Pete Wenman

So I'm playing around in the editor with a night action. Out of curiosity I was wondering re the stars and their constellations. So I used a phone app I have, which identifies the constellations in the night sky, on the night sky in my scenario (Poland). And it worked - identified the various constellations. How cool is that?!

I am curious what titles you own?
The comments about not many units, formations being of no use to anyone, and very little to edit seem to me to be a very harsh description of the games. 
I am also curious to know how often you use the editor to try and create scenarios of your own?

?? that is what they have done - they *have* provided the relevant building blocks and *do* allow designers to build the force they want.
Good lord - we get it you are only interested in a narrow part of the war. If BFC had put out only eastern front modules and games since they released RT would you have been happy? It kind of sounds like you still would not.
It kinda leaves the question - why are you still here exactly? Why are you still posting about how you would like them to reduce their fidelity and put out less accurate content faster to make you happy if they clearly are not listening to you. Thank goodness they are not BTW.

Let's not forget that since CMSF came out in mid-2007, BFC has released 7 base games, 6 modules (7 after R2V), 3 game upgrades, 2 battle packs, 1 vehicle pack as well as numerous free patches. That works out to something new roughly every 7-8 months. I don't think anyone can accuse them of slacking off
 

I do believe it's working, good
P

Alice : " Wait !! Where is rezplode for mac user after eight years? Why I cannot play older titles on OSX and I paid the full price like PC users?
I won't buy PC! I want to use mac, I want to stand in line for new IPhone, I want ..."
Rabbit : " You took medicine today "
Alice : " No? "
Rabbit : " Just a little pinprick, There'll be no more aaahhhhhhhh.."
 
Love
Alice

I'm sorry, did someone mention "flare"? 
 
 

I normally try to not get involved in forum discussions, because I find they devolve into petty back and forths, however as the opponent on the opposing side I'd like to contribute my view and hope to provide some clarity and some thoughts that may have been overlooked. First off, I don't see anything from my perspective in the game, or based on Bull's explanation that points to any sort of bug or needs any review. He asked me to submit my turn and password for review, which I declined. But I'll give my perspective.
The game is early morning in winter. Visibility is very short, infantry has been making contact at less than 100m, in some cases infantry has been within 50m before being noticed. Firing and muzzle flashes change that of course, and a unit firing can be seen at a much greater distance, as can units moving at a faster or more noisy pace. (Also unit makeup, type, experience, quality, motivation, proximity to command, movement or lack there of ALL have input into how one unit functions compared to another. So there is almost no such thing as an apple to apple comparison in this game.) The LOS line tool shows a blue line going out much further than what visibility actually is, and this is in keeping with what I have seen in all other CM games. The blue line is a guide, which I use as a best case guide, not as a sure thing indicator. If a unit saw another at 900m through trees that is quite amazing and in this game I would not expect that to happen repeatedly or for that occurrence to be a tell tale for how other units should spot. Maybe that unit had a brand new pair of binocs, or there position was just right to see through a small gap in the trees and they caught a muzzle flash. Maybe the units closer didn't have binocs, or their's were fogged up, dirty or otherwise not 100%, or maybe they didn't have any. Maybe the unit that did good spotting was a very experienced unit and maybe the other one wasn't, or maybe that had nothing to do with it. Maybe they were occupied more with their immediate situation, or they were communicating their next plan since they were in close proximity to enemy forces and not paying attention to what was going on further away. Maybe the terrain, (which is not level) somehow obscured their view from the position they were in, or maybe the snow was really deep where they were and they were dealing with that. Maybe they dug themselves a snow hole to keep their heads down from the mortar shrapnel falling to their rear and couldn't see out. Maybe maybe maybe maybe.... Having myself spent a significant portion of my life in forest, wilderness, mountains, very deep snow of all qualities, I can say with 100% certainty that sometimes dealing with your immediate situation is all encompassing and in the real world there are micro features and small terrain undulations that can not be modeled in this game, but would most certainly exist in the world that this game is supposed to model.
As for the unit that broke and ran toward the "enemy side of the map", I feel there are some details in the explanations that have been left out. Like most people, I have seen this undesirable behavior before in CM games, but I also believe that in this instance there are more factors in play. The American unit that broke and ran toward German lines had few or no better options. The American attack was coming along the extreme map edge, and attacks that come against the map edge like that put themselves in a position that severely limits their maneuverability and options and puts the force in a bad spot to begin with. So out of all possible directions, 180 degrees of space was not available to the unit in question. Out of the remaining 180, there was an exploding and burning tank behind them as well as mortar shells falling in the same direction a bit further behind the destroyed tank. So take away the 60 degrees of area that would have been directly toward the American lines. The next area, off the unit in questions left flank, are buildings where contact has been made between forces and potentially might give cover to more German units. So that isn't a good direction for the American unit to run. Take away another 60 degrees on their left. This leaves the remaining 60 degrees to their front, where nothing is exploding and no enemy troops are immediately obvious or in hiding, although it is toward the German "side" of the map the area to the units immediate front does not offer good cover to enemy. Due to the unit having such limited movement against the map edge, there is very little choice (especially good choice) in which to move. The unit broke and ran forward along the map edge, which is the only path that moved them away from exploding tanks and shells and not closer to an area of cover and concealment that one could easily assume housed enemy troops. Pretty much from what I have seen the unit was in a very bad spot, against the map edge, close to enemy occupied buildings, under fire, and unsupported. With that much going against them it would have been difficult to choose a better option, and definitely not the AI bugging out from what I see.
Now I'm not saying the retreat function can't be improved, it definitely can. I just think that in many instances in which people complain about any one of the many topics that get complained about, there are many factors that get overlooked or go unaccounted for. There are so many factors in this game that relying on any one, or complaining about any one to me seems to be losing the overall focus and tactical thinking that leads to success. I am not a programmer but I would think that maybe a way to deal with the retreating forward syndrome would be to have the default fall back option to be along the most recent path of advance that the unit took, since most likely the path of advance was along the most conducive and unexposed path available to that unit. I also really don't like it when an unbuttoned tank commander gets shot by small arms fire (happens very easily) and then the standard response is for the tank to pop smoke and retreat, often into a more exposed position than they were in. That is one aspect I feel could be improved. Tanks should not retreat in the face of small arms fire. (Just saying that because I know IanL has a direct line!)
When I have one of those "WTF?" moments, I try and sit back and think about all the possible things going on I can't see in the game. I also try to think about how I could have commanded my units better and not allowed my men to get in a bad position to begin with. Usually I come up with a list of how I could do better that is longer than how the game could be better. Other times it's just straight bad or good luck depending on your perspective and luck is also a real world phenomenon, but I have found looking closer at how I could command better and use better tactics gives me less of a chance to have bad luck, or have bad luck effect me in a significant way.
I know that the game being talked about is still in it's early stages and that both sides have significant forces that have not been engaged.

