Command & Conquer

[Nyerguds]

For comparison, none of the The Covert Operations missions have the briefing at the end of their scenario files, it's always close to the start of each INI.

Not true, actually

(for the record, all mission files in that 'mappics' folder are the originals, before I messed around with them for my patching stuff)

But in the CD demo, at least some of the briefings were either edited into MISSION.INI or placed somewhere near the beginning of the scenario INI files (I'm not sure about the exact solution though), which also fixes the problem, but I think not in all missions.

It's just the game's ini reading system. The system's idea of a "valid line" is that it starts with the key's starting letter in the same case as it's stored in the game (it's related to a 'quick scan' mechanism to find the key; they forgot to make it case insensitive), then has the rest of the key (case insensitive), then any amount of whitespace, an equal sign, and again any amount of whitespace, then optionally a value... and then a line break to end the value. So if there's no line break, it's not seen as valid ini line. This bug is still present even in C&C95, and possibly even in later games.

But yea. In the Covert Ops they actually properly added line breaks at the end of the mission files.

Basically the CD demo is based on some later build of the full game (but probably before v1.19 apparently since it doesn't support The Covert Operations expansion files -- then again, that could've been simply turned off).

No, the CD demo is based on v1.22, the very last DOS version. It has the rather crude "fix" that you can no longer give the "Stop" command to armed defence buildings (to prevent getting free minigunners with the "sell-stop" cheat), and that fix was only introduced in v1.22.

They probably simply removed the "expand.dat" file existence check that enables the New Missions menu.

I'm pretty sure the one in the fix above was made by me, inspired by your version. I tried to edit the shadow for the building placement animation to match how the top of the ConYard opens and the crane moves to pick the "crate". It turned out to be not very good IIRC, so I'm not eager to publicise it. The idle version of the shadow is official as it was taken from the buildup animation of course.

Ah, neat

Thanks for pointing this out! Fixed. (I had no idea Wayback Machine has any archived snapshots from stuff at ImageShack.)

No prob

[MrFlibble]

For comparison, none of the The Covert Operations missions have the briefing at the end of their scenario files, it's always close to the start of each INI.

Not true, actually

Neat, thanks for correcting me on this! My memory is getting shoddy on some aspects of the game.

[failuration]

LORD! A whole CD? What the heck? I could only manage my intro to be at most 128k and at best to be 1MB. I guess working as a demo artist requires a totally different mindset than creating a whole set of missions!