here's how I did it, there may be better ways:



- start the game normally from Hi-Command and get to the broken login screen

- exit the game

- check in your Windows user directory's "Documents\My Games\Tribes Ascend\TribesGame\Config\ " folder for a file named TribesEngine.ini

- open the file in a text editor and find the lines in the "URL" section that say "Map=TribesMainEntry.fmap " and "LocalMap=TribesMainEntry .fmap"

- change the name of the file to one of the maps in "C:\Hi-Command\games\tribes alpha\TribesGame\CookedPC \Maps"

- there's a folder for each map, just pick a .fmap file (the TrCTF-XXXX.fmap ones seem to work)

- change the line back in TribesEngine.ini to something like "Map=TrCTF-Drydock.fmap" and do the same for LocalMap

- run the game again from Hi-Command





that's it! now you can play T:A before the beta officially starts.



(note: you can find the "real" game start menu by changing the .fmap to MainEntry.fmap instead of TribesMainEntry.fmap, but none of the modes seem to work right now because the 'open' command is unsupported in this build)



in the game, there's a console accessible either by pressing ` (~) or [. the commands work for various things, and some are broken, but there's one that works that adds credits/money called something like "GiveCredits 10000". running that command lets you buy vehicles. i haven't figured out how to switch loadouts or add extra weapons yet. since that system is tied up with Hi-Rez's free-to-play system, i'm not too surprised that it's trickier to get working.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWZv97SRBqQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72afjsCQbqM