ParaBellum

Easiest way to solve this problem is IMO a gentlemen's agreement not to target the setup zones with pre-planned arty strikes for a turn or two because it's cheesy as hell.

Hehe... you're welcome.

Tried an MP battle in RT mode yesterday evening with a friend, medium size, after 20 minutes we stopped playing because we both found it virtually unplayable. I like RT when playing against the AI. But I still have no idea how you guys manage RT multiplayer in anything but very small battles. And I'm not even micro-managing that much.

TacAir engaging troops travelling to the front is IMO quite different from TacAir actually strafing troops engaged in direct combat with friendly forces. Fighter bombers were indeed extremely effective in performing interdiction missions against reinforcements and logistics echelons but had a much more difficult time engaging the enemy in the middle of a ground engagement. My problem is that right now there's nothing I can do to defend against them. There's no light flak available, MGs don't shoot at aircraft and the fighter bomber seems to linger very long over the battlefield conducting a large number of attacks.

Hope he runs out of ammo before I run out of men.

Ah, Ok. BTW just got attacked another time. Turn 12. Do these guys actually stop or will he continue to strafe me for the rest of the game?

*sigh* Another squad slaughtered by the fighter bomber of doom. While covering beneath the trees. He's been around for 11 turns now, making attacks almost every turn. Can I has cheesb... Flakvierling please? :eek:

God, those things are a pain in the ass. In a current 2500pts PBEM one of them has been strafing my troops for 7 (!) turns now. I can't shoot him down and he even targets infantry squads in treelines. Are those guys maybe a bit too...zealous? Point-wise a strafing fighter bomber seems a friggin' bargain compared to the amount of damage he does. I expected a strafing run or two, but this is insane.

Since I'm playing almost exclusively against human opponents I'd like to ask the RT players how you manage to play the game without pauses. My preferred scenario size is around a reinforced infantry company with a platoon of tanks and support units, and there's simply no way I can effectively command that many troops without pausing. In a current 2500pts PBEM I have 28 units to control and I shudder to think commanding them without pauses or replay function. How do you guys do that?

I hate the low bocage. Had infantry suddenly make suicidal detours due to me thinking they were simple hedges a couple of times already.

I agree with that. It's far from perfect but IMO it's the best wargame of this scale.

Thank you, Ali Baba.

It's been ages since I played the last MP game in the CMx2 engine, so here's a small question: how does pausing the game work in MP in realtime mode? Does it work at all?

I currently play a WitE German Grand Campaign vs the AI, and am really enjoying it. I'm doing an AAR over on SimHQ. If you're not logged into the site you probably won't see the pics though. Helluva game, love it.

The ATI 4650 was a cheap, low-ish performance card two years ago. It's a totally different league than the NVIDIA GTX 465.

As the one who started it let me make it clear that all I wanted is BFC taking a look at it. Nothing more. And since Sgt Joch mentioned they already do I'm happy. If they think they can/need to fix it they will do so. If not, well, then I guess I'll just play without wind. The BFC guys are doing a great job, and I certainly have no intention to tell them how to do their job. I just got a bit surprised when Sergei repeatedly denied that there even might be a problem at all. EDIT: But then I should've known better. There are two golden rules: don't get involved in a land war in Asia. And don't argue with a Finn about trees.

There is a difference between performance variation due to trees being redrawn a bit different every time you enter the 3d world and the performance loss due to wind and moving trees. Your system specs (considering your FPS) seem lower than mine, so you see greater differences in performance depending on the number of high-LOD models in view. On my system these variations are in the range of less than 10-20%. With maxed out grafics. When I enable wind then FPS in the same scene drops by up to 75%.

Honestly Sergei, I have no idea why you put up this smart-ass attitude. Already in the general performance thread all you had to say was "no, you're wrong". I always respected you as a forum member and your contributions for CM, but I simply can't understand your reasoning here, and I'm slowly getting tired of trying to explain to you what you obviously don't want to understand.

If you lower the 3d objects detail the FPS loss gets smaller. At very low settings there is barely any difference anymore between FPS when viewing trees in windy/calm conditions. But this is no solution, of course.

BFC doesn't need to license Speedtree technology. The tree rendering in CM:N is just fine, it's only the movement of trees in heavy winds that cause such a drastic performance loss. Again: this is NOT about low FPS in general. This is about the FPS on powerful PC systems dropping by up to 75% simply due to trees moving in the wind. I wouldn't complain if I "only" got 20 FPS. As long as I get smooth control and no jerky gameplay I'm happy. But trying to control the camera and issue oders with less than 10 FPS is simply annoying, especially when you're playing it on a system specifically built for gaming. PS: BTW I've been using a (licensed) copy of FRAPS for many years in dozens of games and have never noticed any kind of performance hit. And when possible I usually tested it against a game's built-in FPS meter.

You get no massive performance hit when viewing the trees in the "Closing the Gap" scenario, like when setting up the German forces in the forest?

Good to hear that. Thanks.

Thanks Sgt Joch, good to hear this issue got some attention. For the problem being caused by a certain combination of hardware/drivers IMO already too many people have reported the same issue. Basically everyone of my gaming buddies (all five ) reports exactly the same problem, but they don't post here. And while I agree that FPS in general are not that important in a game like CM:N, FPS below 10 on hi-ish end systems are IMO a problem since moving the viewpoint and issuing commands feels like wading through molasses. If the problem runs deeper in the engine I'd love to see a toggle switch for tree movement.

The GTX465 is a good card. I have a GTX470 in my current system and am quite happy with it. FPS at 1920x1080 with grafics maxed out are fine (30-40), only trees moving in heavy wind cause FPS to drop into single digits. But that's probably due to a rendering problem and will hopefully get fixed in the future. Your slow CPU will bottleneck your card's performance though, slowing down FPS in large engagements. More RAM is always good, but from what I've seen CM:N doesn't seem to be very much RAM hungry and you need a 64-bit OS to use more than 3 GB anyway.

Hehe... yeah, I know, when non-programmers talk about "simple fixes" and "they just need to" the programmers probably want to take out their baseball bats. Still, I hope such a "simple fix" (opposed to "we will rewrite the rendering engine" or "we will create totally new trees") will be possible.