patboivin

Of course he doesn't have his copy of his game, I don't have one either so I am posting here. BTW Spelling Bee, sometimes words end with se instead of ze because not everyone learned English based on that great American invention from the ground up, the Webster dictionary. Buy an Oxford dictionary for @#$% sake.

fyi there is a fire right next to where I live, in Halifax, Canada. Granted it's a forest fire and so it is light grey smoke but it looks just like the smoke in CM -- well done, people! I will never cease to be amazed by how realistic this game is.

That one is hard to answer. It also involves some navel-gazing! I think it's because it's fascinating, in a hypnotic kind of way. We live, then we die and we don't know where it leads. It's like being put on a conveyer belt with rotary saws at the end, with no means of escape. People don't want to think about this, so they fill their lives with preoccupations, they play games with each other (read Games People Play in the self-help section of your local bookstore), they do what their parents scripted them to do (scripts people live, same section), and when they have nothing to do they CREATE problems. Sometimes they brew up trouble just for the sake of brewing up trouble, because they don't want to see their real situation in life. Other people get drunk, become addicted to cigarettes, you name it somebody must have done it at one time or another. Life is really sad sometimes. When there is so much mayhem and destruction as in war it has a hypnotic effect, in a strange kind of way. Why do people care about history so much? Why are they willing to die to ensure a culture or an institution will continue after they are gone? It's like abdicating your life in order to let something else continue for you, at least you know you are leaving something behind after you're gone. Also life is there only once, as far as I know, so when something REALLY IMPORTANT to you doesn't happen, you do everything you can to MAKE it happen. That's where violence comes from, because what is important to me may not be important to you. To insist is violence. OK some people think you live again or your life repeats itself like variations on a theme, but still the parts of us that think, feel and our body don't live on so most people act as if they are NOT going to continue after they die. They may say they do, but often they tied themselves up with some institution or other (usually religion, but sometimes it's a historical ideal about a utopia in the future if only everyone gives up their will and does what the national leaders tell them to do). Also because people don't want to think about this topic they push it back, they bury it with problems and daily preoccupations. When they are on their deathbeds it resurfaces, however. By that time for many people it's too late, I suspect, they did a lot of things they regret and they can't undo them. If there aren't enough resources for both of us, and we both want our "side" (our children, neighbours, you name it) to live comfortably, then we will fight until we win. This holds true for land, water, food, quality of life... Land is the most common cause, I think, because water and food depend on how much land you have. Religion is a problem because it sells itself as something that is greater than we are. So you see a lot of people willing to give up their lives to make it continue, when they should be living their own lives in the present instead of destroying it for some abstract institution. It's magnetic though, it's awfully hard to shake off. (this is my opinion, don't start flaming me just because you think I am some sort of heretic) The problem with tying oneself to institutions is that they NEVER last forever. Who cares about the Emperor of Rome? Many of them are laughing stocks, now. Many of those SS who died because they believed the Fatherland was going to be a utopia for their families and friends -- that backfired, for good reason. Who cares if you are a millionaire and built this huge business empire? The Babylonians and Phoenicians did that, does anybody care now? Do you even know who they are? You can build huge monuments so people will remember you. But now people don't know what some monuments are for, we don't have a clue. So that isn't a good solution either. There is no way out. In my opinion the answer is to live your life according to principles, those never change. Personally, for example, someone dumped me in high school and twenty years later I'm still not over it because I know she was the one. I vowed when I fell in love with her to support her no matter what so I live my own life, because it's what she wants. I feel like a widower now most of the time, esp. when there is a pause in my life, when I have time to reflect on my life. She has her life, I have mine, and they are separate. It's not easy but letting her live her life is the choice I made, and for me it's the right thing to do. Imagine if this was over something vital like food, my family, innocent children, my best friends being threatened, everything I hold dear and believe in being put on the chopping block. People grab their weapons and fight when that happens. I played ASL because I like puzzles (it's like playing chess) but also because this whole business of life and death is a real mystery for me. Also it's fun for a day to see my friends squirm, or to be beaten by a good opponent. It takes my mind off other things, it distracts me for a while, I like to think I am stretching my mental muscles, that it helps me grow as a person. It also helps build friendships. I don't confuse playing military games with the real thing, in real war people die and you can never undo the damage. Also most wars nowadays are more about economics and technology, they are not military. World Trade Organisation, software encryption restrictions, the Internet, etc. When things really come to a head military operations today are more get in, do specific things, get out as soon as you can and deny you ever did anything. The age of the tank is pretty much over, except against countries that don't have the resources to buy high-tech equipment. And they lost before they started anyway. In many cases we never hear about those countries on TV because they don't have any resources our countries are interested in. e.g. Before the British went into Sierra Leone it was chaos, and then within a couple of weeks the Brits completely changed things. Reason: They have modern equipment and proper training, the rebels did not. The UN troops were not given the mandate or equipment to fight against the rebels, so they couldn't hold their own until the British appeared on the scene. You might want to read Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, and his other book, Escape from Evil, he talks about this. Otto Rank (German psychoanalyst) also talked about this, he based his whole theory around will, fear of death, etc. The English translation is a whopper, though -- sentences that are a paragraph long aren't uncommon. Overall this topic just gets me down. Sorry about the long post, but the question doesn't have a simple answer. So where's my copy of CM? I want to think about other things.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by risc: Nothing in Toronto, hopefully this week or next. After that I'm going hunting for it with my MG42, anyone want to join me ? Peter<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Remember you have to register that MG42

