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  #1  
Old March 4th, 2011, 11:14 AM
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Exclamation WinSPMBT v5.5-- NOW AVAILABLE

NOW AVAILABLE

Click HERE

WinSPMBT version 5.5 Upgrade patch

9 New Scenarios *( see note at bottom )
30 Updated Scenarios
8 Revised Campaigns
36 Revised Campaign files
1 New Terrain type ( Desert Houses )
337 New or revised Photos
530 New or Revised vehicle or aircraft Icons
92 Updated OOB Files
40 New or Revised Icon Graphic files
12 New or Revised Text files
1 Revised map
43 Revised picklists
Upgraded Cost Calculator
Upgraded MOBHack, MOBHack.INI and MOBHack Help file
Upgraded ScenHack
Upgraded Camo Map Editor
Upgraded Game Options

1/ Guns or vehicles loaded onto their transport planes in the game have
their crews split off when loaded so they are dropped separately. Previously
there was no way to rejoin them during the deployment phase. New code has
been added so that in the deployment phase only, if you unload one of these
units from a TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT, the crews will be re-united with their gun
or vehicle by pressing ' J '.

2/ All Anti Tank gun unit classes have had their cost reduced by
approximately 25%

3/ The GameOptions program will now auto-detect if your operating system is
Windows XP or earlier or Vista / Win7 and any future OS Microsoft may
release. If it finds you are running an operating system newer than Windows
XP it will automatically run a command line that shuts windows explorer down
briefly then restarts it ONLY IF you have the game set to run in FULL SCREEN
MODE.

4/ There was a minor bug that allowed artillery falling on map in some cases
to affect off map units. This has been corrected

5/ HQ's, scout classes, Forward Observers and ammo vehicles will now
withhold opfire if they have not been fired on so these units will no longer
give away their position prematurely. This makes scouts , for example, much
more likely to be bypassed than in the past

6/ Anti Tank guns and flak units will also withhold fire on moving infantry
and some soft vehicles as well but will not let the enemy get as close as
Scouts etc.. This is an improvement on past code that tended to allow opfire
from Anti Tank guns and flak units at moving infantry from long ranges when
they should have stayed concealed.

7/ Non FLAK units in the delay or defence will not fire AAA weapons except
if the fighter bombers are very close in the first 12 or so turns . This
stops " recce by spotting AAMG fires "', if you put strike planes in as a
pre-game deployment to find the enemy layout. Those units with AAMGs WILL
fire at paratrooper carrying aircraft and gliders normally, however.

8/ There was a small section of code missing from the pre-game deployment
screen (L)oad and (U)nload ALL UNITS routine where the (ESC)ape key did not
allow you to change your mind but loaded or unloaded all units when the
(ESC)ape key was selected. This has been corrected and the (ESC)ape function
now allows you to back out of that situation

9/ Units on water that were destroyed were not being credited as kills. Now
Corrected

10/ There is new min range code for artillery based on 1/5th of the units
range with 5 hexes being the absolute minimum on map artillery units will
target indirect, up to 20 hexes minimum. An on map gun , for example, with a
90 hex range would be able to target units a minimum of 18 hexes from the
gun. All guns with a range greater than 100 hexes will only be able to fire
at targets greater than 20 hexes from their location on the map. Mortar
units on the other hand will have their minimum ranges determined by their
sabot range with the absolute minimum mortars can target indirect now being
2 hexes.

11/ The PBEM long campaign was not supposed to have special battles, but a
bug was allowing these through. The campaign loop now clears down the
special battle flag in the correct place and these will no longer show up in
PBEM campaigns.

12/ Widescreen support has been added to the game for CD owners. This will
allow you to run the game at the same resolution as your normal desktop. If
a player wanted to use a resolution OTHER than the current windows desktop
mode (e.g. to run the game in 1024x768 full screen, with the desktop set to
say 1280x1024 ) then he would need to set the windows desktop to the
desired size before starting the game. (Click on desktop, settings, choose
required windows mode).

