sbg2112

And everytime this comes up, I try to take the opportunity to plead that they not only add the full-movie feature, but that they do it right.... Please factor fog-of-war into the full-movie playback. Let me see things exactly as one side or the other saw them. Or let me be an impartial observer, but still somehow indicate which units are invisible or partially identified by their enemies. This way would make full-movies a real vehicle for studying tactics.

If JasonC writes a Strategy Guide, I'd buy it (even though I have no intention of buying CMAK).

For me, the real point of CMAK's release is the fact that now they can get on with the rewrite! So, to me CMAK is perfect -- let's move on!

I hope they do more than just play the individual turns back-to-back.... How bout factoring in fog-of-war? How bout introducing the notion of "observers"? In other words, for those of us who "like to watch", esp. when the opponents know what they're doing, let us be observers. In this mode, we get to see what both sides are doing -- without switching from one combatant to the other -- but with fog of war factored into the rendering. In other words, being omniscient, observers would see all units -- everything on both sides. However, units that aren't visible to the enemy would be somehow indicated as such using some gee-whiz patent-pending graphics... Perhaps semi-transparent, whatever. If I actually wanna see the field from one combatant's perspective, some sorta toggle would let me do that.... And if you can make this part of a free view-only client, think of the demo & marketing opportunities. Let people watch any battle, but ya pay to play.... I'm certain I haven't thought everything through, but that's the difference between a programmer and a poster.

Yeah, I've long advocated this as well. There are ways they could allow us geeks to add to CM without making it possible to cheat or hack their models. But I'm convinced they won't do it, and I respect that. It's one of those things that just seems to make perfect sense: They'd get a vibrant, thriving community of people adding things they could never get around to doing themselves, and your average CM player would get even more value out of the game. But my guess is that figuring out how they could do this is what's holding them back; they rightly want to protect the integrity of the game, and so this is something that at best winds up very far down on their list. For what it's worth, I arrived at these positions after spending the better part of a year working on a CM utility. It worked well enough for me, but taking it to the level of making it available for everyone else was just not something I had the time for and I'd exhausted my wrists. Plus, I lost interest in CM for a whole host of other reasons, although I hope to play it again when the rewrite comes out.... Combat Mission Control Note that I'm only mentioning this to give a sense of the kinds of things that could be added to CM that BFC could never get around to doing. I will not be releasing this.

Ingenious, but -- This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to see Battlefront actively embrace and enable. Seems to be any number of us geeks with skills, motivation, and time to add all kinds of things that will really add to CM's value but will always be peripheral to any particular release... I guess the idea is that during the engine rewrite, while slinging code, Charles could just say, "hmm, could the CM geeks use an interface here that wouldn't violate the game's integrity and wouldn't blow the schedule", and if so, give us hooks to add all kinds of value. Everybody wins, but of course, the devil's in them details somewhere..... I know Charles, if he reads this, is probly thinking, "yeah, right", but I think it could be done, even if only in a few places initially.... Anyway, thanks for the indulgence.......

I've spent more than a year toying with the idea of writing a proposal to BTS on this very topic. I think there's a huge opportunity to allow us off-duty hacks write all kinds of neat add-ons to CM, without opening up CM one bit. (I think we all understand -- and agree with -- the well-founded reasons for keeping CM "closed", in a sense.) However, all I've got right now are my notes on the idea; I've just figured if BTS hasn't already thought of it, then it's not worth doing. [ December 29, 2002, 12:23 PM: Message edited by: sbg2112 ]

Please, please, please, make sure the unit tables can actually be looked at. The main thing that would help would be to add grid lines -- even if faint ones -- to help preserve the columns. Also, maybe change the font or something.... Thanks!!!!

....which, in my opinion, makes the tables -- a good portion of the book -- nearly useless. This shoulda been caught, and the tables should have some grid lines (perhaps faint ones) to assist the eye. And the typos. This book feels like it's in "beta" -- the content is there, but all the "bugs" make it hard to see that.....

