Hello and welcome to the 29th edition of the Weekly News. As with last week, I have been really busy throughout the entire week, but luckily, it's due to fortunate events in my life (as described on the forum :P). However, that doesn't mean there's no Weekly News - there's always weekly news :)
Patch update It seems like Cyanide uses their beta testers as information officers, so here's the current situation. On the 29th, the first beta-patch was released, but because of some problems with it, Cyanide released a patch for the patch Sunday night. Since then, the beta testers have tested it, and Cyanide have looked through our responses. No one knows when it will be released, but we do know that a beta patch will be released to the community before the final patch is made public on the official website.
Update: As last year, the patch makes the DL-version and CD-version equal to each other, meaning that all languages will be available in the DL-version (instead of just English, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish.
Another bunch of PCM07 downloads The downloads keep coming in, and that will probably continue for a long time. We are of course trying to collect them all, but it's not the easiest job in the world ;) Anyway, here's what we have for you this week:
Ozzy, the former organizer of the World Championship in (P)CM, has made two photo packs. The packs consist of high-quality photos, and in one of the packs there's also a nationality flag added next to each rider's photo. The other pack is exactly the same, but doesn't include these flags. Download package with flags Download package without flags
Also Andecal23 has made a photo pack. It differs from Ozzy's photo packs by having a background with the logo of the team the rider rides for - this will of course not change, in case the rider decides to move to a new team ;) Download the package here
And now when you have downloaded realistic photos you might also be interested in real race logos and team logos. Pere has made two packs available, so that you can make your game even better. The packages are really small, so they are definitely worth a download. Download the real race logos Download the real team logos
An update for the popular GCT 2007 DB has also been made available. According to the Danish member of the team, Aab-ern, it fixes the problem with the ages of the riders at Rabobank's Continental team and few other minor things. Be aware, that it's not a "real" update. A much larger update is planned to be released after the first patch. If you want to download it anyway, get it here.
PCM.daily searches crew - again Back in March, we searched for crew and found some competent people. Since then, we developed and to keep up the standards - maybe even raise them - we are now searching for even more new people. We don't have any requirements except that we expect you to be good at English and that you're interested in doing some work. It's not a really time-consuming job, but we expect you to be around ;) The "job" is (of course) unpaid.
The crew will be divided into groups:
Download Database Updaters - this job is about updating the download database with the newest files. This requires you to have knowledge about FTP uploading and a basic knowledge of how linking works. It's not that difficult, but you won't get this job unless I know you and have some trust in you ;) Who knows - you might end up deleting the entire database ;)
News Spies - this job is simply about gathering news from other communities such as the French, Dutch and German ones. If the news are worth writing a seperate news article that's also needed, but otherwise reporting the news to me is enough.
Event Manager - we always want to be creative and innovative, and therefore we need a person to focus solely on starting new events at this site.
Article Writers - currently, we don't have enough people to write all the articles we would have liked to. Therefore, we are searching for people with knowledge about cycling and / or PCM who wants to write a new article for us once in a while.
If you are interested in any of the above jobs, send me a PM with your application. Thank you!
As I'm sure you're all aware, the new edition of Pro Cycling Manager has been full of lots of bugs, and crashes, that we have come to expect from Cyanide over the past few years. There is some good news though, the first patch will hopefully be available sometime next week and will include the following:
3D * Fixed memory leak problem (which could made some lag effects or even some crashes) * Fixed the dark appearance of riders when the Shader level was set on "low" * Fixed crash occurring with some video cards when starting a 3D race with shaders set on "high" * Correction to slow movement of cursor in 3D races * Correction to "floating" spectators in stands at finishing line.
CAREER * Unemployed riders now react more positively to offers from continental teams * Less AI managers lose their jobs at the end of the season * Correction to crash on stage 8 of Supergiro di Italia 2008 * Correction to crash on stage 1 of Gran vuelta a España 2008 * "Average" (AVG) of abilities is updated every week * Display problem which allowed training progress bar to go beyond 100%
INTERFACE * Fixed the wrong list of favourites displayed when a second race was played immediately after a first one. * Custom Stages/Teams : fixed a crash occurring when clicking on a team name on the participating teams choice page * Display relative times on intermediate sprints * Corrections to "Season Stats" page in career mode * Corrections to "Achievements" on rider data sheet * Various corrections to texts that were too wide for tables * Display of monetary amounts (salary, transfer value) is more uniform (example : 125.200 €) * Results page : sorting by "team" should now be done by alphabetical order * Added a column displaying next year contract details in on "Pro Reports" tab * CN-ITT pictogram now displayed on the relevant pages (instead of the more general CN pictogram) * Rider data sheet : fixed an inversion between the Sprint and the Acceleration abilities when displaying "Training" information. * Scouting page : fixed a bug preventing young riders from being found in the Russian and Australian areas. * Scouting page : image added for "Flanders" area * Changed the date when the definitive season classifications are calculated. Used to cause display problems. * Fixed problem to sorting by salary on "Search" and "Shortlist" menus. * Correction to a crash on stage presentation page when clicking on a team info link.
