Werewolf

Contemporary gaming culture demands that games be Balanced. But what does balance mean when it comes to sims or games or Steel Beasts? To me it means that in a single player game that the player has a reasonable chance to win based on well defined victory criteria. The same would be true for multiplayer games; both sides have an equal chance to achieve victory. The main determing factor being the skill of the players. What it does not mean is that both sides have equal forces which I have seen and heard as the most common definition of balance, especially in your typical shooter. It does not mean that to win one must survive and/or crush the opponent. To me balance simply means that you can win; which simply put means that one must define victory. Let's create an example appropriate for Steel Beasts. Imagine that you command a combined arms team in a quiet sector where no action is expected. Known enemy forces in the area are reserve quality and not numerous. Your job is just to keep track of 'em. Then all HELL breaks loose and your company - covering much too wide of a front - is assaulted by 2 Bn's of enemy armor. You can't destroy them. You can't stop 'em. You can however, delay them for long enough to assure that Bn and Brigade reserves can show up in time to plug the hole that will soon result and if you perform your job well enough - who knows - some of your people might even survive. In a situation like that victory for the player might be defined as: no enemy unit crosses a line or enters an area for at least 30 minutes. In other words your guys are stomped into the mud, crushed, wiped from the face of the earth but if you slowed down the assaulting force and gave the reserves time to show up and counterattack then you achieved your mission. You won! IMO: Your typical gamer today would think he had lost. He'd be wrong though. He didn't lose - he achieved the mission. AND - isn't SB all about the mission? Thus winning in SB would be defined as achieving your mission. Do y'all think defining victory in SB using balance as defined would make for good scenarios? Would they be fun to play out? In multiplayer games would players fight over who got to be the attacker and who got to be the sacrificial lamb? What say you?

Downloaded those yesterday and played the 1st two last night. Very well designed. If the player executes with the restraints and intent of the scenario, he will learn exactly how to do what the the scenario is setup to teach.

Agreed: it is a nice touch and a good effort to simulate the variances in build between T-72's re: the LRF alignment. :luxhello: However, considering that a T-72 gunner would get used to the LRF alignment on his tank and not have to deal with it shifting around from day to day I would submit that the same should be true for the SB player. In other words lock the alignment down to one spot. It may be appropriate to take another look at the feature and remove it from the next build. Unless, of course, the norm for real life tank crews using the T-72 is to hop around from tank to tank on a regular basis.

Got it to work. Thanks for the help guys...

Hey! Heeeyyyy! What about that Senior discount!? :sonic:

Thanks, man. The welcome is appreciated. As for scenarios: much has changed it seems. I'm slowly relearning the system and having great fun doing it. Then I am doing something wrong. Tried that with no effect. Maybe grabbed it in the wrong place or I'm getting senile :confused: and only think I'm grabbing it. Hmmmm... senile? Most businesses these days give a senior discount. I wonder if Ssnake could be talked into giving me back $5, no $10 of that license upgrade I paid. Yeah, senior discount. That's the ticket. :drink: Koen...

Can't get more realistic than that...

\How? I can move the pipper back and forth and side to side but cannot broaden the width of the cone/fan which is what I'd really like to do in many cases. I use the pipper as a gauge of what the unit can see from the set waypoint. If it isn't what I want I'll use the LOS tool and then move the way point to a spot, where the unit meant to go there, can see what I want it to see.

:confused: Contour lines are definitely a light purple so it sounds as if it is highly likely that the problem is an nVidia driver issue. My nVidia drivers date back to May 2011. Asus has yet to approve the latest and greatest just recently released. Some with Asus MB's have switched to drivers released in Oct or Nov of 2011. I may give those a try and see what happens. Do you think the foggy appearance of most everything not close up is a driver issue too. I have the distance sliders set out to 100 and the ground cover one set to 75.

HELP! Loaded up the map editor and a height file. All is well except that the combination of a very thin light purple contour line on a light green background is almost impossible to see. What the heck. Can the default colors be changed? Or maybe this is a function of I've got DX11 on a win7 PC and DX11 isn't fully backwards compatible with DX9.0C? If so can DX9.0C run in parallel with DX11? Are you sure? 'cuz I sure don't want to mess up my DX11. Seriously. Any ideas on what's going on here? Aside: in 3d mode while in a scenario it sure looks foggy. I'm running with an nVidia 560 graphics card.

