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What is involved in fixing CMAK for Vista from a technical standpoint


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There is a bit of debate on the wargamer.com about this atm.

http://www.wargamer.com/forums/tm.as...362271&mpage=2

I have a small question that will probably still some of the debate.

Was it more than .dll issues that needed to be corrected to work with Vista?

Many think that this sort of .dll fixing is just a a quick fix and not worthy of money.

Personally I just wanted to know if their were more issues such as how DEP and others are stricter in Vista. Sidebar interferance or UAC problems?

What interest do I have in Battlefront?

I am actually an owner of the original CMSF and am looking forward to British Forces... hoping for a bundle actually with marines thrown in.

Would you believe I passed on CMAK due to clown heads on infantry and turn based system, fixed in CMSF!

CMSF has most I want including real time. I do miss coop play and better frame rates though. But they are not big deals.

I also own TOW but will prolly pass of TOW2 in favour of British forces after TOW1 frame rate issues on my high end system at the time.

P.S. If you consider this a re-opening of a previous thread or some such. Do what you will.

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The majority of the work, as it turned out, was to get the long since dormant code to compile in a current compiler. Finding the problem was fairly straight forward after that since Philip (who did the fix) was fortunate enough to have a Vista system which CM had problems with.

Once the fix was made we had to test it and create installers, then test with the installers. We also, as it turns out, had to go back and fix the CMAK patch, which then went through more testing and then updated installers.

This is all work that we would never have done on our own. Honestly, we had hoped that Vista drivers would eventually "unbreak" the problem or that Windows 7 would. When we discovered that Windows 7 would likely be a repeat of Vista, we contracted out for a fix. Otherwise we'd probably have to stop selling our old CMx1 games. As small as the revenue is from continued CMx1 sales, we figured a fix was worth doing if it didn't significantly interfere with CMx2 development.

But it ends there. The code was re-examined for a very specific purpose and that was to keep CMBB and CMAK working on Vista and Windows 7. That's been achieved and that's that. Anything more than that would be impractical since even Charles found the code difficult to work with and he wrote it :D

As for hindsight about how CMx1's graphics were coded... in 1997 when Charles had to decide what to support he went with what was then currently supported. OpenGL was not very well supported and there was some indication that it would remain that way. Obviously that didn't turn out to be the case, which is why hindsight is a pretty useless thing. And on the Mac side Apple explicitly told developers that RAVE would be supported going forward, which turned out to be a lie. There's no quick fix for the Mac folks, unfortunately.

Steve

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If your completely done with CM-1, then at what point if any would you consider making it 'freeware'?

I'm sure that once your revenue stream ends on it, or if its bringing in negligible funds then others may be able to work on it?

Or is it somehow connected to the CM-2 code?

I stress again that I know next to nothing about PC 'voodoo' but it does seem a shame to simply let a good game wither, no matter how old it is.

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If your completely done with CM-1, then at what point if any would you consider making it 'freeware'?

I'm sure that once your revenue stream ends on it, or if its bringing in negligible funds then others may be able to work on it?

Or is it somehow connected to the CM-2 code?

I stress again that I know next to nothing about PC 'voodoo' but it does seem a shame to simply let a good game wither, no matter how old it is.

The OpenSource idea came up, using a license that doesn't make commercial reuse feasible (analog to id Software's Quake and Doom releases), but didn't receive a favorable reaction.

You realize that a $5 patch has been released that makes it work for most people?

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