My Short Review

[ADmiral-tse]

The game crashes in my MS Windows Vista VM (using VirtualBox).


It seems to work in Wine 1.1.35, but there are problems with the resolution:


As you can see by the highlighted "Custom Start" button, the recognized mouse pointer location is probably correct while the graphics are problematic.

So I Quick Start a game, and again the graphics are drawn beyond the actual screen boundaries, making the game unplayable.

Also, terrain at the screen border is not drawn correctly because trees on off-screen tiles which should be partially visible on-screen are not.

The sound effects seem to stutter horribly some of the time and work just fine at random.

Of course, I don't know if those are problems with B&S, Wine, or both...

[Mark Pay]

Hi Admiral! Thanks for trying the game.

I hadn't tested it on any emulators or VMs.
Actually I haven't gone back to test the accelerated version on XP yet either.

I'm still using MMF2 for the front end, this time with the DirectX 9 renderer. Which is itself an older Beta version, but renders so much faster on my netbook. I'm also using an extension to mess with the window size because again, MMF2 doesn't do it right.

I've updated the zip with the non-accelerated version ( software renderer ). This might work better?

[ADmiral-tse]

The software renderer works fine in Wine, it's just really slow! I've tried to play the game, but it has too many features already to grasp it in 10 minutes without a tutorial. I found out how to attack enemy units, that X means miss, skull means a soldier dies and nuke means that a vehicle is destroyed (maybe?)

Gameplay elements like cover, morale, number of soldiers/movement/whatever in a unit are not clearly visualized on the map.

I think the scrolling would feel more natural if you could "grab" the map with the mouse. When the mouse cursor is then dragged across the screen, the map is dragged with it. I would personally prefer this method to the current one where the map will not immediately scroll to the right as much as you move the mouse to the left, but will continue scrolling even though the mouse movement has stopped.

The game could probably use a tooltip window much like the one in the lower left corner. It should tell the player not only what unit or tile the mouse is currently hovering over, but instead what will happen if you click there. i.e. "Attack Unit X" instead of "Information about Unit X"

The buggy landscape on the screen area borders is back. Compare the following two parts of two screenshots, both from the upper border:

If I scroll just a little higher, the trees suddenly appear:


So far, it looks like the game already has most of its core features implemented. Did I see the screen shake a little?

[Mark Pay]

Hi Admiral, sorry for the late reply.

That's some great feedback. I know the user interface can be improved a lot, so I appreciate those good ideas.

I tried the other mouse movement that you mentioned ( a bit more 'Black and White' and wasn't very happy with it. It felt more difficult to use )

The tile appearance bug will be easy to fix, just need to adjust the edge values.