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Opinions of 1.05?


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I remember I saw this "can shoot through friendly tank" situation in older versions, so it's good it works the same way in both directions.

Maybe this cover issue will be developed more towards what you wrote about at 08:32. More variety to tank damage modeling would be nice when the bigger things have been coded. Turrets blown away etc.

only time will tell smile.gif
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I apologise for not providing a screen-shot as I'm not sure how to get them with this game. Anyway, if someone can tell me how I will reproduce this bug and post it here.

The bug, basically is that I had a machine gunner on the roof of a single story building in the prone position with a wall on the edge of the roof that he obviously couldn't see over. However, the machine gun was halfway through the wall and he was firing at the enemy.

In the same scenario, I had a machine gun team in the prone position laid at the side of a wall and when I changed their facing, one of the team actually crawled through the wall, whilst the machine gunner turned to the facing I ordered but the machine gun was not in his hands and was facing the original position.

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DzrtFox,

To follow up on TomW's comments:

Wouldn't a more realistic way to fix this be to have the dead AFV block shots both ways rather than letting shots fly through both ways?
In theory, yes. The problem with this is that we'd have to write a ton of REALLY good TacAI to allow a shooting vehicle to move around to a better firing position on its own *or* require the player to do it.

The problem with the TacAI approach is that we feel it is beyond our practical abilities. We could spend months working on it and I'm sure, absolutely sure, people would be quite upset with the results more often than we could ever hope to fix. Any time the TacAI moves a player's unit on its own initiative there is big can of worms opened up and usually the net result is negative from the player's standpoint. So months of coding and testing to generally decrease game enjoyment is probably not a good use of our resources :D

The problem with requiring the player to move the unit on his own is that in WeGO that would more often than not have a lot of vehicle sitting around idle while the target potentially moved out of LOS/LOF or (worse) to a superior firing position to shoot at something else of yours. It would no doubt be frustrating in the extreme.

It isn't much better for RT players either. They wouldn't have the artificial lockout period that WeGo has, but they would have to micromanage things even more. That's something that is not usually a positive thing from a gameplay standpoint.

So for different reasons neither "smarter" TacAI or player responsibility seem to be good choices. The first choice we made was to block enemy incoming fire, which developed into a gamey cheat so v1.05 does the only sensible thing open to us... make it the same for both sides.

Steve

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The AI seems more responsive, both in terms of fighting back on defense and in moving forward in offense to my eye. I'm basing this on the remake of "Chance Encounter" thus far.
Mark Ezra who programmed the AI plans for Close Encounter made several alternative AI plans for each side so Close Encounter should be a good example of a fun scenario. While testing the patch in beta I played Chance Encounter as the Syrian's and found the US AI plan to be clever and well executed by the TAC AI. In the tests I played the Syrians twice and won handily the first time, but then played again (overly cocky in the glow of my earlier victory) and got torn to pieces by the US AI the second time. My units were so badly mauled I had to surrender or ask for ceasefire about 15 mins into the scenario :( )

Remember, the in game TAC AI only interprets the more "strategic" AI plans laid out in the plan by the scenario designer.

The better scenario's (and you can't really tell unless you choose to crack them open in the scenario editor) have at least two or more AI plans laid out for each side so you can replay the scenario and not get the same response or AI plan twice in a row. (which is cool when it works that way if designer has laid out more then one plan and programed the scenario response properly.) There are several scenario designers that are good at this, off the top of my head anything by Rune or GeorgeMc (of Hammertime fame) or Mark Ezra (Chance Encounter) usually meets this standard of multiple plans.

smile.gif

[ December 15, 2007, 09:31 AM: Message edited by: aka_tom_w ]

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I restarted the thunder campain

wego veteran

got thru 5 turns then had a CTD with message being sent to M$

it was late and I had not saved the game so I closed it

I just got done playing the same campain and have gotten thru 13 turns and no CTD

saw the low wall bug with the center divider of the highway

game runs much smother(it ran pretty good to begin with on my desktop to begin with(3.06 ghz single core with hyperthreading 2gig of ram and a ATI 1550 vid card with 512 meg of ram)

I'll try it in my laptop later which is a 1.6ghz single core centrino

1.5 gig of ram 128meg built in video that shares ram

it ran ok on that some stuttering

things I liked

1 when aquiring the Javalin CLU it comes with 1 missile GREAT thanx

pathfinging much better

need to play a night scenario to see the new lighting effects

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OK, after re-installing and playing thru a few campaign games again I am very satisfied by the improvements. This is what maybe should have been released in time for xmas. Thanks to BF for sticking in there, though its not perfect it is now actually playable as a game, rather than a sim.

