Vanir Ausf B

Good to know. But I just looked and Photoshop costs $600. Is there something... cheaper that will work as well? I know nothing about this stuff.

I don't see that happening since CMFI will be CMx2 version 2.0 out of the box.

Yes, you just have to keep the camera at a high altitude. I would personally have preferred the lines to be persistent at a closer distance. It would be perfect if the distance at which the lines disappear were reduced by about half. Unfortunately I haven't seen Niessuh around for a long time and I haven't a clue how to do it myself. There are other grid mods out there that are persistent. Bil Hardenberger made one. Aris also made a hi-res one, but the lines are very thin and only visible at close distance, kinda the opposite of Niessuh's.

Aye, all that's missing are the mohawks and seatless leather pants. I predict that will be one of the first mods.

I would recommend not waiting that long

I think the question isn't will CMFI pass the Kettler test, but will Kettler pass the CMFI test, i.e. will he ever win the demo scenario?

This would be ideal for using tanks to lay smoke screens. Unfortunately it seems from the description that it won't be usable in that manner.

I will definitely buy CMFI, but I may not play it much.

That's my understanding as well. Although they haven't said anything about the patch recently that I have seen I assume it's still on the way.

Gridded terrain mods do help. I use Niessuh's, but there are several good ones out there. Even so, I spend a lot of time moving the camera around the map at view level 2 (which is about eye level for a standing soldier). That seems to be the only way to see those subtle dips and rises.

Yep, looks like there's been a change of plans...

Well I'll be damned. I keep saying, people forget how much grief you guys got on the forums about the abstracted 3-man infantry squads and how it destroyed their immersion, made them lose the will to live, ect.

Oh, and now the AAR is gone too. Whoops! EDIT: Now it's back again, but not stickied!

They deleted your new thread, Mord LOL.

AFAIK it shouldn't have to be an issue, as long as it doesn't deform the terrain, a-la foxholes. Given that it's just eye-candy that doesn't affect gameplay you could even make the tracks only visible to the side that makes them. They could also expire (disappear) after a short time if they introduce a performance issue.

So you never played Combat Mission? "Fun" is subjective. For some people realism is fun. Admittedly, that seems to be a niche market, and I agree that CM has to find some balance between the two. Personally I'm fairly happy with CMBN graphically. I'm actually much more annoyed by lack of anti-air weaponry than I am of glitchy shadows, and more concerned about the Tiger tank's mysteriously shrunk mantlet than texture resolution when zoomed out. But I would like to see graphical improvements if they have time. I've always thought it would be neat if vehicles left tracks and you could see the mud clods fling off a moving tank. I do hope they give us more options so that people with higher end machines can make the game look as good zoomed out as it does at ground level.

Marketing? They need him to design some scenarios

According to it's Wiki page the company that makes IL-2 has over 700 employees. Combat Mission is a hardcore wargame. Always has been. By hardcore I mean it emphasized the sim aspect over graphical "oomph". If you want oomph there are plenty of other games out there that offer it. In fact, most games are all oomph. I like oomph and play those types of games, but CM offers something they don't. If CM was just a Company of Heroes clone I wouldn't bother with it.

You know someone is looking for a fight when the first sentence is a preemptive insult towards anyone who may disagree with what they are about to write... "Personally" is the key word here. I played a lot of CMBB and I was never able to get into it like I have CMBN. In fact, my feelings about that game were much the same as yours regarding CMBN, so much so that I did not even buy another CM game until CMBN. I think CMBB was graphically as dated or more so for its time than CMBN. BTS received endless amounts of grief from the haters (see what I did there?) on the forums about the abstracted 3 man squads. I have to disagree with you there. I know people have accused the game of having neon glowing grass and too-bright colors, and a lot of mods have "toned-down" color, but I have seen recently taken pictures of Normandy and the game is pretty close to correct. Could you name a few?

That is in fact what they did. This is why.

Interesting. Did not know that.

Or they are cognizant of the fact that they have been banned from using their rockets from the cover of any man-made structure and are up against tanks that are capable of feats no real world tank could ever perform, and therefore new tactics, no matter how seemingly reckless, are needed to survive.

This was something they did in the CMx1 games and I don't know why they abandoned that feature. It's quite effective. One issue with CMx2 that may also affect this is the LOD draw distance is very short and oddly non-adjustable.

I don't know how many people worked on Wargame, but the CMx2 game engine was written almost entirely by one guy. That's probably why

The minimum spec graphics card for CMBN is only OpenGL 2.0 capable IIRC which is equivalent to DX 8.