Miscellaneous questions (USB stick; manual; accelerate time)

[Sunbather_]

Please allow me to ask the following questions before I spend my money on the game:

 

1. Is it necessary to have the USB stick in your drive all the time while you are playing (Like a cassette or a CD-Rom)? Or do you need it to activate it once and then you can put it into a drawer? 

 

2. Does the full and shipped version of the game come with a printable handbook? Is it the same as the digital handbook or does it extend to some tank handbooks?

 

3. Speaking of which, I can't find the manual for my 4.357 version on my PC. It is not in the Documents folder (where you put custom scenarios), nor is it in the game folder. On this page there is only the German 4.3 manual but the English one is 4.1.

 

4. In-game: I have a problem with the time acceleration (F12). In the beginning of a (custom) scenarios it always works but after that it does not work anymore. Is that intentional? 

 

5. In-game: Quite a few times already, I had one of my own vehicles drive backwards for a fair amount of time. When I stopped it manually, it stopped. When I ordered or directly moved it forwards it moved backwards again. Sometimes it got fixed later one, sometimes I just left the vehicle in the ditch. (PLEASE NOTE: none of those vehicles had any respective damages to crew or parts that would indicate the reason for such a behaviour. --- Could it be a morale thing? Self-preservation like in Combat Mission games? If so, how can I check the morale? 

 

6. Content: Are more campaigns planned? I know there is the Arab-Israeli one and Talon Strike by Apocalypse 31. But is anymore "official" content planned? (I have found - sorry for that - the official scenarios not very interesting on paper, and the ones that I have actually played were uninteresting as I expected. The reason being, I guess, that they are initial scenarios to get into the game or learn a vehicle etc. The campaign, however, seems very good as far as I can tell. So: will there be more official campaigns or more contextualized scenarios? Or are we to rely on modders (who are doing an absolutely magnificent job btw. Played some scenrios by Apocalypse 31 and ben, and I liked them all!)

 

 

Thank you for reading and please excuse my many questions!

Edited August 30, 2022 by Sunbather_

[Ssnake]

1)

You keep it plugged in; at least, if you go for the classic license. Time-based licenses use no CodeMeter USB stick.

 

2)

The User's Manual (both the US English and German version) are PDFs that are protected against changes, but not against printing. Occasionally we have batches of manuals printed ourselves, and offer them in the web shop. Typically they are both nicer and cheaper than printing the thing on your own. But, we won't stop you from doing so.

 

3)

Maybe an oversight; I'll see to it that the next patch installs the US English 4.3 manual. Thanks for alerting me!

 

4)

Yes, it's intentional. Once that hostile forces have established line of sight, or very nearly so, time acceleration gets disabled. When testing a scenario you can still force it, but in order to guarantee the most reliable simulation outcomes and valid AI pathfinding results, Steel Beasts can currently not run faster than real-time.

 

5)

There seems to be a bug in the AI code currently, it's under investigation. It seems to affect only SOME vehicles (do you remember in which vehicle it happened to you?). There is no "morale" calculation that would trigger such behavior.

 

6)

We hoped in 2015 that we'd get more operations done when we created the feature. Unfortunately, our days also just have 24 hours, and I can't afford hiring people for the explicit purpose of scenario creation. I'm happy to buy scenarios from the community to include them in future Steel Beasts releases, and if someone were to offer an operation, I would certainly be delighted to make an offer. But it seems like our community cosists mostly of people who actually have a job and a life, and can work on this only on a few hours per week.

[Sunbather_]

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to answer every single one of my questions!

 

1) Thank you for the information.

 

2) I had almost made the joke that I know that printed manuals don't automatically update themselves. Fair enough. I just read somehwere that someone was looking forward to peruse the manual while in traffic and it gave me the impression that...

 

3) It could well be that I just didn't find it? However, I search through Documents and game folder via automated search for "manual" and nothing showed up. I also looked manually a bit. Also to no avail.

 

4) Understood!

 

5) Yesterday it happened to a M2A2 in the custom scenario "Attack on the Rail Junction" but was able to fix it so quickly that I was not entirely sure if it was the suspected bug. The day before that it happened in the custom scenario "Operation Gazelle" to the Ulan. Here it took a few minutes of shifting the gear between forwards and backwards to make the vehicle behave normally again. So here was definitively a bug.

 

6) I mean, maybe I get into the editor and make my own missions and maybe even campaigns. But as it stands I still have a trauma from using the Operation Flashpoint editor excessively back in the day, and I just wanna play nowadays when I boot up a game.

 

 

 

 

I have a small follow-up question: is there a possibility for the game to go along while I Alt-Tab out of it to read the manual or look something up? Currently, it is only possible when you are in Windowed mode. When you are in Fullscreen the game pauses when you Alt-Tab. There were many instances already in which I could only wait for 10 minutes (e.g. getting the reinforcements up to the frontline, or worse: to get infantry to the frontline). If I was able to read the manual or the wiki while I was waiting, I would not waste time AND I would be a bit smarter about the game and its functions.

 

[Abraxas]

1 hour ago, Sunbather_ said:

The day before that it happened in the custom scenario "Operation Gazelle" to the Ulan. Here it took a few minutes of shifting the gear between forwards and backwards to make the vehicle behave normally again. So here was definitively a bug.

This confirms my experience with the current Ulan 4.357! Already reported this to Ssnake.

[Ssnake]

...and it was just reported as fixed, an hour ago. So, should be fixed with the next patch.

Seems like occasionally the gearbox thinks it's in forward when it's in reverse, and as the distance between current position and destination egts bigger, the AI steps on the gas, and off you go.

[Sunbather_]

20 hours ago, Sunbather_ said:

I have a small follow-up question: is there a possibility for the game to go along while I Alt-Tab out of it to read the manual or look something up? Currently, it is only possible when you are in Windowed mode. When you are in Fullscreen the game pauses when you Alt-Tab.

 

 

[Ssnake]

It used to do that. Some people hated it, so it now pauses whenever it loses focus.

[RENEGADE-623]

I suppose one work around for that would be to host your own network session, I just did that and the game went along while i was out of it, altho might not be the most optimal thing to do but its something

[Ssnake]

Actually, that's not a bad idea. You can host a network session with no client connected, and it's just as if you were playing a single player game.

[Ssnake]

On 8/30/2022 at 3:55 PM, Sunbather_ said:

3. Speaking of which, I can't find the manual for my 4.357 version on my PC. It is not in the Documents folder (where you put custom scenarios), nor is it in the game folder. On this page there is only the German 4.3 manual but the English one is 4.1.

We have tested this once more, the 4.3 Manual does get installed.

Find it in the Windows Start Menu / eSim Games - Steel Beasts Pro / "User's Manual.pdf"

Since the cover and back page from the printed manual are removed (we have rights only for print reproduction), you will recognize it by the copyright date 2022 at the top of the first page.

[JLS02]

On 9/1/2022 at 10:57 AM, Ssnake said:

We have tested this once more, the 4.3 Manual does get installed.

Find it in the Windows Start Menu / eSim Games - Steel Beasts Pro / "User's Manual.pdf"

Since the cover and back page from the printed manual are removed (we have rights only for print reproduction), you will recognize it by the copyright date 2022 at the top of the first page.

So this is the English 4.3 manual? 

[Ssnake]

If the copyright says "2022", it is.