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Wow.. I have no idea how I could have missed out on these games for as long as I have. I'm a "real-time only" type of person wich is why I've been stuck with small unit types of games (Close Combat etc) and have stayed away from the operational ones. I think that the chaos and "friction" of war is such a great part of it that a game that excludes them (ie hexbased, turnbased etc) is close to less "realistic" than a game that only includes them. This is sucha a breath of freash air and I can't wait to start commanding thoose divisions. I have only tried the RDOA demo sofar but am already sold.. The supply line improvements with COTA makes me to belive that I should wait til this one comes up before I dive in but I dont know if I can hold myself.. [:)] What conserns me though is the system requirements.. Will these drasticly change from HTTR to COTA? And Im not sure I can play HTTR smoothly yet. What worries me is CPU. My sys req is:
Pll 350 Mhz CPU
256MB RAM
64MB vidCard
Will this be enough to play HTTR at the biggest levels? And more importantly will it be enough to play COTA..? I know it's "time to upgrade" but being a student I can't see this happening anytime soon...
Thanx in advance!

Chimo,

Glad to see you're excited about COTA. [:)]

Re system requirements. A PII 500 is the min specs for HTTR and for COTA will likely be a PIII800 or 1000. Essentially the game will run on your rig but oh so slowly. I would not recommend it.

i have just got a new laptop with a wide screen display. 1280x800 is the native resolution but it look okay at 1024x768 although HTTR has not been tried on my new baby yet

will there be any support for the non 4:3 ratio screens or bigger resolutions such as 1280x1024 / 1600x1400 ?
so many people are getting LCDs now and people want to make use of the screens native sizes with a non dithered display

for tbose who are interested my new baby is a Compaq r4000z, AMD64 4000+, 1GB Ram, ATI x200M 128MB Graphics, 15.4' Brightview LCD, 802.11B/G Wireless, DVD+-RW DL, Bluetooth etc etc

it should be more than adequate for COTA !

no, not interested at all [:@]

more interesting I think is: will CotA support 64 bit?

TANX
Andrew

You really should build your own PC's and stay away from pr built.

Have no idea what Compaq are like now but a few years ago I'd tell people to saty well clear. They always made sure it would be as hard as possible to upgrade them.

HTTR runs fine on my 1280 x 1024 LCD display and on any display >= 800 x 600. COTA will require 1024 x 768 or larger. As with all LCD/TFT displays these are best run in their native size ( eg my 19" LCD is 1280 x 1024 ). To specify the screen res for HTTR just enter a command parameter - see p51 of the manual for details on how to do this. It will then automatically open in the specified res.

ORIGINAL: CriticalMass
more interesting I think is: will CotA support 64 bit?

Well, I think CotA has *at least* that amount of bits [:'(]

Seriously, I fail to see where it being 64-bit would be advantageous at this point in time - care to explain the how and why of your question ?

Greetz,

Eddy Sterckx

ORIGINAL: sterckxe

ORIGINAL: CriticalMass
more interesting I think is: will CotA support 64 bit?

Well, I think CotA has *at least* that amount of bits [:'(]

Seriously, I fail to see where it being 64-bit would be advantageous at this point in time - care to explain the how and why of your question ?

Greetz,

Eddy Sterckx

It is all about moving data. A game that supports 64 bit processors will run twice as fast as one that only supports 32 bit. You are moving twice the amount of data at the same speed. So yes actually it would be advantages. And with dual core processors being developed it will only get better, Intel and them instead of trying to get faster processors by uping the Speed are actually going to lower the speed (or at least not go any higher) and develop 64 bit dual core setups. This will allow one processor to be installed but you will really have 2 installed. I am not an expert but I believe you could then have 1 side of the processor handle the equations for movement, combat, etc... and the other side of the processor to handle data for the graphics.

From: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... i=2341&p=2

What’s interesting is that the 90nm dual core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will feature Hyper Threading support, something that is left out of the regular Pentium 4 8xx series. A Hyper Threading enabled dual core Pentium 4 EE would mean 4 logical processors, capable of executing 4 simultaneous threads across the two physical cores. It looks like the EE chip will be launched with the new 955X chipset (Glenwood), with support for the 1066MHz FSB and DDR2-667 support. We often wondered why Intel wasn’t using the 1066MHz FSB with their Smithfield dual core processors, now we know - Intel’s saving the faster FSB for their price premium Extreme Edition part.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... i=2329&p=3

Dual core Smithfield processors, which are really nothing more than two Prescotts slapped together with independent caches.

So I think once Intel starts using 64 bit cores games like HTTR will be able to start doing some of the stuff they haven't been able to do because of limitations with hardware. Maybe 2 -3 years, especially considering I think AMD will be doing their version of a dual 64bit processor.

ORIGINAL: HercMighty
It is all about moving data. A game that supports 64 bit processors will run twice as fast as one that only supports 32 bit. You are moving twice the amount of data at the same speed.

Thanks for taking the trouble to type it all up, but I think you're a bit mistaken in the impact of 64-bit processing - and especially with regard to current time-consuming items like the AI. I'm old enough (too old actually) to have witnessed the evolution from 8 to 16 to 32 bit computing from a professional programmer's pov. Things don't move that fast and while some are already running 64-bit system a lot of people will be running 32-bit systems for many years to come. Releasing a 64-bit program today or even in the near future (like 2 or 3 years) is therefore out of the question. Don't get me wrong : it will have an impact - in the long run - but not for CotA or it's successor.

