Mercenaries 2 PC Demo

[GSH]

There's a Mercenaries 2 PC demo available now. See http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=91759 for links to a bunch of sites. Working on Mercs2 was my day job for the past 3 years, though I worked more on the console versions.

-- GSH

[Steeveeo]

Hmm, I just may try this.

[bigbadbogie]

Bloody big file...

Downloading now.

Gonna take nearly 3 hours.

[General BlackDragon]

Lol Thats bigger then EVE

Must have nice graphics

*brain thumps head*

Hey wait a minute... the "Demo" is 1.6 Gigs? How big is the full game?! 

[Power Board]

The file is gigantic! It will take me about a day to download this!

[Commando]

I played the full game.  It was fun but the people who did the manual need a swift kick in the nuts.  Mainly due to their failure to tell the player what some of the icons mean.  You'll know what I mean when you try to hijack a tank.

The open hand (use key), and the closed hand (melee) look very similar and I had to go online just to figure out the differenct.

The lack of a lot of standard screen resolutions is somewhat odd too.  I think 1280x1024 is not present on my copy.  If that one is present, 1024x768 isn't.

[OvermindDL1]

1.6gigs is not large for a demo nowadays.  I've downloaded a few demo's recently that are larger.

Either way, downloading now (kind of wish I could get the demo through Steam or Impulse instead...) at ~850kB/sec (got another download going on too) so will take a bit.

From the description, looks like it could be fun.

EDIT:  From reading some more things around the net it does not seem to have a lot of replayability though, need to experience this to determine...
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[Zero Angel]

Why back in my day, demos were only <200MB large. Why is the Merc2 demo so huge? Does the player get access to the whole world? Or is it just the assets that take up all the space?

BTW: I've got Mercs 2 for the PS3, it was definitely a worthwhile purchase, and i'll probably spend a few more months accomplishing all the missions and collecting all the weapon/vehicle drops and airstrikes.

[OvermindDL1]

Hmm, almost did not install it when I saw EA on the install screen.  The last 3 games distributed by EA that I have installed do not run due to the Securom crap (I really hate buying things that do not run, hopefully that is not the case here).  Either way, installer is copying files now.

EDIT1:  Hmm, could not find start menu icons, odd...  Launching the executable directly then...

EDIT2:  Ah now what the frick.  Same bloody freaking thing as Crysis (and Sony has been utterly worthless in helping with this, keep trying to pawn it off on the game publisher):

A required security module cannot be activated.
This program cannot be executed (5024).

Yea, uninstalling this crap game apparently, it shall never touch my drive again.  Freaking EA bastards need to ... freaking heck that is irritating.  No other game in existence has issues except the latest EA games.  Screw them with a rusty cork opener...

It is a freaking DEMO for heaven-sakes, what is the freaking deal.  Utter crap programmers.  I would never screw up one of my programs with something like that.

EDIT3:  Hmm, if I right-click on the exe and "Launch Analysis" like on the other games, it opens the normal screen asking if Securom wants to screw you, er, if they can collect information, I click the Yes button, it pops up the same quoted error as above, then the process dies.  That is odd, especially considering if I do that for the other EA crap/games when I click Yes it just dies straight out without doing anything, but the one for this game actually crashed, standard windows error reporting and all, how odd...

EDIT4:  I have not pirated anything in a good 8 years (you know, since I actually started making money), but I wonder if the pirated versions would work (and you know the DRM fails if you have to go looking for the pirated versions of things just to get them to work, especially to at least get a freaking demo to work).  Not entirely my style of game, but I might; if I consider the game worth it I might still buy it (never using the 'official' version of course), although I would prefer to just send the money to Pandemic directly, screw EA...
Has anyone tried any of the 'not-so-official' versions and see if they still have securom?

EDIT5:  And another "Hmm...".  Tried it on a friends computer (which most certainly exceeds all the requirements, has no issues playing any other modern game) and got this:

---------------------------
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Error
---------------------------
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is unable to continue due to an error initializing your graphics hardware.
---------------------------
OK  
---------------------------

Yea, major issues here...

EDIT6:  Seems the game has a d3d.log file (I am really hating dx more and more as time goes on.. I used to prefer it over ogl...), and it seems it failed to launch because the game tried to switch the screen to "640x480xD3DFMT_X8R8G8B8xD3DFMT_D24S8x60Hz", which failed of course (what the frick uses 640x480 anymore, he has to launch BZ2 in windowed mode for it to run because it tries to switch to that unsupported resolution even).  Would work on mine if not for the securom crap though...