13/ The game code has been altered to make it much more windows friendly
when it comes to CPU usage. In the past the game wanted all the resources it
could have all the time including that time you were away from the keyboard
making a cup of coffee or thinking about what you would do next. Now, the
CPU usage will drop considerably when the game is waiting for input from the
human player. It still requires all the CPU usage it can handle when the AI
is moving but once it is the human players turn many players with high end
computers will notice their machine is not working nearly as hard as it used
to be and the effects are more obvious the newer and faster your computer is

14/ There were numerous minor unit , weapon and formation changes made to
the OOBs .

15/ SAMS are now filtered on warhead size versus spotter planes and UAVS.
Large SAMs will no longer needlessly engage small spotter aircraft or UAV's.
These will be left for the smaller SAMs


16/ SP ATGM classes allowed smoke if "main gun" ammo had a Warhead size
greater than 3 which allowed SP ATGM units smoke when they should not have
it. This has been rectified in the code and smoke will no longer be issued
to those units


17/ Unit class #59 and #102 are tank classes than now allow up to 4
passengers to be carried as if they were APCs and are used specifically to
allow Israeli Merkavas to carry 4 men internally

18/ All ON MAP rocket units that had a minimum range close to or exceeding
10km have been removed from ON MAP formations and now can be found solely in
OFF MAP formations

19/ Reaction fire with HEAT being used as HE against non-vehicle targets was
previously restricted only to close range targets (about 250 metres).Now,
units will occasionally reaction fire HEAT as HE out to longer ranges of 1
km (20 hexes). This is especially likely for the CS-tank classes.

20/ A new terrain set has been added to the game that will place single hex
desert houses when desert maps are called for on all auto-generated maps.
For sceanrio design purposes either house type can be placed on maps simply
by switching between desert and summer .

21/ Added Georgia and South Ossetia battle locations for RED (Georgia)
versus Russia in 2008.

22/ Smoke was not being replenished in some cases in Campaigns. Now corrected.

As usual we remind everyone that on going secure PBEM games WILL fail if this patch is applied while they are being played.

* Scenarios note: We originally announced 15 new scenarios but after the release discovered that in actual fact 6 of these were duplicates of scenarios that had been previously release. The duplicate scenarios are 249, 250, 251, 252, 254 and 255. These will be replaced in future upgrades

Last edited by DRG; March 21st, 2011 at 08:24 AM..
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  #2  
Old March 4th, 2011, 07:32 PM

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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

First of all, thanks to everyone who was involved, but especially to Don and Andy for their continued work on this FANTASTIC game, and of course, the new patch.

That being said, I thought smoke round replenishment (after battles) for formation-leader tanks in generated campaigns was going to be one of the fixes in this release, but I didn't see that mentioned. I play almost exclusively pre-TI games, so that issue will affect my game play.

Did that fix not make it into this patch, or is it just not mentioned in the list of improvements?
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Old March 4th, 2011, 10:53 PM
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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

As I recall we fixed that so long ago we forgot it was done when we wrote up the list

Don
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Old March 5th, 2011, 12:26 AM
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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

Thanks ¡¡¡¡¡
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Old March 5th, 2011, 05:05 AM

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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

Thanks about info! Can't wait
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Old March 5th, 2011, 08:06 AM

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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

This is great ! I hope im the next patch will be more Infantry icons, not only one set for enginer, infantry,..... This where great when the infantry have different icons, like the vehicles.
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Old March 6th, 2011, 09:30 AM
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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

Very great as usual!!
But along with an announcement of "soon-to be released" patch usually follows a painful "wait" for any brand new PBeM games.

I think this one addition for the improvements already listed above will be good:
-a zero range close assault factor for infantry against AFVs, as already mentioned by Cross in the WW2 forum.

Thanks DRG and MobHack!
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Old March 7th, 2011, 12:32 PM
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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

Quote:
3/ The GameOptions program will now auto-detect if your operating system is
Windows XP or earlier or Vista / Win7 and any future OS Microsoft may
release. If it finds you are running an operating system newer than Windows
XP it will automatically run a command line that shuts windows explorer down
briefly then restarts it ONLY IF you have the game set to run in FULL SCREEN
MODE.
There should be a beter way to fix the game on Windows 7 / Vista machines than force killing explorer.exe.