Greetz,

Eddy Sterckx

...care to explain the how and why of your question ?

yes of course: I was just lookin at oi_you_nutter's system specs. I notice he has a AMD64 and thought that might be a little more interesting to game play than a wide screen monitor, if a game like CotA could exploit the CPU to it's full potential.

Releasing a 64-bit program today or even in the near future (like 2 or 3 years) is therefore out of the question. Don't get me wrong : it will have an impact - in the long run - but not for CotA or it's successor.

I think that's a little short sighted [8D]. Take for example (and its been a long time since I played it) Operational Art of War which had two exe, one for "larger" scenerios. A scenerio designer had the oppurtunity to create scenarios for either exe. Could not the same principal be applied to a 64 bit processor (I'm not that technically minded I must add).

Shoot....

TANX
Andrew

I think that's a little short sighted

Not at all, just drives up the development costs with having to write and troubleshoot two versions of the game.

Far more effective to do some multi-threading to take advantage of HyperThreading and/or the next generation of dual cpu's. Even doing that is somewhat questionable when the same effort could be spent hand tuning the serious number crunching routines to speed them up for the same effort.

Remember that war gamers are maybe 1% of the overall market and they tend to always be on the lower end of the hardware scale so that probably translates to 0.01% of the market that would actually get any benefit at all out of the extra work.

Anyone actually running the 64 bit version of Windows here?

Well COTA does take advantage of Hyperthreading as we already have separate threads for interface, AI and sound. However, we will not be doing anything to specifically optimise for 64 bit chips at this stage. We have a mountain of work ahead of us already and until they become more prolific we just can't justify the effort. Besides I am yet to be convinced that a 64bit path is going to be all that usefull. Having a wider path is useful for shunting large amounts of data at the same time ( eg for processing really large numbers or data structures but not for serially processing large amounts of data consisting of small numbers or small data structures such as we use for route finding and LOS checks.

In any event we are still running under a 32 bit OS ( ie Windows ) and so we're not going to be able to take advantage of the 64 bit power until MS bring out a new 64 bit OS. And that's still a way off yet.

ORIGINAL: Chimo

Wow.. I have no idea how I could have missed out on these games for as long as I have. I'm a "real-time only" type of person wich is why I've been stuck with small unit types of games (Close Combat etc) and have stayed away from the operational ones. I think that the chaos and "friction" of war is such a great part of it that a game that excludes them (ie hexbased, turnbased etc) is close to less "realistic" than a game that only includes them. This is sucha a breath of freash air and I can't wait to start commanding thoose divisions. I have only tried the RDOA demo sofar but am already sold.. The supply line improvements with COTA makes me to belive that I should wait til this one comes up before I dive in but I dont know if I can hold myself.. [:)] What conserns me though is the system requirements.. Will these drasticly change from HTTR to COTA? And Im not sure I can play HTTR smoothly yet. What worries me is CPU. My sys req is:
Pll 350 Mhz CPU
256MB RAM
64MB vidCard
Will this be enough to play HTTR at the biggest levels? And more importantly will it be enough to play COTA..? I know it's "time to upgrade" but being a student I can't see this happening anytime soon...
Thanx in advance!

Its time for an upgrade my friend. Your system isnt capable of running any games I can think off that have just been released or in development stage.

You can get decent systems at very low cost these days. Goto a computer fair (if you have them were you are) you can pick up a system that will rund both HTTR and COTA for about £200. Just keep your monitor, keyboard,mouse.



Failing that just download all the mods for Close Combat. There like having a new game.

Actually I lie if you like small unti tactical games try SPWAW or Squad Battles. Both should run OK on your system. Well Squad Battles will run fine.

ORIGINAL: wodin

You really should build your own PC's and stay away from pr built.

Have no idea what Compaq are like now but a few years ago I'd tell people to saty well clear. They always made sure it would be as hard as possible to upgrade them.

once you go "build your own" it does give you an extra perspective on buying and supporting computers. i have been building my own desktops for (counting) 13 or more years. the last PC i bought complete was a 386sx 25MHz

my new baby is a laptop, i would love to have been able to build it myself ]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

HTTR runs fine on my 1280 x 1024 LCD display and on any display >= 800 x 600. COTA will require 1024 x 768 or larger. As with all LCD/TFT displays these are best run in their native size ( eg my 19" LCD is 1280 x 1024 ). To specify the screen res for HTTR just enter a command parameter - see p51 of the manual for details on how to do this. It will then automatically open in the specified res.

excellant

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

HTTR runs fine on my 1280 x 1024 LCD display and on any display >= 800 x 600. COTA will require 1024 x 768 or larger. As with all LCD/TFT displays these are best run in their native size ( eg my 19" LCD is 1280 x 1024 ). To specify the screen res for HTTR just enter a command parameter - see p51 of the manual for details on how to do this. It will then automatically open in the specified res.

HTTR in 1280x800 resolution looks gorgeous on the laptop, the widescreen display leaves a nice big map area, looking forward to doing the same in COTA