Just getting back into SB after a 3 year hiatus. :cvcys: Haven't kept up with it so what are the best HD skin mods available? Where can I find them?

I did read on, Ssnake. Seems like a reasonable approximation and model of individual behavior under a great deal of stress. And, no, at least in my case, knowing the basics of the underlying mechanics takes nothing away from my enjoyment of the sim. In fact the knowledge that morale is modeled increases the realism of the sim and tosses in the unexpected, which as you correctly point out

A positive, well written and interesting take on SB Pro PE. Well worth the read. My only disagreement with it would be with this statement: If SB were a shooter then there would be no disagreement with your contention that players should be allowed to drop in while a battle is in progress. But - SB is not a shooter (though I imagine there are those that use it as one :evil:). SB is, as we all know, a tactical level simulation of contemporary armored warfare. In a multiplayer game running a unique scenario both sides need to be setup completely at the start, a commander for each side selected, and appropiate orders/direction given to the players all before the battle starts. Allowing drop ins after a game has started would be very disruptive as they would not have a clue what role they were to fill in the battle plan. It would take time away from the commander that would be better utilized maintaining situational awareness than spending time bringing a drop in up to speed. In the chaos of your typical online shooter where it's every man for himself (which in my experience is what they all eventually degenerate into - even if the scenario/map chosen requires teamwork) drop ins are fine. Drop ins, IMO, are not fine for a game like SB. Caveat: I've been away from the SB community for some time. Maybe your typical SB MP game has changed to more resemble a shooter. If so... Here we are in agreement 100%. 16 players would be real nice and would be enough for hands on Bn level battles. I remember the old days of SB1 when high speed internet didn't exist, a few of us had T1 connections and even one guy I remember had a T3. They hosted whenever they could while the rest of us connected via a phone or - eventually - a 2MB/s cable connection. Once we tried to see just how many guys we could get in one game at once. I don't recall the exact number but I believe it was somewhere between 40 or 50. Great fun. Again Fuby, a good review.

An impressive tale to be sure. Thanks for sharing. However, one wonders if the type of behaviour exhibited by the sprite in the OP's post is modeled into the SB Pro? None can deny that in real life individual soldiers every now and then exhibit levels of bravery that astound? Or was what the OP observed just a fluke and/or an indication that maybe the morale model needs a bit of tweaking. Either way - that was one heck of a story. Which begs the question: Does SB Pro PE model unit/soldier morale?

When I served in tanks back in the early 70's we were taught that the M-60A1 tanks I served on were the match of any tank in the world. They told us that in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe that we had to take out 5 of their tanks before we were allowed to get knocked out ourselves, that it would be easy because we were the best trained and equiped tankers in the world and of course as the crew we would survive the eventual destruction of our vehicle, retire to the rear to pick up another M-60A1 and continue the fight. I was in Co C, 4/64A 3d Bgd/3ID and we believed every word we were taught. I know now that the T-72's we would have been put up against were every bit as good as we were, maybe better. Taking out 5 of them before we went down? Maybe but IMO based on what I know now about armor capabilities extant then - probably not. It was necessary then that armor crews be instilled with the vision that they were the best. It is necessary now that armor crews be instilled with the vision that they are best. Seems like based on your post re: the Challenger that nothing has changed - what gets taught to armor crews is more a function of elan, exageration and you've got the best equipment there is go out and use it - kick the enemy's butts and take names. No different now than 40 years ago or even what Roman Centurions taught their new legionaires. What gets taught to young soldiers is designed to give them the confidence they need to go out and do the job. Reality has minimal bearing on that.

So if ya want a missile team to shoot do a little damage and then move would a guard tactic be a better way to go? I suppose I'll have to read the updated docs. A lot has changed since the last time I played.

LOL: 1st thing I thought of when I played my 1st SB PRO scenarion in 3 years after Upgrading to 2.64. Set all the missile teams to suppress tactic. Seemed like the thing to do. They never fired though. Just sat there and got all shot up by a T-72M1 company.

