Rc 8

[donagel]

Have played 4 months or so with battle pause on and have not gotten any of the known errors.

I either alt-tab or walk away from the game alot. I have noticed two things of a more oddball nature:
First, If my monitor goes to sleep with the game up, sometimes when it comes back on the game is completely black except for the cursor. I can see the cursor and I can hear the mouse highlighting things, but nothing I have tried has been able to get the game to be displayed. The last time I hit esc 3 times and the game shut down. When I start it up again. I got to the splash screen and then I got "Exception EAccessViolation dans le module d3d8.dll dans 005924D. Violation d'acces a l'adresse 77F4924F dans le module 'd3d8.dll'. Lecture de ;'adresse 00000004." After hitting ok the game closed. I restarted the game and everything workded fine.

Second, becuase I leave the game up and walk away, several times I had forgotten it was running and have started another game. I then have two instances running at the same time. I kinda think this should be prevented.

Obviously, both of these are minor and I truely appreciate all the efforts to fix the bugs....

[Pocus]

Hi,

Thanks for the report, I was eager to know if the problem with 'pause on battle' has been tackled. Nothing more stressful (well I can imagine worse but you get the picture ) for a developer to never get a bug that affects people, but with some randomness. So keeping fingers crossed this bug is really gone.

As for the problems you mention. This is indeed a shortcoming of the engine, when some screen savers trigger, if they use directX directly or Windows desktop composition, it might crashes the game as both (game and screensaver) compete with directX usage. On the second point, this is done on purpose, it sometime help people to run 2 copies of the game, for PBEM or playing against yourself (i.e you load the same turn but you view it from the 2 viewpoints with alt-tab).

[Captain_Orso]

Battle reports are working nearly 100%. I have had some pop-up with no accompanying battle sound with very small battles, like a ranger vs a garrison. I can't remember having seen that before, but I wouldn't discount it completely either.

I ran 6 turns yesterday without incident. After running 8 or nine today I got an access violation while the AI was calculating a Union move, which was a first.

Files attached.

[Pocus]

Will check that, thanks.

[AndrewKurtz]

Hi,
As for the problems you mention. This is indeed a shortcoming of the engine, when some screen savers trigger, if they use directX directly or Windows desktop composition, it might crashes the game as both (game and screensaver) compete with directX usage.

Just an FYI, this doesn't always occur with a screen saver. For me, it usually occurs when I am working on other things while playing. CW2 (in windowed mode) ends up behind other windows for a while and, when I come back, I get the error. No screen saver ever kicked in and I was not playing any other games.

[Captain_Orso]

Yes, this has been my experience, but very rarely, like one in the last 6 months.

I am running full-screen, non-windowed. If when I start the game I immediately switch to Firefox and not back to the game until it has completed starting, I can then switch between the game and other windows as often as I wish without issue.

Occasionally however, if I switch to the game while it is 'thinking'--generating orders for turn execution or working supplies, etc.--it will not allow ANY windows to get back on top. Even pressing the Windows key an selecting another application per mouse-click or <Alt><tab> will select the other application, but now allow that application's GUI to be on-top. In such cases the only thing one can do to fix the situation is to save orders and close and restart the game.