Barleyman

Something's not working right Does your Tweaker & driver versions match? Latest tweaker (3.5) only works with Catalyst drivers. Rage3D Tweak is not the most intuitive apps out there, "ok" is not the same as "apply". Apply is what you do want. If the tick box has a red border, the setting is not present in registry. If the box is gray, it's set and "disabled". So, if you have a gray box, hit apply, close the display properties box and start cmbb.. And it's still broken, you have got something different.

Too bad I lost most of the day that I could've been playing.. IMHO, Yelnia Stare's there just to demonstrate how great the new MG model is.. As a scenario it's kind of, er, unbalanced Even when you win, you don't feel like you won.

Oh, I'm using latest leaked Catalyst drivers (6143) No reason to get excited, I already figured out a workaround:

I figured it out. There's a bug in CMBB and/or Radeon's drivers. What you have to do, if you're experiencing extreme slowdowns is to disable "Z-Mask" feature. Go grab a good Radeon tweaker. You'll find the setting under Direct3D stuff, right at the end. You might want to create a profile that runs every time you run CMBB demo. Turning Anti-aliasing on helps as well.

Here's the problem: Demo runs like crap with Radeon 64 DDR, Radeon 7000 and Radeon 7500. CPUs from 1 to 1.4GHz. RAM from 256MB to 768MB. W2k, XP or Win98. Specific symptoms - Selecting any of YOUR units except for mortars and ATGs causes big slowdown in game framerate. Opening unit stats box causes huge slowdown. If you have unit selected when you hit "go", calculating turn file takes 20% longer. (55sec vs 45 sec on 1st turn). Selecting enemy units is no problem. Any other fix except to buy Nvidia? [ September 01, 2002, 01:40 PM: Message edited by: Barleyman ]

Ok, second that here. Only I have a Radeon 64MB DDR which is faster than VE. (And runs CMBO like a speeding .303 caliber bullet) If you're seeing the same bug, try selecting any infantry unit and bringing up the stats box (enter) .. Slow, huh? For some reason, simply selecting an ATG or mortar does not cause a slowdown. Any other type of unit I've tried does.

FWIW, I played around some more and noticed selecting either mortar or an ATG does not hurt scrolling speed. Anything else I've tried from squads to FOs hurts things. A bug is a bug is a bug is a bug? No, it's not a slight slow down, more like 1/2 speed with unit selected vs no selection. With stats box open, FPS goes down to about 1-2.

Maybe it'd help if I'd buy BFC some cheap ATI knock-off card..

Just for comparison, I tried big CMBO scenario (Into the east). With my heavily modded CMBO setup, the base framerate was at least 2x and there was no perceptible slowdown whatsoever after selecting units and/or bringing up the stats screen. Please fix or do somefink!

Ok, I found something. Check this out: Start Yelnia scenario as Germans, extreme trees, blah blah. Try scrolling back & forth (works reasonably quickly for me). Now select any infantry unit and try again. Much slower. Bring up the info screen for said unit. Way way slow! Gotta try if this works with calculating turns too. Oh, default camera angle (but this works on every zoom level) .. Tree coverage blabla does not do anything. I tried this at setup, without covered arcs or anything. [ September 01, 2002, 11:19 AM: Message edited by: Barleyman ]

Hmm.. Antialiasing is off.. And yeah, your spec is pretty close to mine. Even calculating turns takes a lot longer than in CMBB. So maybe it is the GFX card, old radeon is a lot slower (1.5-2x difference in game FPS with same cpu) .. But this shouldn't affect how long it takes to calculate turns? Erm, I just placed an order on a new mobo + some DDR memory, maybe I should swap that for a more speedy gfx card

Ooh, I get to be the 1st CMBB demo is, well, slow. This on a </font> 1GHz Athlon</font>Via KT7 </font>512MB PC133 RAM</font>Radeon 64MB DDR</font>1024x768</font>W2k </font>My box runs CMBO just beautifully.. CMBB, however, reminds me of how it was on my old AMD K6/500.. As I recall, CMBB does not make any use of GFX HW. The only upgrade to make things faster should be new CPU and maybe new mobo + DDR ram.. What makes things tricky is that every component is rather cheap on it's own (CPU, Mobo, RAM, GFX), but they add up.. And a faster CPU requires a new Mobo requires new RAM! So anyone running the beast with fast (~XP 2000+) CPU and not-so-fast GFX card (Geforce, Radeon, G400) .. How is it?

