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).

Another data point: I just upgraded from a GeForce 2 to a ti4200 and am running 31.40 drivers now. It made no difference to CM subjective framerates as far as I can tell (which did disappoint me a little bit). UT2003 Fly benchmark scores tripled at 2XFSAA though! This is all at 1024x768. When I try 2xFSAA I get a blank screen, and no ammount of escaping etc. gets me the real thing back. This used to work with the 12.something drivers I used with the GF2. No FSAA looks aweful, 4x isn't all that much better as far as the sparkly terrain textures is concerned, but 4xS FSAA looks really nice - almost no texture shimmer at all. I do get some spurious pixels next to the movement path lines etc. on zooming out; they are of the same colour as the paths themselves. Now onto a faster CPU (which means a new MB) it seems...

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Resolution isn't everything with a CRT; make sure you can live with the refresh rate at your prefered resolution. For instance, the E90 you mentioned above has an acceptable 80Hz refresh rate at 1280x1024, but a (to me) unacceptable 68Hz rate at 1600x1200 - that is why it is relatively inexpensive. Anyway, just something to be aware of.

You may find the Annotated Bitmaps of use too; you could mix and match them with the bmps your are working on to help with coverage and alignment etc.

With so many nice splash screens to choose from, it is hard to pick just one. So, I created a little DOS script (see below) that you can add to your autoexec.bat (or call it from there). This ensures that every time you boot your PC it will set up a new splash screen. Instructions are included in the scripts below. You will need to modify it as appropriate, e.g. the directory, file name and number of splash screens (each one has a letter appended, starting with "a"). The example below assumes 8 different splash screens, "a" to "h". Well, if you know anything about DOS at all, you'll figure it out. Sorry, with so many different user setups out there, I can't offer any support beyond what is documented in the script... As usual, make a copy of the original file(s) is you like them enough. </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">echo off rem Swaps splash screen every time Windows is booted rem By voidhawk rem rem Set "game" to your game's bmp directory rem set game="E:\Strategy\Combat Mission Barbarossa to Berlin\bmp" rem Set "file" to either "11001" (for 800x600) or rem "11002" (for 1024x728). rem set file="11002" rem Your splash screen choices MUST be named 11002a.bmp, 11002b.bmp rem (for 1024x728) etc. rem rem If "a" exists, make it the real one if not exist %game%\%file%a.bmp goto end erase %game%\%file%.bmp rename %game%\%file%a.bmp %file%.bmp rem Then move "b"->"a", "c"->"b", etc. up to "h"->"g" rem Add/subtract entries as appropriate! rename %game%\%file%b.bmp %file%a.bmp rename %game%\%file%c.bmp %file%b.bmp rename %game%\%file%d.bmp %file%c.bmp rename %game%\%file%e.bmp %file%d.bmp rename %game%\%file%f.bmp %file%e.bmp rename %game%\%file%g.bmp %file%f.bmp rename %game%\%file%h.bmp %file%g.bmp rem Move the previous "a" to last one in series (may need to change "h") copy %game%\%file%.bmp %game%\%file%h.bmp :end</pre>

Looks good - I'm downloading it right now so I can use it in the PBEM game I'm currently playing with ASLer (hi! - and where is that file ) PS What happened to the shadows under the wheel arches? Looks much better with them. [ November 07, 2002, 10:03 PM: Message edited by: voidhawk ]

You may find this link useful too.

I must have originally posted this on an off day I guess?

This is what you are looking for.

The annotated bitmaps mod set is now available at Combat Mission Times courtesy of Michlos. So, what is an annotated bitmap? From the readme file: Thank you Michlos for hosting this mod, and also thank you to the beta testers for providing feedback! [ October 25, 2002, 06:45 PM: Message edited by: voidhawk ]