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BCM Demo - What I think!


Supreme Cmdr
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Well, just like the free version of BC3K released back in '98 and the v2.0 demo, the BCM demo has blown most online download charts. This email below, from the DemoNews folks, pretty echos the same sentiments I got from the FilePlanet and other folks.

Imagine that!!!

If they think THIS was good - just wait until Episode 2] is released within the next two weeks.

quote:


Hi Derek,

Gotta congrat you. BCM is one of the most popular games over such a short period of time. Only CounterStrike have beaten you. I didn't think that many of the DemoNews visitors would find it so interesting.

anyway, congrats on a good game!

Keep me informed about new updates / releases .

You can see the number of downloads here:
http://www.demonews.com/games/battlecruisermillennium.asp

Kind regards,

Johnny Cedergren // DemoNews.com

Website :
http://www.demonews.com


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Guest BillV

Just wanted to quickly post my thoughts on the demo.

The installation was clean, but it took quite some time. I'd almost given up and assumed it'd hung before it finally started installing. During the install, there seemed to be a lot of HD thrashing.

I played the first Instant Action scenario twice. The first time I just tried to figure things out on my own. Bad idea! I ended up sitting there while the base was blown to bits. The second time I used the walkthrough in the readme and did fine, though I was still often confused by the sheer number of acronyms. After the battle was over I tried some of the things mentioned at the end of the readme. I saw that there was a disabled enemy shuttle floating around near the base, so I thought it might be worth it to tow it back. I was able to engage the tractor beam and tow the shuttle, but upon docking with the base, the game crashed. Prior to that, I tried to send a shuttle of my own out, thinking that I could board the disabled shuttle with some marines. I was able to send the shuttle out, but somehow I'd inadvertantly crewed it with my captain and bridge officers! That segment of the interface seemed to confuse me. Again, may have been all the acronyms.

I tried the second Instant Action scenario, but just to mess around. First I took my captain out for a spacewalk, but was unable to adequately control him and nearly lost sight of my ship. He simply didn't want to move up or down, only laterally. His third-person view seemed to get messed up from time to time, the wrong animations perhaps. (He was locked in the cruciform pose, probably a default animation.) After I got him back on the ship I simply attacked my own fleet to see what would happen. I was disabled and blown to bits of course. ;)

Overall, I had fun learning how to play, though I wish the visuals were more impressive. I can see that this being a hard-core sim rather than an action game, more of the fun is in strategy and management than in watching flashy effects. Still, even a modest improvement in explosions and weapon effects would be nice. :) The ships did seem to be quite massive, though the textures became blurry up-close, ruining the illusion of scale. Did I miss an option somewhere to enable detail textures or high-res textures? I liked the ship design however, and also the "derelict" effect on destroyed stations. I also wish the interface visuals were more interesting and had a unique and consistent style, but again, I understand this is more "sim" than Wing Commander.

I'm looking forward to the next demo installment. Curious to see planetary environments and get a sense for how big and interactive the universe is. Based on this first demo, I don't think I'd have the time to put into playing the final version to its full potential, but I am interested in seeing what GCO offers. All depends on how addictive it is to be part of a fleet made up of living players, and if I can play for an hour a night and keep up with things. :) What would interest me in the single-player game is a broad storyline that encompasses a couple of sci-fi plots and also has a variety of conclusions that are based on my actions. Perhaps something similar to Starflight, except with multiple outcomes, instead of the endless open-endedness of Elite.

I played on a P2 550 with 256M RAM and a GeForce. Ran smoothly and with no graphical problems. On my P3 700 with 256M RAM and a 64M Radeon, the graphics were extremely corrupted once in the flight mode. Missing models, wrong Z-orders, interface dropping out randomly. I'm using DX8 and the latest official drivers on both machines.

Edit: Meant to add, using Win2000 with SRP1 on both machines as well.

Thanks for the demo!

BillV

[This message has been edited by BillV (edited 03-25-2001).]

