Birth of the Federation

Hello !

I just wanted to submit 2 little infos on manipulating tactical.
I did not find these with the search function, but if they are already known ->
sorry + please delete topic.

I discovered that you can "lend" commands from other ships in a battle.
Just click on your ship and move the mouse over another - even enemy - ship to use it´s abilities for your ship/group.
Advice: Don´t let Starbases do fancy things. Crashes combat.

You can change combat speed by + or - key on numpad. For a more fluent display of large scale actions.

Greetings
Callahan

never heard about the first one. After 13 years BotF still suprises me.

is this bug still actual? tried it with ecm 4.0 and wasn't abel to do so.

EnPhreg wrote:is this bug still actual? tried it with ecm 4.0 and wasn't abel to do so.

this bug may have been addressed in ECM when Commands in Tactical Combat was edited.

SCT even quoted this topic in Commands in Tactical Combat topic at very bottom

viewtopic.php?f=209&t=1998#p28489

yes, i already read his post. that's why i asked. it wasn't clear for me, after reading it.

when some code value are given in the post, what means the h that often appears sometimes after numbers??
some example from the 'Commands in Tactical Combat' thread:

AUTO:004A6335 mov al, [esp+150h]
AUTO:004A633C call read_shiplist_sst
AUTO:004A6341 mov edx, [esp+70h]

from what I understand that is just how it displays in assembly code for that type of value

and I know very little about assembly code.

the bug is still active, tested it with Vanilla and ECM.
callahan omitted an essential part in his explanation, you have to hold the mouse click when clicking on the own ship and than moving over other ships.

EnPhreg wrote:the bug is still active

yes it is, I just re-read SCT topic on Commands in Tactical Combat

The reason SCT referred to Tactical cheating in that post, Tactical cheating would not allow re-adding "cloak" command to combat menu safely.

But also keep in mind this type of Tactical cheating will often cause crashes.

thunderchero

EnPhreg wrote:when some code value are given in the post, what means the h that often appears sometimes after numbers??

The 'h' is just some other notation for hex values, just like the prepended '0x' oftenly used.
In your sample it's the offset to the current stack pointer (esp).

edit: I just noticed the question is pretty old already, nm

That "h" is something I've only encountered in the last couple years, before that they would put hex, or use a prefix of a dollar sign or 0x. Come to think of it, it has been quite some time since I've seen anyone use the dollar sign notation outside of an Apple II newsgroup or website.

Has the "h" notation been around longer and I just haven't been in the right forum, or is it relatively recent?
The dollar sign notation is from before I was born, as it was used by the original Apple II in 1974 in it's System Monitor in the ROM, and all members of the Apple II family used it. I do not know if it was used by the Apple I.
I could swear I recall the dollar sign notation being used by debug.com (or was it .exe) from MS-DOS 3.30, but I never really used that program, just played with it a time or two.

The 0x is from C and according to Google from 1972.

EnPhreg wrote:Thu Mar 09, 2017 4:54 pm the bug is still active, tested it with Vanilla and ECM.
callahan omitted an essential part in his explanation, you have to hold the mouse click when clicking on the own ship and than moving over other ships.

I wish there was a way to put an end to all cheating. I don't get why people do it.