Philippe

A lot depends on where they're walking. Imagine a squad of German soldiers patroling a cobblestone street. If the camera is anywhere near them that's a lot of crunching and clacking going on, unless they've taken their boots off. Now imagine the same squad in a wheatfield. Apart from the occasional munching sounds, I would imagine the main sound would be gas mask canisters banging into canteens as they walk. Put them back on a dirt road. Muffled crunching. Make them ford a stream. Lots of splashing sounds if they're running (will go nicely with that neat new water explosion BFC has planned), but swishing and gurgling if they're walking. And the point, of course, to all these sounds, is that you can hear them when the camera is over the unit, but at level three or four they quickly fade to nothing. Memory usage? Probably a gadzillion gigabytes of RAM...

One thing that I've always found weird in CMBO and CMBB is the ghostly silent advance of infantry. From time to time you'll hear an NCO yell something, but no footsteps, no crunching twigs, no jackboots clanging on cobblestones. Thinking about this I realize that this could be a huge potential computer resource hog, so 1:1 movement sounds are probably a really bad idea. But it would be nice there was something, a few footsteps and jangling equipment noises, perhaps a bit louder when they're running, and quieter when they're in stealth mode (if such a thing exists in CMx2). And by the way, I just heard a rumor that the call of the North American Robin sounds remarkably similar to the Central European Thrush...

I don't mind it so much if my troops insist on being profane, but vulgarity is intolerable.

And a sound mod of the bad rock music that was loudspeakered at him to make him give himself up...

There isn't a whole lot of snow in Italy in the winter, except in the Alps and the high Appenines. But as I don't have CMAK, what I had in mind was a winterized version of your truck on the Eastern Front...

Very nice trucks. Will there be a winterized version of the Italin camo?

(watches his dreams of recreating the Chaco War fade into the dust and mirages of the Gran Chaco)...

This perhaps a bit naive, but I thought mouseholes were made with the Mark I pickaxe.

For Quick Battles I suppose it would be useful to have some sort of crude map. But what does or does not go onto a briefing map should really be at the whim of the scenario designer.

Any chance you could hard code TO&E's for Quick Battles but make them flexible in the editor? That way scenario designers could make realistic scenarios for situations that you won't want to release games on, like the Chaco War or WW I.

Steve mentioned randomly generated doodads. I just want to mention that I've never been very fond of the random crates graphics. I like the idea, but I find it disconcerting to see a blatantly two-dimensional object filling in for a three dimensional object. So please make your crates out of cubes this time around, and not out of two flat surfaces arranged in a cross. I also have a similar problem with graveyards -- some of those headstones look really weird. I'm hoping that the extra polygon count possibilities will allow you the time to do away with this kind of shortcut. (You haven't heard me say anything nice about vinyards, but that's because I don't have CMAK yet. I love vinyards.)

And that is why the first release will have to be on the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia. You've got Americans on both sides and the research will be easy to do because its in Spanish. And the Gran Chaco is lovely this time of year... http://worldatwar.net/chandelle/v1/v1n3/chaco.html [ August 27, 2005, 02:04 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Soory if I missed this, but my mind is mushier than usual. I'm hoping that there will be multiple image alternatives for the same building. If you're playing a city fight scenario and it has five churches in it, it would be nice if they didn't all look the same. And along those lines, I would really like multiple building types so that it would be easier to create the visuals for scenario-specific buildings, and mix them in with other normal buildings. Think of the fall of Berlin, or a hypothetical German capture of Moscow: you want St. Basil's to look like St. Basil's, but you only want one St. Basil's in Moscow. There are lots of other terrain situations where that crops up besides churches, so if you have a few extra redundant terrain types, a designer can pick one of them and mod it. By the way, that also means that if I have five models of churches to choose from (and you wouldn't have to do different images for all of them -- the modders would take care of the rest), I want to be able to say that I want model # 1 to show up here, and # 2 to show up there, etc...

Who needs ice? I want synchronized swimming!

I would like to see each side provided with a schematic rough sketch map of the battlefield that can be called up at any time. This would be a bit like the notes the commander took on the back of an envelope at the briefing a few hours before the battle. It could (and should) contain mistakes, and not have a whole lot of detail. You don't need this kind of thing on a small map, but on really big maps I would rather have a simple line drawing of the road and river net, prominent buildings and woods, real and imagined fortifications, and pre-game intelligence. And it would most certainly not get updated as the game progressed -- it would be there to consult at all times, mistakes and all.

My favorite military conundrum is what to do about a bridge wired for demolition. This situation is a real nail-biter and has been a problem ever since gunpowder was used to blow up bridges. My favorite instance of the scenario gone haywire was at the battle of Leipzig in 1813: Napoleon was retreating from the field across the Elster and the officer in charge of blowing/not blowing the only bridge panicked when attacked by Prussian skirmishers. The aftermath of the premature explosion converted a defeat into a catastrophe, and guaranteed the fall of France in the next campaign. On a more modern note, this was an issue the Western Allies faced repeatedly as they fought their way to Germany: would that critical bridge over the Seine/Meuse/Mosel/Rhine blow up in their face when they tried to cross it? There's one delightful scenario in CMBB that tries to cover this situation, but it is slightly marred by clumsy game mechanics. This is not an obscure situation, like some exotic German machine gun that no one has heard of. I think they used to teach courses (or parts of courses) on this, because sooner or later a non-engineering officer will come up against it. Engineers, on the other hand, have to deal with it all the time. So even if we don't have fully modeled engineering capabilities in CMx2 (do you really want to wait around for three hundred turns while your pioneers set up pontoon bridges across that river?), remote demolition of terrain features is an important addition to CMx2.

