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Steel Beasts and/or Steel Beasts Gold on windows 7


SgtGlick

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Both were made for Windows 95/98, DirectX 7, and a fixed 640x480 resolution with 256 colors. These days, some of the graphics drivers don't even support these modes.

We simply can't help you there. My strong recommendation is to look into SB Pro PE. It has pretty much everything that SB1 had, it offers infinitely more, and it's painless to install on modern Windows versions.

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The only thing I can suggest is: run it in a virtual PC type softwae.

Unless you're after a serious nostalgia trip.

Go with ahwt Ssnake suggests, SB Pro PE is far more advanced and is the current supported platform, and has been since 2004ish???

Try looking at the Youtube videos if you need more convincing.

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Hey, SB1 is still fun to play. I mean yeah, it's much more limited in terms of vehicles, interiors and such. But the mechanics are the same. And if you have a great imagination (like me), you can get past the...um...how do I say this nicely? ...the "vintage" graphics. Lol.

The only thing I really miss about SB1 (that SB Pro Lacks) is every time you took 1-3 non critical hits, the Stabilization would go.

(So you needed to be familiar with the redundant FCS modes.)

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People actually wanting crap graphics, weird. :cul:

While SB Pro might offer more modern grafics SB1 did a better job recreating a natural feel to the terrain. One of the big drawbacks of the new engine is that it tend to create very sharp changes in height differences which simply looks awfull/unnatural. SB1 created nice rolling terrain with kinda "gentle" changes in elevation.

Or look at how streets are placed in uneven errain and how it intersects with the terrain, that looks not less weird than the whole grafic of SB1.

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While SB Pro might offer more modern grafics SB1 did a better job recreating a natural feel to the terrain. One of the big drawbacks of the new engine is that it tend to create very sharp changes in height differences which simply looks awfull/unnatural. SB1 created nice rolling terrain with kinda "gentle" changes in elevation.

Or look at how streets are placed in uneven errain and how it intersects with the terrain, that looks not less weird than the whole grafic of SB1.

Well, this has more to do with the actual hightmap really. I mean, sure the terrain resolution could be higher, but for the most part if you have a very good resolution hightmap then there shouldn't be much in the way of jaggies in the terrain.

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Well, this has more to do with the actual hightmap really. I mean, sure the terrain resolution could be higher, but for the most part if you have a very good resolution hightmap then there shouldn't be much in the way of jaggies in the terrain.

Which is meaningless if u dont provide customers with high resolution height maps. In most scenarious i see plenty of those jaggies and often "ridgelines" look like beeing cut with a chainsaw. At least when we dont talk about very flat terrain.

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If you haven't already, try right clicking on the shortcut and choose Properties.

Then select the compatibility tab.

Set it to start as administrator as well as run in Windows XP SP 2. Also put checks in Run in 256 colors and 640 x 480 screen resolution. Perhaps that will get it to work.

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While SB Pro might offer more modern grafics SB1 did a better job recreating a natural feel to the terrain.

That wasn't the engine, but the selected source material ...and, yes, occasionally the severe limitations of the SB1 engine. It could handle only 100m height difference across the entire map. So in some cases we had to distort the terrain data (scale the height down) to fit a square peg into a round hole.

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Hello, 1st post.

Both work fine if run within a Win 98 virtual machine.

I used to play a lot of Steel Beasts Gold that way with 64-bit Vista.

The only problem is I had to use the mouse to aim--couldn't get any USB joysticks to function properly in a virtual machine.

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Which is meaningless if u dont provide customers with high resolution height maps. In most scenarious i see plenty of those jaggies and often "ridgelines" look like beeing cut with a chainsaw. At least when we dont talk about very flat terrain.

Whoa, settle down there.

We provide what we have at the moment. If you looked in the recent updates of SB Pro PE, you will see maps down to the 10 meter resolution. If that is not high resolution then I don't know what is. However, we don't have 10m maps for everything, the ones we do have we replace the old ones, and the ones we don't we keep around until we get something better. But you really have to explore the maps more before you make such general and broad statements. Of course improvements could still be made...

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Which is meaningless if u dont provide customers with high resolution height maps. In most scenarious i see plenty of those jaggies and often "ridgelines" look like beeing cut with a chainsaw. At least when we dont talk about very flat terrain.

You have any Idea how difficult it is to get those maps...for anything above DETD 3 you'll have the feeling you actually BUY THE TERRAIN and not the map. Besides most maps in that detail level are offen classified.

Its like the middle ages. Map=power ;-)

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In the US free high resolution elevation data is pretty common.

The jagged terrain is pretty much unavoidable when the size of the features in the terrain are close to the resolution of the sampling grid (aliasing.) Here's two videos I made driving across a small dam:

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On the second video I applied a 2 or 3 sample gaussian blur which reduced the amount of detail but also greatly reduced the jaggies.

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In the US free high resolution elevation data is pretty common.

Great I guess if you want to fight in the US.

On the second video I applied a 2 or 3 sample gaussian blur which reduced the amount of detail but also greatly reduced the jaggies.

So you applied this "blur" to the video or the map?

i.e. you recorded the video and then presented it here with and without the blur.

or

you made the map and videoed it and then on a second run, made the map, applied the blurr and then videoed the result?

Mapping can be pretty frustrating, I know I've just pretty much wasted a week putting date through TerraTools to create 90 x 90 maps only to find that while the terrain is "corelated" to work with other products, the end result is a lowest common denominator that looks like rubbish in SB.

For example "old" map (made purely in SB Pro Map Editor):

8255194867_f9233e05af_c.jpg

"new" map made through TerraTools using latest, "best" data:

8255194967_afaa999ba9_c.jpg

The number of trees / bush in the "new" map is what TerraTools gave us.

The water course that is in the centre of the map was not created by TerraTools but made manually by me after looking at a paper (I wont use the term "normal" :)) map of the area.

It appears this is the price we will pay if we want to use the one data set to create terrain usable by Steel Beasts, VBS and OneSAF.

The alternative seems to be to create "special" maps that work in each application, but can't be used collaboratively across applications. :(

Edited by Gibsonm
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Great I guess if you want to fight in the US.

Europe's been done too much, it's time for some fresh territory to blow up. :D

So you applied this "blur" to the video or the map?

I smoothed the height map.

I made a 40x40 km height map, but after seeing how much work it takes to draw up the terrain in the map editor I kinda gave up. I might give it a try again some time though.

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We provide what we have at the moment. If you looked in the recent updates of SB Pro PE, you will see maps down to the 10 meter resolution. If that is not high resolution then I don't know what is. However, we don't have 10m maps for everything, the ones we do have we replace the old ones, and the ones we don't we keep around until we get something better. But you really have to explore the maps more before you make such general and broad statements. Of course improvements could still be made...

So where do i find the information which maps do use which resolution?

Anyway, having lower resolution maps doesnt mean you have to use them in the same condition you bought. Like Rotreneg demostrated u can smoothen each map with some form of algorithm.

How did u edit the height map?

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