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Topics - Michael Z Freeman

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1
Hi,



I've played through every single FH map. Official, unofficial and everything else. I've noted down which one's are stable and which one's crash. Now I need to start debugging.

I have downloaded the Linux dedicated server with the version that matches the debugger.

So I start my Linux server on one machine and the debugger FH2 client on my Windows machine. I can see logs being generated on the Windows machine but only client logs.

If I start the debugger and begin a map from within the client it starts THEN I see server logs being generated.

I'm trying to debug by running the map on the dedicated Linux server as that is how most coop players would probably run it.

But does that matter ? Is the server client side basically the same ?

In fact Advance on Foy plays for ages when started on the client. When started on the dedicated server it soon crashes suggesting to me that there are some differences, but I don't know how much this matters.

I can test the map entirely by starting from within the Windows client (the debugshell), yet the problem for me is that I get all these buggy horrible psychedelic coloured corpse textures. I'm going to try installing a seperate BF2 installation patched to 1.3 (which is the debugger version) which should fix the issue.

Just want to fix these coop maps !

2
I've been finding it very frustrating playing as it's really a game of Russian Roulette with so many of the newer and "forgotten" maps. Just when you start immersing in the game ... BOOM ! CTD.

Really irritating.

So I suggest any new and even veteran players stick to the older maps. Especially the Africa maps which are rock solid. Then at least you get a full game rather than a CTD slap in the face !

It's difficult to have confidence in so many of the maps unless you really know they are rock solid. There really needs to be a list of confirmed good newer maps.

I'm marking CTD maps as I go along and will endeavour to use the debugger on them when I get to it.

EDIT:  I've been doing a lot of testing and most of the official maps are stable. See the list on this page. Many but not all of the custom and unofficial conversions, according to my tests, are not stable and need fixing. But now I've narrowed that down the task seems less formidable and I should have some fixes over the next few months, maybe sooner.

3
Bug Reporting / Autocannon bug
« on: 06-07-2019, 16:07:26 »
Hi,

I've started noticing this again now I'm playing on a dedicated server. This bug was described here (there is a video of it further down the page). There is a single reference to "autocannon" in this forum section (apart from this post) that seems intriguing as it mirrors the behaviour I've seen. Multiple cannon firings and then I can hear multiple hits on my tank (the metal hull resonating sound).

My server has a ping from between 31 to 109 and is running across a local LAN network between a Linux machine (server) and a Windows machine running the client. I do not get this bug when I start a server from within the client (no dedicated server).

Would be nice to fix this as even though it's cool to have a German "super weapon" this is not an "alternative history" WW2 mod.

4
Hi,

I'm currently troubleshooting a crash I get after playing for a while. Sometimes after about 10 minutes, other times longer as for example in my last game it crashed after an hour and ten minutes.

I can play the same map (Mount Olympus, official version, unmodified) using the FH2 debugger OK.

However the debugger has one problem. Extremely annoying flickering corpse textures ...



Is there a way of fixing that ?

BTW my other mods (for example AIX2 Minimod) in the same installation play without any crashes.

5
Hi,



This could have something to do with having installed BF2Statistics Control Center v2.3.5 but i turned that off as I was having trouble with it. AFAIK none of it's servers are running and I removed it's stats python files using its GUI. Nation at War is also showing medals on achievements in an Coop game with one human player also with (as in FH as well) an offline single player account.

How is this even possible ?

I've never even seen a Forgotten Medal before !  ??? ??? ???

But this is amazing !  ;D ;D

So I'm receiving medals in an FH Coop game using an offline account. I have not logged into any stats servers. I'll examine my python files tomorrow as the only explanation I can come up with is that something new was added there.

So above is my first FH medal ever and I am proud, LOL  :o

6
Hi,

Forum member MaxP has posted that he has fixed the issues that a previously released bot/AI vision blocking smoke grenade implementation had. I have seen the files but I'm not in the right situation at the moment to do any testing. It would be great to get this into SP/Coop. I always think smoke adds a bit of atmosphere to FH maps so it would be nice to see smoke grenades and other weapons with smoke being used. Does FH have smoke artillery rounds ? Commander smoke ? I can't remember now.

