MrWombat

Yeah I get this occasionally as well. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and more with the Zep than biplanes, for instance.

It's always a trade-off. Encryption slows down transmission. By not encrypting some of the imagery streams (presumably the communications controlling the flight and weapons engagement commands were encrypted), you trade off the risk of interception for increased responsiveness. Presumably as well the imagery streams had more volume of data than the command streams and thus benefited most from going in the clear. That doesn't mean folks didn't underestimate the opposition, of course. And yeah, it's kind of embarrassing. But at base it's the sort of trade-off you always have to make.

Thanks for the clarification.

If I buy this now (or going forward) will the version I get be the latest, or will I have to also download the patch(es)? Not that it matters much I guess, as the support seems really good and turnaround time on new patches rather rapid

Heh, yeah, years of simply clicking through dialog boxes have trained many of us to ignore everything being displayed. Hell, we could be agreeing to sell ourselves into perpetual slavery for all we know, when we click through those EULAs for instance. Having the choices is actually not a bad idea, it was just not something I expected. I'll pay more attention next time.

Never mind. I am an idiot. I missed the option to select what got updated. All is well, move along, nothing to see here!

Heh, I'm not angry at Battlefront; far from it. I sympathize--it's nasty trying to manage all the crap necessary to get games to run on PCs, and the brave new world promised by all these wonderful APIs has never really materialized. Not Battlefront's fault, necessarily, even though as customers that's who got the money from us. But it's PC gaming, so yeah, we have to understand that things aren't always peachy. And I also agree that it's not that relevant to discuss other games working or not working, though I will say that it could actually help if we found other games with similar problems (the more problems the better likelihood of getting ATI cracking on the issues I think). It's just that I was going to spend some time getting back into CMSF and now I can't for the moment. Not a huge deal--I have enough work to do, goodness knows--but a bit annoying. I'll keep watching this space and the ATI drivers to see what happens at any rate.

This would be more valid if there were other significant products not working with the newer drivers. So far, this is the only one I've seen, so it does I think call into question the technical decisions Battlefront made in coding their grpahics. Using OpenGL might not have been the good idea it seemed at the time--DirectX gets a lot more support these days and OpenGL is soooo 20th century

Yeah, it's frustrating. I bought the British module and now can't play CMSF at all, without downgrading to 9.3 and screwing up my other games. It's weird that the Vista patched CMAK works fine (once you fix the text issue) but CMSF now is inoperable. I sympathize with Battlefront on having to keep up with the changes in PC video card technology, but blaming ATI seems a bit daft, too. You have to assume that PC hardware manufacturers are going to improve their products over time. You have to assume that your development cycle is going to span several of those product improvement cycles in regards to things like drivers for video cards. And you have to try at least to make sure your game will work on your best guess of the hardware/software available when it comes out, not when it started development. As this seems to be the only real issue with ATI drivers, it's hard not to wonder whether the fault is more on this end than on ATIs. But truly, I don't care about "fault," I just want a functioning game.

NM. I found the file, and it works. heh.

I have the latest (7/22/09) Catalyst drivers, and no combination of AA settings makes any difference--the in-game menu and screen text is missing. I've tried alt+tabbing, etc. and nothing. Someone mentioned a ".bmp fix" for the text; what is that, where can I get it, and will that be helpful? I'd love to buy the patches for both CMAK and CMBB, but only if they, um, work with my system

And when they do join, it sucks (for the Japanese!) Bad enough to be dealing witih the KMT and the Maoists, as well as the Commonwealth and the USA. To have Stalin's boys join it really drives home the fact that, yeah, starting this war was a Bad Idea for Tojo and company. Those Soviet tank groups are mean.

No matter what you do, yeah, it gets slow if you're playing as the Japanese. It's a fair trade-off for a decent AI, I think, but it does make the attention deficit types among us (me included) antsy. No free lunch, I guess!

Doh, yes, with no problems. Well, except the Chinese are being much more aggressive than Tojo would like...

Oh, it's not a big deal...played a bunch of turns with trouble (game is quite nicely done, by the way--very polished, like the earlier SC games, and a big contrast to many games these days from smaller publishers/developers). I'll keep an eye on things and see what happens, if anything. With Vista, nothing is certain or predictable!

