FinnN

Well, it all went a lot quicker then I was expecting - and I have my new job in London starting in late January! Yay! Things have been a bit(!) hectic what with sorting out handing in my notice at my current job, getting ready to hand over responsibilities, etc - and all the bits and pieces at the other end. Anyway things are calming down again now, so I'll be sending over where I was to Gnasher today to have a look over (I want to change a few things before I commit myself to releasing something). Once I've made those changes it won't be long, if I get distracted again I'll just release what I have for someone else to tidy up. Have fun Finn

Yep, I got your e-mail. I'm away for a day more to go to an interview, I'll get back to you on Wednesday. Sorry for the delay, but then again I have been to France, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia, oh and moved house just for good measure in amongst all that! Annoyingly it's almost finished, but I simply haven't touched it for ages - I just want to get a mission designer to look some stuff over (as that's who it's aimed at) before finalising some stuff. Have fun Finn

Gnasher - can you send me your e-mail address so that I can run a few things past you? Have fun Finn

I'm not dead! Out of the blue an expansion pack for Crusader Kings came out and I've been playing that for a while - I tried to be strong, really I did! Anyways, I'm looking at restarting work soon - I'll get the in-progress version out in the next few days so possibly others can help me get it out the door quicker. Have fun Finn

I have to say this game is getting close to being the one I've been dreaming of ever since they invented computer games! Now all someone needs to do is reverse engineer the CC2 campaign engine... Have fun Finn

http://files.games.1c.ru/_/TOW/Unit%20modelingTOW%20eng.rar That should work. Great guide - pretty clear for the most part. Just one question - 'mesh prominence'? I'm not familiar with this term, do you mean each collision box needs to be a convex mesh or something else? Oudy: I would guess that 1C use a custom 3DS Max plugin to generate the in-game object based on mesh naming and bone structures. Now theoretically you can move 3D objects from one program to another and keep this intact, but in practice it generally needs a lot of cleaning up so I'd say that yes it'd need to be 3DS Max. You can intercept the output from various gMax plugins and then bring that into 3DS Max for final export, but again I'd say its a non-starter unless the person doing the export has time to tidy things up (plus 1C would be breaking the gMax license agreement). BTW is that a new multi-turreted tank in the docs - don't remember seeing that before! Have fun Finn

As well as that, there's a setting in the options somewhere that allows you to extend the camera height range - so that you can go right down to ground level and up further (handy if you want a semi-close combat 2Dish style view for gauging the best routes for sneaking). Have fun Finn

The new editor that's been mentioned will make it a lot easier to make basic scenarios - and I think that will do a lot for the game's replayability and popularity. The demo has numerous problems that have been gone over several times here - a new demo is really needed and I hope they come up with one when the patches and/or add-on are out. Have fun Finn

"in the database" is the key phrase there - how can you identify problems systematically by spotting patterns otherwise? Some sort of proper bug reporting system would be an improvement, even if the results or how reports were handled were never made public. I hardly think I'm saying anything astonishing or even remotely controversial here. At the end of the day it's up to BFC how they operate though. Have fun Finn

Well, fair enough each to his own. But it does render arguments about bugs somewhat meaningless. If you see something in the game and you don't like it, is it a flawed design, is it a bug that'll get fixed, is it a bug that isn't considered important or is it something misunderstood? I see very few discussions about bugs and design decisions which don't mostly consist of people arguing which heading it belongs under. Several times I've seen people (BFC or beta testers) plead that if someone is mentioning a bug that they provide full information on it - well without any sort of form to ensure that it happens that way the chances of that occurring are zip, never mind the huge overhead of interpreting someone's post and entering it into a database. It's also interesting to note that only 'important' bugs end up in the database - a clear sign that the current system isn't as efficient or as useful as it could be. Have fun Finn

I like the game, but in all honesty as it stands it's not a 10/10. 40% is too harsh, but I think the scores in the mid/high 70s and 80s are in the right ball park. Now, if just a few of the key things that Sneaksie says'll happen happens then, yes I think we're looking at a 10/10 - a rare thing these days. Have fun Finn

You know, the only fundamentally flawed thing I see to do with CMSF is the ad-hoc method used to communicate bugs and design decisions. Is it really surprising that 'debates' like this are common? I know it's been mentioned many times before by different people (with no comment from BFC), but why not take a leaf from Paradox's book and have a structured forum for people to post bugs which are then categorised by a moderator into things like 'fixed in 1.04', 'known bug', 'working as designed', etc, etc, etc? Not only would it encourage more meaningful feedback it'd also help clean things up here. Have fun Finn

Well, when you consider that the big CMSF framerate increase in 1.04 has come from terrain LODs (very important in flight sims) and ToW is using a heavily modified IL2 engine I'm not so sure. FPS hits in ToW seem to come from things other than the graphics. It's quite a big admission for BFC to say that they didn't think that terrain LOD would yield improved framerates for a negligable change in overall quality - a glaring hole like that is probably down to the one-man-programming-team (Charles) that they have. I'm sure exchange of information on graphics routines could yield some results for both sides, but I wouldn't expect anything dramatic for ToW at least. Graphics-wise, at the moment CMSF has better 3D models (dramatically better in the case of infantry) and I prefer some of the textures. Apart from that ToW has either comparable or better graphics in just about everything else. In particular the models don't exhibit z-buffering problems (which are severe in CMSF) and the map doesn't float in space. Whilst CMSF terrain might be more complex than CMx1 terrain it doesn't really come close to matching all the stuff you have lying around the ToW battlefield. Take a look at the new ToW model screenshots and they're as good as if not better than the CMSF ones. In summary, I think ToW has better graphics and if they'd been done in a similar style to the CMSF ones they'd blow them away (ToW textures, like the IL2 ones, tend to be a bit more 'artistic'/'drawn' as opposed to the more 'photographic' style in CMSF). On the other side, CMSF has a wider range of things you can do in terms of orders and interaction with the environment and the behaviour of units is on a different level, never mind things like C&C, relative spotting etc. Although they're two very different games if there's ever a ToW2 I'd like to see some of those things influencing it from CMSF, not the graphics. Have fun Finn

I think you'll find that in US English it's spelled 'grammer'. At least that's what I keep on seeing on US forums anyway Have fun Finn

Would be nice, but I'd guess it'd need to be from modders rather than an official one. Over on the simhq forums Sneaksie has revealed that a modding guide for 3D models has been written and is about to be announced. http://www.simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2255603&fpart=3#Post2348330 If this covers everything then all sorts of things become possible - such as your SCW suggestion. One difficulty would be adding in the nations as certain parts of the interface occupy parts of a shared bitmap, so you can't simply just add new flags for example. Other things (I forget now which) seem to be hard-coded. Swapping out a country, for example making the Polish seem like they're Finnish, is possible but being able to add completely new ones would be better. I wouldn't be surprised if someone got all the work done (voices, textures, 3D models) if 1C would do the necessary finishing off to get it into the game - and with some theatres it wouldn't be that much extra work as you say. Have fun Finn