Version 1.05 RC 1 released

"Expect it to be released in the near future." That's what i said last time, well, i've been doing.... other things?!

Anyway, I'm glad to announce version 1.05 RC 1 (Release Candidate 1).
It is available in the download section.
So let's see what's new.

New features:
- Automatic recording: no longer restart recording after each and every game. You can now play a bunch of games, and decide after each of them, whether it's worth saving or not. Thanks a lot to xslider for coding most of this feature!
- Automatic WarLatency handling: Playback won't abort anymore while watching replays that were recorded with WarLatency, but watched without WarLatency and vice versa.
- Replay Vision: Similar to Warcraft III replays, you can now choose a point of view (a player) to watch the replay from and get vision from that player only. Basically you see what the player saw during the original game. Switching back and forth between this new team vision mode and the old full vision mode is supported as well as switching the point of view from one player to another.
Easily switch between team vision and full vision by pressing INSERT.

Bug fixes:
- Hotkeys for replay speed and vision control work again (Vista only)
- War2BNE InSight doesn't complain anymore that it can't determine the Warcraft II version, although you are using a supported version (Vista only)
- War2BNE InSight works on multiprocessor machines.
- Fixed the occasionally incorrect information displayed next to Recorded Game -> Resources

War2BNE InSight crashes Warcraft II BNE

This bug occurs when you try to record a game or view a replay. As soon as the game or replay is supposed to start, you just see the hourglass mouse icon and have to terminate Warcraft II using the task manager.

It affects all versions of War2BNE InSight when run on Intel Pentium 4 systems with hyperthreading technology (emulation of 2 or more virtual processors using one physical cpu) or in general multi processor systems.

War2BNE InSight has been designed for single processor systems and heavily relies on the alternating execution of threads within Warcarft 2 BNE and War2BNE InSight. On multi processor or hyperthreading systems War2BNE InSight's synchronizing mechanism fails and produces the crash.

The good news: There is a work-around.
After starting War2BNE InSight and Warcraft 2 BNE, open the task manager.
Right-click the War2BNE InSight process, select "Set Affinity..." from the context menu and assign the process to a cpu.
Right-click the Warcraft II BNE process and assign it to the SAME cpu as War2BNE InSight.

Unfortunately you will have to set the process affinity again everytime, you restart War2BNE InSight or Warcraft II BNE, which is very inconvenient.

Alternative solution for Intel Pentium 4 hyperthreading systems (not recommended): You can disable hyperthreading in your BIOS settings, but this will lower your overall system performance.

I'm working on a bug fixing release, that addresses this and some other issues. Expect it to be released in the near future.

War2BNE InSight v1.03b fixes the "count.c (1)" problem

Find it in the download section. See the Change Log and the Known Bugs sections for details.

This website has moved

http://www.war2bneinsight.privat.t-online.de is the new home of this page. The http://war2bneinsight.webhop.org link will redirect to that URL from now on.
The http://www-users.rwth-aachen.de/Christian.Charles/War2BNEInSight/index.html location will still stay there, but the accessability problems it currently has renders it nearly unusable. I even have problems, to upload files there, so i don't know, if i can update there.

Webspace problems

During the last few weeks this page has often been slow or even inaccessable and downloads from this page didn't finish.

My webspace provider has recently upgraded several hardware and software components and additionally suffers from heavily increased traffic (i guess that's caused by many students, who download the recently released Redhat 9 iso images through the RWTH net).

To increase the odds, that you get complete downloads, i have put War2BNE InSight into zip archives. You will need Winzip or a similar software to extract the program file.

I hope they get their software/hardware/traffic problems under control, soon.

A new bug in War2BNE InSight 1.03a

Some replays cause Warcraft II BNE to crash with an error message "count.c (1)" followed by two numbers.
Let me try to explain, when this happens (it's a kind of rare and hard-to-explain scenario, i hope you get it :))

War2BNE InSight does not restore the original game properly, if there were players in the game, that chose the "Human" Race or got "Human" because they chose "Random". Players start with 1 peon/peasant or (if you chose "Units: Map Default") with certain units and buildings depending on the map design. If a "Human" player looses units or buildings of a type he had when the game startet and the number of the units or buildings he has of that type falls below the number he had of that type in the beginning of the game, Warcraft II BNE crashes and shows the "count.c (1)" error message.
In "Units: One Peon Only" replays this bug occurs, if a "Human" player looses all his peasants.
Furthermore, loosing units and buildings not just happens, when they are killed or destroyed. Finishing certain upgrades also causes a player to "loose" buildings or units of a certain type.
A Townhall becomes a Keep, e.g. in the moment the player finishes the Keep Upgrade, he "looses" a Townhall and "gets" a Keep. Upgrades with that effect are: Townhall -> Keep, Keep -> Castle, Watch Tower -> Guard Tower, Watch Tower -> Cannon Tower, Knight -> Paladin and Elven Archer -> Elven Ranger

Gothic Horror sent me a replay on Cramped BNE.pud that shows this bug. Since this is a "Units: Map Default" game, both players start with 1 hall and 2 peons/peasants. When pimp-juice, the "Human" player on the bottom left of the map, finishes his Keep upgrade (at 00:01:48 game time), he has fewer Townhalls, namely 0, than he had in the beginning of the game, since his Townhall turns into a Keep. Warcraft II BNE crashes and shows the error message "count.c (1) 74 0".

I will fix this bug asap.

