Long PBEM Files?

[spcwrnglr]

Howdy everyone,

I know, I know, there are more PBEM file questions that anything on here, but I've scoured the most recent 5 pages of posts and couldn't find a problem that my opponent and I had last night.

We were playing a simple attack/defend 1000 pt scenario. The first 15 moves went very smoothly, no problems whatsoever.

Once I started calling in the heavy artillery, the PBEM files jumped from 80K, on average, up to about 300K. That's when we had our first snag. I sent my opp a PBEM file that his computer would not read. So, no biggie, I re-did my moves, and re-sent a new PBEM file, no problem it worked.

THEN, on turn 19, the **** really hit the fan. It was my "turn" although it was one of those turns where you don't make any moves, you just receive the PBEM, watch the movie, and then give orders.

Well, I watched the movie, sent the PBEM, and once again, he couldn't read it. Fine, re-loaded his file, replayed the movie, sent it back to him, still no go.

So, he re-did his moves, re-sent ME the file, I redid the movie AGAIN and sent in back to HIM, still no dice (on his computer, my computer never had any problems up to this point - I was on a Mac by the way, him on a PC).

Now, the only thing different about this PBEM that was different from the others is that this PBEM was quite large (about 370 K or so).

It couldn't of been compatability issues, because turns 1-18 worked fine.

Why was the file corrupting over and over again, even after we re-did BOTH parts of the turn? Well, maybe the file wasn't corrupted but something was wrong! Just don't know what it was.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Degrees of Frost]

I have had the same problem - except that I couldn't load my opponents PBEM files.

They came through as text as part of the e-mail, I cut and pasted them into Word saved them as ANSI and ASCII text files but it just wouldn't work. Both of us were v1.03.

Should note that previous turns (15 or so) worked fine, but then failed.

I don't know what kind of computer my opponent uses (but I would guess a PC) while I use a Mac.

Still playing the guy, finished the battle (I lost - his Nashorn and Hummel scared the bejesus out of me - not to mention all those MP40s hiding in the woods ) because he sent the files to me as .zip files which I unzipped at my end and placed in the PBEM folder. Playing our second game now.

Never did work out what went wrong - cut and pasting worked in other games where the attachments appeared in the main body of the e-mail.

Still using .zips even though we have both patched to v1.04.

[Degrees of Frost]

Reposting this from Combat Mission board, thought it was relevant ....

hope Joe and chrisl don't mind

I am too tired to work out how to draw a link to the thread so here it is in all its glory .... it is titled "PBEM problems"

Joe Shaw

Member posted 08-24-2000 11:34 AM Now that we've had more extensive experience using PBEM, I thought I'd ask the group about problems I'm encountering with emailed turns. It's not something that can't be worked around but I'd like to reduce the problems if possible.

I'm using a PC with Netscape as my email client since Outlooks scares me lately

1. With some opponents, my emails to or from them have the turn embedded within the body of the email. Sometimes we are able to salvage it by saving the entire email as the turn. Sometimes even that doesn't work. Sometimes they can cut and paste the relevant portion, sometimes not.

2. With some opponents, the email they send to me shows up without an attachment, but they tell me their "sent" copy shows the attachment.

I'm thinking it could be one of a couple of things, or maybe even both. It may be a problem with Netscape vs. Outlook or the way my Netscape is configured. The second issue might have to do with my ISP. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Also have others seen the same things?

Joe

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chrisl

Member posted 08-24-2000 11:44 AM

I've had experience with problem one, and possible experience with problem two.

1) I did some experiements, since my opponent (using netscape) couldn't see the files getting embedded. As far as I can tell, Netscape does this and you have to live with it.

The solution at the receiving end is to use a text editor (like BBEdit), not a word processor, to paste the files together. A text editor will show all characters, and not

insert any that you don't type. A word processor does all sorts of secret things, especially it it was written in Redmond.

I'm on my third game with this opponent, and never had a file not load, even after pasting together 2 MB files that were broken into 7 or 8 parts. You have to strip out the excess headers (from each email if it's split), and make sure you don't put in extra line feeds (or not enough).

2) Can't help with this one.

[spcwrnglr]

Hey thanks everyone who responded.

I just had a brainstorm over lunch.

Could it be perhaps that he didn't allocate enough memory to the Combat Mission application? I know that on my Mac, I can tell the computer to give the application more memory to prevent it from screwing up if I want to. Can you do this on PCs, and if so, would this be a viable solution to a file being too big to process?

[This message has been edited by spcwrnglr (edited 08-24-2000).]

[Ben Galanti]

I've looked into the problem of the embedded turns. It is a Netscape issue (slightly technical explination ahead). When Netscape sees a text attachment, it sets the MIME header 'disposition-type' to 'inline' instead of 'attachment'. This tells the recieving e-mail client to show the text in the body of the message instead of treating it as a seperate attachment. Here's the standard: RFC 1806. Now, in the MIME standards, there is nothing that says the e-mail client can't _both_ show the text inline and also treat it like an attachment, but there are very few clients that do this. On the Mac side the ones I've found are Netscape (though you have to hit a toggle for it to work right), Mulberry (the interface was too much for me..), and Green (I liked this one the best, but it's a beta. I was unable to send any attachments with it, so it's no good for PBEM). If anyone can find another e-mail client that handles it, I'd love to know. I checked Claris Emailer, Outlook Express, Eudora, Power Mail, Musashi, and Mail Charm.

Now, there is a but of a work around. CM is smart enough to ignore any text before the PBEM file starts. So, all you have to do is save your file as text, and CM will read it fine. No editing is required. I know Eudora will split the mail into seperate chunks, but if you select all the chunks and do a save as, it will concatenate them. If you think 300k files are big, wait until you start getting the 1 meg ones....

[This message has been edited by Ben Galanti (edited 08-24-2000).]

[Toad]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by spcwrnglr:

Hey thanks everyone who responded.

I just had a brainstorm over lunch.

Could it be perhaps that he didn't allocate enough memory to the Combat Mission application? I know that on my Mac, I can tell the computer to give the application more memory to prevent it from screwing up if I want to. Can you do this on PCs, and if so, would this be a viable solution to a file being too big to process?

[This message has been edited by spcwrnglr (edited 08-24-2000).]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

No, it's not a memory problem.

I (Mac user) regularly share PBEM files around 300 K in size with Windows opponents.

Please post what e-mail program you're using (be sure to include the version number) and post what your e-mail attachment settings are.

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Toad

Ontario, Canada

[spcwrnglr]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Toad:

Please post what e-mail program you're using (be sure to include the version number) and post what your e-mail attachment settings are.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hey man,

I'm using Eudora Pro 3.1.3 on a PowerMac G4, system 9.0.4. I have my encoding settings to "uuencode" or whatever it is (its the setting endorsed by the manual). Furthermore, my opp and I were not using email to send files, we were using ICQ. (When ICQ crapped out on us, we tried email, but it did not help us out any).

[Toad]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by spcwrnglr:

Hey man,

I'm using Eudora Pro 3.1.3 on a PowerMac G4, system 9.0.4. I have my encoding settings to "uuencode" or whatever it is (its the setting endorsed by the manual). Furthermore, my opp and I were not using email to send files, we were using ICQ. (When ICQ crapped out on us, we tried email, but it did not help us out any).

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

ICQ, eh? That's a good idea. I hadn't thought of that ...

Try zipping (or Stuffing, if your Windows opponent has Stuffit Expander) the game file before sending it. Eudora may be treating the game file in a way that messes it up, because it's a text file. Zip it, and hopefully Eudora will keep it separate from the e-mail itself.

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Toad

Ontario, Canada