aka_tom_w
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Posts posted by aka_tom_w
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here's a link to the "Master Blaster"
looks like it could have potentialAt present, small numbers of XM-26 shotguns have been issued to US troops in Afghanistan. According to sources, the weapons have been well received by those that use them. To make matters better for our Armed Forces, the XM-26 attachment is planned to be compatible with the next American assault rifle - Heckler and Koch's XM-8. Now that is a weapon Ripley would be proud of.
-tom w
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the rounds in the "ready rack" on AFV's
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Is that correct?Originally posted by Hoolaman:Steve, am I right if I understand that a VBIED will appear out of nowhere as a newly spotted unit that will be graphically shown as a civilian car/truck flying towards you, and known to be a threat.
Theses VBIED's just materialize out of now where and blow up?
Just wondering.
-tom w
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From the blog:
I am afraid I don't get it :confused:The problem here is we aren't simulating the real life traffic patterns and real life driver decisions. The player, in either proposed design, controls the vehicle and can therefore unrealistically exploit things to his advantage in theory. With your example, let's say that the vehicle is visible and the TacAI is programmed to avoid a civilian vehicle instead of shooting it. Well, I'm the Syrian player... I have a Toyota with a family of 4 in it... I know this and I want the US player to lose some points... so I continually buzz a bunch of Strykers to get the TacAI swerving them all over the place. The US player then either has his vehicles being annoyed and distracted, or he blows the crap out of the car with the family in it. Either way the Syrian player has benefited unrealistically from the situation. And since the penalty for wiping out civilians would have to be extremely harsh in order to prevent the US player from whacking civilian stuff whenever he saw them "just in case", a gamey Syrian player could probably get the US player to lose the game simply by buzzing him with a non-combatant vehicle.Now, contrast that with my system...
(the Romulan Clocking Device System?)
There are no non-combatants, only combatants. If a Toyota Taxi (personnel carrier) is in the game, it's up to no good whether the US player sees it or not. Buzzing a bunch of Strykers will get it ID'd for sure and wiped out. No penalty for the US player, no benefit to the Syrian player. In fact, the Syrian player is now short a transport and has a minus score added to his total. So there is no incentive for gamey behavior. If the vehicle is a VIED then getting it close to Strykers is exactly what he wants to do, but not to annoy them like I wrote above. It's to blow them up! If the VIED gets into range then the Syrian player has succeeded and the US player appropriately penalized. If the VIED gets ID'd too soon and is shot up to all Hell, then the US player gets the points and the Syrian minus points.
The big problem with the other suggestion is that it requires the Syrian player to move around vehicles that are decoys. Otherwise the US player will know, without any doubts, that the Syrians have a vehicle that needs to be eliminated. The invisible unit concept requires no such action on the part of the Syrian player, no special action on the part of the US player, it requires no special coding of the OpAI to handle decoy runs, and does not introduce a concept that is different than IEDs and Spies.
My feeling is that your system is not bad, but when the work and potential flaws are corrected for it won't be substantially better than the system I proposed. It is possible, because of gamey tactics, to be less realistic even though it will take a lot more work. Since we don't have the time to mess around with this stuff, we have to go simple all else being equal. If my idea was the one with gamey potential, then we might have to go more complex, but the opposite appears to be the case. So the idea that I've tossed out is the one that offers a better return.
Is the game abstracting a chance that somehow, (and it appears to be out of control of EITHER the US or the Syrian player) that a "cloaked" VBIED will "sneak up" on a US vehicle or position and just blow up?
Neither player having any real in game control over what gets spotted and what does not?
What does the Syrian player need to know or do to decrease the chance of getting spotted?
What does the US player need to know or do to increase the chance of spotting the cloaked threat?
confused
-tom w
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Thanks for the post
fytinghellfish
From the blog:
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"I think will be very frustrating to players.<BFC Voice 2>
Which has been my point... you can't make VIEDs and IEDs less frustrating for the player and still have them be realistic
The whole reason why these things are such a problem is that they are SO difficult to deal with. Any feature that allows the US player to understand a) that the scenario contains a high probability of having such a unit and 
that allows him to react unrealistically to it, undermines the very thing that makes VIEDs and IEDs so deadly.If VIEDs and IEDs aren't frustrating, then we haven't simulated them correctly. Sorry guys, there is no way around this fundamental conundrum.
That voice sounds like Steve.