Still a few niggles with commands and menus and hot keys that make RT play a chore at times but I think I can now recommend a game that plays.

Low wall LOS blocking is a pain but on the whole, well done.

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Originally posted by GSX:

OK, after re-installing and playing thru a few campaign games again I am very satisfied by the improvements. This is what maybe should have been released in time for xmas. Thanks to BF for sticking in there, though its not perfect it is now actually playable as a game, rather than a sim.

Still a few niggles with commands and menus and hot keys that make RT play a chore at times but I think I can now recommend a game that plays.

Low wall LOS blocking is a pain but on the whole, well done.

As soon as you edit the hotkeys it gets a lot better.
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-

I have been testing the same missions a thousand times so I know by heart how the AI works in each situation in those missions.

1.05 shows great improvements. The use of AT weapons is way better. Grenade launchers, and hand grenades. Pathfinding is certainly better. High walls bug seems gone too as far as I could see.

Not to mention the sound when the reinforcements arrive! Seems like a silly little detail but it makes a lot of a difference when playing.

Doesn't seem to be a big deal to most but it really bothers me the way vehicles tend to drive inside one another slowly. Sometimes when close to each other they maneuver and stop in a cross shape formation like a hybrid odd looking beast!!!! :eek:

I friend once told me that collision detection was one of the most difficult things to code.

--

[ December 15, 2007, 11:44 AM: Message edited by: Webwing ]

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Originally posted by GSX:

Is this where RT falls down in a fast paced modern wargame? In WEGO, you have the time to look around the battlefield while in RT I often come back to something after 5 minutes to find my vehicles dead and squads not liking it. In RL Im certain that a bunch of Strykers would notice their buddies brewing up.

In real life you would get... Report!

In CMSF you do not.

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My first impressions of 1.05:

A huge improvement. The game is now playable and enjoyable. Troops generaly move where you want them, mostly along the path you asked them to take (though not always, sometimes they decide they know a better route, faster, more road or something). Troops engage the enemy, take better cover.

Some persistent bugs:

- the low wall. It sometimes blocks los where it should not (like when a Bradley stands behind it, it can not spot a BMP on the other side (and visa versa), while the wall at most blocks the drivers view.

- los probelms when there are units on the roof, viewing over a small rise, a dip and up the next (higher) hill. They can not fire on the hill, as the facing slope is revered as "reverse slope". Line of sight is blocked where the terrain dips down the fist time.

- some minor pathing issues. I want my troops to move straight to a building (assaulting). Set one waypoint. They move along a road a bit, and then make a right turn to the building. As the road is in view of the enemy (and slightly raised), I really would have liked them to leave the road and go straight for the building. I do admit the road probably makes for a nicer surface, and the travel time is shorter this way, but I send them straight to the building for a reason. Now they all lay dead on the road I mentioned, except for one lucky guy who made it past their truning point an got in cover.

I still have the feeling troops keep moving to long when under fire, and I would like to have them to have a kind of "fall back" option, where the whole squad does not really rout, but just decides to pull back a bit to beter cover.

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Thank you for the patch! CMSF gets better with every patch. Now you guys should take a long christmas vacation.

I've only played a couple of scenarios but the overall "feel" of the game has improved. It seems to run a little smoother and the ai seems much more solid.

I have not yet ran into any bugs.

BattleFront: please continue to raise the bar (not lower it like Steve said) by putting out the BEST modern tactical wargame ever made. With every patch that bar is raised a little more, and we get happier. smile.gif

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I still have the feeling troops keep moving to long when under fire, and I would like to have them to have a kind of "fall back" option, where the whole squad does not really rout, but just decides to pull back a bit to beter cover.

Its not an unreasonable suggestion.

I think it would necessitate a further refinement to the "self preservation AI" and they have to be careful not to take too much control away from the player or next thing we know there will be no brave units we can order to advance under fire when that is what must be done.

