Very impressed

[Leslie]

I am using an atypical 800 Celeron with a 32 meg video card of no real import and a more or less mediocre sound card. Running XP and I have nothing else running (to my knowledge).

Changed over to 800x600 and even went to 16 bit colour mode. I have tried scenario after scenario and I am lucky to get 3 turns in without a CTD.

To say I am frustrated is a great understatement.
I am sure the download went fine. I am sure the install went fine. I think I can recite the manual now from memory too

Anyone got any thoughts?
CTD, its an experience I never experience normally.
Going to of course bring this up over at Shrapnel.

edit to add, going to now attempt the "download again" option. Thank god for broad band.

Keep in mind, I am sad, not angry, and I hope I am more or less a rare case here.

[Double_Deuce]

Leslie said:Changed over to 800x600 and even went to 16 bit colour mode. I have tried scenario after scenario and I am lucky to get 3 turns in without a CTD.

Anyone got any thoughts?
CTD, its an experience I never experience normally.
Going to of course bring this up over at Shrapnel.

Are you running in Windowed or Full Screen Mode? Not that I have an anwer for you just been reading through the manual and came across some important points. Not sure it is relevant in your situation BUT one of these is:

NOTE!

Before attempting to play the game in WINDOWED MODE first ensure that you do not, repeat do not have your windows task bar set to "Auto-Hide" mode. Right click your task bar, choose "properties" and ensure that The Auto Hide check box is not checked!. Auto hide, if on, will confuse the game's calls to the windows system metrics routines, and a false result will be returned for the desktop size. As well, you should also ONLY run the taskbar from the top or the bottom of your screen while playing in WINDOWED MODE. DO NOT run it from the side of the screen.

These are simple restrictions to make the game happy. NO autohide and DO NOT run a taskbar from the side of your screen.

These restrictions DO NOT apply to fullscreen mode!

[Mobhack]

Double_Deuce said:

Are you running in Windowed or Full Screen Mode? Not that I have an anwer for you just been reading through the manual and came across some important points. Not sure it is relevant in your situation BUT one of these is:

NOTE!

Before attempting to play the game in WINDOWED MODE first ensure that you do not, repeat do not have your windows task bar set to "Auto-Hide" mode. Right click your task bar, choose "properties" and ensure that The Auto Hide check box is not checked!. Auto hide, if on, will confuse the game's calls to the windows system metrics routines, and a false result will be returned for the desktop size. As well, you should also ONLY run the taskbar from the top or the bottom of your screen while playing in WINDOWED MODE. DO NOT run it from the side of the screen.

These are simple restrictions to make the game happy. NO autohide and DO NOT run a taskbar from the side of your screen.

These restrictions DO NOT apply to fullscreen mode!

Nope - the entire game screen area becomes "squished" in that case. Very obvious when it happens, and requires task manager to kill the process.

Cheers
Andy

[Alby]

oops

[dita]

First off I`d like to congratulate everyone involved in this project. I sat staring at the game set up screen for 5 minutes....Just couldn`t believe it had finally arrived.

Anyway, finally plucked up the courage and was very impressed with what I saw.... But (you just knew there is going to be a but!) after about turn 3 of the last scenario in the list, bang!! computer crashes with a very worrying error message. I wont clutter this thread with that, I`ll post in a new thread. I wont be put off though...

[Mobhack]

Leslie said:
I am using an atypical 800 Celeron with a 32 meg video card of no real import and a more or less mediocre sound card. Running XP and I have nothing else running (to my knowledge).

Changed over to 800x600 and even went to 16 bit colour mode. I have tried scenario after scenario and I am lucky to get 3 turns in without a CTD.

To say I am frustrated is a great understatement.
I am sure the download went fine. I am sure the install went fine. I think I can recite the manual now from memory too

Anyone got any thoughts?
CTD, its an experience I never experience normally.
Going to of course bring this up over at Shrapnel.

edit to add, going to now attempt the "download again" option. Thank god for broad band.

Keep in mind, I am sad, not angry, and I hope I am more or less a rare case here.

The game minimum system requirements are as at http://www.shrapnelgames.com/SPCamo/wSPMBT/8.htm
and item 1 in that list is:
Pentium II 500 MHz

And as specified in the Game Requirements section of the manual, as well.
"Recommended CPU would be a Pentium 2 of 500 MHz or better.. ."

A Celeron is not a Pentium, unfortunately!.

Early model Celerons have no Floating Point Unit (I think they use a software emulation). Later P4 based Celerons are the same chip (FPU is not disabled) with half the level 2 Cache, so may well be up to the job.

This game does quite a lot of floating-point maths!.

I have put a call out to the playtesters to see if they have actually run the game on that processor, or have one to try it on, but as far as I know it was only ever tested on processors that had an actual FPU. (Pentium 1..4 and Athlon).

We'll see if anyone comes up with any success, but it may well be that we have to emphasise that "Pentium" means precisely that, i.e. Pentium or AMD processors, and (possibly) Pentium 4 based Celerons, but not the early model no-FPU celerons based on the P2 and P3.

Cheers
Andy