MrFlibble

Nice

I've also noticed another thing: the target flash is never shown on civilian units and structures. Dunno if it's a bug or simply an omission. It's not as noticeable when you attack anything, but when you use C4, it is, because the flash indicates both that the structure is targeted and that the C4 is placed.

After he shakes hands with Hitler, both are covered with the blueish "chrono effect" field, and immediately after Einstein is shown teleporting back to his lab in 1946, telling his assistant that "Hitler is out of play". Nothing to indicate that he made a stop to leave a message to his younger self or anything of that kind. Not that this could not be retconned later though. The young man in the the intro is Einstein's assistant. Einstein's face is not shown in the intro, but he is briefly seen from the back during the Landsberg 1924 sequence, balding and with grey hair. It is clearly the same person who is then shown in the video briefings, so he is not young.

All demo missions are just slightly modified full version missions. For GDI, it's missions 1, 10 and 6, and for Nod, missions 1, 5 and 8.

Nyer, I remember that in the old C&P thread (under GameSector) you posted some detailed info on things like how you found the original SAM site firing sound and why it was disabled, and that kind of stuff. The patch readme file just states that certain issues were fixed, without any back-story so to speak. Otherwise, such information is scattered throughout your posts, and I think that it would be nice to have some place where the more detailed information on what was missing in C&C, what the devs intended to do but never completed (until you fixed it - or maybe not yet ), and stuff like that, maybe plus a more deep background on how the game works in general. Oh, and by the way, I think you mentioned somewhere that the "Untamed Land" track would only play in the Funpark missions in DOS C&C, while in the original release of C&C95, it's on the list with all the regular tracks. However, I've recently checked with DOS v1.22p, and "Untamed Land" is present on the soundtrack list. Did they change this in the later versions of C&C?

After some pondering I've come to the conclusion that perhaps I've been too pedantic with the flame-thrower infantry firing animation offset. The animation itself isn't the best of things (and obviously inferior to the C&C flame jet animation), so I think it's not that important after all. The SAM site smoke animation, on the other hand, is obviously displaced (not to mention it being an exact copy of the C&C SAM firing animation, and the SAM site base that is seen through the smoke cloud does not match the one used in RA).

The RA1 intro clearly shows that Einstein teleported back to 1946 as soon as he touched Hitler, and erased him from existence. I guess that the developers operated under the assumption that WWII hampered the development of science and technology, while, ironically, it was just the opposite in real life, in that each of the warring nations invested a lot of effort and resources in R&D of new technologies in the hopes that it would help them get an edge over the opponent.

Hmm, did you or Nyer or maybe someone else do any research of the older DOS versions (I think v1.07 is the first release, right?) looking for possible other developmental leftovers? Maybe traces of support for the separate Nod score screen and map screen themes or something like that?

Hopefully I'm not getting off-topic here, but I've been thinking, what about making a small fix for the DOS version of C&C (I don't know if any exist ATM)? Nothing special or large-scale, just a few fixes of the more obvious (and easily detectable) things like minor glitches in certain missions (e.g. a misplaced tile near the starting position of Nod mission where you have to destroy the Mammoth prototype factory), the missing Construction Yard shadow and stuff like that, plus the aforementioned optional extras. Or is there one already that I've missed?

One more thing that I think was not mentioned before, it ain't a bug in the proper sense of the word, but an easily fixable screw-up. In one of the Allied Counterstrike missions, namely Siberian Conflict: Wasteland, there is no music at the start, because for some unknown reason in this mission's INI file the usually unused Theme= parameter is set to RADIO2, which is a Soviet-only track.

The only thing about the DOS-only RA release that makes me wonder is that if the hybrid DOS/Win95 release could fit on two CDs, what specifically was there to gain by a pure DOS release? While publishing two separate releases, one fro DOS and the other for DOS/Win95 would be more costly, with separate packages and CDs with different content. IMO, it only makes sense if the separate DOS version were released before the Win95 version was completed.

