SgtHatred

Combat Mission does a really bad job of telling you anything about the terrain, so often you don't know what you are driving on, but I've definitely seen things like Churchills and T-90s get bogged and immobilized in places they shouldn't. Try light snow for the Churchill and watch them all get stuck.

That's a lot of buzzwords without any understanding behind them at all. You must be a manager somewhere.

When playing turn-based multiplayer, some heavy weapons teams will lose their heavy weapon and gain an extra rifle once the game starts, unless the weapons team starts deployed. This only happens to the client, not the host. eg. this machine gun team (m1917a1) was not deployed at the beginning of the game. As a result, the machine gun disappeared at game start, the man in the rear of the formation received an extra carbine. For the rest of the game, the machine gun in not present and the deploy option is missing. The team in the image below was deployed at the start of the game and given a move order. They retain their machine gun and seem to function fine. I imagine this is related to a similar bug which disappears or duplicates weapons for the client in all CMx2 games.

3 months to fix a corrupted file in an installer. I wouldn't brag about it. Meanwhile, it looks like Battlefront's plan is to hope that AMD goes back on part of their driver rewrite? It doesn't seem very likely. 16 months and counting there.

Don't work yourself up over releases around here. It took 2 years to add "PBEM+" somehow. The tool used to make most of the scenario content is ancient and labour intensive. Be pleasantly surprised if they manage to scrounge up a release in 2024.

If you know the name of the isp you should be able to find out online easily enough.

Does your ISP do Carrier level NAT? If it does, you are in for a bad time. Some allow you to get a real ip for a fee, or just for free if you ask, but simple port forwarding won't work on a CGNAT.

Sure, but it's also the case that inept design creates massive difficulty for simple things. There is a reason the Obamacare website cost nearly a billion dollars after all, and it isn't because "software is complex". Too often that is used as an excuse. I've been in software for 20 years, and if we tolerated the kind of faff in other fields that we do in software, well... I would avoid bridges for one thing. Combat Mission really has hardcoded things like smoke launcher arcs and wheel traversal? Sounds like a very labour intensive design.

You misunderstand my meaning. I was referring to all CMx2 games. The Red Thunder mention is only a time-frame.

So, the meagre improvements since Red Thunder was released 9 years ago are the result of 60+ hour weeks? Yikes.

If you are looking for recording software that won't cause any trouble for you, OBS is the gold standard. You don't need to stream to use it.

Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean? Geforce Experience only requires a Nvidia graphics card (one made in the last 8 or 10 years ish?). You need an account, which is annoying, but you should be able to use the same account on multiple PCs without issue. If it isn't working on your desktop, but you have a Nvidia graphics card installed, then you have an interesting technical issue going on.

I've been playing the game for a while, I can see applications like the Nvidia overlay not detecting the game running or print screen dumping a copy of the menu rather than the game in progress and I know why that happens in other titles. It's a fair assumption that it is the same here. 70% of all software is badly coded, and that number probably jumps higher with games. When I ran into the problem running Combat Mission games with the realtek audio controller on my old Asus board running? It's evidence enough. Can you please state plainly that you believe that the T-90 bug is just a "small issue" and is not game breaking? It's possibly the most common tank of the most common faction in CMBS, and it can get knocked out by small arms fire frontally. It doesn't matter what I think is a game breaking problem, it matters what YOU think is a game breaking problem, since you are the one that can actually do something about it. I think your threshold on what bugs are worth fixing is something people here should know. I'll believe it when I see results.

So all the complaints about CM2 with the latest AMD drivers are nonsense? I don't have an AMD card, so I just assume that the problems aren't made up. Also, that's some weak logic. A drunk driver can make it home 100 times, that doesn't make what he is doing safe. My argument, which you seem to have missed, is that a game breaking for people because new drivers have been released is almost always the fault of the game, and Combat Mission is absolutely no exception here. it has nothing to do with adding new features, and everything to do with the game working as well this year as it did in previous years. If it was done properly in the first place, that wouldn't be a problem. Wanting a game that looks like Combat Mission to run at a higher framerate than Star Citizen isn't expecting AAA production values. Expecting the game to keep working as long as the OS and GPU developers support OpenGL is the bare minimum. Many of these problems have existed for years though, and we never hear anything about them, other than once a year in January. The fact that the T-90 in CMBS has been broken for so long is absurd. It is not reasonable. Forget asking about more complex issues like the weird texture LOD problems or infantry spawning with duplicate or missing weapons in multiplayer. Game breaking issues should take priority over new content. Do you not think so? These issues have persisted for years. I'd even take a "no, we won't fix these issues, they aren't worth doing" over the status quo. I remember getting responses from ChrisND on issues, but since he left its just radio silence on these things. Sure, during the once or twice a year we can get a response at all, you are willing to do this. You also looked at what you posted last year and said "We did pretty well with our 2022 calendar". It sure doesn't seem like you care most of the time.

