XPav

So lets break this down and figure out exactly when I break the law. Do I get any fair use? Am I allowed to hack Battlefront's software in the comfort of my own home, or do I get in trouble only when I distribute something? Ever hear of "Fair Use?" Did you miss the part when I said that I bought Rainbow Six, bought Combat Mission, and didn't download Hag's hack for Strategic Command? I think you did, but you're having too much fun sticking people up on poles because they disagree with you and Battlefront on this, so you chose to make things up. The remarkable thing about this discussion is that I'm usually biased towards the publishers and developers when it comes to user rights. People should buy the games that they play, no ifs ands or buts. What's different about this situation? Its the idea of Battlefront (with the parroting of the people on this forum) that users and fans should in NO WAY ATTEMPT TO TAKE MATTERS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS. You guys are just the strangest, company-line following fans I've ever seen! Its amazing how everyone gets this new "IP Rights" phrase into their lexicon, too. SO -- ANOTHER RECAP: Hags - Bad. What did you think would happen? Hubert - CRC check the exe and scenarios next time. Still breakable, but impentrable to casual hacking. Battlefront - Editing other people's posts is the reason that I spend my time on USENET. Forum - go see how other companies handle user modifications of their games. Hint: They don't mind, as long as people buy the game. Everyone - If you like the SC demo, buy the game. That is all. Try the veal.

I screw around with other people's software all the time. If you look around a bit, you'll see that many, many games have various unofficial hacks done by fans. Examples: Freespace 2: http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/derelict/ Some of the user-created Freespace 2 missions resort to editing the built-in spacecraft. The fans spent lots of time on this. Civilization 3: Despite the forthcoming scenario editor, there is an unoffical scenario editor created by reverse engineering the file formats. There's a nice and rabid community that thinks this is a great idea. Hacking the Civ file-formats is an old tradition going back to the beginning of the series! In addition, I can think of scores of file-editing utilies, usually created to give piles of money or someasmuch for games like Simcity. Is everyone who uses these a "pirating leech?" Moon, I think you missed my entire point. I am *NOT* condoning piracy, but the stance that "ALL FILE EDITING IS THE WORK OF EVIL PIRATES" is way off-base and completely unique to Battlefront. Once again, do I deserve to be sued by Red Storm for deleting 4 lines from a text file and removing a time limit on the demo mission on Rainbow Six? Lets say that I purchase Strategic Command, and hack the EXE to say, add in the Netherlands as a playable country. (Yes, that's a bit of a silly example, since it wouldn't change much.) If this only works on the version that I shell out money for, and tell people where to download this, do I get throw into the "Pirate" and "Leech" category? Overall, I think you guys at Battlefront have got to loosen up a bit when it comes to users playing with your toys. Yes, Hags was stupid for crowing about his time-limit hack on this forum, but you folks made a mistake when you didn't catch that in the first place, and then you overreacted.

