Ryan Crierie

I'm just curious, Steve. You said this: But on the BFC website for CMBB it says: That sounds a lot more detailed than an abstracted dice roll system.

A real right click menu; like in CMx1. Don't dick us around by saying "we're giving you one!" and then bind it to the spacebar, with no way to rebind it to a mouse button.

A real right click menu; like in CMx1. Don't dick us around by saying "we're giving you one!" and then bind it to the spacebar, with no way to rebind it to a mouse button.

A real right click menu; like in CMx1. Don't dick us around by saying "we're giving you one!" and then bind it to the spacebar, with no way to rebind it to a mouse button.

The problem is that, as Thewood points out, we had to choose to make the engine inherently WeGo without ANY chance of RealTime, or inherently RealTime with a perfectly viable WeGo. Since one choice was vastly more inclusive than the other, and far more marketable to boot, the choice was stupidly easy to make If I wanted a game engine designed for real time, I would buy a Close Combat game, NOT Combat Mission. WEGO is now the poor bastard stepchild to the RTS mode. It's now virtually impossible to play realistic games in a reasonable amount of time due to the deletion of the blue bar "fast forward to end" feature. It makes long end marches around an excruciating feeling. I never subscribed to the "mythical blue bar makes things better" crowd; it just made the game a lot more playable, because you could fast forward through the humdrum parts, like road marches, or waiting for the enemy to attack. Now, if you try to make WEGO once again FEASIBLE within the "always suffer through 60 seconds, even when nothing is happening" paradigm by having the scenario start with units near or in contact; the game is essentially over very fast, due to the high lethality of modern weapons.

For me. I have the following Rig: Core 2 Quad Q6600 GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB Asus P5KC Motherboard 163.71 Forceware Drivers installed I play at the native resolution of my LCD: 1280x1024 While burst FPS (close up view down low) is acceptable; sustained FPS (when you spin the view around and move around) goes down to around 22~ FPS; and is noticeably choppy. The only way I can truly get acceptable sustained FPS is by setting my card settings to "performance" and turning CMSF down to the lowest possible detail levels.

How about this compromise? Why not use an IF algorithm in conjunction with a revived blue bar, like: "IF BLUE BAR TIME TO COMPLETE 15% TAKES LONGER THAN X SECONDS, SWITCH TO REAL TIME PLAYBACK". This would achieve BFC's goal of significantly speeding up the time between hitting GO button and seeing things move on monster scenarios like "To the Volga", while at the same time; retaining the blue bar's ability allowing us WEGOers to rapidly fast forward the boring parts where nothing is happening; such as road marches. With the current setup, people are going to be pushed towards impatience just to see something start up; the Blue Bar and the VCR allowed you to rapidly resolve a slow, methodical advance; without it taking up a lot of "Real time".

Steve, I like how you ignore the fact that I posted a clear usable example of how right click was great; and how you could easily get to playing using CMx1's interface within only a couple of minutes; and as you learned more about the game, you could transition to using the keyboard for the most common commands, like move. Move was ALWAYS "M", no matter what. In CMSF it's now "O", which as a bonus is also used for: "Target Arc" "Hide" "Anti Tank Team" Depending on which tab you have selected. Which leads to massive confusion. You're trying to make this into a "CMSF is just as radical and changing as CMBO was" debate, when in reality, for a UI to work, you need the major commands which will be used the most often to be clearly and unambigiously delineated to a single button. I wouldn't mind having to dig through a submenu to find the little used engineering commands like "plant mines, remove mines, prepare bridge for demo, etc", since they will not be used THAT much. However, a heavily used command needs a clear and unchanging key.

Funny how it worked so well in CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK; and how everyone in this thread except YOU wants it back.

Thank you for your clear inciseful insight on what should constitute a wargame. You may proceed to the Suicide Booth.

The Operational Art of War III. Single most awesome feature of it. [ July 29, 2007, 10:19 PM: Message edited by: Ryan Crierie ]

Vote yes this alone would make CMSF massively better

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Steve, can I be honest with you? I don't care about the elimination of QBs, Random maps, etc. They're annoying, yes, but they won't break the game for me. What annoys me is how you tossed out a tried and true interface system that worked perfectly for turn based in favor of a system suited best for real time. I quite literally can only play a single turn of CMSF with the current UI for basic commands before I give up and go play something else. You really did not need to read the manual with CMx1. You could literally tell people how to play the game in a few minutes. "What do I do?" "Well, click on your Tiger and right click" "Sweet! what are all these commands for?" "Move makes your guy move. Hunt makes him move, but really slowly and on the look out for the enemy" "Awesome" I used rightclick quite heavily for the advanced options like covered arcs (armor or basic arcs), as a sort of "paper cheat sheet" to make the game play much faster for me. With Shock Force, this beautiful interface was tossed out in favor of a constantly changing keyboard interface; where "M" is constantly changing according to which tab you have selected. Perhaps this change is better for a real time interface, but I don't want a real time game. I always get my ass kicked in those; where twitch speed rules and you have to memorize keyboard commands in order to be able to react fast enough to constantly changing conditions (cough, Company of Heroes). There is also the graphics issue, where things look really great up close, but from a distance, they turn into a really bad blurry mess. [ July 29, 2007, 07:23 PM: Message edited by: Ryan Crierie ]

We don't like it when you completely throw out what works, like right click menus, and the capability to see terrain a far distance away in some detail, and then berate us for not falling over ourselves to worship the new. In fact, you're making a fallacy here; the addition of Machine gun covered arcs IMPROVED the series; and made Machineguns closer to what they were in real life; a weapon which prevented infantry from assaulting across open fields. The deletion of a lot of good ideas, like the right click context sensitive menu, in favor of a completely retarded system: In order to pick what we want, we have to boop through four buttons of menus! It's not a improvement it's a degradation.

Like the awesome context sensitive right click menus of such: Oh that had to go, sorry. Then call it something else, without the words "Combat Mission" in it.

I miss.... Right click menus... Graphics that were good from a high angle view... Fast Forwarding through a turn where I know nothing is going to happen.... Keyboard commands that were clear, like "M" for move; now it's "O", what?.... The Mouse/screen rotation system from CMBB, now the top/middle ends move your screen left and right, instead of rotating around like on CMBB. [ July 28, 2007, 07:11 PM: Message edited by: Ryan Crierie ]

The fact that I can see textures from a distance, instead of a blurry mass. CMAK - nice and crisp long distance graphics from a height. CMSF - Blurry mass from a height. Set my NVIDIA driver to 16x AF. No change.

Which begs the point, WHY did it have to be changed over what worked in CM, and had worked for the last six years?

also, I can't drag and select multiple units like I could in CMx1. Is there a reason for this?

What then is the point of turn based?

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All of them are at bestest. I'm using a Ge Force 6800 with the latest drivers.

First impressions; using the ATGM ambush scenario; with graphics detail set to HIGHEST on both my GeForce 6800, and the game itself: Not that great. Foreground detail's good, but far away detail is worse than CMBB/AK/BO.

In what? I'm running CMSF 1.01.