Experimental Build

[Nielk1]

Perhaps you now need to set something related to DEP because you moved up to 2008?

[Ultraken]

That could very well be since it was a conversion of an older project file.  I'll look through the settings.

[lucky_foot]

It looks good on my computer. Noticed that some of the graphics are a little smoother without loosing the BZ1 feel. Didn't have the usual loss of mouse (which forever stays as the BZ1 mouse till I shut down and reboot.)

Didn't have any of the other issues (though minor) that I had.

[Red Devil]

This is the error I keep getting in mission 2 after about 1..2 minutes:

[Ultraken]

Ooh, nasty.  That memory address definitely looks bogus.  I'll have to look at the map file to see where that instruction is.

[AHadley]

After installing Visual C++ I get the same DEP issue on both Vista and 7. Is there a way to force DEP off for bzone.exe? On this new exe is on by default and I can't turn it off, like I would normally do.

AH, only important people on this forum are Ultraken and GSH. I wasn't talking down to GBD, we know eachother very well and he would be the first to admit that he often speaks (types) faster than he thinks. It was a friendly comment and also something for everybody else who wants to try this test exe. Most of you here don't even have BZ1 (those who do will most likely come from here), and if you install the game from CD it won't work properly. You can't test new exe like that.
Instead threatening me with silly ban you should try hard not to post off topic 3 times in a row. Other 2 persons I mentioned are on a 2nd try.

PM, please. Let's not clutter Ultraken's shiny thread any more than we have to.

Also, in the rare event that I may want to join a BZ1 server (few as there are) I take it this will cause an assets error? Not too hot on BZ1 modding, I haven't used it for a while.

[ssuser]

Way to go Ultraken! An update for this game is sorely needed. Do you intend to just stick with fixing the problems generated on the more modern versions of Windows, or are you going to take things a little further and add a few new features in too, like, say, a routine to call an external dll for an IA mission built with something like DLL Scriptor? (hint hint). 

Red Devil, seeing (Couldn't find file "nk_1sun1.map") in the symlog.txt is normal, does look like you are getting DEP errors though. It's wierd that you can't turn that off.

[Ultraken]

The primary objective is to get BZ working in HW with more recent versions of Windows, but I'll investigate other enhancements as I have time.  I already have several other projects vying for my attention so I don't want to get anyone's hopes up prematurely.

As for external mission support, have you been reading my mind?  I was thinking about that very thing last night.  

My original thought was to migrate the mission scripts to dynamic link libraries like BZ2, though I haven't investigated what that will entail.  Creating DLLs is easy; exporting everything the DLL needs is somewhat involved.  There's also the issue of BZ1 BZN files not specifying what script to use, since that information is baked into the executable.  The binary BZN format doesn't exactly help with that.  Again, I don't want promise too much just yet.

[sabrebattletank]

Holy hoot.

Beautiful! Thank you.

[TheJamsh]

Sorry to have to do this to you of all people Ken, but Mr Spock has been perma-banned for re-offending. If you would like to reach him to help you test this all out further, his e-mail is still on his profile.

Sorry
- TJ

[bigbadbogie]

Re-offending??

[Nielk1]

sounds excessive

[Ultraken]

Sorry to have to do this to you of all people Ken, but Mr Spock has been perma-banned for re-offending.

No need to apologize to me.  I had noticed that he skirted the line almost constantly, so I guess he crossed it once too many times...

[eddywright]

I tried out the new EXE on Windows XP SP2 and Nvidia video card with updated video drivers. I'll try it with Vista64 and 8800GTX video card next.

Everything seemed work fine, no issues so far, tried both SP and MP. I expect to have more issues with Vista64 though.

You mentioned uncapping the framerate, mine is still running right at 60fps. Vsync?

Eddy

[ssuser]

I've noticed that every IA mission is called with Inst4XMission in the bzn, so it is hardcoded to call only those C++ routines set up for standard IA missions, while the SP missions each call their own special routines, so I imagine there would be a fair amount of fiddling involved to set up the game so it would be able to call external files and still recognize the old Inst4XMission format when needed. BTW, what was the EmptyMission used for? You get this in a bzn whenever you take a normal IA mission and try to rebuid the bzn from the terrain files without renaming then to usrmsnXX while editing, you get a mission that runs, but no odf or aip files are called and the AI does nothing, very strange.

Some other good improvements might be fixes for hacking issues, and maybe a change to the shell for launching IA missions (maybe the training missions could be moved to a button or something). It would be good to have working anims back for XP and later also.