As one of the afore-mentioned "Schweinehunden" on the newsgroup, I feel like walking into here and starting a fight. The parts you will like to hear: I got lots of enjoyment from Combat Mission. It was a fun game, and well worth the money I spent for it. The demo of SC was fun, but the game was slightly too beer & pretzels for my tastes. $25 seems like an extremely fair price for it. I in no way, shape, or form condone piracy of this game or any others. I interned briefly for a game company, and those folks deserve all the money they get. Now for the part which you will not like to hear: People WILL poke around in games. As I stated in the newsgroup, I "hacked" the original Rainbow Six demo so I could play it longer. The hack involved removing failure conditions of a mission so that, in effect, the timer was removed. This let me play the demo a little longer, but in fact, because there was only one level shipped with the game, didn't give me much more gameplay. In addition, the multiplayer on the demo was ostensibly disabled. After it was determined that one just had to use the keyboard to get to the multiplayer option, everyone piled on-line, and I spend a nice afternoon (at work!) playing Rainbow Six against the developers. So, by two counts, I did things that I wasn't supposed to in the demo. Am I evil? Do I deserve to be drawn/quartered/mailbombed? I DID buy the game, after all. Game demos *are* frequently hacked and poked at in an effort to make them work. I develop software -- and my demo cannot be turned into a full version, no matter what you do. Too many pieces are missing. Hubert has learned the hard and discouraging lesson that there are people besides the people on this board that may buy Strategic Commander, and indeed, may not want to pay the $25 for it. It sucks, but what Hubert has to do is make the "barrier for stealing" quite a bit higher than merely hexediting a scenario. Battlefront and its developers, being small, are fairly strict on their "mod" policy. Compared to first person shooters or strategy games, in fact, there is absolutely no moddability in Combat Mission. That's all very understandable, because Battlefront and their developers don't have the time to make a super-user-modifiable game and all the work that it entails to get that right (especially for multiplayer), and they really need to sell new versions of software to keep the doors open. I don't begrudge them that. They deserve to stay open and make money (as long as they make games people buy). My other criticism of this entire issue is that Battlefront's "editing" of Hag's post is just, well, tacky. Its the other reason I like newsgroups. No one can change what I write, even if its unpopular. SO: In summary: Hags is stupid for crowing about his crack in various places. He appears to realize this now. "The Community" is stupid for treating this guy like the reincarnation of Benedict Arnold. Its like the scrabble club ordering a hit on poor Mrs Fletcher because she took one too many tiles from the box. Hubert should have realized that people will poke into his game, and taken appropriate steps. Battlefront shouldn't have edited Hags post. Let it stand on its own. If its so evil, no need for you to edit it. Battlefront should somewhere on their website or in a readme file, clarify exactly what they will and will not allow in regards to the modifications of the game. And that's what I have to say.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>I would be pretty surprised if they had all walked in looking like the guys in Das Reich. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Last time I checked infantry casualty figures, they were enormous. I think the 4th Infantry Division, in continuous combat from D-Day until the end, had something like a 400% casualty rate. Just because the division has been in the fighting the longest means that its the most experienced. Sure, its got some guys that know their stuff, but I'd put money on that the primary people getting experience from continuous combat would be the divisional/regimental/battalion staff, and not the "guys" out in the maneuver elements.

... most info in my post pulled from Ambrose... I'm still going to have to say that the reason the Germans kept going toward Berlin (excepting those few occasion when they starting heading back to London) was because they didn't have the supplies. The Germans got attacked from the air when the tried to move and had constant attacks on their supply base by the Allied forces (effective or not, the bombing campaign did draw off the entire Luftwaffe). The Germans had more supply problems that the Allies did, even when the entire Allied army ground to a half after the chase across France following Falaise. I've read how Germans complained that the Allies weren't fighting fair. Someone would shoot at them, and the Allies would stop, and call in artillery to level the place. To do that, you need serious logistical support, as well, as previously pointed out, good procedures for support. One of the major problems for the Americans (as opposed to Allies here <g>) during the Battle of the Bulge was that artillery shell production was way down, because "oh! the war is going to be over! no need to make more shells!" was the general consensus. So if the German Army falls into the "good tactics, lousy supply" category, the best example I can think of for the "lousy tactics, good supply" category would be the pre-Grant US Army of the Civil War. All the men, but with no one around who knew how to use it.

Whats that saying? "Amateurs discuss tactics, professional discuss logistics." Now, I'm an amateur. The thing that I have read in several books (Ambrose, Ryan...), is that Germans soldiers defending realized the war was over the moment they saw all the ships in the invasion flotilla. Other German soldiers said nearly the same thing the moment they saw the amount of motorization and equipment at the tail of the allied divisions.

