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1.06c development topic

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That is exactly what Nyerguds was doing with the imagecfg. The problem is CnC-DDraw. Somehow it can uses all cores to better performance. (all my 2 virtual ones)

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I know, found that article looking up imagecfg. But it also suggests some other methods near the bottom.

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The Radar only defaults to zoomed out in single-player right? I was changing the view in multi-player and found it zoomed in.

Also there's no way to keep saved games and the scoreboard when uninstalling?

Edited by KevinLancaster

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Pichorra: Excellent, thanks for that information. Just wondering though... which operating system do you have?

 

In conclusion, I'll leave the exe hack out of the patch, and make ccconfig apply compatibility mode on the C&C95.exe file when CnC-DDraw is disabled :)

I already found a system to identify the operating system, to make sure I can apply the correct compatibility mode (WIN95 or WIN98) in each case.

Since this is a Current User registry change, I think this won't require you to use administrator mode to run CCConfig.

 

 

One more thing though... I heard that the compatibility option "DISABLEDWM" fixes a "minimize on startup" issue on Windows vista. Should I keep this when disabling the Win98 compat mode on it?

 

The Radar only defaults to zoomed out in single-player right? I was changing the view in multi-player and found it zoomed in.

In multiplayer you don't start with a radar at all; you start with the players listing. I could change the cycle order though if you want.

 

Also there's no way to keep saved games and the scoreboard when uninstalling?

Sure there is. Just back up hallfame.dat and all savegame.### files before uninstalling. I just think it's cleaner to remove everything when uninstalling; plenty of people have no real knowledge of the file system behind the desktop icons, and they expect an uninstall to remove the game completely.

 

To be honest though, the score board is pretty useless in any case.

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I have tested it under Windows XP and on Linux. Anyway, the problem desyncronisation is not a problem under Linux because i think that everybody that use it know how to disable the Multi-Core processing on it.

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Something that I thought that I should mention... Nyer will understand what I am saying here. I think that there may be a slight issue with the Dark Grey colour scheme--I built a Questionspire as Tomorrow (so Dark Grey scheme) for the first time yesterday and noticed that when it fires, the second to last frame seems to have brighter pixels in the shadow rather than darker ones. Don't seem to get this with the Fire scheme.

 

Just thought I'd mention. :)

Edited by Kilkakon

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I have to say, it's kind of unfortunate releasing at the same time as DTA and appearing to lack online play for those not computer-saavy.

 

Has this been announced on the official C&C forums yet?

Edited by KevinLancaster

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Eh what? All you need to do for online play is run the game through cncnet.exe. That hardly requires computer savviness besides understanding what a file system is and where your game is installed.

 

The only small problem with it is that C&C95 has no players listing in its lobby, but you can always find players in the chatroom of cncnet

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I meant the lack of a shortcut, which would make it all the more apparent. I already mentioned this on ModDB

Edited by KevinLancaster

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I've made a short news post om ModDB about CnCNet.

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Status on my ddraw issue: hifi says that it is really strange, something like "C&C should never try to initialize ddraw without fullscreen exclusive mode... for some reason your C&C does, and fails to go to fullscreen mode." He said to ask again next year. :)

 

You are doing a good job as always M2. :D

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Failing to go to fullscreen mode DOES happen when you are trying to use a resolution your PC doesn't support...

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Hello. I'm currently playing campaigns and there are some mine inclusions.

 

In latter missions of GDI campaign (played on rev. 1) civilians were hostile to me. Now i'm playing Nod campaign and there is same problem. In scb07eb i even didn't need to destroy village - GDI did my work and killed almost all civilians.

 

I've also got problem with New Missions. When trying to start one of listed ones game give me "Error: Out of memory." message and then quit to windows.

List:

GDI: Funpark

GDI: Blackout

GDI: Hell's Fury

GDI: Infiltrated! - work!

GDI: Elemental Imperative

GDI: Ground Zero

GDI: Twist of Fate - work!

GDI: Blindsided - work!

GDI: N64 #1

GDI: N64 #2

GDI: PSX #1 - #3 - work!

GDI: PSX PATSUX

NOD: Funpark

NOD: Bad Neighborhood - work!

NOD: Deceit

NOD: Eviction Notice - work!

NOD: The Tiberium Strain

NOD: Cloak and Dagger

NOD: Hostile Takeover - work!

