Matrix Games Forums

Hi guys,

I played TOAW II: COW for several years a while back and really enjoyed it. It was with great surprise and joy that I discovered Matrix games had released TOAW III a few months ago. However, what finally tipped me over to pick it up was Ralph's support for game patches. The 3.4 patch looks very promising and so I made the purchase.

I loaded up Korea 50-51 to try to get familiar with the UI again and right away I'm having a couple problems. I have skimmed the manual but didn't see the answers right away, so I apologize if these are really basic. I should note I do have the 3.4 beta patch installed and I have not messed with any of the game settings except turning on things like detailed combat reports.

First of all, I remember being able to right click and enemy unit and define an attack as limited or normal, but now it seems to just default to a normal attack? If I open the attack planner I can specify limited attacks, but this seems like a massive pain compared to just doing it quickly from the map. Am I missing something here?

Also, I'm playing the game at 1600x1200 resolution and at "normal view" the counters are quite tiny! Is there no way to zoom in further? I predict a lot of eye strain if I keep playing like this, which is probably going to result in me playing the game a lot less.

Any help on either of these? There seems to be some graphical options in the new patch, should I be messing with settings somewhere or are these already turned on?

EDIT: Ok, studying the 3.4 notes more closely, I see reference to "small view" and "tiny view" so there must be some way to zoom in more closely, but how?

Also, item 36. mentions that you have to hold right click on the enemy unit for the popup to appear or something, so I'll have to try that.

Welcome back!

The settings are more optimized to make it look good than to make it more visible.

If you hold down on the right mouse button, the old menu comes up. There are also a whole bunch of hotkeys listed in the hotkeys.txt file. You can also go to the menu and select the classic defaults which turns off this behavior, the tooltips, etc. You can also selectively turn most things on and off from the player options menu instead.

The mouse wheel will zoom in and out so that you can look at the big picture and actually zoom in closer than the normal view to see the units. That option is also on the menu. If you've got a mouse/trackball with extra buttons, the extra buttons may zoom in and out, and finally, if you've got a touch screen, pinching will change the zoom level. It's in steps, I'm afraid, but it is there, and after the first time, it gets faster because the graphics are already loaded from disk.

You can turn the png graphics off at the options menu to see the classic tileset to see if that's more visible. If it is, you may want to turn them back on and move the png files to a different directory, except for ones like weather. There is a lot of room for customization there.

There is also a contrast option on the menu, I normally play with hi-lighted myself, but there is also maximum.

The player option also has brightness and contrast. You need to restart to see the effects, but playing around with them may help.

If you're ambitious, there is also an opart 3 fonts.ini file that you can edit and change fonts, sizes, colors and other things. Once the patch is out, I'll probably go back to my settings file which has larger fonts, which looks worse, because the numbers can overflow, but are easier for me to read. The worst parts are the lines on the bottom of the screen, but since they are also in the tooltip, I can ignore them. Feel free to post questions or suggestions or samples!

Worst case, if you're a die hard, you can change the desktop resolution before playing, and set it back when you're done. You might be able to use Remote Desktop to play it on an other machine, and set the resolution to do that automatically, but that requires 2 PCs, or a PC and an iPad.

Unfortunately, the problem is that the bitmapped fonts are 8x8 pixels, and the graphics calls and mouse recognition calls are scattered throughout all the dialogs. For the next game, I want to make the panels floating and resizable, but that is a lot more work than I think can do in a patch! Now that I've added in support for Windows fonts, it opens things up more, but makes them harder too without a rewrite. I may play around with letting you set the resolution for the next (3.5 patch) but I am pretty sure that I can not do it without major surgery. The big issue is probably making sure that any calls to see where the mouse was clicked wiould need to be changed. That would also scale the entire screen instead of scaling just the map. I also suspect that it might make everything a bit fuzzy because of the scaling issues. It's something I've thought about since I'm also getting older.

Ralph

ORIGINAL: Hansolo88
EDIT: Ok, studying the 3.4 notes more closely, I see reference to "small view" and "tiny view" so there must be some way to zoom in more closely, but how?

Also, item 36. mentions that you have to hold right click on the enemy unit for the popup to appear or something, so I'll have to try that.

