hoolaman
-
Posts
1,929 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by hoolaman
-
-
I'm completely happy with the malfunctioning radio explanation if anybody from BFC would confirm that this is something they have featured. However, I don't think anyone has. It only seems to be something that gets mentioned whenever there are C2/out of contact issues raised on these boards.
It was 100% confirmed by battlefront in the beta forums that a radio link can fail for a few turns.
Of course there is absolutely no UI to help you and nothing mentioned in the manual about this, but unfortunately that shouldn't surprise anyone
. -
Martin, I know it is difficult to tell from the screenshot, but if you click the pic to upsize it, you can see that the LOS tool is actually pointing to the area I am referring to. I would never doubt the possible inability to see something amongst the wheat.
I still am not very clear on exactly where your tank is trying to see. Is it the road beyond the wheat or before the wheat? It sure looks to me like your LOS line goes right into the middle of the field.
As for your general point, the LOS tool is not really a LOS tool at all and should more accurately be called an "area fire tool" when used on terrain. BFC claimed that the LOS tool was redundant but there are plenty of ways that the two functions differ (unarmed vehicles is a big one).
When you trace a line with it the game is trying to shoot at the ground and any obstruction such as wheat or a fence or whatever that blocks your view of the ground below/beyond will show a blocked LOS. BUT, if a tall unit appears in those squares, it is like adding one or two elevation heights and this unit might be visible where the ground underneath is not, so it becomes rather complicated.
There are times when a tile somewhere in the middle blocks LOS when it appears it shouldn't but these are few and far between for me.
It's worth mentioning again, you can test LOS from a future waypoint by selecting the waypoint and using the target tool.
-
Well thank you, but that doesn't really answer my question.
Like look at at this aerial photo:
I've picked this one randomly.
I'd say Bocage can be seen clearly in this pic, and theres rather field. The individual patters look very distinct, but don't look like they were seperated in any way, and my question would be how to recreate those in the CMBN Editor.
I mean I don't know a whole lot about farming, but it would seem rather odd to place a, say 20x100m strip of Crop2 directly adjactant to small strip of Yellow grass and next to this one a strip of Crop6. It looks just strange, but from these pictures (going after the strong contrast of colors) one would assume that this is the way its done.
Have a look at the same spot on Google earth and I think you'll be surprised how similar it looks with the patchwork of colours.
It could be crops are sowed on different days, or partially harvested, or even the direction of the plow rows that make them catch the light differently in an aerial picture. Some of the fields could be fallow or planted with legumes, or simply left for pasture.
Even within a larger field there can be banks (maybe old bocage) that a farmer can't plow through. That may dictate the direction he plows in or maybe he may sow a different crop either side.
The smaller size of the patches in 1944 may reflect on how much land could be worked over in a day, and remember there is the possibility manpower shortages only saw a smaller percentage of fields sown.
Divide your fields with earthen banks or stone walls. Leave some as grass, some with crops, some with weeds etc. Nobody will tell you you are wrong, just make it interesting.
-
Not sure you are correct about CMX1 and holding positions. I lost a few flags to crews from KOd vehicles hiding in the undergrowth in CMX1 - buggers!
He is right, flags in CMx1 could be contested: [?] or held by either side. An objective in CMx1 was a point but must have projected some kind of zone around it which could be won or lost depending on the weight of forces nearby, not just a binary "kill every single dude".
If you lost a flag to an enemy crew, you must not have had it under sufficient control.
-
Yes the manual is lacking some really basic stuff.
If you own the full game (I think you can use the editor in the demo too), the best way to get your brain around it is to place blocks of each terrain in the editor and just look at what they look like. Most are quite distinctive, and I guess the theory is that the types of terrain should behave like they would in real life.
Bocage is impassible to any unit without a pre-placed gap or a specialist unit to make a gap.
PS I am colorblind too and that isn't the issue, bocage gaps are hard for everyone to find.
-
Yes if you are purchasing forces you can directly attach a HMG to each platoon and that is the best way to do it if this is how you like to set things up.
