WWB

Damnit Harv. Who said you could go on vacation!?!?!?! In any case, my battles are posted. Review away. WWB

Gamespy itself would be a poor fit for CM. First, it is a pure head to head game with no dedicated servers to latch onto. Second, there is no way to start CM from the command line and join a game, which is how other games join games from gamespy AFAIK. Third, the licensing fees are atrocious. Fourth, no mac support. And fifth, I have seen many good games delayed/ruined while adding gamespy support. But this is not to say that the ability to use an online matchin service and join IP games by double clicking rather than entering IP addresses is a fundamentally bad idea. On the contrary, it should be a feature considered for CMX2, especially if they implement true multiplayer. It would require comparitively little effort on BFC's part to add a few command line switches for CMX2 to allow 3rd party developers to create utilities to handle player matching and such. If anyone is familiar with IL2, think hyperlobby for CM. WWB

Friends, boardmembers, fellow scopants. Lend me your ears (or eyes). While many ate, drank and made merry this holiday season, we at Boots & Tracks have been busy cooking up evil. Evil in the form of one TCP pack, to be made avaliable January 9. As a taste and titilation, some screenies are below for your viewing pleasure: German column advances in Kinch's Midnight at the Oasis American infantry wishing they had a ride in JWXSpoon's Murphy's Law Brits cruising through the vines in Rune's Vines and Vineyards So, get yourself a partner and be ready to play on Jan 9. WWB

Friends, boardmembers, fellow scopants. Lend me your ears (or eyes). While many ate, drank and made merry this holiday season, we at Boots & Tracks have been busy cooking up evil. Evil in the form of one TCP pack, to be made avaliable January 9. As a taste and titilation, some screenies are below for your viewing pleasure: German column advances in Kinch's Midnight at the Oasis American infantry wishing they had a ride in JWXSpoon's Murphy's Law Brits cruising through the vines in Rune's Vines and Vineyards So, get yourself a partner and be ready to play on Jan 9. WWB

Friends, boardmembers, fellow scopants. Lend me your ears (or eyes). While many ate, drank and made merry this holiday season, we at Boots & Tracks have been busy cooking up evil. Evil in the form of one TCP pack, to be made avaliable January 9. As a taste and titilation, some screenies are below for your viewing pleasure: German column advances in Kinch's Midnight at the Oasis American infantry wishing they had a ride in JWXSpoon's Murphy's Law Brits cruising through the vines in Rune's Vines and Vineyards So, get yourself a partner and be ready to play on Jan 9. WWB

Tune up the Antiscopic Filtering, and FSAA if you want. FSAA causes some video issues, easily fixed by alt-tab but slightly annoying. AF causes no issues and does wonders. WWB

The 'blue line' is the turn processing progress bar. Basically, the computer is calculating exactly what happens there so one can watch the movie over and over from whatever angle one wants. In order to make it go faster one needs to: a) get a faster computer or play smaller battles. As far as I have noticed, the biggest determinant (outside of the above) to speed of the bar is number of units potentially in LoS of each other. So, a large flat desert map with a tank battalion or two on it will take alot longer than a map of italian hill country where most units can hide behind solid objects. WWB PS: 2 minutes aint bad. I had one operation that is as-yet unpublished which could take 20+ minutes on a celeron 800. The record, AFAIK, is 35+ for To the Volga.

Hmm, that is odd. Try hitting shift-refresh on the page. Might have downloaded incomplete and you are looking at a bad cached copy. WWB

I suspect it is a browser issue--though it works fine for me in IE6, Mozilla 1.5 and Opera 7. What are you viewing it with? WWB

Looks like they moved some stuff around. Try this page: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/ucmaps/soviet.html WWB

If you buy units in the editor they will follow whatever is set in the friendly map edges screen. Note each side must have at least one friendly map edge. Once you load it into a QB, you lose control of that. CM resets it to default, whatever the default is for that particular iteration. Net effect--if you want a qb map, set the map edges to the defaults rather than fight the tide. Maps with lots of odd angles like that one are not good for QBs. WWB

Same experience here, ran it at 1280x960--not too far off, but enough. It just gave me more battlefield. WWB

Thanks Ubertanker and glad you are enjoying our work. Stay tuned, the first quarter of 04 will be big. WWB

I am liking this but I vote for a 4 point scale. That way people cannot cop out and pick 2. Either you liked it or you did not, completely neutral should not be an option. WWB

