CMSF2 Release Update

[lanceh55]

NeoHom.   I will try that, leave the fort and wait for reinforcements.

[sburke]

2 hours ago, lanceh55 said:

NeoHom.   I will try that, leave the fort and wait for reinforcements.

That may be a way to win, but it doesn't really meet the point of the scenario which is to defend the position.  That is more a strategy to take advantage of the limitations of the Strat AI.  I can guarantee that doing that against a human player would have you wiped out.  I have played that scenario to a win fighting to defend the position.  It can be done  

[HunterGathers]

1 hour ago, sburke said:

That may be a way to win, but it doesn't really meet the point of the scenario which is to defend the position.  That is more a strategy to take advantage of the limitations of the Strat AI.  I can guarantee that doing that against a human player would have you wiped out.  I have played that scenario to a win fighting to defend the position.  It can be done  

My thoughts and sentiments exactly. If the AI or enemy player took the fort and the scenario required them to hold it for a certain amount of time, then I guess such a strategy would be pretty fair, but without that, it seems quite gamey. At that rate you might as well save and ceasefire to see enemy positions.

[solinvictus202]

stay and fight - it can be done with close to or no casualties!

might I suggest looking at the fortress and its structures more closely?

 

anything else I'd consider too obvious spoilers

Edited October 27, 2018 by solinvictus202

[Trooper117]

As this thread is about CMSF2 Release Updates, I'd love to hear some fresh news on it...   

I am so looking forward to the full release... modder's can be let loose to do their stuff, mission makers can work their magic etc!

Plus we get to involve ourselves in the campaigns...

[pintere]

So what exactly will happen with these last four campaigns? Will they be updated and then released as part of a patch or something?

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Trooper117 said:

As this thread is about CMSF2 Release Updates, I'd love to hear some fresh news on it...   

Still working on it   One of the side effects of handling sooooo much (too much!) content all at once is it takes a long time to find all of the bugs.  For example, on Friday I went into the TO&E to find a bug that was identified (more of a rough corner) and discovered that one of the more obscure vehicles had the wrong crew assigned to it.  Which would negate the use of its primary weapon if the vehicle suffered even one casualty.  Obviously no tester ran into that situation and so it wasn't discovered until now.

At some point we're just going to have to live with a release that has the potential for minor glitches like this then release a patch.  It's either that or keep this thing in the oven at the 99% complete stage for a while longer.  I don't think anybody wants that, so we're going to get this thing wrapped up very soon.

2 hours ago, pintere said:

So what exactly will happen with these last four campaigns? Will they be updated and then released as part of a patch or something?

We will continue to revise them while you guys chew into the other content.  Each of the four unrevised Campaigns will be released as patches as they are finished.

Steve

[The_MonkeyKing]

18 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

At some point we're just going to have to live with a release that has the potential for minor glitches like this then release a patch.  It's either that or keep this thing in the oven at the 99% complete stage for a while longer.  I don't think anybody wants that, so we're going to get this thing wrapped up very soon.

 

[General Jack Ripper]

This week: We are 99% done!

Next week: We are 99.9% done!

The week after: We are 99.98% done!

The week after that: We are 99.998% done!

You know @Battlefront.com, NASA once considered a 99.99% reliability rating to be acceptable... If it's good enough for NASA, it's good enough for us.  

Granted, they were trying to get to the moon at the time, so they were in a bit of a rush.

Edited October 28, 2018 by General Jack Ripper

[sburke]

2 hours ago, General Jack Ripper said:

This week: We are 99% done!

Next week: We are 99.9% done!

The week after: We are 99.98% done!

The week after that: We are 99.998% done!

You know @Battlefront.com, NASA once considered a 99.99% reliability rating to be acceptable... If it's good enough for NASA, it's good enough for us.  

Granted, they were trying to get to the moon at the time, so they were in a bit of a rush.

In the telecom industry we want 5 9s.  99.999%.  So make sure phones are not included in CM.

[Dynaman216]

Is that NASA rate per launch, per items in a launch?  If the former it is 1 in 10 thousand launches has a problem, if the latter then every launch has multiple problems since there are more then 10K components that make up a space vehicle.  I can see why the telecom industry wants it higher, I'm assuming they handle millions of calls a day.  So even that failure rate is a lot of failures in a day - kinda like the old joke about being one in a million in China meant there were 1000 of you running around the country (heck - even in the US it would still be 350 of you)

 

Ramble mode off.

[sburke]

1 hour ago, Dynaman216 said:

Is that NASA rate per launch, per items in a launch?  If the former it is 1 in 10 thousand launches has a problem, if the latter then every launch has multiple problems since there are more then 10K components that make up a space vehicle.  I can see why the telecom industry wants it higher, I'm assuming they handle millions of calls a day.  So even that failure rate is a lot of failures in a day - kinda like the old joke about being one in a million in China meant there were 1000 of you running around the country (heck - even in the US it would still be 350 of you)

 

Ramble mode off.

For telecom I don't think that is failure per call, but rather uptime of system.  Due to the fact that telecom is a relation across vendors and providers maintaining a call failure rate would mean having to determine who caused a failed call.  A system down is a much easier figure to capture.

[General Jack Ripper]

12 hours ago, Dynaman216 said:

Is that NASA rate per launch, per items in a launch?  If the former it is 1 in 10 thousand launches has a problem, if the latter then every launch has multiple problems since there are more then 10K components that make up a space vehicle.

