voidhawk

The CMAK PBEM files I receive from one of my regular opponents (who uses XP) are sometimes quite corrupted, and seem to be missing almost everything except for the header and footer lines. The pattern always seems to be the same. He then has to do the turn again (it is always an orders turn) and even them it will still be wrong sometimes. This is what I receive: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">----------------- Play-By-Email Data Follows This Line ----------------- /1^7890-=q$wree$k.dj+Wgbv.Uhcty*u23iU(op[]'klkjBh456-nz,k56yHBS); 000000 ---------------------- End of Play-By-Email Data -----------------------</pre>

Try "Counterattack at Petrano" for a scenario where the Axis forces, well, counter attack!

Agreed; I have a Ti4200 with 64M and it works just fine with all versions of CM at 1280x1024 with 4xS AA. The 4xS AA is great for removing the "sparkly" textures when scrolling around a map. I found the anisotropic setting worked but produced artifacts around the edges of sharp lines, such as the targetting lines. I do still use a much older driver (3.0.8.2) as with newer versions I experienced "blurry" (double) in-game text such as the landscape labels etc. Perhaps the current drivers have resolved all these issues; I don't know and would rather not experiment as what I have now works just great and I don't play any other games anyway. I mean, who does - wouldn't that come out of CM time?

Have you tried setting AA via the driver itself? I.e. right click background, properties, settings tab, advanced, <your card's name> tab, additional properties, 3d- anti aliasing settings, manually select AA mode (e.g. select 2x)

I don't think such a "reference turn" is going to work well. Each time a new movie is calculated is will be different from the previous one because of random factors built into the game. For instance, if a tank gets knocked out in one movie but not another then of course it will not be able to fire at other targets, etc. So, you'd have to come up with a turn that always ended up with the same sequence of events and the same outcome - that would be an interesting challenge! Perhaps some long range duel without the possibility of either side inflicting damage on the other side. At any rate, CPU speed, cache and memory bandwidth will be the main factors in movie calculation speed. The video card has nothing to do with it; it only comes into play when viewing the movie. Unless you have so little RAM that the OS uses disk space for virtual memory I can't see that RAM size is going to make a difference either. For me upgrading from a P3 with 100MHz memory to a P4 with dual DDR400 memory made a big difference

I've run into the same problem; ti4200, 30.82. No changes from CMBB, never saw the problem before. What I did notice was that when it happened it seemed as if the game loaded too quickly, i.e. it looked as if it did not try to load all the BMP files. Perhaps this is a clue as to what might be happening? I have to exit the game and re-start (sometimes more than once) to "solve" this issue. Luckily it has not happened very often. I saw it in "A Few Boys From Texas", for what it is worth.

I've seen this same "shoot & rotate" behaviour a couple of times too, always with fatal results. And these were tanks with turrets too (and they did not fire when rotating even though the gun remained pointing at the target - argh!!!) The suggestion above that this happens when the "shoot" part of the orders is short may on target, so to speak; in both my cases that was indeed the case. Seems like a bug though.

I have FSAA (4x) enabled not so much to get rid of jagged edges but to greatly reduce the "sparkly" effect in the distant tree and terrain textures seen when scrolling around. Yes, I see those extra lines along the target lines etc. too - I did not used to see them with my older GeForce 2. I have tried various drivers, but it made no difference. Who knows, but a small price to pay for nice smooth textures though.

Joel: where can I find your CMBO "First Blood" scenario? I did not find it under "F" at the Scenario Depot...thanks!

Ooooh...that one looks very atmospheric!

Thank you both for your suggestions! I'll be sure to review whatever game(s) I end up playing.

Thanks for the suggestion - I will look into that one!

I searched the forums and Scenario Depot, but couldn't find any obvious references to a good CMBB combined arms city scenario suitable for PBEM - does anybody have any suggestions? Thanks! [ January 04, 2003, 10:43 PM: Message edited by: voidhawk ]

Really nice weathering effects too.

I tried the anisotropic filtering, but I find the 4xS FSAA a better overal solution for me as 2xFSAA doesn't work at all and 4x + anisotropic would be too much of a performance hit (at least it feels that way).