Battlezone 1

Don't use it. Never. Sooner or later, it creates a big bug if you used it just once.

How to spot it?
You probably all noticed how sometimes you lose credit. There were some talks that Grizzly loses credit more than other ships, but that is not the case. The problem is not in Grizzly, it's in MDM mortar.

What bug it creates?
It actually creates 3 bugs. Losing credit is the least worry you will have, that's bug #1.
At that point your MDM detonator will stop working too. That's bug #2. You will no longer be able to kill pilots, destroy mines because MDM will stop exploding.
And bug #3, the worst bug, you will need more hits to destroy something. Your weapons will become weaker. For example, you will need 5 more dual SP stabbers shots to destroy a recycler.

How to prevent it?
Stratters, arm your self with regular mortar, that's the only thing you can do. DM'ers, just don't use it.

MDM bug applies only on the players who were in the game in the moment the bug appeared. For newcomers you get a new chance of not using MDM.

I noticed same bug on splinter and pop-gun, but it happens very rare. Splinter or pop-gun can last for few hours before it "breaks", MDM lasts only few minutes. Seems that only regular mortar is immune.

Interesting.

OMG....... That was an irritating issue I never understood. It happened me only vs very few players as I remember (?) I rarely gave up games but against APC atacks it could get too bad . But yes I do remember regular mortars often worked better for some reason.
A bit less buggy now I guess. Good to have a possibility to adapt to it.

I remeber few games with T-34 when I didn't know about the bug... At one point I wasn't able to kill his pilots anymore... I told him about it right away, and I don't know was it because of his English or something else, but after I explained him what's going on, he was sending even more APC's on me.

I also thought before that it's his bad connection because I noticed that bug only when playing certain players. But during those days I was playing a lot of LAN games with 5 ping and I saw the same thing from time to time, so I realized that problem is in something else. After lot of experimenting and testing I found about the MDM.

We thought that the problem is in certain players and their connections because only certain players use APC's and minelayers a lot, so the bug was only more noticable on them.

Another thing, when MDM detonator stops working, direct hit will still work. Direct hit on tank, pilot or even mine.

Weird. The MDM always works for me. Well, at least in campaign mode. And I noticed that in MED mode, all the enemy craft take a lot more hits to kill anyways. I figured it was because easy was major handicap. But yeah, my MDM's always seem to work...

maybe you lot just have bad luck!

just kidding... I should try it out online...

Campaign difficulties:

Easy = just pitiful.

Medium = walk in the park.

Hard = a bit more difficult to sleep while playing.


How the heck do I edit sprite tables and names*.map files? I view the names*.map files in hex editor and notepad, and nothing is readable.

Would make more sense to have a string table for BZ's valid strings.

Allow anything to be displayed in-game, but not having to change ODFs.

structure could be:

<handle in ODF>
<display string>
<handle in ODF>
<display string>

etc.

part of the file could look like this:


And I could easily change MDM to a longer shot delay mortar and have it like this:


This screenshot is edited with paint:

That's what it would look like

I really don't see why BZ couldn't have a string list/table/whatever in ASCII format.

I agree with your table of difficulties especially easy mode...
Med is not really a walk in the park, but it is more fun.
Hard is something that I actually have to pay attention to my ammo gauges.