William Shatner is OK, you can keep him. Scotty too, hey that series was full of Canadians. You can keep Jim Carey too, he seems right at home in the U.S., he fits right in. There is a Rocky and Bullwinkle movie coming out soon, good thing you reminded me. That should be an Oscar nominee!! (OK, not likely). As for Canadians in the warehouse, I don't get that one. I am sitting over here, plastering my house, and no game. <sigh> I liked the top ten reasons, though. I also wondered now whether all those people who modeled the game have been stuffing boxes for the past week. (and drinking beer in the warehouse, it's hard work you know.)

Well, I learned one thing: I will NEVER post jokes on this board, sheesh guys. It was a nice break from all those "where's my USPS package?" or those "I got it, see how good it looks!" threads I don't have my game yet. Maybe tomorrow. I did some plastering though. Guys think twice before you decide to rip off the wallboard in your house, in some places there may be no Giproc behind it at all. Welcome to the board, don't worry about what people say half of them are crazy anyway. They are still waiting for the game to arrive, you see...

Ich wurde mehr Deutsch lernen...

I like those multiple explosions, they look great.

Does anybody know if tank commanders have modifiers like they used to have in ASL? (9-1, 9-0, 8-1, etc.) Thanks. Someone mentioned the drivers, wasn't it possible sometimes for the DRIVER to stick his head out of the top front of the chassis sometimes? (not sure if it was possible for all AFVs).

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mark IV: I made a decent scale map of the Great Lakes area for a hypothetical Soviet invasion (y'know, from their Canadian client state- long story). Then the Red Army rolled up Michigan and I got to crush all my friends' and family's houses. Huge naval shootout on Lake Huron. Fun stuff.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Hey, I object to that! OK, second try: We did win the war of 1812 and burned down the White House, so maybe there was a grain of truth in your scenario...

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Mark IV: I made a decent scale map of the Great Lakes area for a hypothetical Soviet invasion (y'know, from their Canadian client state- long story). Then the Red Army rolled up Michigan and I got to crush all my friends' and family's houses. Huge naval shootout on Lake Huron. Fun stuff.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Hey, I object to that!

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Goanna: Fionn wrote:

I suspect a lot of Germans did not agree with Hitler's fanaticism, esp. since he weasled his way into power and his brown shirts frightened opposition. There is a congressman or senator in the U.S. who survived an extermination camp, he is a very interesting fellow to listen to. It's easy to blame a generation I think, but remember most people are interested in "fitting in" and it takes an awful lot of courage to step forward and point fingers at people who are in power. Of course dictatorships use this, reinforce it even by rewarding people who are afraid of them and so do what they want. After a few years of this people don't remember how they got caught up in the domineering side, also it is very difficult for them to quit after they are in, they would become examples for the others in the group. A couple of years ago there was a brouhaha about Austria, maybe the press exaggerated I don't know, but things don't seem to have quietened down there much. There was a piece on 60 minutes as well, there is a woman from Austria who spent all her life showing the other people in her town how they were honoring people who committed atrocities, and so on. So although people don't want to talk about it and try to bury the past, the threads are still there in the background. I would argue they are not as strong as they were in the 20s and 30s, perhaps because economics are better now. Just more rambling and first impressions from me.

OK, OK. I am still waiting for the game, once I get it that should keep me busy for a year, esp. if I can create my own scenarios. Oh, what about OP tanks? heh heh

I was just wondering, isn't it a bit foolish for tank commanders to just sit there in plain view when there are bullets flying all around them? If I was in one of them only my helmet and my two eyes would stick out. At least I would get some kind of circular shield up there to protect against stray (and not so stray) fire. Whenever I go up against a tank the first thing I tell my MG teams and squads to do is fire on the tank commander. Snipers must love tank commanders too, easy targets.

Nothing in Halifax yet, it's Wednesday 13:00. Usually my mail is in by 10:00, but today I didn't even get any bills! Maybe I will get the whole lot tomorrow. Friday is not likely since I very rarely get mail on Fridays, I wonder why ...