There's nothing wrong with caution. But have you ever hung around a person who was truly pessimistic? They suck the life out of a room with their negativity. There's nothing attractive about someone that is filled with doom and gloom. I have an uncle like that and I used to say that you could win the lottery and he'd have you hanging yourself ten minutes after you told him.
 
Mord.

Arsenal of the Reich.
 

 

 
Mord.

Allright .. we bought everything :)..
see you on the Frontline !

Very well said Vet 0369
That is basically how I looked at this thread.
We live at a time where there is people that have no patience and all of their thoughts are self centered.
 
So this thread is a perfect example of that.
Person likes the game, wants more of the game and is not getting more of the game fast enough for their personal wants. - Thus there must be a problem and that problem must be from the source of who makes the game. They need and must do it faster.
Never in the process of their thinking is there a care or concern about that source or how it would impact that, the thought is focused on getting more faster, nothing else.
Never does the thought cross their mind that the method presently being used is what is already creating the thing they enjoy so much.
They have no respect for the efforts of others if it does not meet their perceived needs.
 
The sad thing is, their view does impact things and how people view this company.
But what is even more sad, I am sure this trait is impacting their life in more aspects than what we see here. I am sure their frustration  with life is constant.
 

Considering all the assistance he provides for other users and the degree he communicates stuff within the confines allowed I think that is a grossly unfair representation of his participation in this forum. 

In the "In the Shadow of the Hill" scenarios (4 separate scenarios) I cover a Brigade attack, with the map based on google earth and period maps and the forces at play are as accurate to reality as the game will allow. This shows how the forces were made up based on AAR documents and in all cases the various battalions attacked with only two companies up and with armour and artillery support. 
If you look at the scenarios in detail you will get a good idea of the tasks allocated to the three battalions (4th Dorset's, 5th Dorset, and 7th Hampshire's)
mission 1 & 2:  C & D Co 5th Dorset's, plus supporting arms (armour and artillery) are tasked to capture two farm complexes
mission 3 : A & B Co 4th Dorset's, plus support are tasked to capture a small village.
mission 4: A & B Co 7th Hamp's are tasked to capture a further village.
As shown below each action allowed the next to take place, allowing the Bde to move forward in bounds as it secured it's objectives in turn. Each battalion had roles within the Bde plan, while each company had a role in it's respective battalions plan, (and each platoon within each co and so on)

