Command Ops Scaling Issue

I am not sure when this occurred, but it had to be some time after the last post I made about this series of games. All of my Airborne Assault engine games (Highway to the Reich, Conquest of the Aegean, and Command Operations) now have what appears to be a scaling issue where the text and graphics on the left side of the screen image are out of alignment. I have checked several forum threads from what remains on the Matrix site and attempted to adjust monitor scaling but to no avail.

I do know that my AMD Gaming Evolved video drivers were updated to version 14.12 some time ago and both the Replay and Record features are disabled (many users are experiencing this). I guess the easiest answer is to roll back the drivers, however AMD makes such an undertaking unnecessarily difficult to accomplish. Unfortunately the other option is to wait for them to roll out another driver update. Until that happens I probably won’t be posting any CO material.


Update 6/21/15: it seems as if the original game Highway to the Reich (released in 2003) is the least affected by this issue, whereas Conquest of the Aegean and Battles from the Bulge are to the point of unplayable (this issue also affects the new Command Operations 2 which I uninstalled this evening after trying out for a couple of months).

A forum post here indicated I would not receive a response and a forum post here has (as of this evening) gone unanswered for over a week.

Update 6/24/15: after having completed an AAR in Highway to the Reich (the original game from 2003) which seems to be least affected by this problem, I noticed one component of the issue when preparing the screen shots. The New Game Options panel is much larger now than previously, and demonstrates the affect in other areas of the game (other than actual game play):


This is a screen shot before the issue occurred, taken on 10/16/14.


This is a screen shot after the issue occurred, taken on 6/24/15.

Both images posted here are set to original size. Note the slider for Orders Delay in the second image, how it is now on two lines as opposed to a single line in the first image, and how the text in the left box appears to almost be set to bold.

I have checked my registry settings as recommended in this post, however they are set as specified so I am at a complete loss as to what is going on here.

I had reinstalled HTTR on this machine on 9/28/14 and was able to play a few scenarios and blog about them before the issue came up. The only significant change that occurred since then was on 5/5/15 when I downloaded and installed the AMD Catalyst Omega 14.12 drivers (I know these dates because the files are still in my Downloads folder).

The previous AMD driver installed was AMD Catalyst 14.7 RC3 which I installed on 9/19/14, and it did not have any affect on the games that I could tell. While the knee jerk response could be to roll back the drivers, I believe the developer (if still an ongoing business entity) bears some responsibility to work with the video card manufacturer to resolve a known issue that has been around for quite some time.

However as this recent revealing article indicates, AMD might be on the way out having lost an additional 11% market share in 2014. Currently only 28.6% of those who choose to participate in the Steam hardware survey (Which I do) report having an AMD video card.

So the hope of a fix coming from a cash strapped company is dim as the swing in fortune is starting: "AMD lost over $400 million in 2014, while Nvidia made over $400 million in the same period".

Update 3/8/16: I do not have this issue since upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 (the free upgrade) and my Control Panel Fonts have the following:

One of these may be a carryover from when I upgraded from W7, so if you do not have all three and have the scaling issue in W10 try downloading the third one (the one with Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc.)

Good luck!!

9 comments:

  1. Tim that sucks. It looks like CO2 will be available for download from LnL servers next week though.

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  2. Five modules for $50 sounds reasonable. My concern is from the screen shots that I have seen on LnL it looks to be built upon a very similar engine, and if that is the case I very well could be facing a scaling issue there (as the current issue effects every other iteration of the engine that I have – three core games and an expansion pack).

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  3. I tried the new engine about a month ago and ended up having the same issue there, and it has continued with all of the other games in the series even after several driver updates by AMD. Funny how it worked fine for about two years on this rig and then started having issues.

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  4. The post has been updated with a couple of screen shots for comparison purposes, as well as some information regarding the video card drivers.

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  5. Although I reinstalled a Windows XP rig to take care of this problem, I received notice of a driver update for AMD, Catalyst 15.7. I installed the drivers and checked out Command Ops, but sad to say there has been no change. Furthermore, there has been no response to my post for assistance on the LnL forum thread addressing this very topic. Given these issues and the lack of support from the developer, I will not be wasting any money on CO 2 until they address this issue.

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  6. Well after having restored a second gaming rig with Windows XP to (among other things) play several Airborne Assault games from Panther Games (most notably Command Operations: Battles from the Bulge), I noticed that I was not patched up to the latest version that was released before the game was abandoned and Panther Games left Matrix as a publisher to go over to Lock and Load.

    I had the Highway to the Reich expansion pack installed and was patched to 4.3.249, so seeing that Matrix had 4.6.279 as the last official patch, I downloaded and attempted to install it. During that install I ran into a sharing violation and the patch failed to finish due to an issue with a file called EM.exe (most likely the Estab Manager application).

    After being able to consistently replicate this issue I uninstalled and then reinstalled the game to only now face the same issue all over again. This effectively takes the problem from being the game to something wrong with my XP machine. Since the original reinstall when all worked fine, I upgraded XP SP2 to SP3, and that is when problems began with the installation.

    I still have the original Highway to the Reich and Conquest of the Aegean installed on that XP machine which are running fine, however Command Operations is a complete bust. To be frank I have no desire to continually chase after this game (granting here that the most current issue is mine and not the games fault) considering Panther Games has offered absolutely zero follow-on support for the scaling issue that is being experienced by users of AMD video cards.

    My intention is to continue with Highway to the Reich and Conquest of the Aegean to complete those single player missions, but Command Operations is a lost cause. The newer Command Operations 2 exhibits the same exact scaling problem, and given the developers clearly misguided decision to create a game that virtually requires two monitors while giving a huge middle finger to those of us with just one I have no interest in patronizing someone by paying money for the same scenarios and force lists that I have already paid for twice before.

    Panther Games can regurgitate Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge all they want, they just shouldn't expect their dwindling fan base to keep paying top dollar for the same basic material over and over (or rely on those willing to mod their games to pull your ass out of the fire with new units, theaters, and scenarios).

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  7. I am using Windows 10 with a AMD Radeon R7 200 Series video card. The scaling issue is so distracting that I have restrained from purchasing the CO2 games. Some windows are unnecessarily large while the principal one, giving unit information, is partially hidden. It is arrogant and misguided to simply write off a decent percentage of users. The game itself could be great, but a fundamental bug is unacceptable.

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  8. It sucks that it is not working for you. When I had Windows 7 it was resolved by adding an additional font that my machine was missing, and when I upgraded from 7 to 10 the issue no longer existed. But that was because I had upgraded (the free one), so had I not downloaded that font it might not still work today (I would have no way of efficiently knowing for sure). Go to Control Panel in Windows 10 and bring up Fonts and verify that you have “Microsoft Sans Serif Regular”, “MS Reference Sans Serif Regular”, and “MS Sans Serif Regular”. I would not expect much support from the developer as I believe they cannot justify (in their mind) spending any additional time on this issue because it affects so few of us. Unfortunately what they are not realizing is that they have lost sales of CO2 (and the add on modules) as a result.

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  9. See 3/18/16 update at the bottom of the post above for potentially important information.

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