Also for anyone who does not play any games with the AI in, this smoke screen idea has a long history. An implementation was released many years ago by "SatNav" on the BFSP site. N@W took up some kind of version of it into their mod. Don't know if it's still in there. But there were many issues with it. FH forum member Djinn (where are you?) famously (at least it was famous to me!) pestered me to get this working for what seemed years. But the dreaded "real life" always seemed to get in the way. Damn I want to blind those bots !  ;D

7
I can't find these downloads anywhere especially the "Mappack #1".

BF-GAMES.NET: FH2 Conversion SP/Coop Mappack #1

BF-GAMES.NET: Forgotten Hope 2 Maps

Some are very old (2007) but have SP/Coop support. if they don;t work out of the box I guess they could be updated for latest FH.

Anyone ?

8
ShareX ( https://getsharex.com/ ) can add logo's/watermarks to screenshots and auto upload to file sharing sites. But, stupidly, it does not work with full screen games only windowed borderless which can't be done with BF2. Anyone know of anything out there like this util that can do games ?

I could write what I'm thinking of (add FH2 logo and maybe map name or something) using Autohotkey and/or scripts on my webhost but I'd rather use a util that can already do this if its out there. ;D

9
So many maps ! Started forgetting what the good one's are so I put together this useful sortable table with columns Map Name, Good Map, Size, Time of Day, Game Mode, Infantry Only, CP State.

My "good map" selections are somewhat personal to me but they tend to be the maps that best express the AI gameplay. Navmeshing is good. Bots do all sorts of crazy things, etc, etc.



If anyone knows of any maps I've missed or maps that you would like included then please say. They are not all in the table yet but the sources are linked at the top.

10
Suggestions / 3D Map browser in WWW browser
« on: 08-10-2016, 22:10:06 »
I thought I'd put this here because I'm not sure I'm going to have any time to do this, so it might give someone a chance to take this up. Then again if there's enough interest it might inspire me to get it done.

I made a map browser for Battlegroup42. There's not quite as many maps out there for FH, but it's easy to forget what many maps include, what the various game mode setups are for 16/32/64, etc. This is often not shown in the selection image in the in game map browser. The map images on the above link were generated with a Perl script. CP's, ammo boxes and vehicle locations are shown.



I briefly tested my modified version of the original script with Battlefield 2 and in principle it seems to work. But the directory locations are wrong and the in game map image is a different size so the script cannot place the asset locations properly. Could all be fixed.

So what I'm thinking of for FH is something in HTML5/WebGL in the browser. Say a WW2 tent or bunker with the commanders table.



Steaming cup of coffee. Smoking cigar in the ash tray. A loop of some actual WW2 recording of reports coming from CP's looping on the radio. You can spin the camera around a bit. Every time a new map is selected there's a russling sound of maps and the "mini map" for the FH map is displayed along with some way to show the loading image as well. It might be a good way to build the atmosphere before loading up a map, as well as familiarising new players with map layouts before jumping into online play.

Only thing that worries me is publishing maps with locations of various assets already marked. I don't usually play online but I imagine it would not have a negative influence on MP unless someone says otherwise.

What do you think ? I've been wanting to use Blender to do something in WebGL/HTML5 in the browser for a while, and/or it could be a good project for someone out there.

11
I'm pretty sure this used to be possible. At least I remember playing Supercharge and being able to defend a German bunker with their MG. So is it possible to turn this back on in my setup ? Does it involve editing every weapon, or is there some kind of global setting ? Cheers.

EDIT: I posted about this in Minor Suggestions. Apparently I *can* use them in MP. Will have to check this. If this is so I'm not sure if its just my version doing this, or if they were locked to prevent AI related crashes ?

EDIT: Seems that its only SOME maps that have enemy weapons like this locked for some reason.Anyone, how to edit these weapons to allow entry ?

