Knights and Merchants.net Forum

On Sox's website is written that it supports MP3 with external library, but they didn't write which one...

Crashes: It happened on 1.471 on Windows 2003 (very similar to XP). Have anybody tested it on different systems (2000 and ME)? Is it crashing also there?

Have to find 2000 cd...

Sox needs to be compiled to support MP3 which I'd rather not. While using two different tools to do this process might not be the most ideal solution, I see it as the easiest going by the fact that I found nothing else.

According to reports, these crashes only occur under Windows XP, not on 2000 (I'm pretty much ready to confirm that no crashes occur under Vista, but then again there is a more serious problem when playing under Vista anyway).

If it crashes on every XP machine, it's very bad, as most people use XP. It was working well during most of the time, WHY IT HAPPENED? Maybe I should check also other versions (1.5 and 1.52) but I don't think it's fixed there.

By the way, has anybody decoded the main EXE?

Decoding exes is really difficult so no discoveries which would help in these problems have been made.
The best bet regarding the exe would be to have someone with great knowledge of assembly or possibly someone who can make out something of the decompiled C source code we currently have of the game. But finding someone like that...

It's getting worse, 1.5 crashed, too... It started to behave like 1.53...
If it's so bad on every XP, I think that most people won't be interested in the patch, which make new critical bugs...

Guess we are stuck with the drunk soldiers and broken AI then

It's a really hard decision. I haven't tried compatiblity mode yet, buy I don't think that will help (does it do anything except system ID changing?). The biggest problems are drunk soldiers in the latest versions, and AI building issues and crashing in old versions. In my opinion other ones aren't critical and using overrides is possible (screenshots, attacks, "track" before number).
@The Dark Lord: the problem with bigger file can be transfer speed (I know that there are not many people using 1GB HDDs using 56kbps modem, but it will be very annoying for them).
By the way, you said that "drunk soldiers" are caused by too many units on map. Do you know something more about that? Is this per map limit/per player limit? It counts only soldiers, or also workers/animals?

I've done quite a lot of testing with the ''drunk soldiers''. My mission 16 was perfect for this, because there are way too many units.

The first thing I noticed was the following:
http://kam.vanmeijeren.nl/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=814
This strange bug occures when you have too many units at the start of the mission. The banner carrier has no banner anymore, but instead the other soldiers have a banner. Notice that the first soldier of every group stands wrong (to the south-west instead of the west). It is always like that at the start of the mission (has something to do with AI_DEFENSE), but these ones stayed like that. They were not listening to AI commands anymore.

Indeed, not only soldiers count, but workers and animals as well. One unit could make the difference, by the way. So there is a limit. I counted all units I placed on the map, but a stupid number came out... 12XX (1243 or so?).
But I think there are more factors. Maybe time or streets have something to do with it as well.

Another note: when you pass the limit, the units of the last player in your script will act strangely (at the start, in each case, when you have played a long time it might be another player or all at the same time).

Thanks for that information. Long time ago I had some banner bug - one group with 5 rows' leader hadn't got the flag - but that to the left and right from him had it. The wrong-standing one also happened sometimes to me - but I hadn't noticer drunk soldiers there yet.

I know that killing drunk groups can calm new trained ones down, but it can happen again to them.

Checked 1 TSK beginning and 1 and 2 TPR with 2000 compatiblity mode and... it was good without F8. Still have to test some more - maybe it really helps?

To my knowledge, what the compatibility mode does is pretty much tell the program that you have a different version of windows and it might also report a different DirectX version, RAM etc. but I don't think it should help against crashing.

Anyways I thought I'd throw in some good news for a change. I figured out a solution that should work out for the problem regarding too long lines in the Russian release. Turns out Service Release 2 (or more likely the Patch Pack) decreased the spacing upwards and downwards for each character which also meant that each new line had less space between them, effectively making it possible to add another line.
Now I just need to do this trimming to the Russian font which hopefully shouldn't be all that difficult.

i wish u good luck on this :p

So audio converter is no longer needed!
And one more question: right now it's known how it's working on only few computers. Maybe should I ask people on Polish forum for testing 1.52 EXE, so we'll know how it's working on other computers?

@Nick: Have you tested this?

no i didnt. i barely play TPR. I only play TSK online...