The master map for these scenarios is 1.6k wide by 4k deep, with the first three missions seeing the forces needing to cover 1.6-2k, with a similar distance covered in mission 4 albeit the start line for the advance is 2k deep into the master map. 
These missions are very histrionically accurate in terms of the terrain and British forces involved, and so give some insight into what was asked of the actual units on 10th July 1944
P

In the "In the Shadow of the Hill" scenarios (4 separate scenarios) I cover a Brigade attack, with the map based on google earth and period maps and the forces at play are as accurate to reality as the game will allow. This shows how the forces were made up based on AAR documents and in all cases the various battalions attacked with only two companies up and with armour and artillery support. 
If you look at the scenarios in detail you will get a good idea of the tasks allocated to the three battalions (4th Dorset's, 5th Dorset, and 7th Hampshire's)
mission 1 & 2:  C & D Co 5th Dorset's, plus supporting arms (armour and artillery) are tasked to capture two farm complexes
mission 3 : A & B Co 4th Dorset's, plus support are tasked to capture a small village.
mission 4: A & B Co 7th Hamp's are tasked to capture a further village.
As shown below each action allowed the next to take place, allowing the Bde to move forward in bounds as it secured it's objectives in turn. Each battalion had roles within the Bde plan, while each company had a role in it's respective battalions plan, (and each platoon within each co and so on)

The master map for these scenarios is 1.6k wide by 4k deep, with the first three missions seeing the forces needing to cover 1.6-2k, with a similar distance covered in mission 4 albeit the start line for the advance is 2k deep into the master map. 
These missions are very histrionically accurate in terms of the terrain and British forces involved, and so give some insight into what was asked of the actual units on 10th July 1944
P

In the "In the Shadow of the Hill" scenarios (4 separate scenarios) I cover a Brigade attack, with the map based on google earth and period maps and the forces at play are as accurate to reality as the game will allow. This shows how the forces were made up based on AAR documents and in all cases the various battalions attacked with only two companies up and with armour and artillery support. 
If you look at the scenarios in detail you will get a good idea of the tasks allocated to the three battalions (4th Dorset's, 5th Dorset, and 7th Hampshire's)
mission 1 & 2:  C & D Co 5th Dorset's, plus supporting arms (armour and artillery) are tasked to capture two farm complexes
mission 3 : A & B Co 4th Dorset's, plus support are tasked to capture a small village.
mission 4: A & B Co 7th Hamp's are tasked to capture a further village.
As shown below each action allowed the next to take place, allowing the Bde to move forward in bounds as it secured it's objectives in turn. Each battalion had roles within the Bde plan, while each company had a role in it's respective battalions plan, (and each platoon within each co and so on)

The master map for these scenarios is 1.6k wide by 4k deep, with the first three missions seeing the forces needing to cover 1.6-2k, with a similar distance covered in mission 4 albeit the start line for the advance is 2k deep into the master map. 
These missions are very histrionically accurate in terms of the terrain and British forces involved, and so give some insight into what was asked of the actual units on 10th July 1944
P

In the "In the Shadow of the Hill" scenarios (4 separate scenarios) I cover a Brigade attack, with the map based on google earth and period maps and the forces at play are as accurate to reality as the game will allow. This shows how the forces were made up based on AAR documents and in all cases the various battalions attacked with only two companies up and with armour and artillery support. 
If you look at the scenarios in detail you will get a good idea of the tasks allocated to the three battalions (4th Dorset's, 5th Dorset, and 7th Hampshire's)
mission 1 & 2:  C & D Co 5th Dorset's, plus supporting arms (armour and artillery) are tasked to capture two farm complexes
mission 3 : A & B Co 4th Dorset's, plus support are tasked to capture a small village.
mission 4: A & B Co 7th Hamp's are tasked to capture a further village.
As shown below each action allowed the next to take place, allowing the Bde to move forward in bounds as it secured it's objectives in turn. Each battalion had roles within the Bde plan, while each company had a role in it's respective battalions plan, (and each platoon within each co and so on)

The master map for these scenarios is 1.6k wide by 4k deep, with the first three missions seeing the forces needing to cover 1.6-2k, with a similar distance covered in mission 4 albeit the start line for the advance is 2k deep into the master map. 
These missions are very histrionically accurate in terms of the terrain and British forces involved, and so give some insight into what was asked of the actual units on 10th July 1944
P

