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The Blue Bar Returns!


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Wrath of Dragon,

This is great, now I can pause and rewind during the first replay, instead of having to wait until the second replay. Should save a lot of time.

I think the feeling of saving time will be real, but actual time savings might not be. That's because for every turn you watch in full one time you have to add to it the time spent computing the turn. The max time for computing would be 60 seconds, but I doubt many people will see that unless they habitually play big battles on low-mid range computers.

But hey... if you guys feel like the game is going faster for you, what the heck do we care if it actually is or isn't? :)

Steve

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The blue bar is back!

Now if we can just have some freedom back in force selection for QB's we can all have a big group hug.

Seriously why the restrictions in QB's I know BFC have said they wanted realism but why?

A scenario designer can make any force composition they want, so why the big deal with QB's it's not like they're realistic anyway in the current format.

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Wrath of Dragon,

I think the feeling of saving time will be real, but actual time savings might not be. That's because for every turn you watch in full one time you have to add to it the time spent computing the turn. The max time for computing would be 60 seconds, but I doubt many people will see that unless they habitually play big battles on low-mid range computers.

But hey... if you guys feel like the game is going faster for you, what the heck do we care if it actually is or isn't? :)

Steve

I was able to run through wadi scouts in less than 15 minutes, when in 1.10, it took me at least two hours. I am able to FF through a lot of inactivity and stuff I am not interested in. Not only that, but the replay is incredibly smoother than the first run through in 1.10.

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Bodkin,

Now if we can just have some freedom back in force selection for QB's we can all have a big group hug.

Seriously why the restrictions in QB's I know BFC have said they wanted realism but why?

Oh so many threads on that topic :D The short answer is that for the Normandy game we're completely overhauling the QB system. It will look more like CMx1's in many ways, including "cherry picking", but in the end it will be its own thing.

thewood,

I was able to run through wadi scouts in less than 15 minutes, when in 1.10, it took me at least two hours. I am able to FF through a lot of inactivity and stuff I am not interested in. Not only that, but the replay is incredibly smoother than the first run through in 1.10.

Glad to hear it on both. Yeah, for some scenarios that have a lot of hide-and-go-seek stuff the time savings even with the precomputation will be huge. Especially for smaller ones since the precomputation time itself is extremely small.

As I said before... this was one of those rare win-win fixes.

Steve

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adultery,

as im never happy, does this now mean you can crank the complexity of the game engine under the bonnet as the blue bar takes the beating mostly?

Yes and no. There will be nothing available to WeGo that isn't available to RealTime as well, so features that can't work without the Blue Bar won't happen. However, so far the features programmed have only been a problem for WeGo and not RealTime. Ironic, I know! So the "yes" to your question is that we can add features into the game that wouldn't be possible without the BlueBar for people with marginal systems and the desire to play in WeGo mode. You can reread my opening statements for more details.

Steve

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adultery,

Yes and no. There will be nothing available to WeGo that isn't available to RealTime as well, so features that can't work without the Blue Bar won't happen. However, so far the features programmed have only been a problem for WeGo and not RealTime. Ironic, I know! So the "yes" to your question is that we can add features into the game that wouldn't be possible without the BlueBar for people with marginal systems and the desire to play in WeGo mode. You can reread my opening statements for more details.

Steve

Do i remember correctly, that you always denied the arguments, that realtime puts restrictions on the game-engine, that true WEGO wouldn't? ;)

Since the goal of you at Battlefront always has been to achieve the most realistic results, i'm confident at some future point - sometime after WWII-title's release - you will yourself be interested enough about the results of a higher battlefield resolution, and you will start to implement WEGO-only functionalities, if they can be implemented without much labour.

The latest development seems great in that regard for me, since game calculation and realtime graphics display in WEGO have been seperated even more.

Also a full-game replay - at least for WEGO - seems to have come a step closer because of the better separation.

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Ok, Just downloaded the new patch and this is what I have been looking for. I like the WEGO system and not the real time. This is perfect and thanks for the input on this, My other question I guess i will include is the resolution of the game.

I have a widescreen 1900x? should I play the game in the desktop mode or play the game in the highest resolution within the game?

Right now I am in a game with the resolution set in the game, not desktop

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Hi, im lurking on this forum since 1.08 came out when i felt there is hope after all, but im playing CM1 3 years now at least 2 battles per week so im big fan of the series.

The blue bar is a great leap forward. I thought i will install cmsf once again, but then it strikes me! The game might be pretty awesome right now, but there is still no TCP/IP wego mode and i hate PBEM as much as playing against AI! Im not trying to build some kind of pressure on battlefront, its my problem that im not suited for realtime and PBEM there are lots of customers which enjoy it.

