jcmil

Try this JSH Mod 1.3.5 Hot Fix

Ok this is an old game & understandably not a top priority for devs but... This is a strange bit of ToW activity, & I was struck by it as it's a bit worrying as far as unit experience goes. I found that at least one unit that had definitely made kills had 0 in its after -battle stats. This was also obvious in the Losses screen at the battles' end. In this instance a brummbar had killed 2 arty & crews + asst inf in trenches. All stats showed 0 & the number of enemy guns killed total was off. Not a huge problem as it doesn't stop play but it is still an error. Any ideas as to a cause? Yep still enjoying this 'ancient' game.

Just wondering if AV is blocking the writes - some AV really doesn't like the eLicense & game exe's need to be given specific permissions. I recall that the auto-update on Kursk had to be updated before you could patch at a certain point. Cannot recall on Africa I see that on the BFC patches page it lists 130 for vanilla & 136 if you have Centauro. There is a thread about the smart-pause switch here. I did have one memorable battle which was kind of a meeting engagement. I was advancing, they were advancing, but to their rear they were also entrenched. So the offensive/defensive battle was also there. Mod-wise - it seems most players, myself included, see these as essential. They make a big difference. Good game, every replay battle is different in some small way & the old RTS style of 'ah now I know what they are going to do so I'll just restart the level ' doesn't work so well in ToW.

Can't comment on every point but.. AFAIK Sneaksie has stated that x64 helps the game performance as it is able to better utilize resources in that environment. I run ToW on x64 & it always seems OK. I think 1.3.6 is the latest for Africa but the auto-update should be able find out what is available. As to .net etc I already had those installed too & the game didn't seem to mess them up. You may find the Africa balance mod 1.5.1 (Decent mirror) useful (You must also have Centauro installed tho). The balance mods (JSH 1.3.5+Bulldogs for Tow1) add units & make the games overall balance more accurate & playable IMO. ToW is a great series if you like wargames. Detailed modelling with eye-candy.

Agreed. JSH makes a real difference, so many tweaks & additions it is quite a transformation.

Glad it worked for you.

Another possible approach/solution from Comodo- Could be the answer as D+ doesn't properly flag the BFC eLicense activity as being blocked.

The tip in this comment made a difference to my ability to survive some of the missions. A simple reduction of elite status to veteran for a couple of enemy units made a nightmare mission a rewarding skin o'the teeth fight. Once you get used to it the game series is a lot of fun. The editors & mission generators are pretty straightforward yet capable of throwing out some really good battles/campaigns.

You probably know this but you may need to white-list more than just the obvious game .exes. Out of curiosity I just did a quick count of .dlls, .bins & .exes in my white-list - over 40 - for Kursk with Caen. I have D+ set to 'clean PC'. Hopefully you will be able to track down which call is upsetting Comodo...I assume you have tried the active processes list for cross refs. ToW is a very enjoyable game, lot of replayability in the series too.

As an FYI, I've been using Comodo for years & have CMSF & ToW working fine. It does flag files that behave in the way the eLicense does for obvious reasons but I think if you ensure you add all appropriate files to the white-list it all goes along OK. For me it does at least... Check the 'files waiting for review' / 'pending files' & ensure you add the contents of the game dir to 'my own safe files'. You can browse for these on the HDD or in memory etc if you start the game up & set their permissions. It is also possible to submit files to comodo directly so they can be flagged appropriately in their white-lists.

I heard somewhere ToW runs better on x64 because of the streams of calculation occurring having more bandwidth. I'm running the game on x64 & haven't had any noticeable issues with performance & I'm only using 4gb of RAM. Also process lasso can smooth a lot of things out.

Just a thought.... What about in the virtual machine? (MS gives out a preconfigured Win XP for 7x64 or if you want to do an OS yourself, you can use VMWare, or free MS virtual PC or free Paragon Virtual PC etc. OT - I was pleased to find the ToW 1 editor now works under Vista x64.

I'd say try the demos - if only to test the specs/performance & watch esp. those made by players. (The advertising videos are great for showing software capability but don't show you what it's like to actually play so much.) At the current price point I found these games to be very good value. I still play ToW1 some 3 years on, even though it has less eye-candy & some quirky triggers in the missions (things improved upon in later games) as it is such good fun yet slanted towards simulation. I play wargames. Only other games I have installed are CMSF, Histwar (non-bfc) & Achtung Panzer Kharkov (non-bfc) if that's anything to go by!

This is a faster link - will give over 100kbps (or more if you pay for the access.) JSH 1.3.5 & Bulldogs campaign 497.7mb Also the ToW2 Africa balance mod 1.5.1 (for Centauro ver.1.3.6 only) 20.9mb Both clean & working for me.

