David Aitken

Wow, entrails and all. Looks tasteful. And of course the Jerries are mysterious shades of grey and black. Those two bars for each tank – those wouldn't be Shields and Armour would they? Can you get powerups? =P

I just inflicted a lot of damage on an opponent's platoon in Tall Pines with direct fire from a 2" mortar, and finished them off with a Vickers. Maybe you need to look at your tactics. David

Treeburst155 wrote: > Squeak urk mumfle rarg umph What was that? There's a weird echo in here.

Moriarty wrote: > [...] TAUNT LIKE YOU GOTTA PAIR!* > (* the aforementioned exhortation of course does not apply to the women who occasionally frequent this den of iniquity.) – What would happen if one had "got to pair" and was unable to satisfy this urge? – How can you "occasionally frequent" a given place? You visit often but not very? Or you're there all the time but not usually? – That depends what kind of a "pair" you're talking about.

Topic discussed recently in this thread: B&W Mod! In my opinion, a black-and-white option is a bad idea because (1) it propagates the idea that the Second World War was fought in black-and-white, and (2) from a practical point of view, colour is a major visual recognition factor, and the game is more difficult to play in black-and-white. Good for movies, where the director can use it to artistic effect, but no use in a computer game. On a Mac you'd switch to Grayscale either from the Control Strip or the 'Monitors' Control Panel. I'm not quite as sure about Windows, but you'd presumably find 'Control Panel' in your Start menu and open the 'Monitor' icon. David

My ISP is Demon Internet (www.demon.net) and I am very happy with the service and reliability. A couple of months ago they brought out their Surftime package, which basically means that if your telephone company is BT, you can give them both 20 quid a month and get free internet phone calls. (You don't want to know what my phone bills used to amount to.) If your telephone company isn't BT you'll have to wait until BT unbundles its local loops (ie. opens them up to competitors) which, with a bit of help from the government, is scheduled to happen sometime before hell freezes over. David

Sgt. Steiner wrote: > The vehicles and terrain all look awesome, but then when you put those stick men in, it really ruins the effect. Enhancing the realism of the soldier models would have exactly the same effect as multiplying the number of soldiers – the polygon count would go through the roof, and your computer would grind to a halt. It so happens that you can texture a couple of boxes and end up with a realistic vehicle or building. Soldiers are far more complex, so at the moment they cannot be visually realistic. Personally, I have never been bothered about the soldier models at all. Sure, they're not as fancy-looking as the characters in Unreal or Quake, but there are far more of them in CM. This means that the polygon count would be too high if you put Quake characters in a CM context, but more importantly, in order to keep an eye on all of your soldiers you can't spend all your time zoomed in to one or two of them. I rarely zoom in at all, so for my purposes the soldiers are great. It is just the case that CM, being modelled in 3D, allows you to zoom right in to the point where you notice that things could be more realistic. But you can hardly fault it. If you compare it to Quake, sure, it's not quite as impressive, but that comparison is irrelevant for the aforementioned reasons. Close Combat is a good comparison. First of all, orientate the camera in CM so that it looks like CC. It looks remarkably similar, except that the terrain is more rigid and less varied. But what else can you do in CC? You can zoom in, and examine all the nice pixels. If you could zoom in as far as you can in CM, the result would be ugly and functionless. And you can't reorientate the camera at all. What I am getting at is, Combat Mission is pushing the envelope. It has taken wargaming into First-Person Shooter territory. The problem is, people then start to compare the graphical realism to First-Person Shooters. That will only be a fair comparison when Quake allows you to have 100 people running around the battlefield at once, and allows you to zoom out and hover over the battlefield, watching these 100 people fighting from a distance. David

The flashes were in Oni long before they took the blood out. I gather it was a problem to make blows visually connect with your opponent, so they introduced flashes to tell you whether your blow caused damage or was blocked. The flashes are not a direct substitute for blood. As for Bungie's views and their integrity, I imagine blood would have stayed in if the game were not being passed on to Gathering Of Developers once it is finished. David

The 1.1 patch was mainly to introduce TCP/IP two-player games. There are a few other tweaks and fixes, but it's not supposed to have any "visible" changes. David New map!

