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Fortification Question - Always above ground? Foxholes?


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I know theres going to now be a hundred questions posted in here, and I will add just one:

Are all fortifications above ground?

From the screenshots, it would appear so. The gun emplacements and trench systems appear to all be above ground - ie. the bottom of the trench/gun pit it at the top of natural ground. Not that this is a bad thing, I am just curious. I assume that this was necessary to be able to use FOW with player fortifications?

As an offshoot of this, did foxholes make the cut?

We can see the trench systems in the screenshots, but I did not see any foxholes.

Thanks in advance!

Chad

PS - are there any plans to partially lift the NDA for Beta testers so they can field some questions and/or post some pics, AAR's?

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There was some fuzz about fortifications with fog-of-war and so far indication was they made it in. I don't recall whether that was foxholes only or also trenches.

I wouldn't worry about the screenshots. The graphics for the FoW foxholes are probably not finalized or they leave them ugly.

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Yup its all fog-of-war related. Foxholes are in the game. And like trenches, hit probability has been adjusted to mimic dug-in trenches. A side benefit to the new trenches is the game avoids the framerate hit that comes from warping the terrain mesh, a significant benefit on a map full of trees and houses. :D

Beta testers can follow Steve's lead, talk about what he's already talked about. But if Steve has not mentioned in-game Zeppelins we can't talk about the in-game Zeppelins. ;)

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Yup its all fog-of-war related. Foxholes are in the game. And like trenches, hit probability has been adjusted to mimic dug-in trenches. A side benefit to the new trenches is the game avoids the framerate hit that comes from warping the terrain mesh, a significant benefit on a map full of trees and houses. :D

Beta testers can follow Steve's lead, talk about what he's already talked about. But if Steve has not mentioned in-game Zeppelins we can't talk about the in-game Zeppelins. ;)

As per my post, I figured it was FOW related.

So are foxholes above ground visually? The trench system looks fine, but I cant picture how the foxholes would look above ground.

Also, are foxholes something you purchase, or does the defender automatically get them? Is it a setting in the editor, ie. "Troops Dug in = Yes/No"? Something I did not realize until after reading book upon book was how infantry dug in *immediately* whenever they stopped.

Thanks in advance

Chad

PS The trench system with all the different types of barbed wire and obstacles infront is just sweet looking! :eek:

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FOW trenches means your units can't see them until they see them, including one unit spotting them and another unit only getting a distant <?> due to chain of command. Full LOS rules. The benefits with this are great enough that we're all pretty much content to live with the above ground/below ground abstraction thing. Y'all demanded 'true LOS trenches'. This is what true LOS trenches look like.

Trenches are 5th photo down in the December bone thread.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=94178

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I cant seem to find the pic of a trench system that you are talking about. Could you please put up a link? I wanna see it!

cm_dec_bone_5.jpg

This is from the earlier bone this month. All that defense works is above ground - and very nice looking!

pak.jpg

Can I just say that the new wire is just amazing!

So how would a foxhole look? Would their legs just disappear under ground?

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FOW trenches means your units can't see them until they see them, including one unit spotting them and another unit only getting a distant <?> due to chain of command. Full LOS rules. The benefits with this are great enough that we're all pretty much content to live with the above ground/below ground abstraction thing. Y'all demanded 'true LOS trenches'. This is what true LOS trenches look like.

Trenches are 5th photo down in the December bone thread.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=94178

Many thanks for clearing this up MikeyD. Seems like a great system.

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The language describing Fortifications and FoW on the new website will likely be updated soon. When I wrote it I didn't have time to confirm with Charles about whether something was a feature limitation or it is a bug. Now that I've remembered to ask, I should get an answer sometime soon. "Soon" might mean after Christmas.

Those of you who remember previous discussions about this will remember that we basically have only two choices:

1. Deform the terrain mesh so that the Fortifications are below ground where they should be.

2. Have Fortifications sit on top of the terrain mesh and do not deform it.

There are pros and cons of each:

Deformation Method

.. Pros = looks natural, incoming/outgoing fire works without modification

.. Cons = no FoW, significant burden on framerate

The Surface Method takes these same elements and flips them:

.. Pros = FoW, minimal burden on framerate

.. Cons = doesn't look as realistic, incoming/outgoing fire needs some abstraction so the results are correct

Based on tons of public and private conversations and debate, it became clear to us that the Surface Method was the better choice for the game as a whole. Some testers were a bit skeptical when they first experienced it in the game for real, but I don't think anybody feels we made a mistake now that they've played with it. The functionality gained by it is just too big to sacrifice for looks alone. The fire effects issue is, from a player standpoint, unnoticeable. We simply had to go through the programming investment and bug fixing for something that wouldn't have been an issue had we stuck with the Deformation system.

Therefore, all Fortifications are above ground. Foxholes are considered a Fortification and therefore follow the same rules. All Fortifications can be placed by the player during Setup Phase and the enemy must be spot each piece individually. Trenches are divided up into 8m long sections, so you have to manually spot the whole Trench system before you can see the whole thing. This is instead of seeing a piece of it and bingo... you see the whole thing. Or as it is in CM:SF, seeing it 100% in full 100% of the time all the time.

