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Freeze at 'splash screen'


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I have had CM for about a week now and have been having a great time with it. This morning I tried to open a Quick Battle that I had saved last night. I selected the Quick Battle from the scenario menu, hit Play, and the "splash screen" came up (the one with the 6 flags and 'loading 3d grahics'). I heard the background sounds and it sounded like they were skipping over and over. The game hung that way. I killed it using task manager and tried loading fresh as yet unplayed scenarios and got the same thing every time.

I run Win95, PII 333, 192 Mb RAM, ATI Rage 128. I have the 1.01 patch and all MadMatt mods loaded and have played about 10 scenarios successfully up until now.

Thanks.

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Unfortunately, you are not the only one encountering problems with the ATI Rage. I have been having lock up problems ever since I got the game and I have an ATI Rage too. Those of us with ATIs also don't get fog effects. I have started playing around with resolutions in order to find where I can play freeze free and the last res I played with was 800 by 600 on 16 bit true color and it seemed to work fine. 1024 by 768 froze solid the minute I tried it. I typically keep my desktop at 1152 by 864 with 16bit true color, but that proved to be unplayable after a while. It is a bit of a pain in the shorts to have to change my desktop resolution everytime I want to play this game. I'm guessing that BigTime didn't test their game on ATI cards - otherwise they would have noticed the lack of fog.

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ASL,

Fog is in the video card hardware. If the card cannot support it, there is nothing they can do. They are using the Directx 7 engine on the PC side and Rage? on the mac side. No fog would be an ATI issue and not an issue of the game.

Rune

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The ATI Rage is for the PC side of things. I am not saying that fog doesn't show up because BTS screwed up. It is standard practice for game companies to test their games on different cards. I merely point out that they couldn't have tested the ATI Rage or they would have noticed the lack of fog. The fact that they didn't test the game with the ATI Rage means that there are likely to be some anomolies with that card. Is it BTS fault or ATIs fault? Beats me .... but the fact remains that there seem to be some incompatabilities between the game and ATI cards. Had they tested those cards perhaps there wouldn't be these incompatibilities.

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ASL - it isn't necessarily a case of "incompatibilities". The older ATI cards, such as your Rage Pro, don't have the hardware support for fog. As was stated by Charles in this thread:

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum8/HTML/000054.html

There are two methods to do fog in DirectX. BTS chose the older and more compatible version. Some chipsets don't support one or the other or even both. Some of the newest ATI chipsets apparently don't support the older method of fog (or their drivers don't), but do support the newer method. People who have mentioned other games showing transparencies and fog with their current video card and CM not... are probably seeing support for newer fog tables, but no support for the older ones.

I'm not sure if BTS could support two fog code types in CM. In this case they decided to go with the most compatible version, but it still is a problem with some cards, such as the ATIs. If there is a way to support both versions in the code, then I believe Charles will probably attempt it, but it may not be possible.

BTW - ATI chipsets are very common in many of the Macs out now. How different they are in terms of hardware & driver support from their PC cousins, I don't know. So BTS did do some sort of testing for the ATIs.

jimburb - The first thing I would suggest is to delete the CM prefs file. Restart CM and select a resolution, possibly one that is different from what you were using previously. I don't have a clue as to why CM didn't initialize correctly, but hopefully this is a start. If that doesn't do it you may want to play around with the sliders for "video acceleration" and "audio hardware acceleration". And one question, did you change anything since the last time you played CM with no problems ?

[This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-30-2000).]

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Guest Big Time Software

jimburb,

If CM was working previously and suddenly stopped working, try to think if you made any changes to your system that might have caused this.

Charles

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Thanks everybody for the help and suggestions. The one thing I had changed was installing an "adkiller" that killed banner ads in Netscape. I removed it, and also made the following changes in CMOS settings:

AGP aperture size -- changed from 128 to 256

Video RAM Cache -- was disabled, now enabled

Everything's humming along just great now. I still don't have fog -- I'll play all the non-fog scenarios before I'll have to upgrade vid card.

JB

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