-tom w
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I was sort of looking forward to "Combat Mission - Med Evac" myself
Or my other favourite, Combat Mission - Recon Patrol
(tongue in cheek of course)
Thanks for the update Steve.
-tom w
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repeat post of a reasonable suggestion perhaps being considered by Steve and Charles...
This one is almost a year old...
Other Means
Member
Member # 11780
posted September 15, 2005 12:07 PM
Steve, can I reiterate my suggestion, which is abstracted enough to be do-able (IMHO and ready to be corrected) while enough to add the WIA/POW dynamic people seem to want?
State 1) When a soldier is wounded, they become immobile & broken. They are still targetable etc but cannot be moved or controlled by the player.
They are in this state for X time, say 3 mins. If they are still within command radius after this they become an "evac'ed" icon and are treated as recovered.
Recovered will mean they have Z chance of death vs WIA in the AAR/next battle.
State 2) If after X time they are outside of command radius but within Y distance of enemies, they become captured and are treated as now, i.e. able to move to the enemies rear. Or possibly change them to a captured icon.
State 3) If after X time they are out of command radius but are not within Y of enemies, they are treated as recovered, i.e. turn to an "evac'ed" icon, but now have a much greater chance of death vs recovery in the AAR/next battle.
ISTM that that will simulate as closely as possible the correct behaviour without over complicating it. This does not take into account the possible state where a WIA and solider are trying to occupy the same space, but I was thinking the live soldier would automatically displace the wounded in the terrain feature.
Can I add that when the WIA becomes captured by the enemy, the player still sees only the evac icon, thereby keeping FOW for hidden enemies. In the AAR the evac icon will show "captured".
-Other Means
Reply:
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Battlefront.com
Administrator
Member # 42
posted September 15, 2005 04:34 PM
It's not a heated argument from my side. You just have to keep clear that new possibilities exist but so do limitations. Hardware, programming, art, other design issues, etc. all have to be taken into consideration. So in theory what you are picturing is possible, it just isn't practical. That's all. Tons of things are not practical though possible, and perhaps even desirable, so don't feel bad
And to make sure I was understood... the abstracted suggestion by Other Means is being considered. No telling what kinds of problems Charles will discover with it
Steve
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I was never actually sure where the end result of this discussion settled out...Originally posted by Battlefront.com:We haven't decided yet. The problem is one of consistency. If we show wounded then players are going to want to do things with wounded. To do that we have to implement a fairly significant bunch of features to simulate all of that. In theory we want to, but we're not sure if that is something we can bite off for the first release.
Steve
Steve says:
"We are not simulating the MV (Medical Vehicle) or the NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) variants. We've discussed how we're handling casualties in detail a few months ago so hopefully a search will pull up the thread/s.
Steve"
Where is the thread with the final word on this?
Just wondering
-tom w
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Maybe this question is too technical
but it is a good one:
"Though I gather than Action Spots are going to be more dynamic than a fixed hexagonal grid (are they going to overlap, for example?)"
Action Spots are 8m x 8m thats a pretty big area for an LOS check on a map IMHO but what do I know?
Its a good question...
Are they going to overlap?
Such that they would touch sides or corners and over lap a whole lot.
Maybe that is not really relevant.
-tom w
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Hi Steve!Originally posted by Battlefront.com:I've only played around with the new spotting a little bit so far because there is no AI at the moment so the enemy isn't moving around. But I can tell you that it is neat when Unit A spots an enemy unit and Unit B can't target it because it can't see it.
Steve
Please keep us posted,
...the truly hard core fans here can't wait to hear and read more about this critically important feature. (i.e. Relative Spotting)
Thanks so much for the update!
-tom w
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Found this on the BBC and thought it might be interesting here:Originally posted by Vader's Jester:Ooooh. We get to plant IEDs in CM:SF? Can we remote detonate them, or will they be more like a mine?
A short interesting article..
with a nice diagram.
-tom w
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sounds great
needs a bump
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From the exclusive interview:
Shockforce will soon enter beta stage officially. Progress is slower than anticipated, but what’s new? At the moment we’re more worried to become OBE (overtaken by events) in our hypothetical near-future scenario of a war in Syria to be honest…Besides the known games, we also have a couple more surprises up our sleeves! Both are games which have not yet been announced, and at least one of these will be BIG news. And if I say BIG, I mean unbelievable freaking huge news. If all goes well, we’ll spill the beans already this month. Only so much: it’s WW2.