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quote:

floating around near the base, so I thought it might be worth it to tow it back. I was able to engage the tractor beam and tow the shuttle, but upon docking with the base, the game crashed.


The SC forgot to include the graphics frontend of the starstations in the release of the demo, that's why it crashes. You need to download a small zip file with this frontend and unzip it in the BCM folder.

quote:

What would interest me in the single-player game is a broad storyline that encompasses a couple of sci-fi plots and also has a variety of conclusions


This game is very open-ended and you are not bound to any pre-scripted plot. You can do whatever the hell you like. In any case the game will ship with a campaign mode spanning a series of missions.

------------------

See you out there, among the stars

Cmdr Nava, GCV Nemesis (Official BC3k tester)

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Wow, SC, almost 11,000 downloads just on Demonews, fileplanet has over 22,000 downloads and that's over 33,000 just on 2 sites. oh and that's the high content version only. wonder what the low content version is doing? lol

Yessir, wait until they get a load of the next ones, and then of course the GOLD!!

Oh yeah, such a pleasure to be involved in something like this!!!

cwm11.gif

------------------

CMDR Jaguar

GCV Armageddon, Starpath (Mars)

Prime Fleet, Delta Wing

External Beta Tester

Battlecruiser Millennium

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Guest BillV

quote:

Originally posted by Hector Socas Navarro:

This game is very open-ended and you are not bound to any pre-scripted plot. You can do whatever the hell you like. In any case the game will ship with a campaign mode spanning a series of missions.


Cool. :) I like the idea of campaigns I can finish, the more epic they are the better! Even better would be downloadable campaigns. I think I saw something like that for the older BC games on this site, so I assume there'd be some for BCM as well!

I do like the idea of an open-ended universe. Especially in a massively-multiplayer setup like GCO promises. :)

For what it's worth I think that the gameplay systems shown in the demo are very impressive, when you think about the possibilities of what you can do.

BillV

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Massive dl figures!

That puts all the flamers in VE into real perspective.

Boy, are you outnumbered! cwm2.gif

------------------

Cmdr Jason Cloud

GCV Silver Lining, GENESIS (Moon)

26 Squadron Commander,

Prime fleet, Gamma Wing, 2nd squadron

External Beta Tester

Battlecruiser Millennium

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  • 4 weeks later...

Random thoughts of mine after spending quite some time with Episode 1.

I like how the cruiser & carrier handle, with some exceptions. It feels jarring to me that they decelerate slowly to a point, but when zeroing the throttle it stops dead in an instant. Hope that thing has airbags!

Didn't care for how the fighters handled, seemed very twitchy to me. Didn't make any kills, which I suppose demonstrates why they put me behind the bridge. I didn't feel too badly, however, as once my pilots ran out of missiles, they engaged in a dogfight with guns with enemy fighters that lasted for fifteen minutes without anyone hitting each other, and seemed likely to last longer. I drove the carrier in there and the PTA took out the remaining bogey. (When I think about PTA turrets, I always picture them launching a stream of soccer moms at the opposition. Apropos of absolutely nothing but my own oddness.)

I like the scale of ships & stations and little spacesuited me against them both. I was greatly amused the times I've ejected forgetting to tell my cruiser to stay put, and they instantly rocket away from me--makes me suspect there's morale problems on board.

I would've liked to have been able to assign crew around the ship within Perscan without the need to drill down into tactical/crew, but no biggie. In differing sizes of ships available, do the crew move about the sections at varying rates?

Also interface-related, I would've liked Fleet C&C to be able to select groups of ships at once rather than ordering one at a time. (If I had some ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.)

I'm interested in seeing to what extent my people behave differently/more effectively with higher AI ratings--perhaps in a future demo episode, include the same IA mission but one with high ratings across board to demonstrate just that?

One of the few crashes it suffered happened right when I was about to dock into the SOS'ing crippled Ter/Mil pigdog station. Definitely difficult to massage the damage just right to reduce it to a hair and not cinders. I recall reading that a plan was to implement a more real-time when-docked procedure, letting you wander down to one of the station's asset and cruise around with it, still order elements under your control via tacops and whatnot--hope that's still set to go into the final code.