In the "In the Shadow of the Hill" scenarios (4 separate scenarios) I cover a Brigade attack, with the map based on google earth and period maps and the forces at play are as accurate to reality as the game will allow. This shows how the forces were made up based on AAR documents and in all cases the various battalions attacked with only two companies up and with armour and artillery support. 
If you look at the scenarios in detail you will get a good idea of the tasks allocated to the three battalions (4th Dorset's, 5th Dorset, and 7th Hampshire's)
mission 1 & 2:  C & D Co 5th Dorset's, plus supporting arms (armour and artillery) are tasked to capture two farm complexes
mission 3 : A & B Co 4th Dorset's, plus support are tasked to capture a small village.
mission 4: A & B Co 7th Hamp's are tasked to capture a further village.
As shown below each action allowed the next to take place, allowing the Bde to move forward in bounds as it secured it's objectives in turn. Each battalion had roles within the Bde plan, while each company had a role in it's respective battalions plan, (and each platoon within each co and so on)

The master map for these scenarios is 1.6k wide by 4k deep, with the first three missions seeing the forces needing to cover 1.6-2k, with a similar distance covered in mission 4 albeit the start line for the advance is 2k deep into the master map. 
These missions are very histrionically accurate in terms of the terrain and British forces involved, and so give some insight into what was asked of the actual units on 10th July 1944
P

War Diaries are always a good place to start. The link below takes you to the 2nd Battalion, Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry's War Diary. Have a look at the account and Annexes of the battle for Manneville La Raoult on 25-26 August 1944.
http://www.pegasusarchive.org/normandy/war_2ndOxBucks.htm
Here is the contemporary 1:100,000 scale map to help you follow it:

The Easting part of the Grid References are not on the image. To help you, the first Easting you can see is the 60 Easting, then 61 Easting, then 62 Easting, then 63 Easting.
The 13 Northing is shown, so the one below is the 12 Northing
Here is a 1950s Aerial Photograph of the same area:

Just some notes on the above, as a member of the research community, I feel I need to comment on this briefly.
First of all, that stance of "anything rulebased is anything but AI" is a disingenous position that does not hold when contrasted with the state-of-the-art literature. Domain knowledge can be expressed in many ways: with if-then statements, or behaviour trees, all the way to neural network architectures engineered to "capture" very specific processes and signals. The successes that have been widely hyped up - like the Star Craft/DOTA players by Deepmind and OpenAI - are fundamentally hybrids of what you refer with scorn as "AI" and machine learning. Even the Alpha players rely on not an insignificant amount of handcrafted knowledge, from the basic features used to parametrize states to the particular selection of activation units and interconnection patterns. All those choices were made by humans seeking the best combination of parameters, architectures, initialization strategies and more. If you check the paper on AlphaGo on Nature you'll see that the section devoted to explain those details is actually longer than the main paper.
 Even more interesting is to see how former preachers of the "end-to-end learning" gospel are now turning to classics like early 1980s subsumption-like architectures to bootstrap and guide those neural networks training process. Suffices to say that all major companies working on self-driving vehicles have abandoned that gospel and are scrambling to snatch leading researchers of areas which two years ago were considered to be "not relevant any more". 
I have no idea what is Palantir trying to pitch but it sounds to me as pure bull**** tbh. This is for several reasons: tactics require to deal with partial information, considering processes that flow at different time scales, on environments which are complex and dealing with a wide variety of platforms that operate autonomously (e.g. single riflemen, AFVs, a drone and its controller). At the contrary than in games like Go, where the number of pieces is fixed and known, and the board is always the same, a contemporary, near-future or past tactical environment shares little or none of those features. The most fundamental issue - there are several, and there's plenty of fundamental issues to choose and work on - to me is that neural models are not composable.
That is, you can work out a neural network to say, steer a simulated squad of simulated robots broken into two teams just all right along a given line of advance and against a specific amount and direction of enemy fires. Here is a list of the dimensions such neural network has to generalize in order to be useful and interesting:
- Initial distance to target (assuming that the order is to Assault)
- Effective volume of fires on enemy positions as distance to them changes.
- Type of terrain the unit maneuvers.
- Obstacles obscuring LOS and LOF
- Equipment of unit
- Hypothetical equipment of the enemy
There is absolutely zero guarantee that a given NN that performs at a certain level, for any meaningful performance index, on a finite sample along these directions will generalize to any possible combination of the above. If you have an algorithm for that which you can use on any problem at hand, then congratulations, you probably solved too Hilbert's 10th problem.  This applies to everything, including Starcraft: how many possible Starcraft maps there are? Can you classify all possible tactical and strategic situations neatly into discrete homogenous categories? That's also why doing funny stuff to allegedly state of the art CV pre trained networks - like adding a 1-pixel wide black border to an image - catastrophically degrades the accuracy of object identification. Luckily, other than perhaps Russia and China I think, nobody even considers to deploy deep learning systems for target identification and acquisition. If somebody does, they're criminally insane or selling snake oil, or both.
Provably you haven't done any of the above, but you may have a quite decent closed loop control strategy that works well enough to make some nice videos to impress people, or even beats some hand coded controller that somebody put a decent amount of effort in designing exploiting knowledge about the laws of Physics or some other fundamental process.
That can be good enough, it all depends what you're comparing it against. Definitely you can't make any guarantees on suitability for any purpose other than that captured by your training set: YMMV.
The problem of composability is illustrated by the following question: can I use that neural network as a building block to coordinate the movements of a platoon? The answer, so far, has been a quite deafening no.
There is no known way to constrain back propagation to guarantee that the knowledge acquired by the neural network you are using as a building block is going to be obliterated or changed in a fundamental and undesirable fashion during training for the "composite" problem.
Composability also challenges the ability to train incrementally, as the capabilities of the unit change due to casualties or changes in equipment. There's again no guarantee that any knowledge will be preserved when re-training after changing those elements in the environment that generates the training data for the neural network.
Last, composability has to do with time: what is the minimum period of time to be considered? Is there a sensible upper bound on the number of such consecutive periods of time to consider? Taking off-the-shelf techniques used for Natural Language Processing has been shown to be pretty much like dancing about architecture, spoken and written word has a very definite temporal structure, for which we know its "laws" (because we invented grammar and rules of style!).
Another fundamental problem linked to this last observation is that whatever the neural network learns we cannot be sure that it is capturing the essential first principles that allow the behaviours which are to be mimicked. This is analogous to the fundamental issue with the classic research by T. N. Dupuy and the HERO institute - in the 1960s, one could overfit a model only by hand, in the 2020s you can use neural networks too!
Contemporary machine learning has a niche, like those "rule-based" approaches you disparaged in your post do. And I certainly appreciate the good things in deep learning, for instance, the dependability and efficiency, provided that the right conditions for the techniques involved to work properly are an invariant of the set of situations I need to deploy them.

Going back to the games briefly. Regarding Graviteam, I learnt through a weird interaction with Andrey on the Steam forums a few months ago that he's pretty ignorant on any of these topics. Which is totally all right, he's not expected to be an expert on that. So my educated guess is that what you see animating those pixel truppen in Graviteam games are not too different from the techniques used in 99% of video games and 80% (?) of robotics: good old hand-designed controllers via behaviour trees, A*/D* and PIDs/SQP/Non Linear Programming.
Last, I want to address the comment which I read is blasting BFC (and video game developers in general) because of not using deep learning technologies. I have zero idea of what is the operating budget of BFC, but say, the cost in $$$ to say develop and train an Alpha-like system for one of the countless drills possible in CMx2 would probably be somewhere north of 1 million USDs (that counts salaries, on boarding of staff and compute for like 40 days with a similar amount of computation power as the one wielded by Deepmind to ensure you can beat Bil Hardenberger like 90% of the time). Indeed, they would probably amortize salaries and onboarding over time, but the cost of computation is what it is, and changes in the game mechanics, or even bug fixes, etc. would require retraining (or training new networks for that special case).
Indeed there are opportunities for more modest applications rather than end-to-end tactical battle management, but I am skeptical than they are cost effective for the return on investment Battlefront will get. I am pretty sure they're already doing this pretty much for the sake of the arts, and unless they get patronage, I can't see why should they spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on EC2 just to replace their code for animations, drills etc by neural networks. Or maybe you could work pro bono for Battlefront developing those
 

Time for a new one.
 

 

 
 
Mord.

An amazing jump to a conclusion from someone with no actual information to make that call from, but hey some people like to always see a potential negative. They make drugs for that. 

I'll buy you a pint - hit me up when you make your plans.

Yep. Reminds me to a night exercise during my Bundeswehr time.
We were stumbling through a pitch back forest, until one of the guys “found” a trip wire and started an amazing show with flash-bangs and fire from all sides. Would have been a very short adventure in RL...