NOD: Under Siege: C&C

NOD: Nod Death Squad - work!

NOD: N64 #1 - work!

NOD: N64 #2 - work!

NOD: PSX #1

NOD: PSX #2

 

Power bar in custom resolution look glitchy.

post-8666-0-49983800-1324833905_thumb.png

If this is hard to fix maybe can you make to display power level in other place? For example after moving cursor over power bar there may be text showing actual power units, something like "Power low 65/60".

 

After wieving into SS files i found there is a bit different ADG cameo. Some of background on TD one is crappy fuzzied in comparasion to it.

post-8666-0-12501300-1324835134.png

(don't mind lack of text - i've removed it)

There also misspelled cameos of Air Raid instead of Air Strike and Humm-vee instead of Hum-vee.

 

And last small sugestion is about now editable mission sufix in "New Mission" menu: may it say Nod insted lf NOD?

 

You're doing great job with keeping this game alive.

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-Civilians: Yeah, there are some errors in alliances there. I should really take a look at that.

 

-New Missions: From what I see, for some reason only your Desert theater works. It worries me that somehow three of your theaters are messed up though; I'd expected it to only be the Temperate theater, but then Ground Zero and N64#1 should still work (since I changed Ground Zero to Winter, and N64#1 to Snow). I suppose you also can't play normal GDI campaign missions then? Did you remove or mess with any of the .mix files from the game folder? Because from what I see, I suggest simply reinstalling the patch.

 

-High resolution: Opening and closing the main menu gets rid of all refresh errors at that moment, but the release article at ModDB specifically warns against going over the normal 1024x768 length. I'm not giving ANY support for that, it's entirely at your own risk. The only way to fix that is for me to put longer sidebar graphics into the game, so there's no real way to fix that since monitors will keep getting larger in the future. The sidebar's only 768 pixels high. Either don't use higher resolutions, or deal with it.

 

-I've tried putting a power label on the mouse-over text, but failed. Sorry. The mouse-over label doesn't support parameters for the text that is put in there; it's read straight from the game text file, meaning I can't insert the actual power values into it. The only exception to this is the build icon mouse-over label, which is a special sub-class of the normal label which does nothing else than add that $+price on a second line. But from what I remember when looking into that, it simply gets a unit ID as parameter and automatically fetches the name and price from the unit data directly, so it's not usable for anything else.

 

-Sole Survivor icons: They specifically edited the C&C95 ones to remove those things, to make the actual focus of the icon (the advanced guard tower) more visible. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to restore that.

 

-Mission prefixes aren't really 'editable'; they simply use the same value as the side selection button in multiplayer. And I don't really see the point there; this is obviously just capitalized for uniformity as list prefixes.

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Well, FunkyFr3sh found a bug in rev2. If you select another language than english, the player limit function always point to 2.

 

uSknE.png

Edited by pichorra

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Hmm, should be easy to test. I'll look into it.

 

[edit]

 

Crap. This is going to take some effort to fix. The error is that normally it reads the name from the map file, but tries again in the briefings file if it fails. Then it tries to read the amount of start positions from the text loaded into memory... meaning, the last opened file X_x

 

[edit again]

 

Right, I fixed it. It now reads in this order:

-read map file

-read name name from loaded file

-read amount of start positions from loaded file

-checks if the name read succeeded, and if not, load the briefings file and read the name from there

-add number of players before mission name string

 

The only annoying detail was storing the success status of the name read a bit longer, but I figured it out. Looks like it won't be too long before revision 3 then...

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Hey

 

First up, Thank you Nyerguds for doing this patch- it's awesome and let me relive something i haven't done in over a decade

 

I ran into only one glitch, so i'd say this is really round- and well done. Also, being a really novice programmer, I'm a bit jealous. But hats off to you for this.

 

That one glitch I found is that if you do a "skirmish" via network game with just YOURSELF and of course those lovely AI :snicker:

 

- if you pause it- suddenly the AI move at hyperspeed- I'm guessing that suddenly the clockcycles become their minutes- because you can unpause after ONE SECOND and they will have built and launched and attacked your forces in that time

 

well, the whole game jumps superfast if you pause it there. Which I guess isn't too odd- since network games can't pause- Just wish it continued to think that one second = one second, even for the AI, not One second paused = 5 mins or 10 mins or so passed for the AI.