Personally I usually leave two HMGs where they can still see their own HQ and advance another. They shouldn't usually be right at the bleeding edge of a firefight anyway so their morale levels aren't usually too big of an issue.
A bit of a shame that you can't do this dynamically, I'm pretty sure in CMx1 a command link would become available from a HW to a platoon HQ dynamically.
-
150mm Japanese
-
Yes they certainly become more detailed, when I bumped the standard textures from 1024 to 2048 it was noticeably crisper.
Now of course, there are two downsides to this: firstly, because the textures are much larger it's more difficult to edit them (the .xcf for the main grass texture is 220mb and while editing I was seriously running out of ram and running on the HDD) and also it has real consequences for performance (a large map will stutter occasionally due to struggling with the memory. Since then I have lowered the resolution on a few "minor" textures and it seems to be fine.
Yeah I think this is the reason the far LOD textures are so small in the game. They are repeated literally hundreds of times and all displayed on screen at the same time.
-
You're making a fairly dizzying number of largely fact-less assumptions here. And ignoring my assertion that comparing the inner workings of CM's engine to other games (unless you've been an engine programmer on one of them, in which case your assumptions would probably be different) is going to lead to your being... wrong.
Quite a lot of users have reported that systems that cannot handle the game in RT can handle WEGO better.
I think the key word here was "paused".
-
The only way to truly understand the deepest hidden meaning of the Peng Challenge Thread is to search the forums for "peng+challenge+thread" and read every post therein.
Beware, the wisdom and meaning are elusive and esoteric.
-
The tank/zook problem is very straightforward. The tank has been sitting in the same spot for at least 10 turns. It is visible to me from a spotting unit on another hill. When I moved the zooks up there the previous turn I could use the target LOS and see to the bottom of the cut; right down the face of the cut under my teams and all over the area where the tank was sitting. But they could not see it. And yet when they stood up to move left and right (which they did not do - just stood there) the tank turned its turret and killed them.
Could be something to do with an old and known bug with units peeking over cliffs/crests. Apparently it is a limitation of the tile system or somefink.
And I know what you mean with the dozens of tiny little annoying things in comparison to CMx1. Usually none game breaking on its own, but enough of them can make me pretty frustrated that this engine is held back by a very long list of seemingly fairly minor tweaks.
-
No the masts don't work at all, but the sensors should give some advantage. The German Fennek is in the same boat. Since they are very vulnerable vehicles it is a big ommision imo.
-
Gee, someone is playing the game at considerably over the scale it was intended to be played and has complaints. I'm shocked! I can't recall CMx1 being much of a walk-in-the-park playing more than a battalion on a six square kilometer map either. But I forgot my rose-tinted glasses back at home.
Gee, MikeyD delivers another unneccesary smart-arse comment and manages to completely miss the point...
-
IIRC it was something about the discarding sabot not discarding right. A rod with half a sabot stuck on it is less than aerodynamic.
-
Interesting too the notes about the poor accuracy of APDS in that time.
20% hit ratio at 800 yards on a static target? The test firing indicated that they couldn't get enough accurate hits on a static Panther to make a conclusion.
-
Only overhead info I can think of off hand, that CMX1 had, was hit texts...and CMBN has those.
Mord.
CMx1 had an option called "labels" with a text status like "routed" "low ammo" hovering above the units and displayed in various colours. It was quite useful but hella ugly and I don't think many people used it.
-
Forget the Tiger at 52 min, at 52min there's a Dead Cow!!!!1!
Cromwells at 15:15.
Thanks for posting.
-
The "problem" with these spotting issues (and a lot of other issues at the moment) is that we are down to the point of tinkering around the edges.
This can mean that what one person subjectively thinks is too easy there may be a dozen others who think it is ok or even too hard. It is pretty hard to prove/justify making a change to BFC without a LOT of statistical info that shows terrain x,y,z or unit z,y,z to be a real problem.
Doing this is extremely time consuming and even the beta testers do not always get a chance to do this kind of work. My suggestion, if you want a change, provide scientific statisitcal evidence. Isolate as many factors as you can and vary one at a time, then do it 1000 times.