I've used both over the years. Doesn't seem to make a difference for me.

I'd love to know how you've managed that. I can never crack 25 fps in this, and I usually play multiplayer TCPIP, Large sized quickbattles, which is usually battalion+ sized. CMCW, CMFI, CMBS, doesn't seem to matter, they work the same. I've gone from an old 6700K to a i7 8086K overclocked at 5.2ghz, to a AMD 5800X with a 3080ti... no difference for CM.

Combat Mission isn't special, old software breaking in APIs that offer backwards compatibility because they cut corners is a tale as old as Microsoft. This is absolutely not the case and any first year software engineer could explain why. Hell, just look at all the games that broke when Windows Vista released. Microsoft had been telling developers since 95 how to save user data, and when Vista finally started enforcing basic security in the Program Files folder, **** broke. Just because the games used to work does NOT mean they were "properly coded" as you say. Yes, AMD has been pretty famous for **** drivers, but they really seem to have put the effort into turning it around. I don't think you'll find that many people have a big issue with how Combat Mission looks. I mean, some chuds online will certainly ****can it for not looking like CoD, but I think you'll find a lot more people interested in getting the tiny view distance for textures fixed, or the seeming 25fps cap even on extremely high-end hardware, or the input lag. I don't think anyone here is expecting AAA production values, but I think seeing some progress on some of the problems Combat Mission has isn't the same as comparing you guys to EA. When it takes 9 months (and counting) to fix an issue like the T-90 not having front armour, or a year and a half to fix infantry units retreating forward into the fire they are supposed to retreat from, or the game lagging and stuttering just as much now as it did in 2011... that's a problem, and you have to expect that people will be frustrated by it. But hey, if you are happy with how you are performing, then who cares what us suckers think, right?

If anyone is wondering why the full game replay would be difficult to do, just look at your PBEM file size. Each turn is larger than 50 Starcraft2 replay files, just to provide a random comparison.

You don't need a fully functional 3d editor to read a terrain file and create a battlefront map from it, then you load the existing map editor for the fine details.

Sorry, maybe we are referencing different tools, but the one I saw had you open the map editor after loading a file and effectively automated your mouse to use the built in map editor to create a terrain map close to the file read? I'm not knocking the tool, I think that is a pretty innovative way to resolve the problem, but we shouldn't have to resort to that kind of hackery to make a map. If we had the map spec, 7 hours could be 7 seconds.

The tool to make maps is painful to use. At the very least the format for combat mission maps should be open sourced so that someone could build a better tool. I saw the recent thread about a terrain mapper tool, but the way it has to work is pretty hilarious. Expecting adoration for profoundly negative news is unrealistic. Besides, since no progress is made, new bones have no point.

This mirrors my thoughts almost exactly. Problems in the game last for years without being addressed, both gameplay and technical, and nothing ever seems to move forward. Even the new content seems lesser these days (CMRT, CMBS, and CMCW seem to have the same list of quickbattle maps, more or less.). Hell, I posted about the T-90 issue in CMBS 9 months ago, and finally heard a month ago that it was fixed and we would see it "very soon". Well, very soon has been a month so far, and now it seems like maybe there are months left to go. Not that it matters, without some sign of life from Battlefront, I doubt I can convince any of my friends to turn up for another CM2x game. This copy paste of last year's status update has not helped. Seeing features for the Professional version that have been wanted for years veto'd from ever seeing the light of day on the commercial version is especially demoralizing. Battlefront seems to be a company with the output capacity of a single guy in his garage, but the agility of a company with 50000 employees. It's frustrating. I will disagree here. There is nothing wrong with OpenGL for an older game. I wouldn't recommend it for new projects, but it is still strongly supported in Windows environments, and some top quality games run great with it. You just had to have implemented it correctly, or if not, kept up with maintenance when your spaghetti code breaks down with new driver updates. As for Apple support, nothing can really be done about that. Apple has always been willing to pull the rug out from under customers and developers with little notice.

AMD's rewritten OpenGL drivers have been considered wildly successful, which isn't really something you expect out of AMD, but they did it. The older drivers may have been more lenient with software that went out of spec, but that's why you are supposed to stick to the spec in the first place, otherwise you will be going back again and again to keep your software functional when updates break things that weren't in the spec. TLDR; AMD isn't responsible for Combat Mission's problems on modern AMD drivers.

Uhhhh, ok. This looks a lot like last year's update with the year iterated by one.

Not yet. I don't think they have very much to say though, and given how comical the last 2 updates are in hindsight, I understand why they are hesitant. Hell, we are almost a month from "very soon" on a patch, if that gives you an idea on how fast things move around here.