 

lol, that's not really important- after all this game didn't even come with a skirmish mode so..

 

Other than that, i have trouble dragging and selecting(the box takes a sec to appear, and I have trouble selecting units at times-Tried lowering the resolution to 800 X 600 and it helped the gameplay go smoother- but I still have the selection issues).Someone else i know installed 1.06 over his TFD copy of Tib Dawn(I just grabbed the no-cd files to get the game, was too lazy to pull out TFD or the original game...perhaps I should) - is not having the issues of selecting units when he clicks to drag a selection box to select multiple units.

 

I have this random wild guess that if I mess with the graphics more(I wouldn't know in what way) or maybe Ddraw(no clue how i'd do it)...it might improve things...or I might brick the game xD

---------

 

Now if only in RA someone could make a ...I think it's called a "paranoid AI" option for Red Alert so the AI DONT GANG JUMP YOU once you 1. Ally with a AI for giggles in Skirmish 2. Kill any One AI( or let the AI fight and eventually one dies, then they all become best buds and dont attack each other) EDIT: Ignore this, 3.03 might have fixed it and i might be remembering back to the old RA

/random rant

 

-----------------------

Ignoring all that, what I really enjoy is that this works on my Win 7 64 bit machine without problems- and that I can LAN battle someone on XP or Vista with no probs- I KNOW it wouldn't be as easy as just installing everything, if i'd loaded up CNC Tib Dawn from TFD or the original CNC95 disk.

 

 

Thank you

-------Zapon

Edited by Zapon

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The super speed is normal. Skirmish CAN'T BE PAUSED, just like LAN games can't.

 

Game speed in C&C isn't actually a speed slider - it's a DELAY value. When you put your game speed to maximum, that means there is zero delay, meaning the game literally goes as fast as it can run on your CPU.

 

Combine that with opening the menu, meaning the game no longer has to spend CPU power drawing things on your screen... and yes, you'll get super speed. To avoid this, simply don't use the very highest game speed. It's generally really choppy anyway, since it is affected by all other processes running in background.

 

As for the selecting issue... I've heard of one such issue which was related to using left-handed mouse, but TFD vs normal CD C&C or the full installer can't possibly make any difference, since all original game files except one are replaced by the patch anyway. The only one that remains original is the 10-mb archive UPDATE.MIX, which just contains the files used to stretch the 320x200 videos to 640x400 resolution.

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Game speed in C&C isn't actually a speed slider - it's a DELAY value. When you put your game speed to maximum, that means there is zero delay, meaning the game literally goes as fast as it can run on your CPU.

 

Huh... I didn't know that. Does that mean that in say... 10 years, with even more powerful CPUs, the game will be too fast even with the lower game speed setting ? That's just curiosity.

I know another game which was affected the same way, Syndicate Wars, and to be playable nowadays, you have to set CPU limits with DosBox, otherwise it's way too fast.

 

Or maybe at one point, the game can't run as fast as the CPU, if the CPU is way too powerfull for the game to follow... Maybe that's absurd though ^^'

Edited by Kamikave

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No, the delay seems to be timed to the PC's clock, to prevent this problem. Game speeds are still the same now as they were on the original C&C I played in DOS on my good old 486. Only putting it on the highest game speed will unlock the blocks and play at full CPU speed.

 

To compare, the SCROLL speed delay is NOT timed to the clock, causing the "fast scrolling" bug. The only way we know to prevent that bug is to put more stress on the graphics system. (which, as Zapon so clearly indicated, is what requires the most CPU power ;) ).

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Woah. Seems like some of my previously-written code somehow got lost in the last patch. I now reimplemented the code to make sure safescrolling isn't transferred to other players in multiplayer, and to disable the credits music with the UseCreditsMusic option. Both of these were present in my code text files, but not in the game exe.

 

I also implemented a SkirmishPlayers=[1-5] option in conquer.ini, which reduces the amount of AI players if you're playing Skirmish. Note that this has no effect for actual multiplayer games where you enable AI players.

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Love the patch. Keep up the good work.

 

Regarding the sidebar in higher resolutions is it possible to do this:

 

post-8712-0-62810400-1328588774_thumb.jpg

 

Or this:

 

 

post-8712-0-25253100-1328588585_thumb.jpg

 

Yes, these pics are obviously fake.

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Well, I think I know where Stripclass is, but I can't make much sense of it.

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