My Italians are wigging out

[j0ker]

Been playing CMBB almost daily since Christmas, no problems at all (i have a dell dimension 4500/64MB video card, plenty of RAM/HD space so it's not really an issue)

... until last night I started a QB with a couple of Italian platoons added to my German Mot Co (aug. 41). Now things are going a little wacky:

1. at start of game, ALL figures were portrayed in standing upright position (at 'attention'); only after hiding/unhiding them did they revert to "taking a knee".

2. when moving, all troops running movements are erratic, and 'sped up'.

3. during one turn (tracking the deployment of 105mm artillery) it got bad enough that it wouldn't run, initially, until i reset the clock a couple times... then, when the PLAY button was on, the time elapsed wasn't going up but down... and there were a series of a half-dozen numbers or so, not real time... very strange. After this turn things got better but still the erratic sped-up running continues.

I apologize for not getting more particulars, or for not checking to see whether these anomalies went away when I played QBs with no Italians in my battle group.... just wanted to see if there's been any other documented probs with the addition of italians in QBs. FWIW, i'm battling vs. Soviet Inf Naval (1st time vs. Naval). I can check on this prob. further later tonight.

-- any initial comments on this?

thanks, j0ker

[Schrullenhaft]

There's something funky with some Dell machines. It some sort of software-timer issue that causes some clock funkiness. I'm not sure about the 'troops at attention' issue, though it may be related.

Here's a post from Madmatt about the timer issue:

There seems to be two different but somewhat similar issues here.

The first issue, which is what this thread was about, is a bug with some Dells in how they report their UPTIME to Windows. This timer gets confused and reports faulty timing. This affects CM as it looks to the clock to synch up the playback. Thats why garbarge is displayed in the timer or playbacks seem to play very fast or slow. For THAT issue, there is nothing we can do. Some of the work arounds mentioned seem to work though with leaving the computer running for a while (approx 45 minutes or more) before running CM. This issue also affects Crimson Skies, Cossaks and some other games.

Now a second issue is the one reported directly above. As I understand it this person is only having this issue with PBEM. Now this *could* be related to some PBEM issues we uncovered recently and are patching in the forthcoming v1.01 update. It depends on if his opponent is on a CDV version or not.

In the past we have seen other timer issues which were related to video drivers and in some cases mouse drivers. Some older Intillieye drivers from Microsoft could cause the timer to jump back and forth throughout a playback. Some video cards also displayed garbage in the timer window.

The best thing to do is to ensure you have the most up to date (but not beta) drivers for your video card and mouse.

It is very important to be careful before you lump in your specific problem with another persons reported issue.

And a subsequent post about the issue possibly being resolved with a motherboard BIOS update:

It is a dell {Hell} prob they are suppose to have a bios udate to correct this problem at thier support site and yes Matt is correct, I have had some customers with similiar issues with other games, It is in the Bios of the mainboard on these specific machines.

[j0ker]

Followup to problem: it occured to me that it had been a while since I rebooted the system - so after rebooting i checked out the performance and found that solved the problems i was having. Thanks for your input and quick response!

j