Warcraft II BNE minimizes, if you try to view a replay

I got several mails about a problem with v1.03: After clicking "View Replay" and switching back to Warcraft II BNE you are taken back to the desktop, leaving you unable to bring Warcraft II BNE to the foreground, until you clicked Cancel in the "Replay status" window.
I don't know why this happens on some systems all the time, while others are not affected, i just know it has something to do with the + and - hotkeys that let you change the replay speed from within the replay game and the way War2BNE InSight activates them seems broken.

To temporarily solve this issue, War2BNE InSight v 1.03a is available in the download section.
There's a checkbox in the "Replay status" window that lets you disable the + and - hotkeys. Disable them and you should be able to alt-tab to Warcraft II BNE, if you encountered this problem with v1.03.
To change the replay speed you will have to alt-tab out to War2BNE InSight then, however.

Sorry for the inconvenience, i hope i can find out what's wrong with the hotkeys and get them working on all systems.

War2BNE InSight and WarLatency

Most of the "the replay game differs from the original game"-bug reports i got contained replays that were recorded while using DjinnKahn's WarLatency program at the same time.
This is not a bug in War2BNE InSight, but rather a conflict between War2BNE InSight and WarLatency.
Affected replays abort with the error message mentioned above and Warcraft shows a "Player X set network for Y latency" message, just before the replay aborts.
To view such replays, simply

• use WarLatency, if the player who recorded the replay used it.
• do NOT use WarLatency, if the player who recorded the replay has NOT used it. (You might have to restart Warcraft II, if you have used WarLatency before, since WarLatency has no Deactivate button)

Sometimes this can be a bit tricky. I have seen a replay, in which a player sets the latency to extra high and back to low (which lets WarLatency take effect, if it's activated), then he realized, WarLatency was not running, so he activates it and again sets latency to extra high and back to low.
To view that replay you'd have to start without WarLatency and activate it after the first to-extra-high-and-back-to-low latency change.

New version 1.03 released

War2BNE InSight version 1.03 is now available in the download section.
First, let me say a big "Thank you" to everyone, who sent me bug reports. They revealed several new bugs and were very helpful, so i could eliminate all serious known bugs (maybe except the bug that prevents playback of free map games, but that's a debatable issue ;-)) in War2BNE InSight. Please see the Change Log and the Known Bugs sections for details.

Besides that, War2BNE InSight 1.03 now supports the german version of Warcraft II BNE and lets you change the speed of a replay game.
To change the speed, either use the track bar in the "Replay status" window or increase/decrease the speed with the +(plus) and -(minus) keys on your numpad. You can use these hotkeys from within the game, so you don't need to alt-tab out to change the speed.

Replays recorded with v1.01 and v1.02 are compatible with War2BNE InSight v1.03

Bugs in War2BNE InSight 1.02

2 new bugs have appeared.

1. If the player, who hosted the original game, leaves before the game is over, one can't switch to other players in the replay after that player left and is stuck with the player one has selected before the hosting player left. Also, this bug disables the correctness checks that War2BNE InSight performs. That means, after the hosting player left the game in the replay, War2BNE InSight does not verify anymore, if the replay exactly matches the original game and thus will not show an errormessage and abort the replay if it differs.
   This 2v2 game played on Garden of War BNE shows this bug. You can't switch between players anymore after wicked[WP] (who hosted that game) left.
2. War2BNE InSight is supposed to automatically add the ".wir" extension, if you choose a filename without an extension in the "Save" dialog. If the path of the folder where you want to save the replay contains a dot ("."), the replay, however, will be saved without an extension. The "Open" dialog shows ".wir"-files only by default. You can load replays without extensions or with other extensions by choosing Filetype: All files (*.*).
   I suggest you put the War2BNE InSight executable in a folder without a dot until this bug has been fixed.

I have updated the Known bugs section. It lists older bugs now, too, and there is a note attached to each bug, if it still exists in the current version or otherwise which version fixed it.
I have updated the FAQ section to answer some questions how one can detect hacks by viewing a replay and how reliable that is.

New version 1.02 released

War2BNE InSight version 1.02 is now available in the download section. It fixes the early-building-bug and the game-length-display-bug (see previous news 1. and 3.).
Replays recorded with v1.01 are compatible with War2BNE InSight v1.02, thus the new version now replays the games, that you couldn't view with v1.01, because the recording player was "too fast for InSight" (as jd5000 said ;-)).

I have updated the Known bugs section to reflect the Non-Default-Unit-Properties-Maps-bug (see previous news 2.).
I have updated the Change log section.

Bugs in War2BNE InSight 1.01

3 new bugs have appeared. 2 of them prevent players from viewing their replays.

1. If the recording player builds something within the very first second of the game, War2BNE InSight fails to replay the game. This Fierce Ocean Combat ffa replay sent by Orkinman2 shows the bug. jd5000 also sent another replay (Garden Of War BNE) that shows this bug.
2. War2BNE InSight fails to replay games played on maps that don't use the default unit properties (in the map editor: Menu Player -> Unit Properties -> Use Default Data is not checked).
   Typical examples of such maps are paintball and free maps. BHC-mitchell sent this replay, played on PaintWall.pud.
3. War2BNE InSight displays Game lengths in a wrong way on american/english windows computers. For example a game lasted 23 minutes and 42 seconds, War2BNE InSight shows "12:23:42 AM" instead of "00:23:42" as the game length.