L.Tankersley

Catgh: I suspect you're wrong. About many, many things.

The things that seem to make PBEM files expand dramatically in size in my experience (all other things being equal) are (1) lots of vehicle movement and (2) lots of smoke. The file size issue is what it is, it's not going to change. If you are bandwidth or storage restricted, your best bet is to avoid scenarios with lots of vehicles, and go easy on the smoke. YMMV.

Not true.

If your artillery is coming in off-target (as it tends to if you target a spot out of LOS) it can be very challenging to find where your fire mission is impacting. If I can't find something in a couple viewings I tend to try to narrow down the search area by sound. One thing that might help would be going to a high overhead view (say 7 or 8) and using shift-I to change to "fast, compatible" smoke. The explosions might show up a bit better then. [ October 06, 2002, 11:46 PM: Message edited by: L.Tankersley ]

This could well be -- my Rage Orion has 16MB VRAM, and my Rage 128 Pro also has 16 MB VRAM. The Rage 128 Pro experiences less downsampling (but its framerate is MUCH worse). I'm surprised that the Radeon drivers worked for the Rage Orion (a Rage 128 chip). More than likely it was only using the 'common extensions' between the two boards, but using its own unique driver/extensions, which is the difference here. Yes, that's almost certainly correct. When I said "same drivers" I meant "same driver download" -- in this case, the "RADEON-0207" download, which according to ATI's site is used for the Orion and various Radeon cards.

I suspect you misread the text - the mode in question is "Hide Roofs." So when you hit it, it says "Hide Roofs On" which of course means that the roofs are off, and vice-versa.

Update: Mike Breedon at xlr8yourmac.com forwarded info on the Radeon 8500 smoke issue to a contact at ATI; apparently the ATI guy is going to get a copy of Combat Mission and look into it.

While I wait to hear back, I'm examining other possible options. Has anybody successfully used the Mac Radeon 7000? It only has 32 mb of VRAM, but that's better than the 16 on my Orion.

On the Radeon 8500 topic, I have a query in to ATI. I also pinged Mike Breedon of xlr8yourmac.com, who said he was writing his ATI contact (their 3d programmer) on the issue. Fog works fine on the (mac) 8500; it's smoke transparency (including smoke shells, smoke from fires, explosions and gun blasts) that doesn't work.

It's probably worth downloading the latest ATI drivers and installing. Go to: http://mirror.ati.com/support/products/mac/rage128/rage128macdrivers.html Unless your card is much better than mine, though, framerate is gonna suck. Good luck!

Hmmm. Not encouraging. I've gone back to my PCI Rage Orion card (using the same driver revision as with the Radeon) because, although it only has 16MB and so textures are drastically downsampled, smoke is transparent and framerate is decent. (The OEM Rage Pro that came with the computer has more VRAM, but framerate is abysmal.) I've put a query to ATI but I'm not expecting much to come of that. So, anybody interested in a "good as new" Radeon 8500? I guess the next question is, does any mac user out there have a retail AGP graphics card that (a) has 64MB or more of VRAM and ( DOESN'T suck in some horrible way (e.g. bad smoke, no text display, no fog)? If the fog doesn't work I could live with it - in foggy scenarios I usually turned it off anyway just because it was too hard to find my units.

I knew about the ATI issues on the PC side, but having two other ATI mac products that both worked fine with CM except for their limited VRAM, I figured I'd be pretty safe with a Radeon. Who knew.

With a (moderately complex) CMBB scenario loaded, I checked and the card was using over 60MB of texture memory.

Yeah. I spent the other day ringing the driver changes. I need to doublecheck tonight, but I'm about 95% certain that, with the same drivers, the OEM Rage Pro card that came with the machine displays the smoke just fine, while the Radeon doesn't.

Bump. No one?

Update: same smoke problem in CMBO. I also tried a virgin install of OS 9.2, same problem. Any other mac radeon 8500 users out there?

So I just upgraded to a Radeon 8500 mac edition, and while my texture memory is now happy, I am not because all of the smoke and dust graphics are now opaque instead of transparent, in both CMBB and CMBO. (Yes, I've hit shift-I -- I'm not looking at fast, compatible smoke. In fact, the "high quality" smoke looks like the "fast and compatible" variety now, except it's about twice as big.) My question is, are there any other mac users out there running CMBO or CMBB with a Mac Radeon 8500? And if so, what does your smoke look like?

Was the foxhole you spotted one from a prior battle in the operation? If so maybe it's already flagged as "spotted" or "known" in some way. Generally speaking, in QBs I don't think the attacker can ever purchase TRPs or other fortifications so this isn't a huge concern. For built scenarios it could be an issue, though.

Hmmm, interesting. I'm pretty sure I see this immediately after launch of CMBB but let me doublecheck tonight. I'm also going to fire up CMBO ("what's that?" I hear you ask) and see what the smoke looks like there now.

I loaded a PBEM file and then escaped out to check texture memory usage -- it was up around 60MB. Things looked pretty spiffy, though. Update on the Radeon issue -- fog looks fine, I checked in the scenario editor. But smoke and dust clouds are completely fubar. The "high quality" smoke and dust graphics look pretty much exactly like the "fast and compatible" smoke graphics (that is, completely opaque), only about twice as big in every dimension. Building transparency still works too, btw.

Hmmmm. Okay, so I've got a Radeon 8500 in my machine now, 64MB memory. Everything looks nice. Except ... the smoke and dust. That looks lousy (basically, no transparency). I had transparency with the Orion. ::sigh::

I wasn't on the distribution list for that memo, either.

I might buy that for CMBO, but the CMBB install disk is just some compressed installer files. I can't imagine CMBB would be searching for data on the CD during the game. It hasn't happened since I took out the Orion and went back to the AGP card. Far from definitive, though. I should have a Radeon later this week; we'll see what that does for me.

Serves you right for buying a Nashorn anyway, ya gamey bastage.

I switched to the original AGP video card and they are much crisper. General performance seems worse, though, and poorer screen resolution -- time to upgrade.