Just a note on standards vs. competition. Competing companies must either adhere to standards, or produce a product which is so much better than the competition that it creates a new standard. Otherwise they will go out of business. I hope no-one would, after consideration, claim that allowing monopolies is a good idea purely for the sake of standards. Of course, universal standards make our lives easier. I would not deny that there are enough things to worry about without having to accept further nuisances because it's supposedly better for society. But it is. Nothing is ever concrete, which is a pain, but it illustrates that we are forever advancing and making progress. A world where everything was simple and straightforward and as we expected would be a very primitive world. David New map!

Corey Tamás talks about realism, and how if people wanted blood in Oni because it would be realistic, they would be ignoring all the inherently unrealistic aspects of the game. This is in stark contrast with CM, where realism is the goal. However, CM does not simulate individual soldiers (and that is another debate). Unless individual soldiers are modelled – which they will not be anytime soon, if ever – then blood is irrelevant. David New map!

Model walks into shot, dressed in military overalls with leather helmet and goggles, covered in oil and grease and soaked with sweat After a hard day in the Sherman, my skin feels dry and taut. cut to moving diagram of skin surface All this grease and oil clogs up my pores, and my combat effectiveness is reduced. cut to shot of product But new Super Pershing changes all that. With its unique fast-acting formula, Super Pershing puts an end to my internal armour flaking and leaves me feeling fresh and confident. cut to shot of model fraternising with French girls Super Pershing. Clinically proven to put an end to the menace of Mk.V Panther and the discomfort of Mk.IV Tiger! closing product shot

Polar wrote: > I want to have a better idea of the actual effect of my fire (or theirs for that matter!). Unless you have Fog Of War switched off, you will not know the effects of your fire on the enemy regardless of graphical realism. CM is a squad-level game – you're not supposed to see individual casualties. You can, though – just click on a squad and keep an eye on the numbers in the information panel. Also, a squad will 'twitch' when it takes a casualty. David

If anyone sees God, please point him in my direction. I owe him a good kicking. In other news... Nob/1 and MaxiPack have been given their final warning by DoorMatt, so we can count the seconds until they're both banned. If anyone sees whichever moron it was who invented electronics, please point him in my direction. I owe him a good kicking. David

Just wait a sec, you've all got your priorities WAY wrong. Mauser Markus raises an important point, in that the tracers look like bright yellow fence posts. They should indeed glow like real tracers and leave a glare trail. I also think they should leave a little puff of smoke when they hit the ground, and maybe singe the grass a bit. The individual fragments of a grenade should also be modelled, as should empty cartridge cases, and of course blood and damage is another issue altogether. We should be able to see soldiers' expressions, so we can tell if Pvt. John has got a Dear John letter (poor guy, he gets a lot of those) and is thus unfit for combat. Most importantly of all, the game will be irredeemably unfinished without bump-mapping and ray-tracing. I expect to see lens flare when I'm looking towards the sun or at a bright explosion. With these improvements Combat Mission would at last be a game worth playing. David New map!

First of all, if anyone is new to this subject, please read the following thread: A Case For Full Squad Representation Remember it's not just a case of polygon counts. If we see every soldier, there's no point unless every soldier is acting realistically. That means a heck of a lot more programming on BTS's behalf, and the in-game AI computation involved will have a considerable hit on your computer, on top of the huge demand of the extra polygons. Speaking from a personal perspective, I HATE low framerates with a passion. Sure, you could theoretically run a game with X more polygons on a machine running at Y megahertz, but you're going to have to set your resolution down low to get a decent framerate. The first-person shooter crowd are continually churning out more graphically demanding games, meaning that your computer is never quite fast enough to run them smoothly. As Mr. Clark points out, wargame enthusiasts own, on average, slower computers than your average twitch-game junkie, and the market is not big enough for the likes of BTS to risk alienating those who don't wish to, or cannot, shell out for new hardware every few months. We'll maybe get 1:1 soldier representation when (a) the computers owned by the average wargame enthusiast are a heck of a lot faster than they are now, ( BTS decide to make CM a soldier-level game rather than the squad-level game it is now, and © they are able to devote the time to programming it. David New map!