Well, maybe. But we at Boots & Tracks could not resist spreading a bit of holiday cheer. In keeping with the spirit of the season, we present to you three battles: The Haunter in the Dark by Marc S Chekovnya Woods by Marc S ROWIII-Koltov Corridor by Kinch Enjoy and have a wonderful holiday. WWB [ December 22, 2003, 09:53 AM: Message edited by: WWB ]

Boots & Tracks has been silent for a bit, but we could not resist spreading a bit of holiday cheer. In keeping with the spirit of the season, we present to you three battles: <ul> [*]The Haunter in the Dark by Marc S [*]Chekovnya Woods by Marc S [*]ROWIII-Koltov Corridor by Kinch Enjoy and have a wonderful holiday. WWB [ December 22, 2003, 09:52 AM: Message edited by: WWB ]

Except you are not providing criticism, you are just whining, much like a child who got an etch-a-sketch instead of a playstation for christmas. Criticism would go like this: The folks who made the "circle" criticise, because it makes it better. In fact, we spend more time breaking down each other's work than slapping each other on the back. I am sorry you find the operations flawed. I tested several of them and found them to be largely enjoyable, depending on taste. And, if you dont like what you see, take a weekend or three, get some playtesters and make your own. WWB

It is listed, but not hosted. If BFC would be willing to wiave certain copyright issues, I would be willing to host it at B&T. WWB

Size should not make it jerky. Worst case scenario is that one has a 60hz refresh rate and the screen seems to flicker. More than likely you have a default dell install which is never too good and usually includes slightly outdated drivers. Update them to something more current and things should improve. WWB

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize we need a six point scale. That way people cannot cop out and choose the middle--they have to say it was either above or below average. Regarding searchability, I think we really need to look at allowing authors to attach categories to their battles. Having designed an open-ended search or two, I must say they are quite a bear. And in reality 90% of the searches are for a small subset of what you built out the search to do. Oftentimes adding such "metadata" helps alot. This metadata could also be used for the lists, presuming they continue. Instead of just pulling randomly based on scoring, the author could choose a "primary group", such as TCP Battles, for his battle to be potentially ranked in. In addition, I think requiring at least 10 reviews to be ranked in anything is a good idea. WWB

Ok, you cannot host with the XP firewall enabled. It is too low-grade and not configurable enough to let one do such a thing. If you are behind a router, there is nothing to worry about. If anything, you need something that can stop outgoing traffic--like Zone Alarm. WWB

What firewall? If it is a local, software firewall, like Zone Alarm, you need to allow incoming connections from your router in addition to opening the port. If you are behind a router, than you should not worry about port scanning anyhow--the NAT the router runs prevents this, aside from the open port 7023. Which they cannot really do much to because the only thing that should be listening on that port is CM, which has no known security vulnerabilities. WWB

Basically, the effects of CAS are too random for both players and designers. While, at least in CMBB or AK, it will always show, the stuka bought by the designer could annihlate some already routed squad, or it could take out a platoon of KV2s. Players like to win games on skill rather than luck, so many players completely shun scenarios with CAS. Designers like to design battles that are balanced to a t, so dont want a big X factor coming into play. WWB

Note that they are only marginally less useless in CMAK than they were IRL. WWB

I have pondered this a bit, and I think I have come to a workable solution. Given that the movement is afoot to also tie reviews to logins, I propose doing the following: 1) Old reviews scores are divided by 2 and rounded to the nearest integer to give a score on the 1 to 5 scale. Comments field is kept as the new comments field. 2) Given that email is a required field in both reviews and scenarios, it might make sense to make email address the login name. One can then SELECT DISTINCT emails from both reviews and scenarios, add in a random password, and generate an initial users table. Then this could be tied back to the scenarios & review tables by JOINing things on email. 3) One then emails the list of addresses their new logins and temporary passwords. I have a blast email system that does customized messages and can send it for you if need be. 4) People can login, setup their accounts and such, and it will tie back nicely to the existing body of reviews, all of which will appear in the new system. One other big question--how deep will the registration system go? Obviously one will need it to upload or review battles. But do we want to require a login to download a battle? My vote is no--I dont think putting impediments in the way of people getting the battles is a good idea. WWB PS: GaJ--I understand your proposal. I just find the idea of authors directing reviews of their work by anything other than the quality of said work to be fundamentally flawed. PS: AK, I can try and lean on matt for a poll if need be, when the time comes.