Barleyman

Those are kind of fantasy. Assuming you're talking about blue vs red. Reality is that USMC (and US army helps a bit too) has so much firepower vis-a-vis anyone not in silver-spoon 1st world country that it's not funny. And even going against australia or something you should give them a couple of years notice to give them a decent chance to defend themselves. So just for realism sake, US vs anyone post 90s in a pure firefight is not very interesting. Well, anyone who doesn't have a significant stockpile of nukes, that is.

Gentlemen. As much as I enjoy pulling wings off flies and other such escapades, it would be nice to have a bit of a challenge in my wargames. CMSF has (with recent patches) very solid game engine indeed but the settings are geared toward people who think executing bunnies tied up to poles is sporting. So what about we get some not-so-much-sci-fi blue side gear and expanded red side gear (like, ahem, helos and air farce in general?) so we could have decent scenarios with real-life military adventures such as Turkey liberating Kurdistan or Russia liberating Georgia? Yes, I know that won't be very salable.. But you nice people at BFC could kind of sneak the necessary units and terrain types into another exciting david vs goliath-module. Pretty please?

Right. So give the Finnish target market some opportunities on nice red-on-red action instead of concentrating on modelling the USMC underwear folding procedure and other interesting details.

I guess someone's always going to be satisfied with the sideshow..

And we demand more soviets to shoot at, dammit! IMO it's enough reason to see ostfront as more interesting as the war in europe was decided there..

Since we're talking about attacking someone.. Arty/mortar smoke? Or, heck, targetable smokes for grunts..

You guys have already pointed out the obvious. MG42 had many good things going for it.. but the super-fast ROF was not one of them. Heck, all the follow-up copycat models cut down on the ROF as far as I know. Enough is enough and all that.

Are we going to get better support for 2 and 4 core processors with CMSF or that's going to wait for WWII game? Dual cores are kind of supported right now but you can have a nice 1fps slideshow in an urban map with the combined CPU load howering at about 50%.. I assume the problem is the new ELOS that's supposed to be very CPU intensive. So any hope of getting more multicore-friendly LOS code in a patch?

I finished the campaign and yes, the 2 Hims maps are sloooow. The graphics detail level does absolutely nothing performance wise beyond "improved" or so, ditto for textures. The problem exhibits when the simulation is running, when you pause the action it's quite smooth. Shooting makes things ridiculously slow. Just troops standing around is bad but less so. And, yes, about 50% cpu load but it's more like 1 core has 75% and 2nd core has 25% load.. If you set CPU affinity to make CMSF run only on 1 core everything slows down a lot. Possibly because code is supposed to be multi-threaded now?

I finally finshed the campaign. Just decided to get it over with, silly deployment aside. Anyhow I played up to mission 10 or so with 1.04 so no big deal. Sans general super-easy setup it was ok fun. "What do you mean I get REINFORCEMENTS? After completely overrunning opposition?" Except for the last 2 Hims scenarios which sucked bollocks performance wise. I do not know, I have nagging suspicion it's some stupid incompatibility with Athlon dual-core rather than running out of CPU-juice as such. After all, task manager shows <50% CPU loads while the action is exciting 2fps slide show. Oh and having bad guys teleport into the same house you have squad already occupying is somehow very .. DOOM of you.

For what it's worth, I've got AMD X2 4200+ 2GB Nvidia 7800GS XP SP2 Finally decided to finish the stock campaign with 1.06, since it's been waiting for patch after patch.. Runs just fine until you hit the urban maps at the end of the campaign. Then it starts to crawl big way. But only when lead is flying. When there's no firefights the performance is quite acceptable. Moreover, from the task manager graph, when shooting is going on the CPU load drops to 50% on both cores and framerates go to seconds per frame. When there is no shooting both cores have high load and performance is just OK with no major slowdowns. Makes me think if the problem is really fancy lighting effect or maybe audio. CPU load drop on heavy action at least seems to show there's something iffy going on. For AMD you can get their "multi core optimizer" from their webpage that's supposed to "fix somefink" so that games that are not multicore aware do not choke. Timing issue, doesn't do affinity tricks. I do have old X64 3000+ that I could plug in to try if it runs OK on single core. But frankly I'm too damn lazy to tear open my water cooling rig for that

Speaking of improvements to the UI. How about in-game hotkey editor finally? Feels like I've been warped back to 1992 when I have to switch keyboard to english layout to make hotkeys work. It'd help tremendously to have CMSF do this like most games that allow you to reconfigure keyboard do. When I press "ä" button, windows knows how to handle it, even if you guys do not. Many games actually show funky internal system names for the accent keys when you assign them. Do not really bear resemblance to what the characters look like!

Mainly a tool to select your units, like. So they can be easily kept together in platoons and have their leader keep in touch too. Doubles as a unit status tool.. Sort of what the previous/next unit buttons do now. Like a rock and M14 are essentially refinements of the same idea. [ February 10, 2008, 05:06 AM: Message edited by: Barleyman ]

I'm not sure I'd call that much of an improvement since it's something CMx1 engine already had. Now if you want to be NICE for all of us hard-paying customers, please take cold hard look at how to give us that click-able OOB everyone (?) seems to want.

Steve refers to AI setup zone problem above. It'd seem to me that it can be a problem with any scenario, not just the Campaign. In any case, if the latter scenarios in the campaign play fine, maybe I'll just finish the silly thing. Definitely would like to move on to something a bit more challenging.

Just a dumb question.. What's the problem exactly with scenarios and how can you avoid/fix it?! BFC is just referring to secret mistake scenario makers have committed for which will be issued a classified fix. But what should be done different? And can I take malfunctioning scenario and fix it easily?

Good grief. Have to test this myself but if this is accurate, I'd have to finish the kid gloves campaign in 1.05..

And personally I was just making a lame pun on the "No Major problems" -line by Battlefront. Which seems to turn a bit less funny and bit more perceptive as time goes on.

Never discount a Captain with an attitude.

One thing that blows my mind about Abrams is that they never put in a darn periscope. Until the high-tech-doo-dad from A2. I guess kraut invention just can't make sense? Or there's always more boys from reserves to put their head out of the hatch..

Do not know about you, but I'd get off the mood by those sticking ribs and hip-bones.

Ha-ha! (In annoying simpsons character voice)

Or shoot at the damn thing?

That still leaves the status icon-style approach. Kind of like red exclamation point for broken units and so on. Something like in Silent Storm, maybe? Dare I suggest a minimap? Or a top-down map view accessible from a hotkey (tab?) that can be clicked on to zoom to a position of interest? As for OOB and textual representation.. If you go with funky descriptive icons or, god forbid, NATO symbols, actual type of equipment and number of men in squad still kicking would be very important info. About stopping work to work on UI, there's also option to introduce new elements in add-ons and/or sequels..