I've found these to be very good: - Black Edelweiss - Johann Voss Death Traps - Belton Y. Cooper Invasion! - They're Coming!: German Account of the D-Day Landings and the 80 Days' Battle for France - Paul Carell It Never Snows in September.The German View of Market Garden and the Battle of Arnhem, September - Robert J. Kershaw The Battle of Hurtgen Forest - Charles Whiting

I set it up for my 9800 to improve image quality, but the 400 series will be different in a lot of ways I'm sure. Try turning off the non opengl settings eg enhancements & texture filtering 1st & see what happens. I think this might help - change compatibility - Conformant Texture Clamp to 'hardware' optimizations - texture filtering to off My main feeling is that it kills the global flashes but as you say something isn't quite right. But for me it is a whole lot easier to bear than the map-wide star-shell rifle fire.... I find I don't actually need to totally uninstall just del or deactivate a profile & then import other profiles. nHancer will also reset profiles. That way I can continue to mess with it w/out it messing about elsewhere - you can stop it loading with windows too. The key thing for me has been getting some registry keys written by the earlier driver builds so that nHancer can activate that instruction set in the newer drivers. Interesting that the driver for openGL can still be accessed with that config tho. Shows the driver still has the commands embedded even if NVDA has turned them off & the newer cards still respond. I am probably gonna grab a 460 soon, as I like the bang for buck, esp as you can SLi em & outperform the high-end card for less $s. When I do I can start reconfiguring the profile for that GPU. (If you don't solve it 1st). Wondering why no-one more technically advanced in driver architecture hasn't used my ground-work.... Thanks for the feed-back - it seemed like I was the only one interested in testing it!

I am thinking the 460 will suit my next gfx upgrade. Just curious, did my attempt at a fix in the nvida driver thread work for you? Something in the registrys' openGL settings is key to the profiles function I think. If it does improve it then I would hope someone would be able to pinpoint the switch & write a fix into a patch for the game....

Any feedback guys? :confused: Does my mod via nHancer look like its working?

Ahhh. yes a VT-34 or bergepanzer etc would be nice. Game design is supposed to be for an engagement rather than a extended time I think, so all repairs occur off map. Need to learn how not to deploy things... the setup phase is pretty critical to keeping things alive. I like Promt & google for translations, I think your English is OK though.

Volltreffer suggest you start with the 186 drivers & get a profile set from there to work on. The later drivers (I think) drop some needed registry entries. If you put earlier drivers in they will write those values so nHancer can call them - thats my theory anyway.

I would say you need a newer VGA card - min reqs is a series 6 & you're using series 4....

Don't know that its 100% but it's better & more localized. See the 2 min in-game video of a spin round a quick battle fought in dusk urban environment. 12mb avi & slightly altered profile 7 zipped. Sergei Had a clean install of 186.91 then nHancer, set up the profile. (Used Driver Sweeper to clean the old drivers out completely, in safe mode.) Installed the latest driver (& since then the latest beta.) straight 'on top' of existing driver. Presumably as the settings are already written (in the registry as switches?) they stay put. You can then play around with the settings under the later drivers - no multiple re-installs req'd. Notably I can deactivate the profile & go back to global flashes. Activating the profile manually then brings back localized effects (requires nHancer to be closed & restarted if you have turned the profile settings off). Surely someone will now be able to see which OGL switch needs setting to overcome the nvidia driver failings....?

Update 259.31 works with the nHancer profile above. (Without it we're back to global flashes) I have managed to bring the image quality back up with no noticeable FPS loss. So its not all bad news... Edit Enabled forced DXT3 in optimizations, & upped to GL version 3.0 & it's looking pretty good to me now. (Still using a manually activated profile loaded before the game starts up.) Anyone like to match settings & confirm it's OK for them too?

GeForce Forceware 259.31 The NVIDIA developer site shows a new driver today. Please consider this driver BETA. Windows driver version 259.31 and Linux drivers version 256.38.03 provide full support for OpenGL 4.1 and GLSL 4.10 on capable hardware. This driver also supports several new OpenGL extensions for both 4.1-capable GPUs and older GPUs. Just found these which I am going to try - GL support sounds promising...maybe someone read the complaints... Volltreffer186.91 worked perfectly for me on my 9800 - also fine on other newer games but I think one may miss the specific optimizations made for newer games with an older driver.

In something of a fluke moment during a whole lot of experiments I seem to have isolated something that returns the lighting to more localized activity. (nHancer profile attached in zip below) See screenie for open GL settings. I don't think its 100% & I suspect I have lost quality noticeably. However the BFC crew may be able to identify which things are causing the issue with this as a starting point. Notably I installed nHancer when the driver was version 186.91 & made a profile. Then the driver was updated without uninstalling the existing driver to current 258 & I activated the profile manually prior to loading the game. Anyway it's something to play with... cmsf.zip