How do you run SPWAW Without Videos?

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How do you run SPWAW Without Videos?

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All Forums >> [Current Games From Matrix.] >> [World War II] >> Steel Panthers World At War & Mega Campaigns >> How do you run SPWAW Without Videos?

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How do you run SPWAW Without Videos? - 5/12/2000 7:13:00 AM

Larry Stephens

Posts: 14
Joined: 5/11/2000
From: Ottawa, Canada
Status: offline

I downloaded the version of SPWAW that includes video files. I loaded it up on my computer at work and everything runs fine. I then tried loading it up on my computer at home *without* copying the video files (space is a real problem) and I can't get the program to run. Tried running both intro.exe and mech.exe. Mech.exe doesn't seem to do anything and intro.exe tries to load the videos and gives me an error message telling me it can't find a certain (57 meg)smk file. I can't seem to find anything in the manual about this. Is there a special parameter for starting the game without videos? I know there must be some method because the smallest download of the game comes without videos.

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- 5/12/2000 7:23:00 AM

Supervisor

Posts: 5166
Joined: 3/2/2004
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THE GAME LOOK FOR VID988.SMK. IT WILL NOT RUN W/O IT BEING PRESENT.

quote:

Originally posted by Larry Stephens: I downloaded the version of SPWAW that includes video files. I loaded it up on my computer at work and everything runs fine. I then tried loading it up on my computer at home *without* copying the video files (space is a real problem) and I can't get the program to run. Tried running both intro.exe and mech.exe. Mech.exe doesn't seem to do anything and intro.exe tries to load the videos and gives me an error message telling me it can't find a certain (57 meg)smk file. I can't seem to find anything in the manual about this. Is there a special parameter for starting the game without videos? I know there must be some method because the smallest download of the game comes without videos.

------------------ Grenadier SPWAW Beta Team

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- 5/12/2000 3:57:00 PM

O de B

Posts: 136
Joined: 3/28/2000
From: France, Paris
Status: offline

I had not the chance to check the game yet (maybe tonight :-)) but maybe you could try to create a dumb file of the same name ?

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- 5/12/2000 8:09:00 PM

Larry Holt

Posts: 1969
Joined: 3/31/2000
From: Atlanta, GA 30068
Status: offline

On a similar note. I tried to install it on a system without a sound card and it would not install. Now I know the sounds are neat but they are not indispensable. What about hearing-impaired gamers who just don't need a sound card? It seems that they have to buy one just to install the game. Could you consider this in future Matrix releases? Thanks, ------------------ An old soldier but not yet a faded one.

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- 5/13/2000 5:39:00 AM

Larry Stephens

Posts: 14
Joined: 5/11/2000
From: Ottawa, Canada
Status: offline

Thanks for the response Brent. After doing a bit more testing, it's clear that you can't play this game without copying the 57 meg opening credits video file to your hard drive. I tried re-naming a smaller smk file to vid988.smk but it wouldn't buy it. I even tried the old DOS trick of running the intro.exe file from my hard drive but running the video file directly off the CD. This successfully ran the opening credits video off the CD but after the video was over it looked for the 57 meg file on my hard drive, couldn't find it, and gave me an error message. After I cleared the error message, there was no sign of the game but for some reason the mech.exe file was still doing 'something' in the background. You could actually hear it running even though you couldn't see anything on the screen. I also noticed that there was a huge drop in the available space on my hard drive space. I hit con/alt/delete and saw mech.exe referenced in the active task list. I then hit 'end task' to clear it from memory and found a huge 50+ meg log.txt file in the spwaw directory. The log file clearly went into some sort of circular loop that it couldn't get out of. I tried the same procedure on my PC at work today. When I let the program keep 'running', I eventually got a message saying that my hard drive was full. My hard drive had over 1 gig free when I started the program!! After hitting con/alt/delete and deleting another huge log.txt file, the game gave back the disk space. I'm not sure that I understand the design philosophy with respect to the opening video. Although the video is very well done, it's not something you'd want to see every time you play the game. In fact, the intro.exe file is designed to allow you to bypass the video and go directly to the game *providing* the video file is resident on your hard drive. Under the circumstances, I simply don't understand why it's necessary to copy the huge smk file to the hard drive. Personally, I like Harpoon 2's approach to this type of issue. With that game, the user can modify the game's ini file to point to either a directory on the CD or on the hard drive. Wonder if that could also be done with SPWAW.

quote:

Originally posted by Brent: THE GAME LOOK FOR VID988.SMK. IT WILL NOT RUN W/O IT BEING PRESENT.

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