Got it installed and running tonight. I’m having problems with it freezing for several seconds during gameplay though on my laptop (HP Win7/A6-3410MX/4GB Ram/Radeon 6755G2 - Crossfire disabled). Hesitates (I’m playing through the tutorials) for up to 20 or 30 seconds and then continues. Seems to be random. Does it in the default windowed mode, and when I cranked everything up (detail distances). Played the intro Leopard 1A5 video (tutorial 1) and it ran fine the first time, but had all kinds of issues the 2nd time. The tanks continued to say 'on the way' but did not shoot at all, however they kept moving to the different battle positions. It also froze up several times. Any ideas?

Do you have more than one CPU core? If it's still a single processor, it might be something like a virus scan or so that hogs computing resources. Checking with the task manager and looking at which process eats all the CPU time could give a first hint.

Also, cranking up all details may actually be a bad idea, especially with the last item, the ground clutter. Even the fastest cards can be brought to a crawl if the ground clutter density is high enough, and the items are large enough, and if they use 8 bit transparency (like the grass does). See for yourself. Alt+F12 activates the frame rate display, Alt+D brings up the details dialog box at runtime. Move the sliders to see how much it affects the frame rate (and how much (or little) difference the various settings make to the overall quality of the scene rendering. The sweet spot is usually not at 100%, not even for the fastest cards.

It's a quad-core CPU and I run very lean in the background. The only thing I use is Zone Alarm (no virus programs), and I use 'Autoruns' to keep the unnecessary processes off. Does this game support quad-core and crossfire? The issues started right off the bat when I ran it at the default settings, which had the graphics at a very poor quality (lots of jaggies I noticed) and windowed mode. Cranking the details up made no difference, same problems (but vastly improved graphics ;-). I'll try it again at the default settings with a fresh restart of the laptop to see if it helps.

Right now, SB Pro still is a single threaded application. Crossfire is supported I think (at least it doesn't crash, although it's not specifically tailored for it, but from what I heard, it works. Speaking of "jaggies", that's best addressed with either an application-specific profile in the Catalyst Control Center, or defining global settings where you activate antialiasing.
I think we now have a section in of of the earliest chapters in the user manual that describe how to improve graphics performance.


All this however doesn't help with the freeze thing. Right now I have no idea what might be causing it. Please try and find out a bit more with the task manager to see what might be involved.

I've tried every possible setting, disabled every application that isn't essential in task manager, tried with and without crossfire enabled (it does give a bump in fps), even completely uninstalled Zone Alarm, but I still get random freezing. Sometimes it's for 10 or 15 seconds, other times it's almost a full minute. It can happen several times in a 5 minute span, or not at all. Seems to happen more often the second time I replay the same tutorial. My fps with the distances at 100 and ground cover distance at 40 is about 30-35 fps, so I don't think the graphics are the issue, unless it's driver-related? Am I seriously the only one having this issue?

What can I say, I don't remember anyone reporting similar symptoms lately. This suggests that it is a local configuration issue. A graphics driver update (or "downdate") might help. The fact that this occurs in so irregular intervals makes me wonder however whether it isn't tied to some other sub system. I wonder if there's some energy settings that went haywire, if we can rule out the interference of some other background application.

I did go and get the latest vid drivers and installed them (thought I had them already, but apparently not) but now when I try to run the game I get this error: 'Codemeter error:Please ensure your CM stick is securely in a USB port' I had this once before and hitting 'retry' worked, but it doesn't work now.

The same here . Server error?

Are you using a demo license, or your own CodeMeter sticks?

If the former, it may be that the license server may have a downtime for maintenance. Another possibility is that all demo licenses are in use.

If the latter, please contact me by email (my forum name here @eSimGames.com) as we may need to go through the regular troubleshooting procedure.


I suspect however since it seems to have happened to you both at nearly the same time that it may be related to the demo license server.

Yes, the license server changed. Got it going again, but still freezes even with the new drivers. Oddly the new drivers seem to lower the framerate.

Yes, license server. But I tried to ping the server IP and everything was OK. Average reply was about 200ms. So, maybe all licenses in use? I tried that at 15:00 UTC and 19:30 UTC.

Running out of licenses is the most likely cause. Of course, only Sean would know for sure. I don't handle our servers.

Well, it was worth a shot, but apparently we'll have to look elsewhere now.
When it freezes, what does the performance monitor (perfmon) say? Is it a network access, a disk access, are there other notable peaks?

Today again several attempts, but no success.

I tried to hint it before, but just so there are no misunderstandings: Please write an email directly to the address that was given to you as your point of contact for the demo license program. I'll be out of office for a few days.

Did that, but so far no reply .

...for how long have you been using the demo?
After a while we have to block people to make room for new players who want to test it. I can't say if you're one of those cases?

Everything is OK now. I already received reply from Sean with corrective action description.