willmontgomery

Sweet! If saving the game during playback was possible under CMx1, I never knew it. I'm 44.380821918 years old (approximately). When I was a child, we didn't have personal computers. When I was a little older, we had primarily text-based computer games. When I started my professional career, we were sharing a UNIX machine. Having to manually save each turn doesn't deter me at all, doesn't even rate on my personal tedium meter. I withdraw my suggestion that BFC enhance anything in this area. I am convinced that they should invest their effort in other, more important areas. Once again, sweet!

I apologize if I am being obtuse or annoying, but... Suppose we pretend that I didn't use the term "CoPlay". Suppose I had merely suggested that single-player mode be enhanced so that it would be possible to retain the movie from a turn, making it accessible/replayable during the subsequent orders phase, and also saveable during that phase. Obviously movies can already be saved in a game file, because that happens as a matter of course in a PBEM, so saving the movie itself cannot be a huge deal. I'd be surprised if retaining a (notional) live reference to a (notional) movie object while proceeding into and operating within orders-giving mode would be a huge deal. Like any modification, this "enhancement" would require programming effort, and for what purpose? Simply so that a friend and I could share a single-player game. Between ourselves, we would feel that we were playing co-operatively, but the software itself would never have to know. The game wouldn't even have to know that there were two of us giving orders, let alone which units supposedly belonged to me and which to my friend. CoPlay itself has been dreamed about for a long time, and apparently there are serious doubts about its viability. Got it. However, maybe "CoPlay-lite" (such as I have tried to describe here), which wouldn't require the software even to be aware that multiple people were playing, would be relatively easy to implement, and maybe it could do a surprisingly satisfactory job of fulfilling some of the CoPlay dream, at least for PBEMers, who are already used to saving and exchanging files.

In CMx1 single-player, there didn't seem to be any save game file that stored the movie. If I saved the game _before_ the movie played, then every time that file was opened, it would generate a different movie (because it would be calculating the turn again). If I saved the game _after_ the movie played, then I was in a post-movie orders phase, and the movie would not be saved. Is this somehow different in CMx2? Or do I have this wrong about CMx1?

If it's a huge thing to put in, then I imagine that it's not commercially viable, in the sense that lack of CoPlay probably would cost you very few -- if any -- sales. However, I imagine that you're talking about real-time CoPlay. I dream of a CoPlay-lite, where a friend and I could play cooperatively against the AI, much like playing turn-based, single-player but where the two of us would e-mail the game file back-and-forth to give our orders and stuff. The only major obstacle we face (with CMx1) is that it seems that only one of us can watch the "movie" each turn. If something could be done about this -- which I doubt is a "huge thing" in itself -- it would enhance our enjoyment of your product.

They came from America. It's where they are now that's unknown.

I should mention that I have no affiliation with Battlefront, but this made me think of a case from my work. We were working on simulating bombs falling through air, with air resistance accounted for. A tester entered a terminal speed for a bomb of 1 foot per second (~ 1.5 miles per hour), because that was the minimum value allowed by the software (since a value of 0 would obviously be invalid). Ignore for a moment would what really happen if a bomb released from a jet aircraft in flight actually experienced the deceleration that such a terminal speed would cause. In our simulation, the bomb, upon release from the aircraft (which was diving), decelerated very abruptly, so abruptly in fact that its downward velocity was more than completely negated, and it actually gained upward velocity! After a bit that velocity was sapped by gravity, and the bomb began to fall again. But then it began to rise again. The simulation never reached termination conditions, and by the time I went to examine the results, all of the bomb's initial downrange velocity had been lost to friction with the air, with the result that the bomb was just hanging there in midair, slowly oscillating up and down. I thought that was funny.

Now even Adolf Hitler is being "Swift-boated"? Is nothing sacred?

I offer the T-34 as an example of such a counterpart. Not perfect either, but a better starting place.

Perhaps I should mention that I grew up in SoCal and that I didn't move to this area until the fall of '85. Among the Eagles of the era you're thinking of, I paid more attention to Carmichael and his 127-game streak than to the exploits of my "namesake".

I'm in Pottstown. I am not at all sure that I can make it, but I am interested.

You must be a "consultant", i.e. you must have to pay for "overhead" things like self-employment taxes and full medical insurance premiums out of that hourly rate (so it's not all salary). 'Cause if it's all salary, then shouldn't you be working only half-time or else retiring early, so you should have plenty of time to write custom software for people you'll probably never meet except on this forum.

Sounds like Hearts of Iron _might_ be for you. Combat is fairly abstract, and the AI isn't too bright, but you get a _lot_ of control over the grand strategic stuff (including technological development, production, and where to strike next).

I think he means, when you "cash in" an attached unit for an upgrade, you can cash it in for the points it cost to buy, not for the (usually larger) number of points you rolled up at the time that you bought it. In other words, any points you lost when you originally bought that attached unit stay lost when you "cash in" that attached unit for an upgrade. Hence (interpreting what Biltong wrote), the new points you just received for attached units are added to the points you actually used for the attached unit you are cashing in rather than to the total number of points that you rolled up back when that unit (which you are now cashing in) was originally purchased.

Gentlemen (specifically excluding Lopaka ), Thanks for the replies. [ June 03, 2002, 09:37 AM: Message edited by: willmontgomery ]

I've known this guy for like 25 years (since fourth grade or whatever). I thought he wouldn't expect it. I thought it might be cool to surprise him with a battalion in his backfield. Plus it's the kind of thing he would do. If it ended up causing entertainment, I wanted credit for doing it first. Guess which post on this thread is from him? So it was conceived as a lark. If it's not a credible strategy, then that's all it will ever be. On the other hand, before abandoning it, I thought I would ask whether infiltration was a bad plan a priori, or if I just did a bad job of something that a good player might seriously do under the right circumstances. I know at least some combatants used infiltration in the actual event. [ June 01, 2002, 03:22 PM: Message edited by: willmontgomery ]