Enter ericgorr stage left EG: Support GameRanger you punks! Enter Madmatt stage right MM: Sorry, we won't be supporting third-party TCP/IP services in the immediate future. EG: You don't know your facts! Do some research! MM: Sorry, we don't have time just now. EG: Yes you do! Support GameRanger you punks! MM: Look, we're busting our asses trying to finalise the TCP/IP patch. EG: Don't be stupid, it's probably easy! Do some research! Enter Charles stage right CM: Sorry, we might look into this in the future, but we don't have any time just now. EG: Yes you do, you punks! MM: Unscrews ericgorr's head and gives it a shake ::tinkle tinkle:: Ooo, there's something in there! Reaches inside and pulls out... ericgorr's inner Croda! MM: Hey, is it you making this guy such a knucklehead? IC: No Madmatt sir, I've been trying to get out! There's an awful echo in there! EG: Talking through backside Support GameRanger you punks! Repeat ad lib

Chupacabra wrote: > As if that part of the country wasn't bad enough what with the royals running around in it, the English decide to build a big plastic city on top of it as well. I think you'll find that is the Danish bridgehead. (There aren't any Danes around here we can slap around a bit, are there?) We've been trying to push them back into the North Sea, but so far they have taken little damage from the bombardment of European Union directives alleging that Lego bricks should be classed as offensive weapons.

Blaise Pascal wrote: > Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. So that's why I was never any good at it. Emma, stop toying with Croda. Can't you see the poor child is too young to understand, and you're only going to end up hurting him. I think we should all take every opportunity to encourage Croda to stop playing with his Lego bricks and go out and explore the Real World™. (Not to say that there's anything wrong with Lego bricks, they are of sound educational and developmental value and were recently voted #1 toy by parents.) That way we can lock him out, and his sickly gurglings over the Scotswoman with the nationality crisis will cease to distract us from our paranoid delusions. David Real World™ is a trademark of Germanboy GMBH. Croda® is a wholly owned subsidiary of PawBroon Corporation. Registered offices London, Paris, New York, Cambuslang. ------------------ Also I would just like to say to David that your as thick headed as a pull of stout. – jshandorf

Colonel_Deadmarsh wrote: > Isn't it funny Dave how you always chime in when I write something YOU don't like. Why don't you do us all a favor from now on and practice what you preach. The only way I could "always chime in" when you write something I don't like, is if I were to trawl the board for your posts, something which – you may be upset to hear – I do not regard as a good way to spend my time. When I do pass comment, I make an effort to state my thoughts clearly and concisely, instead of just slinging a retort which sounds clever but is otherwise meaningless and irrelevant. David ------------------ Also I would just like to say to David that your as thick headed as a pull of stout. – jshandorf

Scott Clinton wrote: > PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE keep me entirely out of any discussion involving Mr. Kelly. I have done my best to avoid him at every turn. I avoid mentioning him by name in any reference...Hell, I even just stopped coming around here! Then, I come back a few times and this crap is still stinking up the forum! I don't post about him on the newsgroups nor do I slander him in emails (I'll leave that type of behavior to him). > I want absolutely no association with him whatsoever. Can I be more plain than that???? I have heard very similar words from Fionn. It's one person's word against another, so unless anyone knows both Fionn and Scott and understands the truth of the situation, I suggest we leave the matter alone. David

Colonel_Deadmarsh wrote: > What I said about the CC series has nothing to do with CM so it's preposterous for you to say what you did. People seem to like slinging the term "preposterous" around whenever someone says something they don't like. What MantaRay said was perfectly relevant. David

Mace wrote: > Besides David, you could never be an Australian. If you were you would contravene our prime rule: no pooftas Huh, I've got a mind to forget a nice little quote I picked up a while ago concerning the rash of litigation in America which is now seeping across the Atlantic. The British whinge; Americans sue. (Australians say "No worries, mate!" and buy everyone a beer.) That said, you can never be forgiven for Neighbours and Home And Away. David

iggi wrote: > Have two go buttons. I hate to say it, but this actually makes a lot of sense. It's like the safety on a bomb (see Dr. Strangelove). It would be far less annoying than a dialogue, because a dialogue makes you feel like an idiot, whereas just pressing two buttons rather than one has a nice military feel about it. I'm not asking for this, but if anything were ever done then this would be my vote. David New map!

Seanachai wrote: > Who can forget the scene where he extends the hand of friendship to Aitkin, a failed Scot Now that's a stooping a bit low mister, even by your standards. I may not be much of a Scot, but it's hardly fair of you to accuse me of being Australian.