You can also press minus (-) or plus (+) to move from unit to unit, sometimes I do that when I know that one mistake might turn my scenario into a nightmare. It helps double-check that nothing was forgotten. As for turn-based, the game is based on a cardboard chit game called Advanced Squad Leader, www.advancedsquadleader.com That game was totally addictive for intelligent players who wanted to manipulate hundreds of chits on a map board during a game. Games in ASL often lasted through the weekend, or had to be chopped up into weekly sessions of four hours or more before the battle would be over. fun fun fun!!! Combat Mission lets you play similar engagements in much less time, you get to experience the battle instead of pushing cardboard chits around, and it really tries to be historically accurate. I think it's the best computer game around! (OK, Star Trek Armada looks promising but that's just a slugfest, not much thinking involved I suspect). If you don't like turn-based games then maybe you should try games like Red Alert, where it's more a matter of how quickly you can move your mouse pointer than about strategy. Well OK there is SOME strategy involved in Red Alert but nothing like in Combat Mission. In CM you can also create your own games on the fly, you can't get this kind of realism so easily in any other game that I know of.

Hey, morjit, you are in Halifax? Maybe we can PBEM later, keep me in mind if you ever run out of opponents, if they all scurry off in fear...

Dual P300 should be OK if you have enough RAM -- 500 to 600M should be enough. You are running NT, I imagine. There is something you can do to speed up disk transfers on NT servers, set UDMA on. Speeds up disk transfers by about 40%. See www.arstechnica.com. Also if you are running something like Oracle, that has its own buffering and cacheing, you can set NT to Maximize for Network Applications instead of for file serving. But it depends on what you are running. Microsoft also decided at the time NT was written that it should be able to page part of the NT kernel to disk (yikes!!), that was because at the time NT was released memory was much more expensive and they wanted people to be able to run NT Server on about 32M of RAM. ha ha ha. Turn off paging of the executive, arstechnica explains how to do that too. If pageing occurs (not likely), put page files on multiple devices across multiple controllers if you have them. Speeds up reads and writes to pagefile, parallelizes them. This only helps if you are a bit short on physical memory. If running UNIX, the odds are your server is tuned. Maybe some kernel parameters can be changed, let me know if you want more info. A great resource for this is Oracle8 and UNIX High-Performance Tuning, by Ahmed Alomari, Prentice Hall. No fluff in that book. Regards, Pat. (Oracle DBA, 1 exam short of MCSE)

Nothing today (Tuesday) in Halifax, maybe tomorrow. At least it gave me time to rip off the wallboard in my house... Ahh, that was a stress reliever. Now I have all this plastering to do tomorrow.

You might also want to post scenarios in the SCENARIOS FORUM.

Ok, how did that happen?!

I can't log onto the CM forum, is that because its server is overloaded? Time to buy an alpha or a cray... Funny though, that only the CM forum is inaccessible, maybe it's a web server URL thing. You're not using IIS, I hope!!!

I forgot to add these: multi-level buildings, including church / cathedral towers. real cliffs, not just steep inclines. swamps, bogs if they aren't in the game yet paved vs. gravel vs. dirt vs. mud roads wood paths cellars for buildings, i.e. send a tank through a building and half the time it will drop into the basement. large buildings, like in map 1 of ASL castles, you can't play a game without castles, like in ASL map 8. Château, with orchards maybe. Tunnels there are tunnels all over the place in Europe. Between house cellars, from one castle to another, to caves, etc. Scenario designers should be able to place tunnels on maps. Water: fords, streams, small rivers, wide rivers, deep rivers, shallow rivers, slow current, fast current, rapids, falls. Boats: rubber, canvas and wood, rafts, motorized, pontoon bridges, landing craft, beaches, obstacles, mines. Not that you have enough to do already. Did you realize what you were getting into when you started this project?

Let mortar teams share their ammo, so one doesn't run out before the other. Let (cowardly) tank crews return to their AFV once they realize NOTHING HAPPENED TO THEIR TANK. Maybe they could rout / flee to nearby cover, then once they are themselves again they could decide that maybe they shouldn't have abandoned their vehicle. Squads, crews that go beserk like in ASL. Field promotions, i.e. sometimes under heavy fire one squad member emerges as a leader. Ability to turn captured troops around, i.e. send a leader over to talk some sense into them. Ability to capture enemy guns, vehicles. Vehicles maybe out of the range of an individual battle, but maybe could be taken into account during operations / campaigns. Why couldn't a US squad figure out how to use a panzerfaust? Coloured smoke to help air support target the right places, as was used by Allies after D-Day. Leave possibility for Axis troops to capture those shells and use them on the Allied troops... for the entertainment value. But I think the game designers need a break now, maybe a week in Hawaii or something.