Jump to content

ClaytoniousRex

Members
  • Posts

    1,108
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by ClaytoniousRex

  1. Agreed that taking out a halftrack full of troops is satisfying! But if you're careful, you can take out panzers, too. Bazooka teams will fire from within buildings. They need enough time to acquire the target and take a shot. So, for example, if they have limited LOS to a small break in hedgerows, and a panzer rolls past that break, they will posture and aim at it, but it might roll back out of LOS before they have time to finish lining up and take the shot. They will not attempt to fire through thick obstructions like bocage, since the chance of success is nearly zero (but not quite). Therefore, it's critical to position your teams so that they will have not only LOS to a target, but also enough time to actually take a shot. Sometimes you can use other forces to slow down advancing targets for this purpose. If you use the Hide command, a bazooka team won't fire until a target is within 30 meters or so, unless they are, themselves, under fire.
  2. A black line means you have no line of sight. In the 1.2 release that you have right now, there were some instances where you would get "No LOS" when it wasn't true. That has been fixed for 1.3, which will be available shortly.
  3. If you have no LOS during the orders phase, you have to move to a position that does have LOS and then issue your target order in the next orders phase. The unit won't automatically keep order and acquire the target point once he has attained LOS on his own.
  4. It is currently meandering through the byzantine halls of Apple waiting for approval.
  5. The only "cheating" that the AI does is having more units at its disposal. As for accuracy, ballistics, morale, et. Al - it is playing by exactly the same rules as a human. The best way to get the AT guns on Uncle Red is usually to get your Sherman hull down against them (one good spot for this is the the lip of the ridge near the beginning of the dirt road, depending on where the guns are deployed). Your turret alone is a small enough target that your coax MG and main gun's HE will very probably take out the gun or crew before it scores a hit on you. Of course if any guns are deployed closer to the beach it's best for your infantry to take care of those as quickly as possible before the tank takes position.
  6. This was a bug in 1.0. It was fixed in 1.1, so you should already see the fix in your updated version. Adjustment of a fire mission in progress is still not available yet, though. Moving the target point will result in a new fire mission.
  7. No, and I haven't had a chance to try that one yet, either. There have been so many silly "drive my tank around" mobile games that I just unfairly ignored this one when I first noticed it.
  8. Our min spec is not 1GB of RAM, it's 512MB, because we support the iPad2. Out of that, only a fraction is available to any one running app. Furthermore, a big chunk of it used by video, VBO's, textures, and shaders (video memory is not separate from general purpose RAM). So memory is an extremely scarce and difficult-to-manage resource in this environment. There is no concept of virtual memory here, in the sense of paging to disk. This, and the amount of time a player is willing to wait for turn computation, are the main limiting factors in the simulation. (These are related to, but not comprehensively inclusive of, all of the limiting factors for the graphics, but I think your question was about the simulation).
  9. Yeah, I know, but in my myopia every screen full of pixels is an OpenGL context upon which a 3D wargame should be rendered.
  10. Thanks for the kind words! I'm not sure what you mean by 'internal', but if your question is whether or not all weapons are modelled differently and accurately, the answer is emphatically, absolutely, Heck Yes! We take ballistics, penetration, and effects very seriously. This includes the weapon firing, the range travelled by the projectile, the place on the target that was hit, etc. The game definitely understands the difference between the early Sherman's crappy 75mm hitting the sloped front glacis of a Panther vs. hitting that same Panther's turret front, or vs. other weapon types hitting it, etc., and different things happen as appropriate!
  11. This is in already. Just tap any unit during playback and the lock view button will appear at the top of the screen. You can select units after the AAR and view their info (even enemy units). Are you looking for something else than that? And thanks all for the suggestions!
  12. Yes, there are. One unfortunate reality of iOS, even as of 5.1, is that you occasionally have to reset the device to clear its memory. You will run into this with many other big games, too. Hold down the Home and Sleep buttons simultaneously until you see a red slider, then swipe the slider to shut the device down. Power it back up and odds are very high that your problem will be gone. Either way, make sure you connect to WiFi sometime soon so that we can see your crashlog and address it if there's some problem other than iOS not releasing memory.
  13. 1. No, you can't pause, but you can rewind as much as you like (so if you need to grab a beer, just let it play to the end and then rewind when you get back). 2. Don't sweat the spam. The app ought to be smart enough not to send empty feedback messages to us. Unfortunately, it's not, and we have a huge pile of empty feedbacks already. ;-) But there's no harm done; they are easy for us to filter out.
  14. They would make more sense being separate, IMHO.
  15. Upcoming 1.1 Update We are planning to release the 1.1 update in 2 to 3 weeks. The exact timing is a little fluid because it's based not only on what's already planned but also on feedback from you guys (if anything else critical comes up then it may also go into 1.1.) Multiplayer Currently, when you play online, your force is randomly selected and the scenario to play is randomly selected. In 1.1, you will be able to decide whether to play American or German and which scenario you want to play. But you will still have the option of either or both being random (called "Any"), too. Why in the world wasn't this option always present? Because, by selecting either of these options, you are reducing your own chance of finding a match when using online matchmaking. There could be 1,000 people online, but if none of them wants to play the scenario you've chosen, then you won't find a match. We didn't want this to happen in the early days when the number of players was building up. Therefore, we saved the development time of implementing this until after 1.0 was released. Even after 1.1, if you're not finding an online match, then select "Any" for your force and scenario to broaden the possible number of online matches to be found. Saved Games Your games in progress will be automatically saved as you play. This will work much the way that replays do (it's completely automatic and to load one, you just select any of your previous past few games to continue where it left off). This feature is also the groundwork for asynchronous multiplayer, which won't be in 1.1, but also won't be far behind it. Performance Improvements Including not only framerate but also reduced memory use. Bug Fixes We have received a few crash logs from your iPads that we're looking into. They all look like low-hanging fruit to fix and will be included in 1.1. Other As you can see, there is discussion in this forum about other improvements the community would like to see. Please feel free to chime in. The goal of 1.1 is to keep it pretty simple so that the update can arrive quickly. As improvements are agreed upon and definitely slated for the 1.1 update, I will edit this post and include them above. Others that are deferred will appear when the 1.2 post is made. And so it will go… and go …
