Well of course it would be a bad idea to force the patch on people, I think he meant more of making it an add-on to patch III much like the nitro 30 fps patch is. Also, I haven't noticed any choppiness, but then I also have a relatively fast card.KIV 6051 [SH] wrote:I'm afraid I'm going to have to advise against this. I think I speak for a substantial amount of the community when I say that I really appreciate what you did to make the game work correctly, as it certainly saved my hide when I was using an eleven year old intel video card to play the game. I did notice however that the 30 fps patch seems to make the game feel ever so slightly choppy. One way to tell is to make sharp turns in third person view. For the most part it's unnoticeable, thankfully, but playing the game now with nvidia profile inspector, using the battlezone parameters + a 24 fps limit, the game somehow feels smoother, like film vs. video tape. I guess what I'm getting at is the community certainly needs this patch, but some may prefer to use their own method for frame rate capping.
I didn't know gog added patch III! Then again I disabled auto updates, so it could have been something added recently. Still, I think it would be a good idea for all future multiplayer and fps patches to come with the cd check pre disabled and cutscenes folder set to HDD. I wouldn't worry about the music crack, you can add a readme explaining how to map music to the wrapper via hex for us gog users. Also, I've read some versions of the wrapper support ogg, so that's something to look at if the quality bothers you.KIV 6051 [SH] wrote: Aside from the music hacks it looks like the only other thing the gog version (at least the one I downloaded) has is nitro patch III already incorporated. I hope they do some more work on the music since even though it technically works I noticed some other issues:
The music files are mp3s, which are a notoriously lossy format. Sure they're 320kbps, but mp3 encoders simply cannot properly handle long notes nor long pauses. It's the same principle behind saving 16 color screen shots as jpgs; it doesn't take an expert to notice the flaws in the media. I certainly appreciate the effort to get away from the CD requirement, but for music that has been listed as one of the top ten best video game soundtracks of all time, a lossless audio format would have been a better choice.
The music still seems to play when you have it switched off in the settings: the music can actually be switched off, however you'll hear about a half second of music every so often, as if it were still playing it but silently and becoming audible when the track starts over.
The music played is the same track on loop: the only difference is the looped track played depends on the map you're playing. The original version of the game did start different tracks on different maps, but they were never looped. Instead, the next track would be played and the CD would be played on loop, not the individual tracks. The only exception was the menu music (which was originally Ovum Bisquit, then Activision screwed it up in one of their patches [v1.083 iirc] and now it's Mission Code B.F.A.M., and has been ever since). It's one thing for the menu music to be looped, but for in-game it gets old fast.
