Thomm

In reality, a careful advance appears to involve very thinly spread-out squads. I am curious how this will affect the quality of LOS determination and how issues like overlapping squads (and the resulting confusion) will be dealt with! Best regards, Thomm

Follow-up question(s): Clearly, AT soldiers will be modelled in the game. How about regular (rifle) infantry? How many infantry do we have to expect in a scenario? Will there be infantry-versus-infantry fights?! Best regards, Thomm

One question here: How big a part of the gameplay is shooting infantry? Somehow I do not have a good feeling with this. In the standard FPS the player assumes the role of a foot soldier, usually an underdog compared to enemy tanks. With roles reversed, shooting infantry should be a one-sided affair, given that one would avoid to close in with them ... What is your impression on this subject? Best regards, Thomm PS: I played all OFP sequels, and I do not recall special ("morale") problems with engaging enemy infantry in a tank. But then again this was only a small part of that game, not the main focus.

That looks really cool! My interest bar is raised!!! What is up with that "checkerboard pattern" on the damaged building. I guess the greyed sections are structurally damaged, but can't they be made to blend more seamlessly?! Best regards, Thomm

It is very sad that people abuse this knowledge for cheating! If anybody would come up with a way to extract the terrain elevation data from the map files then I could make you contour maps for these pesky desert scenarios. THAT would be a worth-while "hack"! Best regards, Thomm

Wrote already how cool that is! I just hope they make sure that all this involves *a lot* of *persistent* smoke and dust (should be the easy part, anyway)! Best regards, Thomm

I do not care anymore! Just make that year pass quickly!!!!! Best regards, Thomm

Cool info! The last two paragraphs alone imply sooo much thought and coding that I do not want to start thinking about it!! Nor do I think that follow-up questions will reveal more details ! In any case: This is going to be an amazing game! Best regards, Thomm

First of all, thanks for all the answers, Steve! From the bits of information (1:1, basic for m of staircases, much more detailed) I form the following image of CMx2 houses: </font> Individual rooms *are* modeled</font>Furniture is "abstracted", the rooms, therefore, look empty.</font>Houses have well-defined entry-points (doors)</font>changing floors is only possible via staircases</font>Windows are modeled as a consequence of 1:1 modeling?!</font> Maybe I got it right?! Can't wait to see the grenades flying ... Best regards, Thomm

Since we are knee-deep in technical details: Will there be room-to-room fighting?! Best regards, Thomm

I do not think that the user will ever get in touch with the 1m x 1m tiles that are mentioned here. These are apparently only for LOS crunching and (maybe) pathfinding. The map design and storage will most likely be vector-based. For example, a 4-sided field is described as a polygon with 4 vertices. Should it come to that a flood-fill algorithm can fill all 1x1 m2 tiles within the vector-enclosed field with "field-type" tiles. So a minimum of map data has to be stored in the file. I guess the same is true for the current CM1 engine. I remember an internal tile size of 2x2 meters, such that the 20m tiles are composed of 100 sub-tiles internally. But, in the 20m tile scheme the 2x2 m2 grid does not have to be composed in its entirety, because all sub-tile operations can be performed within the individual sub-grids of the 20m tiles. Best regards, Thomm

Please keep in mind that there are thousands of scenarios floating around, so I am not afraid that the need to play any CMX2 scenario twice or more often will become urgent! That is, unless you fail to beat that scenario in the first place, what should be a possibility given well laid-out AI pre-planning. Best regards, Thomm

The same article, hopefully without registration: www.cgf-ai.com/docs/gdc2001_paper.pdf

Points 1 and 2 sound more like dumbing down the human player than improving the AI. Point 3 is promising. All in all not enough substance here for specific discussion, IMHO. I assume that SOPs will be implemented, which will automatically lead to better AI behavior at the platoon level. Some form of learning would be great, although I doubt that I will play the scenarios more than once. I am thinking back to the CC4 campaign where I fought over the same map a dozen of times - had the AI remembered my deployment pattern, the Germans would have walked over me ... Here is a good article for you: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010912/sterren_01.htm Best regards, Thomm

A, Never finished my one-and-only PBEM. A pity, because I had a *nasty* surprise for my foe!!! I think I will buy it no matter what. I just hope it will not be a too extreme time-sink! Best regards, Thomm

I basically agree with you and I do not have a problem with these imposed idle phases in the RTS game (playing with 45 min. timer). But you have to extrapolate the problem to larger forces. Then I am afraid the pauses can become arbitrarily long while the commander flies around the battlefield trying to keep his forces together. And this is what I consider unrealistic: the fact that with larger forces the order delays most likely increase in an RTS setting, while in real life intermediate command levels would keep the forces going. The fact that the command delay is a function of the force size due to the limited capacity of the user is a give-away for a unrealistic game model. Best regards, Thomm

Yes, that would be perfect. Plus: full replay movie available at any time! Best regards, Thomm

Hmmmm. I know what is too much for me, for example. In the RTS wargame (name withheld intentionally) where you get 20 units and maps on average 540m square, I notice that when I perform wide flanking moves I concentrate on the flanking group and leave the rest of the battlegroup unobserved for minutes. Clearly, this is a result of the real-time character of the game, and not very realistic although one might argue that it offsets the God like abilities of the player a little bit - he can only be at one place at a time. That is not primarily a result of the number of units that are available but the large distances that have to be scrolled over and having to re-focus. Best regards, Thomm

I would also like some kind of continuous time capability in the new engine. Pausable, of course, at any time to give detailed orders PLUS (and that is something that I did not see in any game yet) the possibility to go back in time and review what happened at a certain location; kind of an instant replay which is not confined to turn intervals. This would avoid movement to contact phases that take an hour (wall-clock-time) just to move into attack positions. But I think that it is pretty clear that this is not going to happen, the reason being loss of scalability. With the turn-based solution the only real limit to force size is the patience of the player (or so it seems to me). Continuous time would certainly place some restrictions on force size that would be undesireable. Best regards, Thomm

I want a CMX2 game to last for an hour (wall-clock time) on average, two hours maximum. How is that for a difficult design goal!? Best regards, Thomm

Sorry to hear about your sickness! Hope you are getting well soon! This is a very beautiful mod! Personally, I would strongly enhance the lightness contrast between the hood and the sides and the wheel covers, after all we are in the desert (strong sunlight), but I understand that this is not in line with most of the CM graphics. The texture itself is perfect, I'd say. Best regards, Thomm PS: Nothing to do with the Kübelwagen, but the faces are too pink; kills immersion.

Will this lead to situations where soldiers virtually stare into the enemy's eyes and do not react because the LOS between the centers of mass of the squads is broken? And ... do you plan to accept such situations out of necessity or do you have a workaround? Best regards, Thomm

Another aspect of 1:1 that has not been discussed so far: PBEM file size. If the movie contains the states of all individuals at all times then those files will grow in size enormously! Best regards, Thomm

Thank God I am old enough to grasp the nostalgia in this line ... Was it 20 years ago that I tried to code something like this in BASIC ... ah the glory. But then again I tried to code a "game" where every soldier in a formation was represented by - hold your breath - a single pixel on a C64. And now we have Rome - Total War ... Best regards, Thomm

I completely second that, having seen it at work in a mod for another game (I have posted an AAR here: http://freedom.d-a-s.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=142 It adds a lot of convenience to be able to read the terrain from above! At the same time I assume it must be quite annoying to code contour lines in a aesthetically and technically convincing way ... the procedure I used is certainly not suitable for generating contour lines "on the fly". Best regards, Thomm