  16. Wow that is a great set of screenshots that you posted. Tells a story!
  17. Amen to that, Redwolf. I wish they had just done the beefing up of the GPU and left the screen alone. But we play the cards we're dealt. Kindle Fire is a woefully underpowered device, but we're looking into it anyway. There's a lot we can do with dynamically lowering the quality of the game's rendering based on where it's running. Some of our problems there apply to the rest of this discussion generally: the limiting factors for a game like this one on all of the mobiles are usually RAM, Fill Rate, and OpenGL implementation quality. The main problem on the iPad1 was RAM. The ongoing problem on all of the iOS devices is fill rate. (Hence my amen above). OpenGL quality varies wildly across Android devices. (For example, Android devices don't even all implement the same texture compression format support, so it can get quite complicated.) But please continue to let us know what you would like to see supported. All data points are helpful.
  18. Oh, and, I just had to say "Pffft...." to that one.
  19. This is actually a really encouraging (and thankfully specific - thanks Harv!) short list to work with. It's a little hard for me to relate to these issues being what's holding you back from having fun, but I'm glad they are because they're darned easy to address. Feedback during the playback phase This is deliberately minimalist so that you feel more immersed in the actual action during this phase. Hard to believe, I know, but many players actually like to just watch and enjoy the action from many different angles without being a scientist during the playback phase. But if you want more, we can definitely provide it. The thinking was that, after this phase, you would go open the unit info window and look at as many specifics as you wanted to after this phase - it's only a few seconds away. But if you want some of it in realtime as the playback is playing, then, as the old saying goes, "Ask and ye shall receive unless it makes the game crappy for everyone who is not a super groggy canuck like you." Feedback that's already there includes text balloons when troops break or rally and when vehicles are penetrated (these are your cues to know what unit info might be interesting later.) I suppose your issue with these is that they're easy to miss (you only see them if you're looking in that area when they happen). I think that being allowed to show unit icons during the playback phase, as some others have also suggested, would go a long way toward resolving this. Others, like lines for elements' current targets, would be trivially easy to include. I would definitely include these as an optional toggle, not by default. What other kind of feedback did you feel that you're missing during playback? Camera controls have too much inertia and bounce I think some slider settings are in order here. It has been too much for some and too little for others. It's an easy thing to adjust. Also, are you using the "Move Camera To..." button at the top of the screen? It's a dirt easy way to just zap to wherever you specifically want to go instead of dragging your way around. No information about enemy units Do you mean that you would like to be able to open the unit info window for enemy units, and have it only reflect what you "know" about that unit? If so, this is an incredibly easy tweak to make. No save system There will be in 1.1, which is not far away. No button/unbutton That particular one may cross the line into being more work than many players on this device want to invest. It's easy to implement, but would penalize more casual players (reduced spotting because they didn't know to unbutton, etc.) This is one of a class of "cons" that would best be addressed with an optional "advanced mode". We have been discussing such a thing for a while now, but don't yet have a timetable for it. No terrain cover info This is, indeed, WYSIWYG. If you would prefer a more explicit icon when under cover, then that seems reasonable. No animations for running gear, floating Surely the graphics aren't driving your differentiation of this game's amount of "fun" from CMx1's? Either way, graphics improvements are always ongoing. These are extremely tractable issues and we are always looking for ways to improve the game, so nothing worrisome here. But my suspicion is - and I could well be mistaken - that when these are all addressed, you will have a different list of differences between this game and CMx1, because there will still be many. We look forward to improvements like these, but steadily matching more closely to CMx1 over time is not one of our goals.
  20. I'll be posting shortly about what to expect in the upcoming 1.1 release, which is not far away at all. I'll elaborate more in that post, but the short answer to your save issue is: Correct! Explicit saves are not yet in this 1.0 release. When you send the app to the background and do something else, your game will still be there where you left it unless it gets jettisoned from memory. Without getting geeky, that means if you just leave the app to respond to a notification or check a quick email, or if you just put the tablet to sleep and have dinner, then your game will still be there when you come back, exactly where you left it. But if you do some serious long-term work in other apps, then sometimes it won't be. Obviously, true saves that persist no matter what are what you want and expect. And that's coming very soon in 1.1. (They behave exactly the way that replays do - they are completely automatic so there's not a "save" button to worry about). As for documentation, it is difficult to spend effort on something that we thought, perhaps mistakenly, that nobody would ever use. If there's enough demand for it then we will be happy to provide it. In the meantime, please feel free to get all of the answers you need here.
  21. It already runs on Android, so no need to necessarily wait that long. What we are waiting for, though, is enough business justification to thoroughly regression test and do any remaining polishing for Android - which usually boils down to workarounds for specific device types with quirks. For example, all we know right now is that it runs great on Android devices with Tegra2 and 3 chipsets. Letting us know that you're interested helps to make that case, so thanks for letting us know. Letting us know which specific Android devices you have in mind helps, too.
  22. But remember this link is only for those Down Under. You can buy it when it's April 2 for your region's app store.
  23. The App Store doesn't offer a "testicle" payment option so we went with $4.99 instead. I think they avoid it due to logistics/shipping issues.
  24. The DropTeam wiki is located here. Many thanks to Poesel for creating and maintaining it.
×
×
  • Create New...