Guys, BFC can hire a coder-wannabe or two as soon as the returns from cmbb start turning in.. So engine rewrite in 18 months instead of 36? Plenty of boring leg-work coding I'm sure everyone agrees is not where we want Charles concentrating.. And maybe we can even get the bloody movie viewer and (*gasp*) commad line switches!

FWIW, the AI in Xcom-Apocalypse was supposedly learning from your behavior. I don't know how well it did work in practice, but it DOES keep you on your toes right until the end. Of course, the game environment is closed quarters and the scale is squad-level, so it's not the same. Also, the designers made evil tweaks to the AI, such as giving target priority to fallen comrades. (no loot!)

That's something I've wondered about. As far as I know, Luftwaffe had quite enough fighters, but ran out of competent pilots to man them. So, in effect, 8th AF won a war of attrition. I've read some comments that Luftwaffe had bad priorities re: trying to keep B-17s out of the Reich, instead of going for the maximum number of bombers/fighters not going back home. However, how well did they do, really? If you compare USAAF vs Luftwaffe kill rates, which one made better use of men and machines?

Why, the only Axis ally that did not have foreign tanks roll into their capital!

One would think the problem of doing vectored fire instead of point-based ought to be less than Steve argues in his post. You don't actually have to do honest-to-god ballistic arc for each and every bullet like it's done with the guns. LOS check already has the info of which units are visible to/from a given unit and a simple 2D check will tell you if any are actually lined up close enough for some garden hosing. You can use simplistic ballistics for small arms in any case, nobody sane will be complaining if the Kar98 arc is the same as the LMG42 arc.. In any case, I'm all for modeling invidual weapons and ammo loads instead of catch-all firepower. Not a huge change to the existing model and it'd help to deal with different ROF of full auto stuff vs Kar98 etc.

Oh constructive criticism is always fine. Do note that the german attacker didn't win the scenario. I'm pretty satisfied with how I handled the first half of the game but I made some really bad decisions during the last half. Being over-eager with my guns is a fault of mine.. That's what the girls say as well I was really looking for 2-2-1 situation but tac-ai ****ed up by rotating guns to engage new targets instead of keeping firing at the current target. As for open ground.. One word: Treeburst

Xmas, anyone?

Come on! Taxpayers pay for the guns, not field commanders I don't think your average battalion commander has that much say in what kind of hardware is shipped your way.. Sure, you can request JagdPanthers, but.. IMHO, rarity coupled with buying vehicles and guns in batteries and sections instead of ala carte should make it a little bit less boy's own tale.

Personally I'm not terribly concerned with absolute parity of forces. Historically, one side or the other did dominate the battlefield even when numbers were roughly equal. The challenge for me is to be able to use whatever forces are at hand as effectively as possibly. So if my Pz-IIIe's are outmatched by T-34s, too bad. Neither historical or balanced force mix is compatible with ala-carte gamey tactics. However, balanced rules would probably ban T-34 until it can be countered.

I do believe my suggestion was to improve the force picker so that it uses the rarity data in CMBB. This should give you a roughly historical force mix in decent-sized battles, no? But it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a checkbox to make sure you have an attached panzer section/AT gun battery.. It'd suck to have 3 companies of rifle against heavy tanks Historical or not!

We've got new & improved Fionn's rulesets and alternatives, with their pluses and minuses. It occurs to me that there's already an option to let artificial stupidity pick forces for you. Only nobody seems to use it. It occurs to me that it'd be relatively easy to adjust the AI force picker so that it would produce typical force mix given the time period and service arm. In fact, you could pipe over the rarity data that's already in place. The benefit? You could have impartial (unless hacked) 3rd party pick forces for both sides. This would defeat gamey tactics of buying semi-rare unit z en masse to have an unrealistic advantage. Also, it'd shift the burden of command towards utilizing whatever you have on hand, instead of fine-tuning point-perfect shopping lists. Any chance of "semi-historical" force selection button for CMBB?

Well. It seems to me that the "gamey" approach is buying massed FlaK guns. As someone suggested, a limit based on battle size should serve just as well. For example, one autocannon plus one for every 1000pts. Personally, my experiments have been a little discouraging with FlaK guns. The 50mm PaK is better at taking out tanks and the 75mm infantry gun is better at taking out GIs. And what about the Wirblewind? It's an AFV, so it has to keep it's head well down or it'll get taken out. By that train of thought, shouldn't you ban every German AFV with 20mm AC?