[Shock Force 2 Unofficial Screenshot And Video Thread]

50 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Don't breach inward, breach along the face of the building or wall.....It's not 100% reliable, but it should stop your engineers entering a structure or compound. 

I place a covering squad (preferably with a LMG and lots of grenades) on the same spot as the engineers, then have my engineers Blast to the next spot along the wall and then Hunt back to their starting place.  This way if there's someone in there they get suppressed by the blast then hammered by the covering squad and then your engineers get to join in too, instead of charging straight into a hornet' nest.**

I'd recommend switching to Iron Mode and learning the intricacies of C2 in some detail (it doesn't make the game more difficult, but it does help you to learn who can see what and more importantly, who they are telling about it). 

C2 is everything in CM.....If your units know where each other are and are communicating properly they become orders of magnitude more lethal.

** The potential downside to this is that it doubles your casualties if a devious scenario designer had, for instance, placed a Huge IED against a wall that he knows you are likely to breach. 

Come into the old city, infidel, we dare you! 

Thank you so much for this! I'll be sure to keep paying a close eye on things.

 

And yes, I will be seeing you there soon, I feel - may the better commander win!

[Shock Force 2 Unofficial Screenshot And Video Thread]

6 hours ago, Phantom Captain said:

Good job and nice work!  I used pretty much all my artillery leveling the fort and trenches outside it. As the Americans you have tons of arty, use it!

I was using it rather judiciously, especially in the hopes of clearing out the AT mines via sympathetic detonation. However, I still missed a few - to the chagrin of my poor tank.

I've been curious how to better detect mines with combat engineers. They seem rather... bad at their job, in my experience.

 

7 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Bravo! 

That would be a good result for an experienced player.

Don't expect the bad guys to surrender like that in all CM:SF2 scenarios.

We await you in the old city, infidel! 

It was thanks to a good degree of save-scumming I'll admit, mostly in the final minutes as I tried to find the ideal path into the fortress. Getting breach timing right was key, and I think that took my team about 30 seconds to do, which I had an infantry squad follow in fifteen seconds later (would that it could have been more simultaneous...).

My hope is to someday be able to play the game with the confidence that comes with experience, and to let scenarios play without any degree of gaming on my behalf. I will say, though, that playing on Basic Training feels like a bit of a trap - builds bad habits, especially re: enemy spotting and support call-ins, so I've been playing on Warrior(?) instead.

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

4 hours ago, Zeb II said:

Shaders run on the GPU and CMx2 implements OpenGL in an oldschool way, so there is potential for weird interactions. Immediate mode instead of retained mode and some of the vertex and texture data for the UI is passed as quads, which is deprecated functionality. Depending on drivers etc. many GPUs seem to handle this without major issues, others don't. FXAA and Intel integrated GPUs are some examples where it doesn't work very well.

It could be a bug but it could also be cooling or VRAM related. Maybe taking a look GPU memtesting and temps. I don't want to be alarmist, but I had a GPU die recently and monitor going black, screen tearing and needing to refresh websites because VRAM went out under load were the exact symptoms I had before more serious artifacting appeared. And by the time there were serious artifacts on the screen, magic smoke was in the air. Same PID1000 general error on the same module, only it was followed by kernel exceptions. I would health check the GPU just to be sure.

I will be sure to do that. I'm praying it's not my graphics card dying - buying a new one in this market would be a nightmare, and I don't really have the means to afford a new one at present anyhow...

[Shock Force 2 Unofficial Screenshot And Video Thread]

I completed the first mission of Task Force Thunder tonight! Someday I want to do a full write-up based on the campaign, but for now I am still getting my sea legs with both Shock Force 2 in specific and Combat Mission in general. Here are some photos I took during the fighting!

US Army Combat Engineers begin their search for anti-vehicle mines at a Syrian border checkpoint while an M1A2 provides overwatch.

 

An immobilized Abrams from 1/B/TF Thunder provides overwatch as the rest of its platoon begins to push down Route Lightning.

 

A/TF Thunder progresses down Route Lightning following 1/B's M1A2s. An assault on the Syrian frontier fort is imminent.

 

With Stryker support, 1/A/TF Thunder begins its assault on the fort.

 

The immobilized Abrams watches over a quieting battlefield as dawn breaks.

 

4/1/A/TF Thunder provides suppressing fire with their M240s in the waning seconds of the battle.

