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Version incompatibilibties affecting the playback of recorded games exist between the shipped version of RoN on the CD (US distribution) and the first patch downloaded from GameSpy. The problem will, if you are lucky, put you back on the desktop, or if unlucky, force you to reboot or red switch your machine.
Symptoms of the problem are as follows: when attempting to load a recorded game from a version of the game different from that currently installed on your machine, one of three things will happen:
1) Best case: the recorded game starts, but drops back to desktop, where the following error message is displayed in a window: "BHG RTS Run Time FATAL: unknown net command received" -- three buttons available, Ignore, Retry, Abort. Using any of the three will end execution of the game.
2) Worse: the recorded game starts, but hangs - music, movement cease. Mouse can be moved, but no obvious response to keyboard input. If you do Ctrl-Alt-Delete, while you will not see the task manager come up, it will be available, and you can reboot from there with Alt-U, R.
3) Worse #2: the recorded game does not start, but hangs during load with message to the effect that game is waiting for players. Same process as above (Ctrl-Alt-Delete, etc.) will succeed in rebooting machine.
The above errors occurred on a Windows XP Pro machine, cpu, memory, disk space above specs, NVidia card, driver latest WHQL, DirectX 9.0a.
I suggest that the next patch at a minimum not allow the load of a recorded game creating by a version of the game different from that loaded on the users machine. That way, at least one won't have to deal with trying to safely reboot your computer.
Symptoms of the problem are as follows: when attempting to load a recorded game from a version of the game different from that currently installed on your machine, one of three things will happen:
1) Best case: the recorded game starts, but drops back to desktop, where the following error message is displayed in a window: "BHG RTS Run Time FATAL: unknown net command received" -- three buttons available, Ignore, Retry, Abort. Using any of the three will end execution of the game.
2) Worse: the recorded game starts, but hangs - music, movement cease. Mouse can be moved, but no obvious response to keyboard input. If you do Ctrl-Alt-Delete, while you will not see the task manager come up, it will be available, and you can reboot from there with Alt-U, R.
3) Worse #2: the recorded game does not start, but hangs during load with message to the effect that game is waiting for players. Same process as above (Ctrl-Alt-Delete, etc.) will succeed in rebooting machine.
The above errors occurred on a Windows XP Pro machine, cpu, memory, disk space above specs, NVidia card, driver latest WHQL, DirectX 9.0a.
I suggest that the next patch at a minimum not allow the load of a recorded game creating by a version of the game different from that loaded on the users machine. That way, at least one won't have to deal with trying to safely reboot your computer.
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