ACG: Speaking of Shockforce, can you tell us how it will be different than the previous versions and name a few features which will bring the series into the modern era? It isn’t even listed as "In Development" on your website. Should we take that to mean it still has a long way to go?
After you said that, we listed it immediately as “in development.”
As I mentioned above, we’re hoping to announce a beta formally pretty soon. So you can say that it’s a long way still I guess before we’re gold as we’re just leaving alpha, but then again the (by far) bigger stretch is already behind us.
CM: Shockforce will be totally different from the previous versions. It’s a totally new game, designed and coded from the ground up, and won’t share a single line of code with the first three CM titles. In a nutshell, what we’ve done is take the experience and the good stuff from the first CM games, digest it, and then design a completely new game with the goal of delivering the best tactical battlefield simulation out there. As such, I guess, the only thing that didn’t change from when Steve and Charles set out to make CMBO, is the goal. Everything else is different.
The new engine allows us to take advantage of all the new technology out there which wasn’t around when CMBO was made. From motion-captured human animations (for CMBO all animations had to be hand-coded! Motion-capturing didn’t even exist for games), to all sorts of new 3D card features (CMBO was made to the specs of the very first 3D video cards!), to an improved set of physics, ballistics and human simulations (like morale) in real time. People who are expecting simply a revamped CMBO or who think that we’re going to take the easy route and simply clone one of the existing RTS clickfest games couldn’t be more wrong.
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Well
I opened the thread because the game CMSF is Syria Vs US right?
So we are seeing some tactics (maybe) in the current conflict between Israel and their enemies, that might not be dissimiliar to what might happen if the US invaded Syria.
Here's the main point. After an the regular military is destroyed by or surrenders to the invading force what's left? Insurgency and terrorism (terrorist tactics). They have said that they aren't interested in modeling anything like thar part of the invasion or the occupartion period of the "war" once the insurgency begins. OK....
But about this:
So the US invades Syria and all of the Syrian regular army "declokes" (or more accurately clokes), all of them take of their uniforms and they ALL enmasse become insurgents. Then what? I am loath to look back at Vietman but that is sort of what war as become now a days. The enemy does not wear a uniform and is VERY hard to identify unless they are shooting at you.
One minute that "military aged man" is a non combatant "citizen" but the minute you turn your back on him he picks up a weapons and shoots at you? This concept does NOT bode well for wargames because thats not really fun to play, and Steve says that HARDEST thing to do is model into the game civilians and non combatants that turn into enemy combatants when you are not looking.
I guess I am just rambling on here..
carry on... sans the politics (Thanks KwazyDog!)
-tom w
[ July 16, 2006, 06:41 PM: Message edited by: aka_tom_w ]
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thanks for the news update
very interesting:
"The drone's TV camera makes it relatively easy to mount such an attack, Pike said.
"It's not bigtime rocket science to put explosives on the thing and then use the TV camera to home in on the ship," he said."
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Ok then I guess somebody knows what they are doing over there...BEIRUT (AP) — Hezbollah rammed an Israeli warship with an unmanned aircraft rigged with explosives Friday, setting it ablaze after Israeli warplanes smashed Lebanon's links to the world one by one and destroyed the headquarters of the Islamic guerrilla group's leader.The attack on the warship off Beirut's Mediterranean coast was the most dramatic incident on a violent day in the conflict that erupted suddenly Wednesday and appeared to be careening out of control despite pleas from world leaders for restraint on both sides.
I would not like to comment on the "politics" of the current situation but this is clearly an expample of assymetrical warfare that has proven effective today.
Are we seeing any tactics in this conflict that might show up in the CMSF game? (wondering)
Your comments?
-tom w
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"With an M1, however, most shots will blow through the armor whereever you manage to hit the target. "
Isn't that kind like a paradigm shift in thinking.
We may be used to thinking in WWII terms were this was only really possible with the German 88 at close range: "most shots will blow through the armor whereever you manage to hit the target."
So the whole aiming at the turrent ring in modern armour combat is completely irrlevant... (as posted).
"With an M1, however, most shots will blow through the armor whereever you manage to hit the target."
-tom w
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this is what he says:
Posted by: Battlefront .com 6/30/2006Martin has been bugging me to write something for this new blog thingy we have going. I guess I gotta do what he says. He is German after all (or Polish, he can't make up his mind!). Plus, the new pattern of June Monsoons that we have here in the Northeast US (you soccer moms out there, keep using those SUVs to buy a quart of milk!) has ruled out lazing in the sun all day like we game designers are prone to doing.