I do however agree with the suggestion to look at "fall back" as a TAC AI option and tweak the self preservation AI a little to allow the TAC AI to automatically execute a fall back or take cover order smile.gif

Good point.

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Here are my impressions after one battle (In Harm's Way):

The first thing I notice as I'm scrolling around is the huge ditch running the length of the map. I was really happy to see this, as in past versions I had to be zoomed in really close to see ditches and trenches. I'm hoping this works now for trenches also, but there were none on the map to check it out.

Turn 1 starts and I almost jump out of my skin the first time I hear artillery start raining down near my troops. Watching the fireworks show is seriously cool.

As the game progresses I am insanely happy to report that vehicle pathfinding seems to be almost completely fixed. I had Strykers moving along multiple waypoints, reversing, rotating and hunting exactly how I would expect. Great job fixing that one BFC!!! Infantry movement seemed spot on as well.

One problem I noticed was when I ran a machine gun squad to the 2nd floor of a 3 story building. I tried to deploy their weapon on the little ledge that sticks out and it wouldn't let me so I tried moving them to the roof.... and nothing happened. The rest of the game they were stuck out on that ledge and refused any orders to move no matter whether I plotted them inside the building or out. On maps with smaller forces like this, having a machine gun squad out-of-commission the entire game because they're stuck is pretty frustrating.

However, all of the improvements far overshadowed this problem. This patch has definitely renewed my hope that BFC is going to turn this game into something special. I'm looking forward to playing a few more battles this evening and seeing how all the fixes and improvements hold up!!

GREAT WORK BFC!!! Keep it up, it's almost there!

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The AI does something close to that ("fall back")now when infantry is in 'hunt' mode. In v1.05 they now respond immediately to fire, get down quick and get out of the way. Also, when I bail out of a vehicle the AI seems to do a pretty good job of picking decent cover for them to scurry off to, usually. All you have to do is not disembark directly in front of a mg team smile.gif

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Infantry combat is much, much improved with 1.05. Fewer LOS absurdities, much better movement, much better use of available weapons.

The AI seems to have gotten craftier too. Unless I'm mistaken about who fired the shot, I think a bunch of Syrians just wiped out an entire fire team of mine by blasting an RPG round into the side of the building my guys were using as a firing perch. I've never seen the AI do that.

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Down loaded 1.05 last night and did a test run. I thought it ran very smooth. Hunt command work alot better now. Troops go to ground when fired apon and return fire. Before they would just get mowed down.

One thing that impressed me was during the battle, I dissmounted a squad from a Styker in a bad location and they came under fire from a building. In the old days, the squad would just keep running around untill they were all dead. Not this time. They went to ground and returned fire. there Stryker and two other Strykers also laid down fire as well. I have never seen that before in the game. I only lost two troops and they were able to assualt the building and take out the OP4. I also notice infantry hits the doors faster when going to a house. Good job BF.

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Substantial improvement. IMO the game should have been released at this stage. I'm having fun, although the scenarios I've played so far seem to be stacked heavily towards the US.

Pathfinding w/in city basically works, although there is the odd wierdness. But very functional - up through 1.04 by my experience pathfinding was hopeless.

It's possible to grab unit icons without annoying fiddling.

I noticed that if you blow out the side of a building, even multiple floors, the balconies stay put. Don't know if it's possible to occupy them. Also, if you blow out the bottom of a building it doesn't drop, it just gets a yawning hole. This tested on a mosque.

Infantry is for practical purposes functional.

Scrolling seems to work dramatically better.

Off to play some more...

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Yeah, Charles dialed back the "ammo conservation" logic for vehicles and that helped out enormously. The problem with the Strykers is that they have only a limited amount of ammo "at the ready", which means exposed reloading when it is expended. So he had the gunner be rather conservative. I'm sure this is what happens in real life, however in real life the gunner is a bit smarter than our virtual one so the real life gunner knows better when to say "ammo be damned!" and light up a target.

Steve

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From the Stryker crew members I have spoken with, it is more a matter of "the PFC be damned!". This is because the machine gunner is an NCO, but the guy that gets the job of changing out the .50 box is one of the riflemen inside the machine. RHIP.

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