EDIT7:  Went ahead and tried debugging into the exe to see what was causing that message box, first thing I notice is What The Frick is with the executable, the PE header is all screwed up, the entry point is outside of the code section...  Not entirely unheard of, but about the only time that is the case is when some compression is used.  Some of these opcodes are weird, apparently someone tried to shift-left by zero (the frick? should not such a case be optimized out by the compiler... since it does nothing...).  Actually there seem to be a lot of shift's of zero..  I honestly did not even know a shifting of zero was even valid, thought that threw an error (or at least a warning) at compile time...
The heck?  It is using an LDS opcode... on a register that is not a double-word in size, this should be an error...
Heh "MOV EBP EBP", another instruction that is going to do nothing, who on earth wrote this code...
Seems to have a lot of weird strings that are being passed between functions, like "70019740A0E44E28353E399114A60BB763CAA8EE1498085FF1297FA1E19A6FF86470{%d}D7FB23D2C29F4A06567DDB8104C0ABBF" and so forth, and no, that is not in hex, it is in ascii.
And enough of that now, my long compile is done and time for my next round of debugging, how fun writing parsers are (>.<).

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[TheJamsh]

lol... overmind cursing at bad things...

overmind should be the worlds C++ overseer. if it isnt alright with him it aint alright at all...

BIG demo. shame my connection gets to about 200kbps max...

[Nielk1]

EA is evil...

I heard from my mother Spore puts software on your PC that locks it down if you install ANYTHING more than 3 times.

[OvermindDL1]

No.  Spore just does not let you install it any further if it is activated three times (or did they raise it to 5 yet?), and that does include hardware changes on a single machine, which will cause another activation to be used up, kind of like with Windows XP.  You can call them to get another activation if you have a good enough excuse, but from what I have heard that can vary wildly if you get it or not depending on the person you get when you call...

And EA is not strictly evil, yes they are sheep for their shareholders (they are the ones that demand the DRM crap, they do not play games, they are businessmen, you know, normal idiot shareholders), but it is Sony that is truly evil (the makers of Securom).

And yes, one of the few times I get rather angry (I normally never really display any emotions) is when it feels like I am getting screwed by someone, I am already well out above $100 thanks to the Securom crap.

EDIT1:  Took a look at the exe again real quick, noticed it has a lot more sections, specifically in addition to the standard .text, .data, .tls, etc... it also has Stext, Sitext, Srdata, Sdata, Sidata, and .securom, ones I have not seen before...  Is that really necessary...

EDIT2:  It is also not exporting any functions that look at all useful for any sort of mission control, I am guessing it has no high-end modding capabilities?  That will cut down on its life...

EDIT3:  Oh now, this is even worse.  You already pay a large amount to get the game and apparently it has this little clause:  INCLUDES SOFTWARE THAT COLLECTS DATA NECESSARY TO PROVIDE ONLINE IN-GAME ADVERTISING.
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[Nielk1]

EDIT3:  Oh now, this is even worse.  You already pay a large amount to get the game and apparently it has this little clause:  INCLUDES SOFTWARE THAT COLLECTS DATA NECESSARY TO PROVIDE ONLINE IN-GAME ADVERTISING.

BF2142 in game billboards.

Damn my mother's overreactions. Still sucks.

[OvermindDL1]

Yea... and what do you think was the reason I did not get BF2142?  I do not fancy paying twice+.  That is also the reason I will never get that Microsoft Live crap.
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[GSH]

EDIT1:  Took a look at the exe again real quick, noticed it has a lot more sections, specifically in addition to the standard .text, .data, .tls, etc... it also has Stext, Sitext, Srdata, Sdata, Sidata, and .securom, ones I have not seen before...  Is that really necessary...

I'm not involved with the Mercs2 PC port or demo, but the reason usually given as to *why* demos are also protected is this: The demo's executable is likely to be over 95% identical to the retail game's executable. If someone has a secured retail exe, and an unsecured demo exe, they've got a digital rosetta stone with the same thing in two formats. And then it's *much* easier to figure out the how/whys of the security.

And as to ingame advertising, yes, in a game mirroring a real-world country, there are real-world billboards ingame. Much like sports games (especially soccer) have done this as well. Unlike those games, you *can* destroy billboards in Mercs2 -- in fact, it's one way to get onto better terms w/ one of the factions. We wouldn't make a game about destroying anything and everything and omit billboards from that.

-- GSH