jkkuchar

Henri, Take a look at http://combathq.thegamers.net/battle/Turn12x/backe12d.JPG which shows the terrain in front of the woods from the AAR. I think the hill in my map doesn't extend quite as far south as the one shown there, but it's pretty close. In any case, it looks like a pretty clear shot from the river to the road exiting the woods.

Henri said: "But there is worst: although the author has done a good job of replicating the scenario, he forgot to put in two small hills on the Allied right flank" Hmmm. Can you be more specific about where these hills are? I did include 2 hills toward the south side of the map which were apparent from the AAR. One is along a small clump of scattered trees (one of Martin's Shermans started hull down there), and the other larger one is parallel to the road that cuts south just in front of the edge of the big mass of woods to the east. This is the hill where Fionn had sent a halftrack on the east side which was ambushed by a bazooka by Martin. I thought I had pretty faithfully replicated these 2 hills, but perhaps they are not high enough, or I missed some other hills somewhere. The hills as placed do, for example, block LOS from the starting position of Martin's southernmost Sherman to much of that road. As far as I could tell from the AAR, there was a pretty good LOS to the exits of all the roads from the woods. If you find a picture from the AAR that shows the hills which I forgot, I'd appreciate knowing it so I can fix it. Henri also said: "In order to balance the game a bit more, I would suggest giving the Germans in the town a couple of mortars" This may be true. However, I wanted to replicate the scenario as accurately as possible, even if it is unbalanced. If someone would like to make variants to better balance it, that's fine, but I'll leave that to someone else. - Jim

I have just uploaded a reverse-engineered scenario based on the classic AAR between Fionn Kelly and Martin Turewicz with the early Alpha version of CM. The scenario should be appearing at the combathq scenario depot in the next day or two, once they confirm that the file is ok: http://combathq.thegamers.net/depot.html The scenario is titled "Going to Town" If you haven't already seen it, the original AAR can also be found at the combathq site, in the archives section. Since it was reverse engineered using only the AAR as a guide, there may be some differences between what I made and what is in the AAR. Please feel free to contact me if you find such a discrepancy, and I will try to fix it (it would help if you also cite whatever information you used to identify the discrepancy). I have not tried it out single-player, so I have no idea how well it will work out that way.

It was the alpha version, and the scenario was called "Going to Town". I am 95% done reverse-engineering the map and units from the AAR, and should be able to upload it in the next week or two.

You may want to try Switchres -- see http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum8/HTML/000465.html -- I was able to run at a much higher resolution using switchres, but am only able to get fog & transparency effects to work in 640x480. - Jim [This message has been edited by jkkuchar (edited 09-06-2000).]

Nice work on the mods to date -- but I've noticed in the mac sound update that some of the big explosions (including the game exit sound) have funky noise in them (something related to sampling speed maybe), to the point where I went back to some of the original sound files instead. - Jim

I'm also stuck in low resolution, and I fear we're stuck using 640x480 unless someone finds a fancy solution (someone mentioned it's limited by the ATI Rage Pro chipset). I started with the latest ATI drivers, but didn't get any transparency effects. Installing ATI Univeral Installer 3.3 gave me older drivers that enabled transparency, though textures are blended and fuzzy. I then also had a font problem ('l' and 'i' letters were goofed up) that was fixed by adding ATI Resource Manager 1.2.4, which wasn't in the 3.3 installer but was part of my original driver set. But, don't know if that's the same font issue as you're experiencing.

You probably do have a 3D card (or chip) on your Powerbook G3 series -- run the Apple System Profiler (in the Apple Menu), click on 'Devices & Volumes', and click on the 'Display Card' arrow and it will show you -- you probably have a Rage LT Pro. I have a similar setup to you and can only run at 640x480. If I try 800x600, CM quits to the desktop at the 'loading 3d graphics screen'. If I try 1024x768, CM works fine, but uses 640x480. My textures also look washed out and fuzzy -- not sure if this is due to the lower resolution or some texture mapping problem.

Thanks! I downloaded ATI Universal Installer 3.3, which includes some of the older versions of my extensions. Works fine, with fog etc. -- what a difference! The only problem I have now is that the 'l' and 'i' letters in the fonts on screen are screwed up, but I can live with that and potentially fix with a little more extension tweaking.

There's been a previous thread regarding getting CM to work with the Powerbook G3 (freezing at the 'loading 3D graphics' window). I think I've traced this to a single extension: ATI Resource Manager. CM runs fine without it, but I don't get any transparency effects (fog, buildings, smoke, and yes I've cycled through the different graphics options with the hotkeys in the game). My question: is this a fundamental limitation of my graphics card, or is there some combination of (older) ATI extensions that will provide transparency? (I'm using a Powerbook G3, OS 8.6, with the latest ATI update (1.4.8, I think)). Just want to know if someone out there has a similar system working with transparency before I waste a bunch of time trying different ATI extension versions.