Looking forward to future episodes, particularly the ones involving planetary operations.

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quote:

Originally posted by Drastic:

but when zeroing the throttle it stops dead in an instant. Hope that thing has airbags!


I've noticed that too, but it's no biggie for me. I always have my ship in AP/AI mode and I just bark orders to my crew (makes me feel like I'm actually commanding, not piloting, my carrier), and normally you don't run into that problem in this mode.

quote:

Also interface-related, I would've liked Fleet C&C to be able to select groups of ships at once rather than ordering one at a time. (If I had some ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.)


You'll be glad to know that has been addressed. Check the version control file.

quote:

One of the few crashes it suffered happened right when I was about to dock into the SOS'ing crippled Ter/Mil pigdog station.


A couple of bug were discovered (and fixed) after the release of episode I. I believe these bugs are the only instances where the game will crash. The first one is related to some missing Station frontend that the SC forgot to include in the demo (I suspect this is the one that crashed your game), and you can fix it by downloading a small file and placing it in your BCM directory. The other one is related to the game trying to write debug info into an inexisting file. To fix it you must create a new shortcut with the /d1 option.

Search these forums for more details.

quote:

Looking forward to future episodes, particularly the ones involving planetary operations.

Heh, like the rest of us

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Wasn't the station-frontend issue, I made sure to get that along with the main demo. That did happen back before I used the /d1 command line, however.

It did lock up last time I played, after 90+ minutes in. Station defense mission, done without a single hitch. About an hour in, a much larger collection of hostiles came in, along with friendlies, and duked it out with some help. (Alpha One & Two bought it, sadly.) Intruders caused a bit of problem, killing one marine (four of the ten were offship at the time in shuttles, which didn't help), and one of the marines died. None available to replace him at either friendly starbase, so for revenge I went after the gammulan base. For a time was convinced I wasn't even going to get to my cannon range, as its turrets were really chewing up the shields, but once inside range and up close, they ceased to be able to touch me. Leaned missiles and IOD blasts into it till it went boom.

Took on more intruders, and my grunts aren't doing too good, and started to hightail it back to friendlier space for stations to help me out--intruders are just fine camping in the shuttles (after destroying a weapons pod). Was in the process of hyperjumping at the wormhole out, while flipping back and forth in and out of Perscan, when it froze solid on me. But like I said, that was a tad over 90 minutes in.

Good to hear flight dynamics maybe might get tweaked. Mostly I don't control speed with throttle any longer anyway, just leave it pegged forward and use the 1-9 keys with taps of the retros when I'm driving.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, I've been playing around with the demo for the past fortnight, and I'm not finished with it yet. It's seriously good fun. I'm itching for the "gold" version already.

Though unsupported... I love the window "/W" flag. Reading the manual while playing is a great help.

Kudos to all involved, and for sticking with it.

BTW - I only encountered two problems:

- one resolved by scanning the readme (mouse pointer)

- the other was solved with the "/D1" flag.

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While i haven't been able to play the demo yet (minor technical difficulties im trying to sort out) i have listened to the music included with the demo and the bcstudio.exe, and the music and the graphics for the ships are absolutely amazing. i cant wait till i get this thing running on my pc.

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I have gotten my demo working and its a fine game that I can see... only thing is in the 2 missions, I dun really know what to do, well at least for mission 1 I know what to do, but mission 2, I dun really know how to capture the Starbase. But I still like flying ard in the BC and its lots of fun, looking at the worm hole the cool graphics and all.

I am just wondering, my game drops out to desktop a lot esp when I play at it for a long time, is this normal?? anyway I still dun know whne the actual game is coming out yet, I am very anxious to get it, but being from a country out of the US and Eroupean market, I wonder if I can get it at all. Well I cannot wait till the planets come out. This is the most impressive game I have every seen so far, not just the graphics but down to the concept of teh game.

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To Guyffon

1st, to fix the droping problem after playing for a while.

