AlexB

Hi codeine, seems like I didn't rebuild the launcher properly... Does Arda work if you put Syringe.exe "ra95.dat" (with quoutes) in the address bar and press return?

Ok, that last time was a little unfair. Of course there is a new feature, but it might not appear as new one by today's standards. The important part of the screenshot can be seen above. Though Volkov and Chitzkoi are selected, the health bar of the enemy tank is displayed. It is the default in modern games and it can help tremendously to decide what unit to attack next without having to deselect your own units first. This feature cannot be turned off at the moment, but it respects the EnemyHealth tag already. Good addition or unneccessary gimmick? The shadow of the past: This image shows two new features, both affecting aircraft this time. As you can see, I recreated the Orca from Tiberian Dawn here. It doesn't have any rotors, which can be controlled by the new Rotors tag. You can put 0, 1 or 2 there; the latter is used by the Chinook. A second feature is the alternate image used for the aircraft when it reaches a certain speed. TD's Orca was the only unit that could use this feature, and it was hardcoded to a speed of 11. In Arda, you can use the new PitchSpeed tag on any aircraft to make helicopters tilt towards the direction in which they are flying. This is no Visceroid. (It's the Blob and wife on their way to church.) But it appears to be, because it loops through all image frames no matter of its facing, just like the original Visceroids do. Still, it isn't a real Visceroid, because it doesn't wander around on its own. You can use the new Animates tag for... well, I don't know. Another new tags is Crusher=, which does the same as it does in TS and later. You can set this to yes on ants and they will run over infantry, just as in real life. (Not pictured) The country bonuses should be fixed once and for all, the fake structures will hide their true nature from the enemy and aircraft will not show more ammo pips than they can hold ammo. A bug has been fixed that caused a crash whenever a Demolition Truck detonated. The MPEG feature has been deactivated to see whether it causes more problems than benefits. I also added some logging to the function that is supposed to unload the movie mixes; maybe this gives a hint. Apropos, there's a new tag called NoExcept in arda.ini. If you experience many crashes, try to set this to yes. It prevents Arda from catching exceptions, including the ones in the original game (some seem to happen when drawing Tesla zaps). If you set this in arda.ini, you will get the beta Tesla Tank, courtesy of Nyerguds (big Thanks!). [Hacks] TeslaTank.Image=TMRJ You can download the latest revision here. An updated manual is available, too. I'll do some more fundamental research in the next few days, but I'm still working on some new features I'll post about soon. Have fun for now, and please report back if the crashes stop when NoExcept=yes is set. If it doesn't help, please report back also. ROB: That's the problem as with almost everything else in the game. The game expects certain things to be in certain spots. The intro is track 22 and the credits theme is track 23 at the moment. The sound problem should be an original game problem and I'm not sure what I can do about it yet. New buildings cannot be added, and it is still out of reach because I have yet to understand most of the building objects. Another problem is that new buildings cannot be prerequisites, because the system is limited to 32 bits (only the first 32 building types count at all). More problems than solutions.

They just won't use the name "Metro" any more. Now it's "Windows 8 UI". The actual interface will stay. What a pity. http://www.winsupers...t-3-2012-143906

Hi Moby3012, the german caption is "5 reasons why the lack of news will end on GC", the teaser paragraph says "We explain why the lack of information will end" and the first paragraph says "why the GC in Cologne will be the place where the lack of information is stopped" which all contradict your above explanation. No subjunctive mood -- you're stating it as a fact at least three times even before the theses start. I very well remember that UF was certain G2 would be announced about a year ago. In retrospection, you were correct, but when you made that announcement, the signs could have meant anything. If you know more than you write, like from certain sources inside the company, mention this and do not come up with dozens of faux guesses to hide the fact you know. If you are right, state a single fact and its source. It would be enough and leave no doubt. If you don't, you are right for the wrong reasons, which in my eyes doesn't make your future predictions (like this one) any more credible. That's why I don't believe neither G2 will be shown nor G2 will not be shown, even though one of them must be true. I don't know whether you are right or wrong because I just see no obvious evidence that you are wrong (even though I think most of the theses don't make sense). But I suspect that if you turn out to be correct on this matter, you would be wrong about the reasons you are giving in the article on why you were right. We will see.