Anyway im speaking for my self and im saying that i want TCP/IP Wego or pausable realtime TCP/IP. Adjustable time for wego (15-60s)would be also awesome.

Marry Christmas and looking forward to CM2 WWII.

(as you can see english is not my native languish :) )

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One last bone before v1.11 is uploaded for you guys... v1.11 brings back the much "discussed" Blue Bar for WeGo players. Yes folks, you read that correctly ;)

Since this is no doubt a big (and good) shock to you all, I think it's a good idea to let you all know how it came to be. Years of doing this with you guys has proven to be beneficial to both customers and to us. The more you understand how it is CM is made the better quality of the discussion here. Well, excepting the crazies that invent their own story and then keep confusing it with the truth year after year. For example, some 13 years later I still occasionally see a known nutter insist that CMBO was originally based on ASL/SL (it never was). Well, mental defects are a life-long problem, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that education doesn't help :)

OK, so here's the scoop...

As some of you might be aware of, soon after v1.10 was released a handful of people began to report massive performance drops when playing large battles. This issue was quickly confirmed to be real, not driver related, and not within the player's ability to influence. It was dubbed the Slideshow Problem because when triggered the FPS went down to literally a fraction of a frame per second. Definitely not a reasonable framerate hit!! Thanks to the help of some internal testers and external guys having the problem, Charles found the causes.

Without going into low level detail, the root cause of the problem was a combo of things... medium to low end systems combined with large scenarios and WeGo play. When playing under these circumstances a time came when a lot of units from both sides were in combat and maneuvering for advantage. The normal WeGoer reaction to this is to issue/reissue lots of Target and Movement commands to optimize the situation for the best results in the next 60 seconds. The problem CM experienced was that in the first mili-second of the following turn it was being asked to do a ton of work simultaneously. People with higher end computers may have noticed a slowdown here or there, but not a complete overwhelming crush of number crunching. RealTime players, on the other hand, tend to micromanage units less and to give instructions over a longer period of time. Hence, demands on the computer aren't as concentrated nor as heavy. They probably never saw this sort of problem, ever.

Looking at it now we think the Slideshow Problem came about mostly because of improvements in v1.10's basic functions. Marginal systems using earlier versions of CM:SF went from milder symptoms (i.e. poor framerates, "scarecrows", etc.) to problems which made the game completely unplayable. As unintentional as this was, there was no rolling back the improvements that v1.10 brought to the table. Therefore, we faced a choice... raise the minimum specs for future customers and tell current ones that they can't play big scenarios OR find a way to relieve the bottleneck for systems that can't handle CM as it is now. It wasn't much of a choice in our minds!

The best fix was to recode WeGo so that it pre-computes all the action before showing it, just like CMx1 did. I say "best" for three reasons:

1. A significant number of customers have asked for this feature, primarily so they can skip ahead during turns where there isn't much action going on.

2. Recoding the routines that were choking up computing resources would take a LOT longer and might not make a dent in the problem. And worse, what would happen when we put in more improvements down the road? Get us right back to the Slideshow Problem, most likely.

3. The return of the Blue Bar wouldn't negatively affect any existing or future customer in any significant way.

So the choice of reintroducing the Blue Bar was a win-win for everybody. So why didn't we do it earlier, if it is such a great thing? Simple answer is... we didn't think it was necessary or, for a while at least, possible. A card carrying member of the Blue Bar Brigade might question our definition of "necessary" ;), but that's the difference between customers and developers... developers have to be pragmatic.

As some might remember, and a search of this Forum will reveal (I know because I double checked before writing this ;)), I argued against many of the reasons why people thought the Blue Bar was "necessary". Too many people let emotion cloud their arguments and initially we got a lot of abuse and too little rational dsicussion. Many of the arguments blamed perceived, and real, shortcomings of various features on the lack of the Blue Bar. The arguments, therefore, were that the Blue Bar would magically fix various things listed. Even further, some felt that the ONLY way this or that issue would be fixed was to have a Blue Bar. Since many of the assertions were nonsense, and proven so since, we feel quite strongly that not reintroducing the Blue Bar back then was the right thing to do.

Having said that, there was one consistent point made about the Blue Bar that I agreed with. Although I personally didn't think it was a big deal, I did see the desirability of skipping through a "boring" 60 second replay. But there were a couple hundred other rational and desirable suggestions that we felt were more important, so we focused on those first.

On top of comparative prioritization of customer requests, there were a ton of things that needed to be tweaked/fixed before precomputing turns would have been technically viable as a stable feature. The irony is that if we had tried to implement the Blue Bar a year or so ago it would likely have caused more problems than it solved. Now it was implemented without too much difficulty, therefore it didn't have a significant negative impact on the development schedule.

