alwaysfish

Careful, very graphic https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1499637858658881537?s=21

Thank you guys for all your input.

Well, i see several things. First, the Russian tank was hull down, only turret visible. Second, the Panther was buttoned, so I suppose visibility was somewhat limited. Plus, there were trees in the middle of the LOS (only trunks are visible in the video), so that could have hindered the visibility. And, like Michael said, shock maybe?

I am playing a pbem match, and on several occasions i observed that it is really hard for Russian T-34-85s to penetrate Panther armor. In the video you will see how T-34-85 hits Panther four times at a range of 400m, but never penetrates Panther's hull. I don't know much about armor penetration, so i thought maybe somebody will provide good insight, if Panther is really that hard to penetrate at such short range.

You can mod demo by adding custom textures and sounds. However, you cannot add scenarios.

i have zipped files that i found in the skybox/mountain folder within "Version 100.brz" file of CMSF installation. Here is the link. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ikfvzarahsjeoht/CMSF skybox mountains.zip?dl=0 If you were looking for some other files, please let me know.

delete (or rename) intro.wmv file in the folder <CM Game Install Dir>/Data

dragonwynn, add me to the recipient list too. thank you in advance

Sorry, Steve, my intentions were not to insult you. You guys are doing a great job, no question. I enjoy your products immensely. I just wanted to say that optimizations could be done, but i also admit that it's time consuming.

Fantastic example. Just remove motion blur effect. The difference in fps is very noticeable.

In the provided example you might not notice big difference, however if the bouncing was much much faster, you would definitely notice a difference. Another example, if you tried to record a fast motion (in example, the motion of legs while moving on a running trainer) with your GoPro @ 30 fps and @120fps, and then would like to see clips in slow motion, you would see, that the recording @30 fps is very choppy, missing smoothness.

I think this saying, that eye can not notice anything over about 30fps, came from movies industry. However, computer animation can not be compared to the way movies work (at least old ones), which had a collection of static images and you had to change them at around 30fps so that human eye does not notice the change in frame (the "blinking" effect is gone). In the computer animation, the higher the fps, the more fluid the animation is. Just a simple example. Imagine, that in a game a camera (an imaginary camera, through which the scene is rendered) is turning right. In one second (world time) it will turn 60 degrees. Now, question. How many frames will we see during that "camera turning" animation, if the engine is running at 1 FPS? The obvious answer is one, which will be a scene, rendered when the camera is at 60 degrees from its starting angle. Now just imagine how would this look like in-game. We press the button to turn the camera right, and then after one second (which will feel a very long second) will be turned right by 60 degress. No frames will be showed in between the starting angle and ending angle. I already can imagine that many of us will think that the game is crawling. Oh, and even though the engine will be rendering scenes at 1 fps, we will not see the "blinking" effect, because a monitor refreshes at 60 fps (or 120, depending on the monitor you have). Now, let's imagine the engine runs at 30 fps. Obviously we will see 30 different frames while the camera is turning right (the frame will be rendered every 2 angles). compared to my previous example, the animation will be much more fluid. If the engine ran at 60 fps, we would be seeing 60 different frames while the camera is turning (at every 1 degree angle change), which would make the animation even more fluid. In other words, the more frames per second the engine could render, the more fluid all animations will be. As for DirectX and Opengl, i think there is no much difference. Both are just APIs, and it is up for a developer to use an API in a smart way. I already wrote in some other messages that i was curious to know why the game struggles with the rendering. I used some developer tools to get a log of opengl API calls that CM is doing. From the log i concluded that CM is using a "brute-force" approach when rendering a scene. Several simple optimizations could be done to increase rendering performance. One of those, which every graphics programmer knows, is sorting geometry (before rendering a scene) by material (textures). I just wonder, what would be performance change, if CM engine actually did that. In any case, i perfectly understand that optimizations require time, smart programming, digging through recommendations from nvidia and amd, etc.

I like a lot this idea. The export/import could be done to/from simple XML file.

The kills that the unit/vehicle incurred to the enemy could be seen a the end of any scenario. When you see AAR screen, press the button Review Map (or something like that) and then select any of your units. at the bottom left you will see a transparent window, which will list all kills for the selected unit.

Dude, you sound like Wiggum. Wouldn't be surprised he is back, only under different name

Fantastic news, Chris. Looking forward to new product releases. Merry Christmas to all BFC team

Common Myles, Skwabie found a small bug and made the game better. I respect him for that. I think both parties (skwabie and BFC) could have handled things differently. none of the parties deserve a laugh.

Fantastic material, Slim.

Get well, buddy

'smooth as butter' is very subjective. FPS, on the other hand, is an objective performance measure. I would bet that 'smooth as butter' meant having around 40 fps, which is really low from my point of view

No, the game is not heavy on CPU. The reason we get low FPS is because rendering engine is purely optimized. There are many places in the rendering engine where CPU is just waiting for GPU to finish its job, which in turn decreases overall rendering performance. Most of the rendering is done utilizing old fixed OpenGL rendering pipeline (in other words, programmable vertex and fragment shaders are not used) which doesn't scale well with increasing power of GPUs. CM performs better on NVidia mostly because NVidia has multi-threaded OpenGL drivers. I am sure many of us, including me, have observed long map loading times on AMD GPUs. It appears, that mipmaps (smaller textures of original texture) are generated much much slower on AMD GPUs than on NVidia GPUs. Nvidia GPUs handle mipmap generation better because (it's only my guess) it's done on another thread, which in turn means less waiting time for CPU and faster map loading times. There are many ways how BF could improve their rendering engine to get higher frames per second and deliver better user experience. Rather than create lots of intermediary blending textures for terrain, create just one atlas map. Convert all rendering to programmable pipeline. Use vertex objects, texture arrays, etc. NVidia has made many presentations where OpenGL performance could be improved 10 or even more times if some optimizations were applied. Maybe all this sounds a little too technical, however i just wanted to make clear, that CM is not heavy on CPU and lots of optimizations could/should be done on the rendering engine.

Close this discussion. It doesn't add any value. It only takes Steve's time, when he could be working on the Bulge game

Oh common, man, think rationally. For $55 you get a finished product. In the description you can check its features and content, and you can even demo it. Obviously, description does not include line, that product includes additional content which will be released in the future. As for free additional content, just think, why any sane developer would spend his time on additional content, which doesn't generate revenues? Sure, you do patches to the existing product to fix some game breaking bugs to keep your customers happy. Other than that, no developer would spend the most precious resource, time, on something which doesn't generate returns.

I think discussions about price don't get anywhere. Price is very subjective and everybody has a choice to buy or not to buy. Sports cars cost hundreds of thousands, but are they expensive? For those, who have money it's nothing, but for those who don't have such money, it will look expensive. But the fact, that battlefront is in business for more than 15 years, developing essentially the same game, says that their business and pricing model works. And in comparison to other war games, CM is kind of a sports car. Not the fastest, not the shiniest, but very unique.

When i take a look at community created content, it seems that CMFI got lowest amount of love from community. Even CMRT, more recent title, has higher amount of community created content. I've seen many comments that people love CMFI for its difference in terrain compared to that in CMBN, but CMBN is a "king" in respect to the amount of community content. Why so?