@ROB: The death explosions and sounds for units have been requested already about three or four pages ago. The damage-aware warhead explosions would be solved best by adding an animation list like in the later games, but I have to look into this further first. @Bullet: That's the information I want to publish for now. (And I didn't say the image contains any new features in the first place. ) Just be patient. I don't want to name features I'm experimenting with, because it would just put pressure on me or disappoint people if I can't finish them. I took out the MPEG video feature for the time being (shouldn't affect anyone), all other things are unreleased as of now.

Five theses, five vague guesses. Number four in the original text is particularly weird. It says the 2013 release is getting closer fast. Besides the point that all future dates are coming closer every second obviously (that's how time works), they seem to refer to the beginning of 2013, which is indeed in less than four months time. Yet, December 2013 is still 15 months away. So, no time to hurry per se. They come to the opposite conclusion, apparently taking an early 2013 release as a fact. So they roughly conclude "They are already late to get the PR machinery going!". Without actual facts it's just wishful thinking. Why does EA have to steal the show from Blizzard? Will Starcraft players say "Ooh, shiny Generals 2! I'll wait for G2 and not buy Starcraft"? And why would the 2012 Christmas season be of importance if customers can't buy G2 by then? Why would EA show G2 at Gamescom for sure? "EA knows they have to show something", but they didn't show anything at E3 either. Didn't they know back then? If not, what changed their mind? And why would EA have to care for the fans? They'll most likely come back when the first ingame videos appear anyhow, forgetting everything that happened, thus no need to please them now.

Hi all, I finally added most of the stuff I wanted to get done. Some new features had to be removed, because implementing them would take much more time. It's mostly bugfixes, re-organization and some light additions. While I start to update the manual tomorrow, enjoy some pixels. Hi Bullet, I added a new option to turn of the exception handling (the dialog that appears if something crashes). Possibly some of the crashes will just go away. Arda stops on any exception it encounters, even if the original game caused them, thus the majority of excepts should come from the game itself, not Arda. Finding bugs like that was the point of adding the except thing in the first place. (Though I still have to find the reason for the radar crash.) Hi ROB, most of the crashes seem to happen while unloading mix files. I added some logging to see what's going on there. Looks like I swapped the values for the manual. The MissionList= is 0 for Aftermath and 1 for Counterstrike. I'm not sure whether this is a good way, though. Afaik there was the idea to add a third New Missions button above all the others, so an upside down order might be the most logical thing to do. If such a list isn't needed, it would be pointless. I'll have to think about it a little more.

Hi ROB, I'll try to find out what's happening, but debug.log files do not help to find the reasons for crashes. I'd need the except.txt files. Is NoCD mode enabled or disabled? What are the drive letters of the virtual drive and the real drive? Hi Chad1233, I don't know how it worked earlier and I don't know what they changed between these versions. Can't say anything about this. Same for the paranoid feature. I might have found something (this doesn't mean anything) related to it, though. Next version will take some more time. I was working on understanding the game, which led to some internal changes I have to test first. And I found a bug caused by the reloading feature, which also tries to reload for Demo Trucks right after they blew up. I plan to get it done by this weekend.

First you should use ddraw.dll alone. it might fix most of the problems. The version I recommend is the original exe, because that's the version I tested. You could try to set the resolution to 800x600 (or to any other resolution you graphics card and/or monitor supports) in arda.ini.

Hi ROB, you will have to create the new INIs for themes and sounds yourself. Arda does not add any new contents through INI files, so they don't exist. At the moment you will have to set the resolution settings in arda.ini yourself, as described in the manual. Looking at the except.txt it appears this is the same problem that seems to occur if you don't use an original ra95.dat file. It crashes when trying to unload the movie mix file, which might indicate you are using a NoCD-patch. Which RA95 version are you using? For the other crash: There is no sign in the log file an exception occurred. Arda closed normally. Do you use ddraw.dll?

The AI assigns each infantry type a certain value. Rifle gets 3, Grenadier and Flame Thrower get 5, Rocket gets 2, Engineer and Tanya get different values depending on the game situation. All others get 0. Sum up all numbers and chose a random number between 1 and the sum. Subtract the infantry type values until the random number would get less than zero. Build the corresponding infantry type. So infantry with a "share" of 0 will never get build. It can be changed, but I don't know how "smart" the AI is not to attack the enemy base just with dogs.

Ok, that is enough. See ya in a month.