There are a couple of rough edges to the system that we feel we could ship with and everybody would be OK with them most of the time. However, we are trying to smooth those over before we ship because we're perfectionists at heart :D

Steve

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Cool. Thanks for the post Steve. I think it looks fine personally. Would much rather have it with FOW enabled above ground.

Some general foxhole questions:

1. Will they individual? 2 man? Or a template similar to the trench where you have a string of say 12 of them fashioned in a certain way onto a tile and you place this tile just like you would wire, or a trench. I am assuming that it is the later.

2. While *in* (wow, just got a flashback to ASL . . . ) the foxhole, will infantry be standing? Prone? Knelling?

3. Will support weapons be placable in foxholes? MG's? Mortars?

4. And finally, to reask my question from above, will defender always get to dig in? Will attacker get to? Is it a setting in the editor, ala 'Allied dig in = yes/no'?

Thanks Steve again for all the great bones!

Chad

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Cool. Thanks for clarifying that.

A quick question: if the troops are in a foxhole which is represented as an aboveground fortification/parapet, what happens to LOS/LOF =beyond= the foxhole? Allow me to draw a picture:

1.

X------F-----T

Or

2.

X------------T

........F

In figure 1, the firer, X, would have his LOF to target T interrupted by unit in foxhole F. If the foxhole is underground, it would act like figure 2 which (hopefully) shows LOF from X to T as going above F.

I'm sure you and the betas went through this, and I'm sure once I have my sweaty, shaky hands on the disk-o-goodness it'll all be clear, but for now, I'm trying to get my head around how this works.

Maybe some more screenshots would help? ;)

Thanks,

Ken

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Foxholes are required to follow the same rules as soldier placement. Which means Foxholes are placed per 8x8m Action Spot and are setup to handle the 7 Soldier max for that Action Spot. Since Foxholes can not be customized ahead of time (i.e. when placing) to account for whatever unit may be placed in them, Foxholes are a "one size fits all" situation.

We do intend, in the future, to have Foxholes conform during Setup to whatever specific unit is put into them. But that's a layer of complexity we simply don't have time for with this release. If we perfected everything in the game now I think we could easily take another 6-12 months. 20 years if we tried to perfect everything people asked about :D

C3K,

The abstractions associated with Fortifications take into consideration LOS as well as LOF. So there are no problems with the game system's ability to handle them.

Steve

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So, what does that mean, count wise? What's the lowest amount of guys we can have in a fox hole? I mean, if there's say 12 dudes in a squad, will guys be divided between fox holes in teams like how we break them down now? Or is the whole squad going in one hole? Or can we have 2 guys per hole?

Mord.

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doesn't look as realistic, incoming/outgoing fire needs some abstraction so the results are correct

Is that why the Panzergrenadiere in the screenshot below have their heads exposed (dangerously exposed, I would imagine)? That is, IRL wasn't the SdKfz 251's interior deep enough that passengers could sit inside without their heads being exposed?

sdkfz251-3-d.jpg

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Mord,

Remember there is a difference between Squad and Team. A Squad is a "container" for between 1 and 3 Teams, each with between 1 and 7 men. So when you deploy a US Rifle Squad (3x Teams) you will need 3x Action Spots with Foxholes in them to get everybody into cover. IIRC there are 4x Foxholes per Action Spot, each one ideally suited for 2x Soldiers.

Dietrich,

Yes and no. Passenger and crew positions within vehicles aren't necessarily final. That's stuff is for a final round of tweaking. However, their position shouldn't matter because the ballistics have to interact with the vehicle in order to hit anybody. Which means if a seated passenger is protected in the code then it doesn't matter what the graphics show because the vehicle's protection overrides everything else. That being said, we are probably going to have the graphical side of things fixed soon.

Steve

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There are a couple of rough edges to the system that we feel we could ship with and everybody would be OK with them most of the time. However, we are trying to smooth those over before we ship because we're perfectionists at heart :D

Steve

Since you brought it up, when are you guys planning on shipping this bad boy? :D

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Mord,

Remember there is a difference between Squad and Team. A Squad is a "container" for between 1 and 3 Teams, each with between 1 and 7 men. So when you deploy a US Rifle Squad (3x Teams) you will need 3x Action Spots with Foxholes in them to get everybody into cover. IIRC there are 4x Foxholes per Action Spot, each one ideally suited for 2x Soldiers.

Steve

Excellent! That will look really cool...much more visually appealing than CMX1.

Mord.

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Thank you Steve. I am sure you made the right decision for a heavily attack/defense oriented WW2 game.

The "carpet" system for fortifications (2D paint over unmodified 3D terrain) gives us what we need gameplay and realism wise. The abstraction you have to introduce has the advantage that you can easily modify parameters for protection and concealment, just set them, you don't have to mess with the 3D system to get to the values you want.

And look at the bright side, if you ever come around to making terrain modifiable after setup you'll have a nice update at your hands that plays well in screenshots :)

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