jiggles

Oh yeah, I just fired up CMBB (never mind the AF/FSAA), and boy is it a horrible experience. The mouse goes crazy, the pointer disappears and reappears randomly. The leftmost panel on the game control panel (victory/morale) flashes constantly. Come back 30.82, I love you really...

Well, I tried them. I can't tell you whether they have the same problems, as I was unable to bring up the control panel window which is supposed to allow me to change the AF/FSAA settings. With the new drivers Windows (I'm talking XP Pro here) complains about a missing DLL on start-up. This was a problem with 40.71 too, but only if you installed the drivers the wrong way. I installed 40.72 the same way that was right for 40.71, and I get the DLL error. Then when trying to access the GeForce3 tab in the control panel to the control panel crashes. So there you go. From my limited tests, 40.72 is worse than 40.71. NVIDIAs drivers seem to be de-generating with this 40+ series. Historically I've had three irritating problems with their drivers: firstly the problem with anit-aliased text, and transparent whites (which plagued CMBO), and secondly with a persistent 8-pixel shift it puts on my flat-panel monitor when I attach via DVI, and thirdly they didn't support 1600x1024 (which is the native resolution of my flat-panel). The third problem got fixed in 23.xx, the first problem in 28.xx and the second problem in 30.82. The 40.xx emissions seem to re-instate at least two of those issues. I get the feeling NVIDIA and ATi have swapped driver development teams.

That's irritating (if true), as I cancelled my order with Game and went with Amazon (I got a £5-off voucher thing from Amazon, and they're £2 cheaper to start with, and postage is £3 less. That's £10 more to spend on beer to drink whilst playing!). The Game website still says the 11th. Upshot: I'll believe it when you (or I) get it.

Pascal, give over. You've had your say (as have I). I think BFC have made it pretty clear they've taken the general feelings on-board and will try to do better next time. No amount of carping and sniping is going to make things better this time. You give us Europeans a bad name, and waste bandwidth. </rant> [ October 02, 2002, 04:23 AM: Message edited by: jiggles ]

no

Oh how wrong you are. The combination of FSAA and anisotropic filtering make CMBB/CMBO look just gorgeous. In particular they really beat down the texture crawling you get when using hi-res modded scenery tiles. The anisotropic filtering is what really helps here, more than the FSAA. If you card is fast enough (GF3+) all-the-toppings FSAA+aniso shouldn't really be a problem with typical large or huge CMBO maps. (Not sure what a 9 sq. km CMBB will run like though!)

Great. So not only do we have to try to think of other things to do for three weeks, but now they're singing their Country + Western at us. Careful, we might retaliate with ... BAGPIPES!!! And Chas 'n' Dave...

amazon.co.uk now have it listed, with a release date of the 4th October...

By my reckoning at least. Released 4th October, maybe posted on the 4th/5th/7th, spends a few days in posties sack (the UK being such a large country and all). Can't wait. (Demos' getting a bit tired now, resorting to playing CMBO and reading the spoilers on this board). Tum ti tum... NEWS!: Oh no, I've just checked my pre-order and it looks like the ETA has slipped from the 4th to the 11th. So it's posted on the 11th/12th/14th, spends a few days on posties coffee table... I'm going to stop typing now... [ September 24, 2002, 04:26 AM: Message edited by: jiggles ]

Not like the Americans to turn up to a war early...

Did they mean permanently, or just when you install? Anyway, it sounds like your software store is talking nonsense to me.

Hummm. I've played this scenario from both sides (admittedly only against the AI), and noticed a few bizarre things which caused me to wonder and do a few experiments. When I played German (I had +100% extra forces) I decided to sit tight and try to let the AI do it's usual WW1-style "lets all walk towards the enemy guns thing", then let go with all barrels when I could read the labels on their Gucci-designed uniforms. The AI dutifully rolled it's T34s up to the line of the forest for my PAKs to blow away -- only for me to find that even at 45m the engine seems to think they have no chance of a kill. It didn't seem to matter whether they were front on, side on, or showing their bare behind to me. A naive reading of the penetration stats on the PAK suggested that a kill at this range shouldn't be a problems. This was a bit strange to me, as when I had previously played as Russian two of my 34s had been taken out before they got halfway across the map. So starting again I opened up with my PAKs much earlier, and took out four of the 34s. The other two ran away. (It was then only a matter of waiting for the massed Russian infantry to bunch together a few hundred metres from my lines. A late artillery barrage and my MGs sent them packing and handed me a total victory). Anyway, I was rather puzzled how it's possible for a PAK to have a Poor, Fair, OK, Good chance of killing a T34 at 400m, but None at <100m? In the Yelnia scenario the attacking Russian tanks are decending a hill before climbing towards the German positions. I wondered if the engine was taking this into account. Firing downwards at the sloped armour would decrease the angle of incidence, and increase the chances of a penetration.

