alt-tab away from CM (or minimise it) and when you return the mouse cursor will be the pointer instead of the hourglass. (Now for the weird thing -- the framerate also seemed to be slightly better after doing this. I hate to say that at the risk of blowing any credibility I may have, but that's the way it seemed. Need to get my hands on a framerate counter....) There's probly still some more DirectX tweaking to be done -- fer instance, I noticed that DxDiag claimed my card wasn't AGP. May not matter, but something to look at....

Fionn, Thanks for the quick answer. I'll try the re-install today. 4. As far as toggling the transparency goes, I tried that and it didn't seem to have any effect. I also tried to get it back to the beta demo's behaviour, but no luck -- I'll play with it more later today.

First, the good: 1. The audio really adds to the immersion (which seems kinda like overkill the way some of us are addicted to this thing....) 2. Group move works very well and is every bit as useful as I'd hoped. 3. I've never cared for fancier / better textures, but the soldiers really look much better and the faces are much more realistic. 4. The "splash screens" are much nicer -- very professional looking. Now for the not-so-good: 1. Some of the tiles are "blinking" -- in CE, for example, one of the tiles in one of the fields was randomly being replaced with one of the tiles from the road. I don't believe I had this problem with the beta demo... 2. The "fire" sound is more like an electronic buzzing sound, and doesn't sound as nice as the crackling sound I used to get with the beta demo. Guess I could figure out which WAV it is, and try to replace it.... 3. Noticable drop in framerate (at least in CE), but nowhere near enough to make me quit playing. 4. I had a unit go into a building, and they disappeared as if CM thought it was drawing the building transparently but the graphics card / driver wasn't actually doing the transparency. 5. The mouse cursor was stuck on the hour-glass the entire time I was running CM. My system is a PII 266, 128 megs memory, and an ATI Rage Pro graphics card, DirectX 6.1 (I believe). I imagine I'll be playing around with drivers to try to fix some of my problems....

For whatever it's worth, I mentioned this nearly two months ago but since it was in response to one of the trolls on this board, I won't quote myself. Back then, somebody had a clever response -- "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" Anyway, check out www.digiscents.com. They have an SDK, but I don't know what the status of their hardware is.... For anyone too lazy to follow the link, here's the first paragraph from their site: <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> DigiScents iSmell digital scent technology brings the sense of smell to your computer. With iSmell software and devices, you can enjoy more immersive interactive games, realistic movies, and atmospheric music. Send online greetings that smell like chocolate or roses. Enjoy your personal aromatherapy track while sitting at your computer. Smell groceries and cosmetics before purchasing online. Explore faraway worlds. Communicate and express yourself in ways you never thought possible. Just follow your nose!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Anyway, that's all I know about it.

The only thing I've read about this is from Doubler's "Closing with the Enemy" where he describes an American tactic of using smoke to isolate an objective's defenses from supporting units. The idea is that if you're trying to take a village in front of you, you lay smoke on the other side of the village (i.e., behind it, from the American perspective). It would be nice to know if there were other tactics for using smoke.

So, does anyone know why this was changed? Not a big deal -- jus' seems interesting that CM had arrows for unit bases at one time... (A search of "unit base arrow" didn't turn up anything relevant.)

Actually, I just noticed something interesting: it looks like the unit base is in the shape of an arrow.

As for "holding until June 6th", I've been saying for some time whenever the release date came up that there was a reason it was called "Beyond Overlord" Looks like I was within a couple of weeks. As for the intro -- it's good, I just wish that the audio included some in-game sounds (esp. incoming artillery), and I think it would've been easier to follow if there had been more "continuity" (or at least fades between unrelated scenes). I was still discovering new things on my fifth or sixth viewing, although I did notice there were some things notably absent (e.g., air support). I didn't expect to see everything in the intro -- I'm just saying I noticed those things weren't there.

Well, I don't feel qualified to nominate it for "best", but this site has a rather extensive collection of 3D renderings of German AFVs. I only mentioned it here because I stumbled on it somehow after surfing the previously nominated sites.... http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Bunker/1211/3dmodels.htm For example, check out the Tiger II at http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Bunker/1211/3dmodels.htm And check out these views of the half-track: http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Bunker/1211/3dbtr.htm. Notice the interior detail in the last two rows.... I wonder if BTS or CoolColJ are aware of this site? Anyone got an informed opinon on the accuracy of these models? Fionn -- perhaps you have an opinion you could share? (My take is that the camo is rather lame, but that there's an astonishing amount of detail in the models -- I just don't know whether they're realistic.) If they are "correct", I think it would be awesome if these were linked into discussions on these weapons -- these visualizations would seem to be very useful. [This message has been edited by sbg2112 (edited 03-26-2000).]

Hey -- that's a really great picture. Which one is Charles, and which one is Steve?