Hello everyone! The Ares 0.2 RC is out and until people start to insult us because there are still bugs, I got a little spare time. So I looked up stuff and did several things. Because I still don't know that much about the game's internals, I have to understand which function does what and which object saves which property where (and of course, what all the other object settings do). This takes much time, but it doesn't look like progress is being made. Currently I'm trying to understand how the base planning logic works. I think I can remove the AI check for aircraft before teching up quite easily, but I cannot estimate whether the AI will behave like a small-minded idiot trying to spend all money to get a tech center while the human player overruns him with infantry because the AI doesn't have any units to defend its base. We'll see. Most likely I'll enable this in the next version. The country bonuses should finally be fixed, as well as the revealing tool tip on fakes. With a little bit of luck I can get the next version out this week.

How do you start the game? By running the exe or by using a shortcut or batch file? If it's one of the latter, check whether the "-480" parameter is used. (I'm not sure whether this still makes sense with the patch.) If you installed to the Program Files directory: How do you run the game and CCConfig? None as admin, or both? Or only one of them?

The unlocked movies are encoded in the network settings (NetID).

You can already see some improvements: The current site doesn't insult people with different opinions any more, and finally all links are working. I like the Plesk default page.

CnCSaga.com is the french site, which is not affected by this at all. The german site was the "successor" to the site CnC-Welten.de, using the same name as the french site, with which they had worked together already. So the german site was founded as a partner site in 2010. The remaining german leader tried to create a network in 2011. I don't know whether they worked together since then.

Others say it was the people that stayed that were its downfall. Almost all staff members resigned (or were fired) because of disputes with the site leader. Considering the state the site was in for the last 18 months, it's not a real loss. And they did everything to scare people away: Recently the page had only three dozens of active users (including the network sites' staff). Edit: see who likes it.

I started to create an installer that asks for all the disks and creates a combined main.mix (implemented in .Net). It's not quite done, the mix generation works, but the UI, error handling and related stuff is not finished yet. And it needs twice the size of the combined main mix as temporary space.

DDraw.dll fixes most of the crashes (or freezes), which can also happen in original RA after a short time. @Agent_M: I've seen that problem before. It's either because of a non-original exe file which contains some changes (possibly a no-CD patch) colliding with Arda, or Arda's movie mix unloading function. I want to keep the Arda manual as short as possible. Installation of the original game is out of scope, because it is not specific to Arda, but I'll update certain information like the recommendation to use ddraw.dll. @Spyda46: I'm trying to get things done (and at least the country bonus problem should be fixed already), but at the moment my time is limited. No estimates yet.

Yes, neither this patch nor Ares update the game to support more recent operating systems, so all compatibility settings are still required.

@Hippox77: For me, RA works best if I do not set the CPU affinity, but your experience may vary depending on processor and what not. If I set the affinity, the sound gets jerky, the video playback hangs for over a second and the game crashes randomly. I referred to Arda as "extension" (opposed to the expansions Counterstrike and Aftermath), so the launcher menu does what I intended it to do. I put the launcher into Windows 7's Games folder, so I can start the original version and the Arda-extended one. To disable CS and AM, enable portable mode and disable the expansion disks in arda.ini (this is explained in the manual). @Agent_M: Yeah, it's a little problematic to install RA95. Copy the folder "Install" to your harddisk and install Nyerguds' 3.03 patch into that folder. This should do it, even though you can't enable NoCD mode because the combined main.mix isn't included.

Hi Hippox77! That depends on the version of Ares you are running. 0.2 will enable this automatically, with 0.1 and 0.1p1 you will have to enable it manually. Create a file named "ares.ini" and put this in there: [Graphics.Advanced] Surface.Sidebar.Memory=System Surface.Alternate.Memory=System Surface.Composite.Memory=System Surface.Hidden.Memory=System Surface.Tile.Memory=System Make sure there is an empty line at the bottom of the file. I haven't tested the patcher with 0.1, because it does things differently than 0.2. Actually, it should override all settings from above, but that is a guess. On 0.2 the graphics patcher should have no additional effect, neither negative nor positive, because Ares does the same. If the game runs too fast, just don't use the fastest game speed.

Hi Sybert, thanks for mentioning the CnC Graphics Patcher. Was surprised to see it there. Anyhow, I concur this episode would have been better with actual mod images or screenshots of their websites being referred to. It would have added some colorful pixels to a segment dominated by black and white. Still, good episode.

It's just that I don't have that much time atm, so it will take time to get back to Arda. Implementing this would be trivial.