In fact, because of the maturity and stability of the code in general terms, Charles found that he could de-couple the display of the graphics with the math behind them without too many technical problems cropping up. What this means is that turn computation can go faster than realtime on systems that can handle the load being asked of it. In practical terms this means that most people, most of the time, in most scenarios can generally have a turn's resolution crunch in less than 60 seconds. Therefore, if a turn's replay is skipped completely the player may spend significantly less than 60 seconds to get to the next turn. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true... when a turn's replay is not skipped the player will spend more than 60 seconds (max is 120 seconds) before getting to the next turn. In v1.10 and earlier the time was always 60 seconds no matter what. The good news is that if the testers' experiences are representational of the average customers', things should even out so that a WeGo game in v1.11 takes about the same time to play as v1.11 BUT with the advantage of being able to skip through "boring" replays. If true, it's probable that a game won't take any less time to play than before, though it might feel like it because of skipping over "boring" parts of the battle.

In the end this is a win-win for everybody. The Slideshow Problem is gone, middle to lower end players have a better game experience (even in RealTime to a lesser extent), WeGoers have the ability to skip "boring" replays, total gametime is probably about the same, and we've got one less concern as we move along with Normandy development. All good :D

Steve

Wow!

More than 18 months later, we get CM again. Well done, what took you so long to realise that the customer is right and RT aint for serious wargaming!

By the time Normandy comes along we should have CM back on track then to what it should have been all along. A step forward from CM-1 but with all the improvements a new engine would bring together with the tried and tested things that made CM-1 so good.

This is excellent news, well done for doing what other companies often dont do - listening.

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I would not go so far GSX in his thinking but I am very pleased with the update. It installed like a charm and so far everything seems to be working fine (I installed the Marine patch).I love the return of the blue bar. It makes it feel more familiar and friendly. I know this is all psychological but one works with the brain cells one is given (or lack there of). I think you put tremendous effort into this game and it shows and it is much appreciated. The game play is solid.

Now that we have a good stable engine, do you think we could start a thread of little things we would like to see added (and I do not mean a new QB module) with your thoughts of their feasibility? You could then shoot us down or tell us to wait until the next module to start looking for some goodies.

E.g. The UI to indicate the starting number of soldiers in a unit and a how many are incapacitated (now if dead they disappear)

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"More than 18 months later, we get CM again. Well done, what took you so long to realise that the customer is right and RT aint for serious wargaming!"

I only play RT and have ZERO problems with any scenario in the game. Not quite sure how RT makes the game less than serious considering that I never once tested "Pooh" in WEGO and it seems to be kicking everyone's ass no matter how they play.

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Since the goal of you at Battlefront always has been to achieve the most realistic results, i'm confident at some future point - sometime after WWII-title's release - you will yourself be interested enough about the results of a higher battlefield resolution, and you will start to implement WEGO-only functionalities, if they can be implemented without much labour.

Wow!

More than 18 months later, we get CM again. Well done, what took you so long to realise that the customer is right and RT aint for serious wargaming!

Is this some form of self-parody or are you guys actually serious?

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Dont know. Maybe I'm too young to be emotionally attached to a single bar. And still like more "straight" places :D

Seriously, name me one incident that can happen in CMx1 and cant happen in CMSF RT. Once we move to Normandy most complaints will vanish because the game will prove far superior than CMx1 once the engine wears the same ww2 clothes and has a more human tempo, less lethal weapons and more balanced sides. My main complain so far is the lack of pause and save in multiplayer. Would be nice to have it in the next title. Ok..plus kill list, unidentified units, hit texts and sound contacts that is :rolleyes:

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Dont know. Maybe I'm too young to be emotionally attached to a single bar. And still like more "straight" places :D

Seriously, name me one incident that can happen in CMx1 and cant happen in CMSF RT. Once we move to Normandy most complaints will vanish because the game will prove far superior than CMx1 once the engine wears the same ww2 clothes and has a more human tempo, less lethal weapons and more balanced sides. My main complain so far is the lack of pause and save in multiplayer. Would be nice to have it in the next title.

there isn't an instance that WEGO will give you better than RT, it really is just a matter of taste...I find myself quickly overwhelmed in RT and like the slower WEGO pace....its not better, just different and I'm glad that we have a choice in the matter.

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there isn't an instance that WEGO will give you better than RT, it really is just a matter of taste...I find myself quickly overwhelmed in RT and like the slower WEGO pace....its not better, just different and I'm glad that we have a choice in the matter.

Definitely. For smaller games I find real time to be to my liking. I can change orders immediately and the battle flows naturally. When I feel like being intricate, if the battle is too large, or I need to improve my frame rate, I can break out Old Blue (Blue, you're my boy!).

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