When developing man-rated rockets, NASA quickly realized a compromise must be reached between 'Reliability' and 'Safety'.

The Air Force, who was building the rockets, saw 'Safety' as providing as fail-proof an abort system as possible capable of detecting a critical flaw and extracting the crew, I.E. 'Crew Safety'.

NASA, on the other hand saw 'Reliability' as making a rocket so well-built it would never fail and would launch successfully every time, I.E. 'Crew Safety'.

Eventually, they settled on a compromise. The rockets would be made as reliable as necessary to make the overall rate of launch failure to be one in ten thousand, (to reduce overall costs and development time), and the crew would be kept protected by launch escape systems capable of rescuing the crew from an exploding rocket in the event one of those 'Ten Thousandth' events happen.

 

So yeah, if we can land on the moon with 99.99% reliability, we can have CMSF with 99.99% completion.  

[Dr.Fusselpulli]

I think patience is key. Let Battlefront decide when to release the game, they know best about their product. It is not that we will really miss about something, just that we have to wait a little bit longer, which is fine.

[Snake726]

Thanks for the additional update Steve, much appreciated!

[Snake726]

If there's anything I've learned from game development, it's that there is no such thing as bug free. Patches are just the reality of iteration. Most games these days ship with day 0 patches - in the old days the "gold disc" build would be achieved and the game would go into production, and maybe you then start to work on a patch. These days you cut off a build to ship at the production date, but then immediately start working on a day 0 patch to be downloaded on release, to fix as many other bugs as possible. Even then, you are always "shipping" bugs during bug triage - just like medical triage. Things that break the game are fixed first, things that block the player often are fixed next, things that look ugly are fixed last, and things that are stupid but don't do any of the above are shipped and tucked in the backlog to *maybe* be fixed in the future.

To give you an idea, one of the last games I worked on shipped with 3,000 bugs - but only one A bug that crashed the game if a user idled in a certain boss encounter for something like 2 days - that was fixed shortly after it was found in the wild.

[Aragorn2002]

3 hours ago, Snake726 said:

If there's anything I've learned from game development, it's that there is no such thing as bug free. Patches are just the reality of iteration. Most games these days ship with day 0 patches - in the old days the "gold disc" build would be achieved and the game would go into production, and maybe you then start to work on a patch. These days you cut off a build to ship at the production date, but then immediately start working on a day 0 patch to be downloaded on release, to fix as many other bugs as possible. Even then, you are always "shipping" bugs during bug triage - just like medical triage. Things that break the game are fixed first, things that block the player often are fixed next, things that look ugly are fixed last, and things that are stupid but don't do any of the above are shipped and tucked in the backlog to *maybe* be fixed in the future.

To give you an idea, one of the last games I worked on shipped with 3,000 bugs - but only one A bug that crashed the game if a user idled in a certain boss encounter for something like 2 days - that was fixed shortly after it was found in the wild.

I agree. There will always be bugs. The example Steve gave shows how difficult it is to iron them all out. It's sheer impossible. For that we have patches. People who don't accept that, should realize how complicated games such as CM have become. As long as they aren't gamebreakers I gladly accept bugs in a just released game.

[Behemoth]

***** Jerk Alert, Jerk Alert****** So... When do we get our grubby little hands on this thing?

-Behemoth

[RexSaur]

I can remember when CMSF1 was published. It was so horribly broken with bugs, rightfully all the reviews smashed the game. It took a long time to get the games patched to state where it was fun to play. Please not again.

[Dynaman216]

It was a dreadful piece of work, BF patched it up fairly quickly I recall.  The return of the blue bar was an awesome day.

[Erwin]

Yes, most of us CM1 fans were shocked at CMSF when it first came out.  I put it aside for a couple of years and then started to hear good things about the patched versions.  Eventually it became superb and bug-free and my favorite title.  Was very impressive that BF kept at it until they got it right.   That's a major reason why we old-timers are very patient and understanding when new BF titles take more time to be released.  One can be confident that BF will "get it right".

[markus544]

Again making the comparison to NASA...I would add that if 99% is good enough then I would be more than a little worried about that sticky little 1%... Morton-Thickol's o-ring issue on the ill fated Challenger disaster as one example.  Although this comparison may not be fair given the different issues involved.  1% failure on a large rocket motor vs the wrong solider crewing a certain vehicle, or whatever.

 

Edited November 3, 2018 by markus544

[Michael Emrys]

Back sometime in the late '50s-early '60s the aerospace industry at the very pointed urging of the USAF and NASA instituted the "Zero Defect" program to quell the string of rockets blowing up on the pad or just after launch and were making the US look bad. This was a bit optimistic of course, but it did produce results. It naturally made everything more expensive to produce, but in the long run was the lesser of several evils.

The later loss of the Challenger and the Columbia was SFAICT entirely due to bad management decisions not to postpone a launch under questionable circumstances. In other words, they put PR ahead of crew and mission safety.

Michael

[kevinkin]

On 11/1/2018 at 10:54 PM, Snake726 said:

that was fixed shortly after it was found in the wild

I like the way the term "wild" is use here. As the number of players using the software explodes, those corner cases driving BFC nuts will surface. Maybe a patch for Holiday gaming time will be possible.  Man, where did 2018 go BTW?

[markus544]

Yes as far as I remember in the Challenger incident it was rather cold on pad when they launched and the "o-ring" failed.  A very sad and tragic "accident" ensued.  I will as many of us who were around back then will forever remember watching in horror. We will forever remember where we were, what we were doing at that time.