phil180

For reference, the Omega drivers (the most recent Catalyst 6.3 derived version) seem to work fine for that laptop. (The one claiming to be an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700; possibly a 9600 depending on which panels you believe. It's seriously confused the Source engine, though -- it thinks it's is talking to a DX7 card instead of DX9.... ) I think my work productivity might be about to drop....

Will the released version of DropTeam require an Internet connection every time it starts, or will it have an offline mode (similar to Steam)?

Can I suggest that a meaningful error message comes up if the auth server(s) is inaccessible, rather than just appearing to hang after clicking `join'? (Although I wasn't feeling very patient last night after one of the kids managed to be sick on me....)

I think that's a really nice idea. It reminds me a bit of the TacOps feature where you may get more airstrikes or ammunition for artillery: the scenerio dictates the probability of this happening. It can make a lot of difference when you're in a tight situation.

Nothing wrong with that idea, IMO. I've already tried ramming other vehicles (typically Shrikes) when I'm out of ammo . No obvious effect, alas.

I've had another go at this laptop. DropTeam definitely complains about missing support for OpenGL 1.5. However, the relevant ATI Catalyst drivers refuse to install, referring to the notebook manufacturer... who doesn't appear to have any updates. (A bit pathetic considering that the machine was only supplied this year!) Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Ah yes, I forgot to add that 0.9.42 had said something to the effect of 'the drivers are old, do you still want to try?'. I, of course, said yes, given that the ATI drivers didn't seem to want to go on to it. I get the impression that DropTeam cache's my response to try regardless -- where does it store that (so I can undo it)? Will do -- I'll try to find a few hours to rebuild the relevant bits of the machine (being both stable and rather complicated with lots of other bits'n'pieces). Thanks!

A few more little points: Am I missing a way to find out if a weapon has reloaded and is ready to fire? (Apart from frantically clicking the mouse....) Perhaps something like a telltale on the display? Is it possible to have the names of friendly players always displayed in green and the enemy in red? When watching the various kill messages, I find it hard to keep track of how well things are going. (Ditto for messages about flags.) The comments about bots being too good at downing dropshops with ATGMs and 120mm -- I heartily agree, having watched four of my dropships being spashed in the last five minutes! Is it possible to kill your own side? (Actually, I can probably answer that myself. Excuse me a moment....) Nice game.

Excellent, I will go looking for that later this evening. Just a UI problem, then. Thanks!

I've been trying DropTeam on a range of computers: </font> I've had a server running on a Linux box (within a Debian unstable/sid chroot hosted on Debian stable/sarge) with connections from a WinXP desktop without trouble. Very nice and shiny.</font>The graphics, sound and whole gameplay on the WinXP desktop are very nice indeed.</font>A work laptop running WinXP just crashes without getting into the lobby: the display changes resolution, then changes back and displays the crash dialog box. A sticker claims it has an `ATI Mobility Radeon 9700'; Windows' Device Manager thinks it's an `ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Series' with driver file version 6.14.10.6404. Attempts to pull down updates from ati.com fail: the Catalyst 6.3 release reports that it's unsuitable for that machine. In case it makes any difference, the display is set to 1280x800 at 16 bpp.</font>Running the client on the (unstable-in-stable) Debian box is hopeless: the sound is corrupted, as is the minimap. The terrain appears and disappears. I suspect the machine or its software configuration just isn't up to the job: </font></font>It has 0.5 GB of RAM.</font>The video card is a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-AGP8 with 128 MB, although the drivers are positively geriatric (1.0.4496).</font>Sound driver: ALSA 1.0.9.</font>Kernel: 2.4.18. So it's fairly old (but very, very stable).</font> Quiting appears clean, except the console reports `Fatal signal: Segmentation Fault (SDL Parachute Deployed)'. There's no chance of it running on Debian stable: it's only got glibc 2.3.2, compared with unstable's 2.3.6. I'm happy to pass further details on system configs, etc., if that would be helpful. (I don't know if I'll ever get round to installing a clean Debian unstable on the work laptop -- enough work to do as it is!)

Hi, I downloaded 0.9.42 and spent some time (too much time, SWMBO would say) playing with it. I broadly agree with a number of other comments: - Please add an option to reverse the mouse Y-axis. - 20mm is nice. I don't think it's too powerful. - 76mm appears hopeless, although it might be that I haven't really got the hang of it yet. - Not sure about 120mm. Bots with ATGMs tend to curtail my fun with that.... - Visual feedback on damaging hits would be good (but I guess this meant by costly in graphics speed). - ATGM rapid turns are, erm, exciting. Smoother turns would be better. - Being able to hold down fire and have continuous fire (or, at least, fire when loaded). Other stuff: - Is it possible to damage the tracks of tracked vehicles? (Say, 20mm vs. Thor tracks?) - I'm not sure that an ATGM lock warning is worthwhile -- if you're not paying attention, you get hit, just the same as with the other weapons. Perhaps add it as a server option? - Counter-measures when you see them would be nice (chaff and/or smoke). - I suggest altering the scoring to add `assists' -- i.e., you damaged something that later died (whether suicide or by another means). - Is there a way to extract a summary of controls? E.g., from data/keycontrols.xml? (I'd like to print a reference to look at as I get shot....) A very nice game: thanks for letting people at the beta. Will the final version include the Windows and Linux binaries together, or do we need to buy both versions separately?

Alas, I'm not having much luck with Wine (on Linux on i386) and the demo of TacOps 4. Curiously, the symptoms vary between different machines (tried three!) and different Wine/WineX builds (the suggested 20030911 Wine build, Wine 20040309, and a recent WineX). Some of the symptoms are similar to the parts listed as `What doesn't work quite so well yet' on your web page (e.g., lock-ups when touching arrows in the artillery support window). Unfortunately, the best running machine locked-up randomly during the combat phase. Oh well. Others threw exceptions or locked-up during the initial placement of units, or while selected the scenerio file. Have many people reading these forums had much success with running TacOps on Wine? Did it need any tweaking, or is it really very sensitive to both the underlying hardware and Wine[X] build (as it seems from my attempts so far)? Cheers, Phil.