Thanks for all the help guys - even though it was for naught. BUT! All is well in Whoville as the saying goes... I bit the proverbial bullet, took a chance and went ahead and bought an upgrade license for 2.64. Uninstalled 2.328 which never would run for reasons unknown, installed 2.64, held my breath and voila - IT RAN! with AA at 8XCSAA, Anisotropic filtering set to 16X and all the other enhancements I could turn on and it ran at 60FPS continuous (vertical sync turned on) and it looked great! Quick question - can the key and joy buttons be remapped? If so how? To Ssnake: I had vs 4.40 of the codemeter runtimes installed. When installing 2.64 it wanted to install 4.30c of the runtimes. I figured that it would see that 4.4 was already installed and abort. Figured wrong. It installed 4.30C. Now I have 2 versions installed 4.3 and 4.4. I'm afraid to uninstall either of the versions for fear that'll break something. Doesn't seem to hurt anything but that may be something y'all might want to look into as it is possible that someone with 4.4 already installed that uses codemeter for other non esim apps might have those get broken. Anyway - I'm now a happy camper as the saying goes. Now all I've got to do is relearn everything I've forgotten about scenario design and playing the sim. It should all come back easily enough. Just gotta minimize the senile moments.

The original install using typical does not prompt for a path - if it did I completely missed it. I'll go back and look. thanks for the heads up.

And that is the crux of the matter. I don't care about 2.328 at all. 2.64 is the goal. Just want to make sure that 2.64 will run without issues related to the dongle. How does one go about borrowing a license? If that's an option I'll download the 2.64 files this evening and give 'em a shot and if all works right I'll be breaking out the wallet and ordering a license upgrade post haste. Thanks for all the help so far guys.

Good call. That is the one thing I haven't tried. Will give that a shot.

How did you specify the install location for Pro PE. When I installed off the original disk it didn't give me the option it just dumped everything into the programs(x86) folder. Did I need to choose custom install instead of typical in order to change the install directory?

Yep and the SB PRO PE version I am trying to run is the original version 2.328 which is older than 2.4. I haven't yet purchased the upgrade license nor downloaded the 2.64 files. I do appreciate the time you've taken to go over the CMDust file in an effort to troubleshoot and resolve my issue, I really do but: Until I can get the original version of 2.328 to work on my PC I am reluctant to pay for an upgrade license, uninstall 2.328 and install 2.64. I may eventually have to bite the bullet, though, and do just that. That said: I agree that there may be something going on with the license but since the error I get when trying to run the 2.328 version which should work with the license i have says that a codemeter or wibu-securikey runtime is not installed and I've tried per previous posts (see detail) uninstalling the version 4.4 64 bit runtimes and reinstalling and get the same error - well - I think the reason for my reluctance to pay for an upgrade that may or may not work exists. FWIW the 1st install on my new PC of 2.328 when complete did not run either. Got spinning icon on load and then nothing. that's when I checked for the license and noted it's absence. When I tried to load the web admin from the old stick with vs 3.21 runtime's loaded by the SB installation it obviously pointed to a dead URL because nothing happened. At that point I to the codemeter website, got the 64 bit runtimes and upgraded both the runtimes and firmware on the stick. Uninstalled 2.328 and reinstalled. Still no joy. And the reinstall didn't overwrite the new codemeter software. Wierd.

did that. no joy. still get the same error that codemeter or wibu-securi key runtime is not installed.

1. Uninstalled 64 bit Codemeter Runtime 4.40 2. Scrubbed registry of all references to codemeter and wibu 3. Deleted all codemeter folders and contents from Programs(X86 Searched for WIBU and Codemeter. found only the installation execute Rebooted PC Installed 64 bit codemeter runtime 4.40 Checked to see if license available -11051 in container 1-1053925 Ran SB PRO PE vs 2.328 - spinning icon. Received this error: Codemeter or WIBU-KEY runtime system is not installed I am attaching the CM-Dust file ran after trying to launch SB PRO PD Below find listed some of the text file entries I find interesting. The one I find most likely to be the source of the problem has to do with a password. It has been a very long time, but I seem to remember we had to enter one on an initial installation or maybe I'm just getting old. In any event i'd like to get this worked out so I can go ahead and purchase a new license and download 2.64. These registry keys could not be found: Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WIBU-SYSTEMS\AxProtector Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WIBU-SYSTEMS\CM Password Manager Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WIBU-SYSTEMS\CM Password Manager Do I need to enter a password? These keys also could not be found: Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\WIBU-SYSTEMS AG Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\WIBU-SYSTEMS AG Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Griffin Technologies\SecuriKey Could not find or read in registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Steganos Another interesting note in the text file says Securikey Not Active This was listed in the file and references the Password once again: ================================================================================ Listing some interesting details about CmDongles CmDongle 1-1053925: No entry for CM Password Manager found (0:100000) Checking CmActLicense Plugins: No CmAct Plugins found. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = CmDust-Result.txt