Games such as Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft and Fallout have all had the same color palette messup when running on those newer operating systems. And it is from forums for those games that I found out that they all work when a DirectDraw Compatibility registry patch is used.

See Microsoft has build in compatibility modes for old DirectDraw aplications that are wery poorly documented! The fixes are build in the operating system, but need to be enabled in the windows registry to work.

The compatibility mode can be found in windows Registry under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\C ompatibility\

On 64 bit machines the path is a little different in that it has the "WOW6432Node" path in it.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ DirectDraw\Compatibility\

So below there are the fixes for SPMBT v.5.00 only. This will most likely not work on older or newer versions of the game. For those one needs to write a new reg file with the correct value for the ID field matching the values in the .exe.

Copy paste the text below to notepad and save it as SPMBT_ddrawfix.reg for example. The .reg part is the important one. Then run the file you created and it will update your register.
Code:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\winSPMBT-v5]
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
"Name"="winSPMBT.exe"
"ID"=hex:81,62,A6,4B
And if you have a 64-bit operating system you need the text below instead:
Code:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DirectDraw\Compatibility\winSPMBT-v5]
"Flags"=hex:00,08,00,00
"Name"="winSPMBT.exe"
"ID"=hex:81,62,A6,4B
If this works you should not be getting any color problems and you do not need the cmd file to start the game. And most importantly it is not closing your explorer.exe. Its just using a compatibility mode built into Windows itself.

Here are the links for discussion about the color bug in Fallout and Command & Conquer for referance:

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=56175

http://www.cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=711.0

Unfortunately I dont have access to a Win7 computer to test this so I don't know if it will work for SPMBT too. My apologies if it does not work. However im sure some compatibility option will fix the color issue without the need to use special tricks to close the explorer.
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Old March 7th, 2011, 12:48 PM
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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

Quote:
13/ The game code has been altered to make it much more windows friendly
when it comes to CPU usage. In the past the game wanted all the resources it
could have all the time including that time you were away from the keyboard
making a cup of coffee or thinking about what you would do next. Now, the
CPU usage will drop considerably when the game is waiting for input from the
human player. It still requires all the CPU usage it can handle when the AI
is moving but once it is the human players turn many players with high end
computers will notice their machine is not working nearly as hard as it used
to be and the effects are more obvious the newer and faster your computer is
Would it help at all if the program run only using a single core on a multicore CPU system? It might reduse overheating and make the system better at multitasking if the resource hungry program would be using just one cpu core.

Heres a link to one way of fixing the processor affinity:
http://www.robpol86.com/index.php/ImageCFG

Also have you checked out Microsofts Aplication Compatibility Toolkit? With it you can create your own custom compatibility patches for old software to run on a new OS. I have had success in the past using it on my XP machine. It is the window to the inner workings of Windows XP/Vista/7 compatibility layers.

Wery useful program once you get to understand how it works. There are about 100 different compatibility options that you can play with instead of just the standard "run in windows 98 mode" etc...

Here's the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...displaylang=en
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Old March 7th, 2011, 02:13 PM
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Default Re: WinSPMBT v5.5

I have seen the registry fixes on the net.

They are pointless since they are aiming at a moving target. They seem to be different numbers on each and every machine as well, not a fixed set of numbers. We cannot ask end users to manually peek at registry entries and edit hex codes every time the game is changed, or whenever Windows decides to mess with these "magic numbers".

Also, it would appear that we would need at least three different installers - an XP or earlier one, A 32 Bit Vista/7 and a 64 bit one. That is not going to happen - with 2 different games, multiple patches for each, and an existing stock of CDs.

The batch file fix is simple and does what is required - it runs the game full-screen for those who require that facility. You lose the ability to multi-task out and do email or whatever, but that is a small price to pay.

Should you require to multi-task then CD owners can run in windowed mode at desktop resolution. The task bar and start key are available at the bottom of the screen as usual then, and the GDI mode graphics do not clash with the Aero desktop interface.

Cheers
Andy
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