12
Hi, I've had this problem for a while and its incredibly frustrating. I just found over 600 custom maps for download - http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=1803979 ... But it looks like many of them - if not all by the look of it - suffer from same problem that I encountered when I first started using some of the older custom maps with Blitzkreig Mod; the game plays fine, it will even actually allow you to save.. But loading that save shows the default COH loading screen (one that I never see on maps that DO save properly - big clue!) and then just goes back to the main menu. Grrr. This is bad ...

1. I often scale my graphics settings up and down between vanilla CoH and Blitzkreig because BK is a resource hog. I forget to change them back before a game. Its convenient to just be able to save, go out of the game and change settings, then go back into the game.

2. I play heavily with the AI Skirmish mode because I don't always have a lot of time to play a game, so I save and go back later.

Unless Relic can patch this I suspect that there must be a way to fix this using Worldbuilder. If that works and its some kind of setting change that I could run a script for all these ~600 maps, fix them and re-release.

So come on people, surely someone knows something about this problem with such a big game ?

13
Modding / Are there any example FH2 models available ?
« on: 14-03-2014, 22:03:28 »
Hi,

I'm looking into creating a 3D interface to my mod HABAI using the Blender Game Engine. If it comes to it I can probably create something myself, but I'm not a very experienced modeller. However are there already any example FH2 models available that I could use in the interface ? It would be a simple 3D scene, probably on some part of the battlefield with a sky background. There would be some animation, smoke and flames, that kind of thing. The rest would be a 3D interface for starting Coop/SP FH2 dedicated server and client ... a menu showing image and minimap for each level that the user clicks to start things up. I was going to do a traditional 2d GUI util sort of thing, but it makes more sense doing something 3D for a game.

14
Off-Topic / Tankies: Tank Heroes of WWII on BBC2
« on: 06-01-2013, 23:01:05 »
Did anyone else see this ?



Hopefully it will be available on iPlayer. It had an operational "Honey" and a German tank from the desert war, in full working order being driven around. There was also talk of the colour of shell fire, red being our side and green and something else being German. Some very humbling descriptions of the type of war the "tankies" has before they had proper equipment. The early tanks did not have proper escape hatches leading to nervous crews. The Germans knew that they could get out in a hurry which built their confidence. There was also descriptions of how the soldiers were treated like nobodies early in the desert war leading to lack of tactics and low moral. Later on Monty actually started telling them the outline of what the battle would be where, before, that was kept secret. Made it look like the older attitude could not cut it against new German equipment and mentality which forced more responsibility being put in the hands of ordinary soldiers. There were also some profound stories from the veterans that are best watched in program. Suffice to say they made sure that the battles were not glorified or treated disrespectfully. A lot of footage I've never seen here before although I guess many of the FH experts might have already.

Most effecting of all for me was seeing tanks, that I've only seen in FH, appearing in person as it were. They have a certain presence sitting there in front of the narrator. Not sure where he had borrowed them from but it was amazing to actually hear and see them driving around.

15
Singleplayer and Coop / My progress with SP development
« on: 21-03-2012, 19:03:16 »
Hi, just an update about out what I'm up to as I'm not exactly surrounded by bf2 fans here in RL.

I've gone as far as I can ATM with the tracker. I'll keep an eye out for new issues. I've been learning A LOT about bf2 internals. A lot to digest. It has given me new respect for SP developers. So often the solution to a problem looks simple but of course there are bugs and inconsistencies and I can see where the FH SP devs have made compromises on quite complex issues.

I've been digging up some Python documentation on the bf2 technical wiki. Looks like Python could be used to link an event to the smoke shells and grenades based on a radius. That could be used to  allow blinding of vehicles. But I've still got some way to go. I really need to find a Python coder.

I started doing an add-on making a GUI interface to start SP on a multi-core system. You'll be able to select the map from a menu that shows that level map as well as map graphic ... basically replicating what is in the game menu. A coop map will load with server and client on separate cores. There's a max of 64 bots as that is the limitation for team balancing but that is plenty on most maps. Performance is a lot better - 64 bots can take a lot of cpu when run on a single core (server/client coop). I can even pause the game by hibernating my system and the server continues on going after coming out of hibernation ! However the client needs restarting.

I'll put it on my Moddb page when it's ready !

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