The Brad Hole

As some eagle-eyed folks have noticed, we released new patches for all 3 Medal of Honor games the other day (Medal of Honor, Spearhead and Breakthrough). There are a few noteworthy things about these patches that deserve further explanation.

First and foremost, the new patches include an updated version of the Miles sound library for both the original Medal of Honor and Spearhead. This is the same version used in Breakthrough. This is notable because users with dual-processor Macs should no longer have random crashes while playing. Woot.

Second, these new builds have a means to auto-configure your settings to give you the best performance on your Mac. However, the process to do this is non-intuitive. Here's how you can make it happen:

1. Go into the "main" and "mainta" folders for Medal of Honor and Spearhead respectively and delete the file "newconfig.cfg" found in them. I would also recommend deleting the file "config/unnamedsoldier.cfg" as well.

2. If you have run the new patches under OSX or you have Breakthrough, you'll need to go into your home directory (press Cmd-Shift-H in the Finder) and navigate to ~/Library/Application Support (the ~ is just Unix shorthand for the path to your home directory - there's no directory with that actual name). Look in the folders "MOHAA", "MOHAA Spearhead" and "MOHAA Breakthrough".

3. In those folders, delete the newconfig.cfg file, and optionally the config/unnamedsolider.cfg file as well.

4. Once you've done this, you've effectively reset all your settings for the games to their default. When you run each game from here on out, it'll see that those files don't exist and attempt to auto-configure the settings based on the CPU in your mac, the quality of your video card and the amount of memory you have. In most cases, this will result in a noticeable performance win over whatever settings you were using before.

Several people had performance issues with Breakthrough when it came out, relative to the same multiplayer maps running inside of Spearhead or MOHAA. This is also solved by following the above steps, as it gives Breakthrough a fresh set of preferences instead of using any old settings it found in MOHAA and/or Spearhead first.

Other than that, there are lots of minor bug fixes and cleanup to bring the first two games to parity with the Mac code used in Breakthrough and our other recent Quake 3-based games. There were one or two other crash fixes as well, so hopefully the games should be pretty solid now. Saved games are also now in a compressed format, which means that they take up 100-500k instead of 1-2 megs each (Breakthrough shipped with this feature already). The first two games are now very OSX-friendly - they save all their data into your home directory, so they work well on a multi-user Mac (this is something that was also already in Breakthrough).

There should be a set of dedicated command-line server apps shortly for all 3 games, so you can run your own server on the Mac just like folks on Linux. Martin's hard at work on new "Configulator" apps that make this process very easy to do - I recommend checking them out. I worked fairly closely with him during the development of these patches and the dedicated servers to make sure that we eliminated as many bugs as possible with regards to server setup and maintenance. Most people probably won't care about these things, but I'm pleased with how it all turned out.