I had one crash, when changing in-game from 2D to 3D counters. I restarted, played a turn or so, left the game running to run to the Post Office, and when I came back, the game was permanently minimized. Meaning, there was a tab at the bottom left on the task bar for the game, but right or left clicking on it did nothing; there was also a small icon on the far right, in the system tray area, that was blinking but also did nothing. Task Manager said the game was still running but it wasn't possible to actually get it back. Alt-Tabbing did nothing either, except toggle between the desktop and the folder where I keep the shortcuts for wargames. Any one else have this sort of weirdness? Other than that the game looks really neat.

I would say that is fair enough when you choose to play at the highest difficulty. </font>

Never mind; my sarcasm meter wasn't working [ July 25, 2007, 06:55 PM: Message edited by: MrWombat ]

I've preordered this, and certainly hope to find out for myself what's up this weekend. That being said, I think folks have to take some deep breaths and think clearly for a bit. Tom Chick's assessment of the game may or may not be accurate, it may or may not aggree with what you or I or anyone else thinks of the game (once we get it, heh). But Tom isn't some adrenaline junky, or some l337 dude Counter-strike freak, or an amateur of any sort. He's a professional writer who has been reviewing a truly impressive variety of games for many years now. When I was an editor at a major games magazine some years ago I worked with Tom a fair bit. I didn't agree with everything he wrote--his Deus Ex review, for instance, is infamous among fans of that game--but I came to respect his opinions. He plays wargames sometimes, but not like a grog. He's part of the community of gamers that Battlefront is clearly trying to reach with games like Shock Force--interested in military stuff, willing to try something beyond RTS. What this group of gamers is not willing to do, however, is deal with games that don't measure up as they see it to the "state of the art" in terms of interface, functionality, and design. Comments about the differences in budgets between different games are relevant in some degree--you can't expect $150,000 to buy you what $20 million can. But they're also irrelevant from the consumer's point of view, if that consumer is not already fully invested in a niche perspective. Comments about the types of games a reviewer plays, likewise, can be relevant, if it's clear the reviewer simply doesn't "get" the game being reviewed. But in this case, I think Tom "gets" it, he just doesn't feel the game as reviewed bridges that gap between niche and mainstream gaming--according to his review it has all of the drawbacks of a niche title without the polish of a more ecumenical title as it were. And as for how old the build he has is, it's pretty much immaterial. I've reviewed games for years and years, starting back in the print game days for Fire & Movement, and continuing all the way through maybe a year or two ago in the computer era. I've also managed free lancers and staffers writing reviews. If you get a game from a publisher and the publisher says it's reviewable, there you have it. It's the publisher's responsibility to disseminate versions that reflect the released product. Yeah, that means you gotta choose between publicity being potentially skewed by the version being reviewed, or publicity being reduced by not having review copies out there in time, but that's life. Troy Goodfellow, as well, is a quality reviewer (and professional historian/teacher, and a real smart guy). There's no need to agree with these folks of course, but there's also no need to excoriate them in ignorance, either. Steve's reply, while passionate, is a reasonable rejoinder, though none of us can judge either it or these reviews until we get the game in our hands I suppose. Even then, you can't fault a reviewer for giving an opinion on the game in the state it is when they get it--there may well be uber patches coming out, but prdicting the future is dangerous work. Anyhow, personally, I can't wait to try this baby out, as I'm fairly sure Battlefront will have patches/updates/continuing development to make whatever's wrong, right. But it doesn't strike me as beyond the pale to think this new step into CM's future might be a bit rocky at first, too....

It's understandable how difficult it is to do good AI for wargames--I've been playing them on computers for nearly 20 years now and I've seen pretty much every variation of attempt at doing it right, and witnessed only limited success. But while it's certainly true that playing humans is the best challenge, it's not much comfort for many of us who often just want to fire up a game after work or on a Saturday morning or on a day off, at our own pace and without the pressure of having to turn around turns for someone on the other end. So yes, it's not terribly useful to complain and yes PBEM is the way to go ultimately but I have a wealth of sympathy for people who want the AI to do better--in any game, not just this one. Overall the computer opponent in the CM series is pretty fun to play agains, but as noted you have to pick your battles. The issue with embarked troops is just one more reason to pick the attacker when you are playing the AI I guess EDIT: Oh and despite what it says I've been around here since the dawn of CMBO but have repeatedly lost my login and password and keep having to regenerate myself as a new entity. Wish I could do that in RL....