It's why games are always late, doncha know! Speaking of that, I'll move onto the topic at hand; Combat Mission: Shock Force development update.
Many of you out there have been with us long enough to know that we have a hard time getting anything out of the oven until we're 110% happy with the way it looks, smells, and tastes. Or something like that. Well, considering this is the game engine we plan on using for 5 or more games, this is not the time to change our ways. The side effect of this is things taking a lot longer than we imagined or would like. But the good news is we're just about at Beta. Probably 2 weeks more.
What does Beta mean for you all? Not much, other than I'll probably post some screenshots of some sort in the middle of July. I wanted to do it in the middle of June, but thanks to ATI's well known attention to detail when it comes to their drivers, that wasn't possible.
Charles has a video card that works and Dan and I have ATI cards. In order to get CM working well enough with smoke and dynamic lighting on my computer, Charles had to also acquire an ATI card so he could experience the broken graphics for himself. He did that this week (it involved buying a new system) and spent 2 full days working around ATI's brilliant "features" contained in the driver. He's almost done, then he can move on to finishing off the user interface work and bingo... I can take some shots for you guys.
The in-game art is still pretty rough at this point. Since this is a new game engine we've been spending all our time making sure everything works right before going ahead and doing a bunch of art. Back in my previous life of corporate game development they never understood this.
3 artists would crank out a small mountain of artwork only to have it thrown out a couple of weeks later when the development team figured out things weren't going to work that way after all. While it would be nice to have the money to burn on wasted efforts like this, we don't so we have to be smarter about how we do things. That means the game looks like an early Alpha even though it is nearing Beta, as opposed to the corporate games that look like Beta but are in fact early Alpha.
The dirty secret is we both ship based on what we call the game. You can figure out what that means on your own
Well, I guess that about does it for my first Blogfront entry. Hope you found it entertaining. If you also find it enlightening, so much the better. For me, I'm just glad to get that German (or Polish) guy off my back. Hint to all you budding entrepreneurs out there... if you are a slacker by nature, don't hire a German (or apparently Polish) guy to run your company. Instead, go for someone who is happiest to let things be. Like an Australian. Dan (aka KwazyDog) NEVER bugs me for anything. Hmmm... maybe it is time for a management reshuffle at Battlefront? Hmmmm....
Steve
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speaking of scenarios....
Here's a crazy idea to help promote the game....
(note, I did say it was a CRAZY idea!)
Lets say there is a great demo scenario that lets the player ONLY play the America side No choice. The AI is played by the Syrians only. BUT like in the real life the Jessica Lynch story their/your convoy is off course and lost and ambushed. It is an unwinnable scenario and the only good way out of it is to surrender.
BUT wait.....
if you BUY the full version of the game you can send in a fully equipped Stryker Brigade and rescue them. In another scenario.
Since there is nothing else really to talk about with regard to the new game I just thought I would post some nonsense about the demo scenario and one of them should be completely unwinnable by the America player JUST to keep things interesting!
-tom w
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or they could just keep ignoring us because they are busy.....
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LtCol West
Thanks for the insight!
interesting post and comment.
-tom w
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Hell yeah!Originally posted by MikeyD:There would be some loud weeping & wailing on the board if BFC didn't jump directly into a WWII N.W. Europe title following the release of Shock Force. Awhile ago the consensus was that 'we' wanted to see (in this order) CMSF; WWII European Theater title; CMSF expansion pack; European theater expansion pack. And by then the glaciers will have melted and we'll go back to living around campfires.
Dirka Dikra DIRKA!!!
P.S. Team America FYI
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YES YES YESOriginally posted by samurai man:I'd happily pay $50-$100 for a CMAK upgrade to ETO with king tigers, M36 jacksons, etc, larger maps, follow the leader command.
this thread should have a NEW title
me too!
seriously!
The whole reason why these things are such a problem is that they are SO difficult to deal with. Any feature that allows the US player to understand a) that the scenario contains a high probability of having such a unit and 
that allows him to react unrealistically to it, undermines the very thing that makes VIEDs and IEDs so deadly.
1:1 representation and casualties
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
I don't think we are going to see little sprites doing this.
I suspect that Steve's comment (above, yours in bold) was in reference to what actually happens in Real Life, NOT what we will see in the game.
He has been pretty clear there wll be a substantial form of abstraction in CM:SF dealing with casualties.
(I think)
-tom w