Go to the folder where BC:M demo is installed, open it, inside there is a file called bcm.exe right click that file and choose "create shortcut". After that you will see a file in that folder that is called "shortcut to bcm.exe" right click on that and choose properties. A window will pop up, in the line where it says Target:"C:Program Files3000ADBattlecruiser Millennium Demobcm.exe" type in this /d1 it will make the line look like this "C:Program Files3000ADBattlecruiser Millennium Demobcm.exe" /d1

2nd Regarding the station capture in scenario 2. Jump to a different system, target the station and fly to it, preferably cloaked, pound it untill its shields drop, then turn off your pta and pound it with your main guns untill it has about 1/3 or armour left, then lower your main gun power to 10% and one shot at a time keep shooting untill a stationn starts emiting a "SOS" signal, then after it does, press "ALT-D" it will ask you if you want to capture the station, press "Y" and you are done. Now you have C&C of the station and all it's ships.

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Thanks soback for your help, will try that station mission again thanks.

Well i have tried it and I tried to dock to the station after it was on SOS. I got an Invalid target msg flashing b4 me... oh well but the game did not throw me back to the desk top this time, anyway thanks soback for the all the help so far.

[ 05-09-2001: Message edited by: Guyffon ]

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Do not try it with the station that is in the system you start in, for some reason that one does not work for me either. Jump to the next system and try it with the hostile station. Also, start the game by double clicking on the "shortcut to bcm.exe" file that you have created and added /d1 parameter to.

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OK.... I did try with the new shortcut i made. Does it work if I jump to another system and then jump back and try it on that starbase??? if it does let me know if not I will try it anyway thanks for the info also.

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Guyffon,

Too weird, I just started selling for a company in Singapore, been on the phone with Singapore about 5 times since 4:30 PM my time, 7:30AM tomorrow your time.

How's the weather out there? TOO cool, welcome to BCM!!

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What you selling man... the weather here is hot as hell, you guys know if the game ever gonna get shipped here, although the e-mail reply I got was go check on the sales info and notthing is said there. I am trying all my means to get a copy of the game as soon as it is out, but so far no one in singapore ( the shops I mean ) knew abt BCM. What a shame, i did ask them to look at this website if they had the time. I do hope some one will bring it here or if not then I just have to order it thru the net.

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No, it doesn't work with the station that's in the region you start in. Don't know why. So, just capture the hostile stations in the next 2 regions.

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quote:


Go to the folder where BC:M demo is installed, open it, inside there is a file called bcm.exe right click that file and choose "create shortcut". After that you will see a file in that folder that is called "shortcut to bcm.exe" right click on that and choose properties. A window will pop up, in the line where it says Target:"C:Program Files3000ADBattlecruiser Millennium Demobcm.exe" type in this /d1 it will make the line look like this "C:Program Files3000ADBattlecruiser Millennium Demobcm.exe" /d1

Do NOT do that!!!!!!!!!!

There is a shortcut created by the demo install. Just edit that shortcut as indicated by adding the /d1 to the target line as indicated above. There is NO need to create a new shortcut. Its just a waste of time.

quote:


Do not try it with the station that is in the system you start in, for some reason that one does not work for me either. Jump to the next system and try it with the hostile station.

Thats because you can only capture hostile stations.

[ 05-09-2001: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]

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Originaly posted by Supreme Cmdr

"OK, the problem with the assert error has been found and fixed. This fix will also be in the E2 demo.

The problem occurs because the demo runs in non-debug mode and there is a particular error that is trying to record to a non-existent debug file. This error relates to NPC transports docking with stations and resupplying them.

To fix this error in the demo, do the following:

delete the default BCM DEMO shortcut (you can't modify it)

Create a new BCM DEMO shortcut (which points to BCM.EXE) and add the /d1 parameter at the end. If you do it right, the shortcut target should look like

"C:Program Files3000ADBattlecruiser Millennium DemoBCM.EXE" /d1 "

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  • 2 weeks later...

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