I think it's probably a transitional arrangement. I expect CM3 will most likely use WASD (forward/back/strafe left/strafe right), with view/aim/shoot controlled by the mouse, like most sensible first-person shooters. It'll make the Hover Tiger with Big Laser Beam much more responsive

What I want to know is when will we be able to pre-order it?

Maybe they'll put a health warning on the side of the box for the full product?

The CDV version renames the "Waffen SS" as "Waffengrenadier" and removes the SS runes, as these are Nazi iconography and illegal in Germany, where CDV is based. And this would bother people why? :confused: </font>

So let me get this straight. Even though I live in the UK, I have to put up with a version which has been sanitised due to the requirements of the German government? Or am I missing something? Is there a German version and a non-German-European version? (Sorry, I know you said this was gone over before, but it must have slipped me by.) If there's one thing which annoys me more than being censored by my own Government, it's being censored by someone elses :mad:

Yeah, happened to me too. Bloomin' P4's, uuuuseless I tells ya...

Well, I like! The tutorial was rather easy (playing as Russian), but the Citadel scenario is an intriguing one. Still haven't cracked it yet. There are still a few nits with the TacAI (did the Germans really reverse their tanks into battle?). I like cover arcs. Alright, that's the demo done with. Where do I order the full thing?

Get Mozilla. You can program it to refresh your bookmarks at regular intervals (eg. once per minute), then play silly noises when the page changes.

Depends what you mean by "significantly" I'd say. Looking at the benchmarks posted above it looks like the GF4 is about 15% faster than the GF3. Is this 15% worth your A$140? Only you can answer that! Of course it's possible those benchmarks don't reflect the performance of CMBB. If you've using the hi-res texture mods, maybe having the extra memory will help. It's not all in the graphics card though. The benchmarks above might will be different has you increase the processor power. I'd expect the higher-end cards to pull away with faster processors. I've just upgraded my CPU/motherboard/memory underneath my GF3 and the game feels much smoother. I can turn on 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering (both of which make the visuals much, much better), without feeling too much pain. Whatever you do don't buy an ATI, you'll miss the fog!

Eye candy man, eye candy! For example: 1) Proper directional lighting on the map. Proper shadowing must help when studying the terrain. 2) Dynamic lighting, shadows, bump mapping, etc. 3) Make modding easier. I mean what's with the naming scheme for the BMPs? 4) More building types. I know the EU like standardisation, but only five building types is silly I like the idea of the redundant textures too, as suggested above. 5) Can we get away from the 4- or 8-way symmetry on the maps? The obvious grid-based pattern really makes the terrain look fake, and roads don't just run along 8 points of the compass. More seriously... 1) Indirect fire capability for on-board SP guns, etc. (like mortars can). 2) Perhaps the capability for a more "realistic" line-of-sight view (maybe not in real-time). I look over your shoulder and I can see the *%^%(%% tank, yet the engine says I can't. Show me why... 3) Why can't I load a map into a Quick Battle, or choose my units in a Scenario? 4)

Thanks for the tips, I'll try them out!

A quick noobie question: when using a Crocodile against infantry, how can I "persuade" it to use flame rather than it's main gun? I mean naively speaking, being say, for example, 28 metres from an infantry squad, and face on, I would expect my Sherman Croc to use flame, not it's main weapon. Moreover, being 13m from a 75mm AT pillbox, out of it's line of fire, but "in front" of it, I'd rather hoped my Croc would flame it. It seems reluctant to do so. Is it just being environmentally friendly? Or does it need a Tiger in it's tank?