 

A/TF Thunder's Fire Support Vehicle watches over the remains of the Syrian border guards.

 

The final positions - I had only begun to force entry into the fortress when the Syrians surrendered.

 

All in all, I'm very proud of the results. Only one killed and two wounded in exchange for 339 enemy casualties and eighteen destroyed tanks. Unfortunately, one of my Abrams has been de-tracked and another has had its turret-mounted M240 disabled by enemy fire - I'm hoping they'll be repaired by the time the platoon is called into action again...

 

Edit: Strange that these are in 1120x630 - I should be playing 1920x1080...

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

Okay, I just did a multi-hour session tonight. I think the shaders, somehow, someway, were causing the crashes.

 

54 minutes ago, ratdeath said:

Maybe your GPU is overheating?

Way back in 2003 I had a GPU overheating while playing Star Wars Galaxies, I noticed the problem only when I moved on from Tatooine to Corellia. From a planet with no water to a planet with rivers, the game didn't crash totally but it lagged a lot while trying to cross a river, turned out my GPU fan had died.

I am praying that this isn't the case, as my computer should have sufficient cooling. I am certain there was some kind of bad reaction with my graphics card, as the crash would completely blank my monitor for several seconds. Any programs open simultaneously would need to be restarted (or webpages needed to be refreshed), and even occasionally I observed screen tearing when scrolling on said webpages after recovering.

 

For the life of me, I don't know why the shaders were the problem... But I do want it at least set in stone somewhere in case it happens to someone else down the road that that was the silver bullet.

Actually, to that note, is there a way to get the attention of a moderator? I would like to change my first post to state my solution + change the title of the thread to show that it has been resolved/fixed.

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

With shaders off, I haven't had any crashes in a while. I'm hoping that was the problem, but I'm not certain yet...

I'm not sure why that would cause a crash, much less - from what it seemed - a graphics card crash.

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

40 minutes ago, Zeb II said:

What drivers, Nvidia control panel settings and in-game settings are you using?

I am using the most recent driver, and I reset my control panel settings for managing 3D back to the recommended(? at least I assume that's what the nVidia eye next to an option means) selections.

 

In game I am running with both best texture and model quality, with antialiasing/multisample also on. However, I did turn off Shaders as that was what someone on another post reported as being a fix to the crashes. I am not able to investigate whether or not this is the silver bullet presently, but later tonight I'd like to check.

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

I tried those changes out - I'm not sure if they did anything because I quit before any crash. Some of the terrain textures seem oddly stretched or blurry, which makes me think that something is badly out of sorts...

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

6 minutes ago, Erwin said:

Am sure someone here can interpret the above.  But, probably the first thing to do (if you haven't already) is do a complete uninstall and reinstall.  Also... perhaps install to the HD where one has the OS.

Hm, I'd not tried or thought of that as a solution. I may just have to take that approach, though I was hoping I wouldn't have to.

I've also been looking at older posts and recommendations to change 3D settings in order to get a fix. I'll post a link to the post below:

 

[SF2/CW Consistent Crashes]

Hello everyone! I wish I could have made a slightly less inauspicious first post, but unfortunately I've been pulling my hair out at this issue and was hoping someone would be able to help me.

I use a PC that runs Windows 10 (64 bit iirc) and a GeForce GTX 980 graphics card, for reference.

I've been having consistent crashes from my CM2 games that, for a while, I thought were tied to mods. I had not been dealing with crashes a few months ago, but suddenly they became overwhelmingly prevalent, and I am not sure why. However, I was able to secure a crash log for help.

 

CM Shock Force 2.exe

0.0.0.0

5f038258

nvoglv32.dll

30.0.14.9709

61a0f733

c0000409

00f27af8

25bc

01d7e7c4edf14bc7

E:\Battlefront\Combat Mission Shock Force 2\CM Shock Force 2.exe

C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nv_dispi.inf_amd64_642e50d7b66aa2a4\nvoglv32.dll

e641de2f-883c-4339-bd13-fb0f01fdc037

 

The rest of the log notes that it is an "ApplicationError" with an Event ID of 1000. Please let me know what path forward I should take, I've been researching the forums for answers but all of the topics I've seen seem to be a few years old at this point and I'm not sure if I should trust their solutions (especially since one recommended downgrading to a driver version from several years ago...)