-
I don't think the trees themselves provide anything like a "cloud" of concealment like they did in CMx1, so any LOS obscuration by the trees will work both ways, though you can set up sort of a keyhole LOS to your own advantage.
The best concealment will for sure be IN the brush tiles, but Like PLM says, a human oppo will give any isolated woods tiles some HE lovin.
-
But recently I read here in the forum that bugs in CMBN won't be fully fixed until the next game about the bulge comes out (did I get that right?).
What do you mean by "fixed"?
The game as it stands is working as designed, there are some bugs still, but these will be patched long before any new title comes out.
New features that won't be patched into CMBN but might go into a new title (I'll believe it when I see it) include some things that have been omitted from this new game that were in the old games:
Terrain Fire
Flame throwing units
Ground to Air combat. (Consequently a bunch of AA units were also just left out)
Detailed Unit info
Covered Arc Armour
Move to Contact and Hunt orders or the equivalent functionality.
TCP/IP Wego
If the non-onclusion of any of these bothers you a lot then don't buy the game. Personally I prefer to enjoy the game for what it IS, rather than for what it isn't.
-
This has been the case since day one, BFC are aware of the issue and have never fixed it and development of CMSF is now over.
-
At least if you so wish you can avoid eating aspartame. That's always been the case as it must be labelled.
Certainly it is impossible to test every combination of factors, and I think many people would be surprised just how flimsy the research can be behind the longer term health effects of medicines and food additives. Long term studies are very expensive to do and controlling for just about everything someone does in their life is near impossible. And it is true that in many cases some vested interests are fighting their own propaganda war.
The only one of these sort of things I'm really against is water fluoridation, because you cannot avoid it and it is not really necessary.
-
There is no AAA in the game because ground to air fire wasn't seen as a high enough priority to code into the game. The guns weren't included for ground fire role either because supposedly people would complain they weren't firing at planes.
Ditto for anything that shoots fire.
No idea about the tractor for the 88s.
75mm and 50mm German PaK are in the game. There are no onboard versions of indirect artillery howitzers like there were in CMBO. Not a big deal since they shouldn't be near the front anyway, but nice to have for simulating overrun rear areas.
-
What's the terrain on the side of the road?
Careless use of mud because it looks nice could cause this, and if it is under a bocage tile it might not be immediately obvious that is what you are looking at. (I see the screenshot provided doesn't appear that way, but it can happen).
Also I think CM is very forgiving of wheeled vehicles cross country performance. Wheels are fundamentally meant to go on roads.
.
Frustrating discrepancy between LOS tool and 3D environment?
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
But you can use this to move your tanks to a point where the game grants you LOS to the place you want. Don't fight the game, use the tools available to get the result you want.
That's just not how it works.
The coarse LOS checks in the game are actually very simple. LOS can be traced from only a few heights and only in pretty simple ways. The LOS heights are roughly 0m (ground), 0.5m (prone), 1m (kneeling), 2m (standing + jeeps etc.), 3m (tanks) and I think there is a higher one used by some tall trucks in CMSF. LOS is only ever from a whole action spot to another action spot.
Imagine a pole stuck in the middle of every tile with these height lines marked on it and that is the LOS grid.
Infantry teams trace LOS from the HIGHEST MAN whether prone, kneeling or standing. So your gun team takes its LOS from the action spot and the highest man, not the gun. Guns don't have eyes.
A tank trying to check LOS on the ground will always take its LOS from ~3m to 0m. If a wall or some tall grass or some wheat gets in the way your LOS will be denied. If another tank appears on the exact same tile, suddenly the LOS will trace from 3m to 3m.
If LOS is granted there are some finer checks that take place that I don't understand very well. If LOS is not granted, that is the end of the story.
Best to make peace with the fact that the target/LOS tool has some limitations and works in a particular way.
I have never seen non-reciprocal LOS, and due to the simplicity of the system I don't think it can happen. However it is very possible to not SPOT something that you could theoretically have LOS to.