Now, I'm working with Visual Basic, C++, and C all at the same time right now, so some observations. I do software for a company that sells embedded hardware for industrial control. As such, our current product is a DOS-based 386-33 with 4 megs of RAM and 2 megs of space on a flash disk. We use some 3rd party software to handle all the OS tasks that DOS doesn't do and provide extra functionality that we don't have to write. We have written the program that does everything else -- GUI, communication with external devices, BASIC interpreter, etc, etc, etc, in C++, and it fits happily into around 300KB. Now, we also have the Windows software that the users of our product use to program the embedded devices and put buttons on the screen, and things like that. Its a little like Visual Basic, but a little more targeted. This program is written an MFC/C++ program. It works pretty well, and C++ has made portions of this program very nice and easy to use. What I'm currently doing is grafting an ATL/COM interface onto this MFC program so that we can have other guys in the company that aren't into C++ programming write our Wizards (those things that people use to get going) in Visual Basic. I'm adding a bunch of hooks into the application to allow code to perform the same tasks that currently have to be done by a human. Each langugage is suitable for different things. As for C#, what Microsoft is going for is a language somewhere between C++ and VB that ties in nicely with COM. Best of both worlds. It seems like a nice language, but I wonder about how many people are going to use it. And Java. You know, it seems like Java is just finally to start being able to do the things that Sun promised 5 years ago. The JVMs are better, and you're starting to see some pretty hardware designed to execute Java byte code natively. That's pretty cool.

C++ is a better langugage to use for a first language than C is. Using the C++ Standard Library, with such nice classes as string, vector, map, and the like, a novice programmer, without really knowing the guys behind them, can put together a data-structure manipulating program in a fraction of the time that it would take them to understand C-style strings and arrays. For the best example of this approach, look at Lippman and Lajoie's C++ Primer. That's an excellent book. In my opinion, teachers who teach C as a prerequiste to knowing C++ are just making more work for themselves. Now, that said, to become really proficient in C++, you're going to have learn about that stuff. The main thing that people don't seem to get is that C++ is a multi-paradigm language. Structured programming? Sure! Object Oriented programming? Sure! Generic programming? Sure! Now, other languages may be better at one of these areas, but I can't think of any other language that supports such a wide range of programming models.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>But when it is called Squad Leader, make it Squad Leader.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Its a name. That's it. It goes on the box. Its a good name, too. Nice, short, and easy to say. I don't think that Hasbro is trying to sucker people into buying it, because, quite frankly, how many people know what Squad Leader is/was in the first place?

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. Over on the newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.war-historical, the general consensus towards Squad Leader, was indeed, one of disgust and outrage. The producer, however, showed up, answered our questions, and addressed our concerns. Now, he's a wargamer, apparently! He's even played ASL. He acknowledges that this ain't going to be the most realistic hardcore wargame ever. Its not supposed to be. However, they are trying to make a good, solid, WW2 tactical game that is fun to play. You know what? All this bitching about "its not squad leader".... who the hell cares? Its a name. Nothing more. If the games good, well, then, great. If its not, well, then, its not. Anti-Hasbro Jihads against Hasbro (for SL, Falcon, M1TP3, B17 whatever) don't serve any purpose. Writing hate filled emailed to the support mailboxes at Hasbro and Microprose doesn't help either. And its not worth your time, or my time. We could be playing Combat Mission.

I run CM with my Voodoo 5 at 4x FSAA. Except for the "fuzzy the text after a minimize", it works great.

I have to play it on 4x FSAA. I tried dropping it to single chip and it looked so bad I couldn't stand it! I'd love to be able to minimize the game, because then I could tab out of the game to check to see if my PBEM turn came in or to see if the ICQ message I got was worth responding too. But it doesn't work! Argh!

When you get it looking right, though, you still can't minimize out of the game and go back in without major problems. Any word on whether you're going to fix this rendering problem or whethers its a V5 driver issue or what, BTS?

It'd be nice, but quite frankly, its probably not worth it. Linux is a great server OS (and will be a great embedded OS), but lacks when it comes to non-techies using it for desktop work. Besides, don't you know the rules? You're only allowed to support one alternative OS per games.

Yup, something is definitely amiss with Voodoo5 cards. Is there any hope of getting some of these issues looked at? (isn't this where I go and start apologizing for the entire software industry?)