Say, this is a good idea.

Wouldn't this improve the visuals? I would think at the right transparency level the bases would still be eye-catching but a little less artificial-looking. (Frame rate, card capabilities, vram, yadda yadda yadd....)

CM:BB arrived yesterday and I was carping to a friend about how Quick Battles still dumped your forces along the edge. I know that's an old complaint, and that people have asked to have platoons, etc., kinda lumped together with the squads forward of their HQs etc. But how about this: Why not just let the AI place the units as if it were doing a setup? Nothing else would change: human commanders would still do their setup as usual, etc. The only thing that would be different is that you'd have some logical grouping (and even placement) of your units to start with, rather than the police lineups you currently start with....

All of this is why I've previously suggested letting us use the CTRL key settings for things like unit scale, trees, bases, roof visibilities, etc to set things up one way for the orders phase, and another way for the movie phase. In other words, the keys would work exactly as they do now, but the state would apply ONLY to the phase in which it was set. With this change, I might set it up so that bases are on during the orders phase, but off during the movie phase, etc. In some sense, BTS has already seen the wisdom of this: You can only see movement / targeting lines in the orders phase.

(Personally, I liked deanco's clipboard interface best of all! Of course, I mostly use the keys so I almost never see it.....) Speaking of interfaces, has anyone ever asked why they don't just get rid of the nav buttons on the right side? That would make the interface look a little cleaner, or give them more room for additional information....

"Is CMBB Gold yet?" It is to BTS. :cool:

Well, with my little utility to add terrain grids to CMBO tiles, I can have gridded grass within five minutes of installing CMBB. :cool: (Assuming of course, the terrain tiles are sequentially numbered.....) But I guess that won't count, since I'm not likely to release 'em. Grid your own grass, is what I say....

Well, Garry, you and I are neighbors here in Apex. Unfortunately, I can't make it. :confused: So why don't you kidn- :eek: , er, ahem, well, take some pictures or something. (And yes, my drama teacher did instruct me to emote when I speak. )

It would be tres kewel if CM could had a toggle that enabled this kind of rendering. Let the game engine figure out the vertical and horizontal surfaces, without requiring a massive mod effort. However, that's crazy talk best ignored until the rewrite, by which time I'm sure they'll be implementing fully dynamic lighting, with flares at night, etc. (Maybe that's why BTS hasn't had anything to say on this topic.....) In the meantime, as somebody sorta implied, perhaps the best the CM community can do is assemble a list documenting which BMPs can benefit from this and whether they're horizontal / vertical. With this, we could then apply your lighting technique to any set of MODs. Maybe CMMOS would be interested in adding that kind of function, so that you'd have a little checkbox somewhere that said "Apply George-III's lighting", with the lighting applied as the mods are copied into the CM BMP directory (assuming it does that sorta thing at some point).

Oh, c'mon, let's put an end to this right now. This wouldn't work because it would make the rest of CM's graphics look so bad. Seriously, after seeing this picture, all you've got left to do to convince me is to tell me where I get this stuff.... (The Tiger's road wheels do look a tad too dark at this distance....) By the way, how does it look on half-tracks? I wouldn't expect much of a difference.....

But let's not call it "5%" -- let's call it "full movie playback".

Good idea.... I'm gonna start using the rule and if there's any interesting outcomes as a result I'll post 'em....

Every time stuff like this comes up, BTS invariably starts mumbling about the amount of video memory such a feature would require. I've never had to program at that level, so I have to take 'em at their word. Guess we have to be patient until the average amount of video ram hits the point at which they can do this. (But I've never been able to reconcile this limit with my understanding of AGP -- after all, I thought the whole idea behind it was to allow the video card to store textures in system memory. Obviously, I'm missing something.)

Since QBs don't have briefings, why not list all the QB settings that were chosen in the scenario briefing?

(nevermind) [ April 18, 2002, 07:49 PM: Message edited by: sbg2112 ]