The mouse wheel zooms in and out. There is also a menu option for the map size(?) I think it's called Huge.

There is also a player option to set the menu delay to 0 which reverts to the old behavior.

ORIGINAL: Hansolo88

I have skimmed the manual but didn't see the answers right away, so I apologize if these are really basic.

In addition to the manual, read the "What's New" file.

Thanks for the rapid response Ralph, as I mentioned your continued support for the game is what tipped me over into making the purchase.

The funny thing is I would never have even thought to try such a modern convention as using the mouse wheel to zoom the map!  I actually really like the new clicking convention for movement purposes but I like my attack options so I'll see if holding down the right mouse button feels good enough.

Really nice to know there are so many options, its just going to take time to get them all figured out.

Quick question here - I don't seem to be able to do nuke attacks or bridge attacks any more - when I select my capable aircraft within range and right click a target all I get is the red targeting cross but no option pop up.

I am bracing myself for an answer that makes me look stupid LOL

Thanks

And a big thanks to Ralph and the team. Have always been impressed at the subtleties in the design of TOAW since it first came out back in 1998 or so (was it really THAT long ago?) and Ralph and the team's work not only did not interfere with them but built on them. Many hours of hard work on view here. Many many thanks.

Kipper

Just a guess but its probably the same convention as normal attacks, where you have to hold the right mouse button down over the target and the menu will pop up after a short delay.  Try it and see.

ORIGINAL: Hansolo88

Just a guess but its probably the same convention as normal attacks, where you have to hold the right mouse button down over the target and the menu will pop up after a short delay.  Try it and see.

indeed

ORIGINAL: Hansolo88

Thanks for the rapid response Ralph, as I mentioned your continued support for the game is what tipped me over into making the purchase.

The funny thing is I would never have even thought to try such a modern convention as using the mouse wheel to zoom the map!  I actually really like the new clicking convention for movement purposes but I like my attack options so I'll see if holding down the right mouse button feels good enough.

Really nice to know there are so many options, its just going to take time to get them all figured out.

I tried to add in new conventions like the mouse wheel, left click selects and right click moves/attacks, dragging the map, etc. A lot of people are invested in the old ways, and they make sense for some play styles, so it makes it tougher to change things, especially in a patch.

One big thing I tried to do was to make it more playable by someone who hadn't played before, which meant minimizing the need for right-click menus and adding in tooltips to explain terrain and adding in modern conventions from RTS games (no, you can't group select yet) and items required to support touch screens.

Unfortunately, that means that many obscure sounding options are required. Let me know if any need more explanation, please.

After trying it out, I have to say the new clicking convention is great.  Much quicker the majority of the time.  However, I would like to tweak the delay from holding down the right mouse button just a tiny bit shorter.  Where would I do this?

Nope - anti-bridge or nuke is never on the right-click attack popup. Sorry, should have made clearer that they weren't on the pop-up, as opposed to the pop up never appearing. So what's the story Ralph?

ORIGINAL: Hansolo88

After trying it out, I have to say the new clicking convention is great.  Much quicker the majority of the time.  However, I would like to tweak the delay from holding down the right mouse button just a tiny bit shorter.  Where would I do this?

I think it's something like menu delay under the.player options menu. It's in 1/10 seconds, I think.

ORIGINAL: Kipper

Nope - anti-bridge or nuke is never on the right-click attack popup. Sorry, should have made clearer that they weren't on the pop-up, as opposed to the pop up never appearing. So what's the story Ralph?

I'll look into it.

Folks, is there any way that I can move "entire group" using the new movement technique? I have done a lot of experimenting but can't figure out how to do it. It would be great as it would really cut down the heavy mouse work.
Thanks
Kipper

Hold down on the right mouse button for at least .5 seconds (settable in the configuration) and the old menu pops up.

ORIGINAL: Kipper

Nope - anti-bridge or nuke is never on the right-click attack popup. Sorry, should have made clearer that they weren't on the pop-up, as opposed to the pop up never appearing. So what's the story Ralph?

I can't reproduce this, I get the option to destroy the bridge, can you tell me how, possibly with a save game?

Thanks,
Ralph