DATABASE * Changes and updates of rider stats * Updated objectives for Cya Top Tour teams and some Continental teams * Changed the race category for Tour of Australia and Qinghai Lake Road * Correction to experience level of some riders who had level > 4. * Fixed characteristics of some equipment * National champion jersey added for Fumiyuki Beppu, George Hincapie, Thomas Lövkvist and Jussi Veikkanen.
IN-RACE * Riders finishing outside time limit now taken into account. The interface is not active yet so names are not displayed.
A little late, and after the most eventful week in PCM.daily's history, here's the 28th edition of the Weekly News. It might not be the most interesting news, but I hope they are useful anyway ;)
PCM 07 Downloads With the release of PCM Kicker New Generation Gold, the first working databases finally was released. The very first one was released by MKL, but had the disadvantage that the race names were in Dutch. Later, he released an international version, but before that was done, Dankan, the leader of the very popular PCM Spain 2006 Pack for PCM06, had released his Initial Mod v1. It contains real names for riders, teams and races, correct jerseys (includes the official jersey pack), photos for almost all riders and even a revised calendar, making the race dates more tue to real life. You can download it by clicking here.
Because of my exams I haven't had time to update the download database with all the new downloads, but it's worth mentioning that the German CyM Team has released another real name database. As with the Initial Mod it contains real names for riders, teams and races, but furthermore it contains other graphical updates such as real team logos, real race logos, and more. You can read more about the database on our forum and also find the link to the download: [Edit] Now available at PCM.daily: http://www.pcmdaily.com/infusions/pro_download_panel/download.php?did=160
Our own forum member, gwynvyd, has also made a database which is based on both the PPDB 07 (for PCM 06) and the Initial Mod (for PCM 07), meaning that the stats should now be nearly perfect for all teams and riders. You can read more about it on our forum. (Edit) Now available at PCM.daily: http://www.pcmdaily.com/infusions/pro_download_panel/download.php?did=161
PCMBenelux has once again made a Ultimate Shirts Package. Since the shirts from PCM06 are pretty much equal to the ones PCM07 it hasn't taken them long time to convert the old jerseys to the new game. Therefore, it's already available. Find it here: http://www.pcmdaily.com/forum/viewthread.php?forum_id=25&thread_id=520
Impish has also made it possible to play the DL-versions in more languages than what Cyanide has made possible. Now, Danish, Portuguese and German is available and can be installed by simply replacing the Local.cdb in Pro Cycling Manager 2007\UserHome\AppData. You can find all three languages in our Misc.-section: http://www.pcmdaily.com/infusions/pro_download_panel/download.php?catid=7
PCM Kicker Goes Excel Impish has decided to work even more with his DB editing tools. In the future, it will be possible the edit the tables in Excel like with the converters for PCM06. Not much has been said about it yet, but knowing Impish's speed, this new feature will probably soon be available.
Site updates As said, I have been quite busy with my exams, but we are of course always trying to imrprove the site anyway. First of all, we have changed our Main Navigation panel a little. Our "dead" PCM.daily League has been removed from the navigation, and we have added a link to one of our new features - The Toplist. The toplist shows you some of the more "fun" statistics - who has posted the most posts in the forum, which article is the most popular, etc.. You can find it in the Main Navigation-menu.
Secondly, we have started using a new Download Management System for our PCM 07 downloads. This makes it possible to comment on and vote for our downloads. If you need help I'd still advice you to use the forum, though ;) Also, we have seperated our screenshots section and articles section into a PCM06 amd PCM07-part, making it easier for you to find what you need.
I've also modified the Donation-box a little. Now, it's possible to see a list of guys who have donated to our site through Paypal. For example, you can see that gwynvyd has donated 12 €, cmfos 10 € and Smoothie 1 € ;)
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We will be back with more news soon. After all, this weekend is soon over ;)
We are currently having problems with our host ("Bandwidth exceeded"). We are far from having reached our limit, though. An e-mail has been sent to the support, and we are awaiting an answer.
Update: It seems like we have exceeded our "Daily Bandwidth Allowance" - a limitation I haven't been aware of. I'm not satisfied with the answer from my host, so I will keep disturbing them until they allow the site to use its bandwidth as it want to ;)
In any case, the site will not function normally until 01:00 GMT.
Update at 03:00: As you all noticed, we didn't manage to resolve the problem. We will learn from this experience and do our best to avoid it in the future. We are very sorry for any inconvinence caused by this.
Impish has once again managed to "crack" the DB-system. Therefore, he has now brought us the PCM Kicker New Generation Gold Edition, making you able to use the most advanced editor tool for PCM for PCM 07! Along with the new version he also told us how to make an unpacked CDB-file:
How to unpack a 2007er Database?
Easy take the file you like, rename it to Local.cdb. Copy this file to PCM2006 (yes to the old one) over the Local.cdb file. Start PCM2006 the game crashed, but in PCM2006 root directory you get a file called decompress.txt (cant remember the exact name). THis file is a unpacked PCM2007 cdb file
Based on that information, Danish member Aab-ern made a pack, consisting of the database files included with PCM 07 - but in unpacked format.