(pardon me while I debate this with myself.) <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>I hope in the future BTS will consider making this available while the scenario is being played<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I guess one problem with doing this is that it might give some people a way to not play CM the way it's intended (that "seat-of-the-pants" thing). If CM had this, I'm sure some people would invent some sort of notation for marking last known positions of enemy units, places where units had died (yikes, not the dreaded "dead body" debate!), etc. This seems like a tricky thing to balance -- on the one hand, it doesn't seem unrealistic, but the problem is preventing the feature from being abused.

Very nice! I hope in the future BTS will consider making this available while the scenario is being played. That way, commanders could scribble notes on the map to mark interim objectives, kill-zones, whatever. (Believe me, I understand why this isn't there now -- I know there's a big difference between adding static labels during scenario design versus adding/deleting/editing labels during game time.)

What's with all the frivolous road trips? I mean, this is the 'net Age -- there's any number of ways we can do the same thing virtually, across the internet. NetMeeting is one, and there's others.... So, let's set up a thread here or a form on CMHQ where each beta tester can post the connection info (address, etc.) and the times they're available; this will allow the rest of us to preview the beta demo from wherever we may be.... Okay, okay -- I'm not serious. But it was sure fun writing it as if I were....

Wait a minute, everyone. I believe that Mr. Marketing's observations are very important in that they force us to consider the question of when CM should ship..... However, Mr. Marketing's answer is "yesterday", supposedly because technology is a-changin'. I'd like to offer a rebuttal to that: I do not see how shipping CM is in anyone'sbest interest BEFORE it leverages the stuff at www.digiscents.com. I mean, they have an SDK, so this stuff is like here today, and who doesn't want the smell of cordite wafting thru their computer room? No, to ship without this would be to completely fail to realize the vision BTS had for CM. In a sense, Mr. Marketing is right because digiscents changes the very definition of what a game should be right now, so CM has already missed the boat. Guess BTS should just skip CM1 and go directly to CM2. (Yeah, I knew it was a troll, that's why I responded this way. Does that mean I've taken the bait?)

I think Berlichtingen has the right idea: I'm sticking with the random scenarios "to forget everything I've learned" from the demo we've got now, and to work on tactics. Then, I'll play the scenarios "blind" or "cold" against somebody else who also hasn't played them, although I'll probly save a few of them for the AI just to see how good it is. No matter what, CM will occupy my hard-drive longer than some operating systems have.

Woo hoo, yet another place for me to point out that CM1 is sub-titled "Beyond the Beachhead". All those years of waiting for Christmas as a kid did nothing to prepare me for this wait -- this wait is worse than all those combined. I'm a professional software developer, and I compose music as a hobby -- and oh, yeah, I'm somebody's husband and I've got two kids, but I'm still waiting. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: can somebody (perhaps the folks at CMHQ) set up a distribution list that simply e-mails us any important news (and news only -- jus' the facts, m'am, as they happen). I mean, this is a forum, which is a place for discussion, and there seems to be so little to discuss right now. The e-mail approach would cut down on most of the noise because I'm sure I'm not the only who stops by everyday waiting for the one append that ends the wait. If I knew I'd get e-mail when the gold demo is out (or e-mail for any other similarly important event), I'd stop by here perhaps once a week, and I'd almost certainly not post stoopid appends like this one. (I've just e-mailed the good folks at TGN with this idea, since they already have support for mailing lists, so we'll see where this goes....) [This message has been edited by sbg2112 (edited 03-04-2000).] [This message has been edited by sbg2112 (edited 03-04-2000).]

I don't have a laptop, but I had similar probs with the cursor. I read somewhere (probly on this forum) that not using custom cursors was the solution, and in fact that worked for me.

Well, then release the editor -- we'll make our own scenarios. (yeah, yeah, I know all the reasons why this isn't practical, feasible, viable, whatever.....)

Thanks for the info. Now, why wouldn't this be in the manual? I guess it revolves around "gamey-ness", but I think what you've described will be very useful to beginners -- I've been convinced for a long time that learning a new game is all about learning a sense of scale. Personally, I don't think this info is gamey; it's not something that can be used to exploit the game or the AI, etc. It's all in the presentation -- heck, all you really have to do is mention that terrain tiles are 20 meters on a side (perhaps in the section covering the editor), and people can take it from there. Or you could avoid mentioning it altogether, which would give those of us clever enough to measure a tile with the LOS tool a slight advantage. [This message has been edited by sbg2112 (edited 03-04-2000).]

Since nobody else has asked the obvious question, I'll ask: Did this not have a noticeable impact on your rendering times / frame rate / whatever you wanna call it?

Just take a deep breath and think Beyond the Beachhead, and everything'll be okay. [This message has been edited by sbg2112 (edited 02-29-2000).]