Thanks for the info. I also noticed that when you run the demo without the videos, there will be a black screen in the beginning of each mission, and you have to click the mouse or press Esc to start the mission, whereas both in the downloadable demo and in the full version, the game runs fine without the video, going straight to the game screen. (It's kinda natural for the demo in that the video and soundtracks were an optional download though) [Edit] It occurred to me that the black screen I was referring to is actually a result of greater mission loading times, and is not related to the absence of the video files in the demo.

BTW Nyer, I think that you mentioned once that not only the Commando's "You got it!" voice clip is different in the DOS version, but other sounds as well. Is it true, or does my memory play tricks on me?

I've thought about this issue before, and somehow I think that if the logic were changed to disable the chances of infantry being spawned when the Commando blows up a structure, it would no longer be the same thing (aside from really affecting the balance). I wonder why the devs chose to make this change for RA1 and TS, where there are medics that can heal Tanya/Ghost Stalker (the latter having the additional bonus of regenerating in Tiberium), thus making the inevitable damage that occurs to the commando unit if the target structure spawns soldiers much less harmful. Some Tanya missions in RA1 are a real breeze because of that.

Did the put the complete soundtrack on the demo CD? (I just can't be bothered to download > 140 megs of stuff that's absolutely identical to the full version) I suppose that the videos are the complete intro, and all the videos (briefings, intro/outro action cutscenes) for the respective missions, right? BTW, have you noticed that in the official demo, the briefing text for the demo missions is truncated because the [briefing] section is put right in the end of the INI files? In the updated CD demo, they fixed this for all but the second GDI mission (SCG10EA, that is) by adding an extra blank line after the [briefing] section. The Nod missions don't have this problem, because only SCB08EA uses a different briefing, and its [briefing] section is located close to the beginning of the INI file; the two other missions read their briefing texts from MISSION.INI.

Yeah, it isn't as much a solution as it is a workaround... Just like it is with the flamethrower animation offset thingy.

I must have missed that. Thanks! (It's still a good idea to mention those extra pixels as a sort of a bug/screw-up, for completeness' sake)

I assume that the videos and music are identical to those in the full version?

I've always assumed that those animations of the Chronosphere and the Iron Curtain were not for the "charged" state, but for the "action" state, intended to be played when the respective superweapons are actually used. If that is the case, no wonder those got disabled, as the superweapon structures themselves are very likely to be off-screen when they are used (especially the Chronosphere). As for the preference of the charged/action animation used as a damaged animation for the Chronosphere, there's some logic behind that because it implies that the damaged Chronosphere becomes unstable. However, a simple edit of the Chronosphere SHP will restore the original damaged animation if you want to BTW, anyone remember that some civilian structures have a frame with lights in the windows as the damaged animation? Apparently, the developers intended for these buildings to be able to turn the lights on or off (perhaps through the settings in the mission files), because the damaged frames for both versions (with and without lights) exist in the SHPs but are not used. This was probably too complicated to pull off, and the simple workaround the devs have come up with was to just place half-damaged buildings of this kind on the map to have the lights on. I remember I tried to fix that by using copies of the respective animations from the temperate tileset (renamed to have the appropriate interior tileset extensions), but I think the game would crash at some point. I'm not 100% sure it was not a coincidence, but there was at least one crash when I did that. I forgot if I put the new animations into any of the EXPAND.MIX files or in the INTERIOR.MIX file though. Also, I dunno if the following was fixed or not. Generally, if you start a mission in RA1 (any version), the track that plays is always "Bigfoot", no matter what side you're playing (it's a Soviet-only track). However, in v3.03 "Bigfoot" will also play whenever you load a mission, although previously, the game would just restart the track that was playing right before the mission was loaded. Kinda annoying. BTW, I think all of you remember that the Counterstrike track "Arazoid" does not play in the game because it's filename was misspelled in the SCORES.MIX? Oh, and is it me, or did the scorch mark fix for the winter terrain that I made somehow get lost during the transition to the new forum?