For whatever its worth, just look at how many D-Day scenarios got produced after CMBO came out. People want to see a beach assault. Doesn't have to be the focus of the game, but if the game has something close to a D-Day or an Iwo Jima scenario it needs to be in there. And yes, my favorite Steel Panthers Modern Battles scenarios involved the brown water navy. Something to do with being too fond of Joseph Conrad and Apocalypse Now...

I think it is illuminating to watch a few color movies made prior to 1960, and then ask yourself if the world was a lot brighter back then, or if there was merely something a bit off about the way color was captured on early film. Beyond establishing that that two-decker bus really was some kind of fire-engine red, it doesn't give a good sense of the palette. I've tried to have this discussion with a few WWII veterans, but to no avail: they were literary people not artists. So what you need to do is to find a 90-year old painter who was in the war, because they're probably the only ones who understand color. Personally, I prefer my WW II in relaxing shades of sepia and brown. I know it looked like that, I've got my father's photographs to prove it.

Doesn't sound very realistic. In real life what you're describing is done with the Mark I Eyeball and the Mark II Brain (patent pending). In CM you know that vehicles move at approximately walking speed, and they fast move at something that looks a bit more like their top speed. The info panel gives this information to you klicks per hour as well as meters per second -- so it shouldn't be all that hard to figure out who will get there first, or whether you should issue a pause order to prevent a collision. I'm all for making the interface easier and more intuitive, but this is going too far. If you don't have the information in real life, you shouldn't have it in the game.

One of the things that makes CM a very healthy medium for head-to-head play is that everyone is playing exactly the same game. You can modify the visuals to your heart's content, but you can't change any of the unit values. This means if two owners of the game who don't know each other start playing PBEM, there won't be any compatibility issues. It also means the unscrupulous can't go in and alter the ranges and combat values of their weapons. One of the problems in games where you can make this kind of change is that a lot of modders take the "Wouldn't it be cool if..." approach, skimp on the research, and never bother to tell you exactly how historical or unhistorical their mod is. That's a real pain, and over time you end up with a host of competing versions of the game, most of them badly researched. There will always be a few minor quibbles about how Battlefront does things, but by and large their research is state of the art. And far better and level-headed than that churned out (or ignored!) by your run-of-the-mill fifteen-year-old modder with too much time on his hands.

And if you aren't already thinking about it, try to add a new section to the briefing called historical outcome, that you only get to read after the end of the battle.

If it isn/t too late, please try to have the left and right sides of things covered by different graphics. I'm really sick of seeing tanks numbered 808 because the number appears backwards on one side. And I can't stand seeing American soldiers with the same shoulder patch on both shoulders. And this is a minor point: Stug drivers tended to wear grey uniforms, but tank drivers wore other things. There are lots of scenarios where you get tanks, stugs, and recon vehicles showing up at the same time. If you use the same uniform for all of them, one of those groups is going to be wearing the wrong clothes. I want my German assault guns driven by guys in grey, and my tanks driven by guys in black or camo, and I want to see it at the same time! Please make it possible to have French fighting French (Vichy vs. Free French), Italians fighting Italians (the guerilla civil war in Northern Italy in '45), and Spanish fighting Spanish (SCW). [There's a great Spanish sound mod at CMMODS -- voice acting is fantastic, though the sound quality is not so good -- I'll bet you'd have no trouble getting them to repeat the performance with good recording equipment. There's a thread at the Punta de Lanza website]. I'm not much of one for quick battles, but it would be nice to allow a scenario editor to select any kind of unit from any nationality, and then specify what language the troops would speak. And if you add the possibility of allowing that scenario editor to create custom squads from existing weapons, editors could mod their own Spanish Civil War, Chaco War, or WWI scenarios. And it wouldn't mess up the Quick Battles as long as this was a scenario editor-only feature. And speaking of WWI, how about some poison gas and respirators? And an artillery setting that lets us fire off a two week bombardment before turn one?

This is probably the wrong place for this, but I hope this means that fortifications like bunkers and pillboxes (what are wooden pillboxes, anyway?) can be treated as terrain that gets moved into, used, and moved out of -- rather than as a unit. If my squad happens by a previously abandoned concrete bunker that is facing in the right direction, the concrete makes great cover even if the machine gun/anti-tank gun is out of action. Same goes for whatever those wooden pillbox things are supposed to be. The guys defending it should panic, grab their machine gun, and abandon that weird piece of lumber. But later on it should be possible to reoccupy it, even if it is shot full of holes. And it has always annoyed me that I can't figure out the firing characteristics of the inherent machine guns/anti-tank guns of a fortification. So can we have proper entrenchements, foxholes and trenches that actually make a dent in the terrain? Can we have built-up firing ramps as independant terrain so that dug-in vehicles don't have to spend the entire scenario immobile? I never dig in my tanks -- but I would dearly love to play a shell game with a fast tank and a few pre-prepared firing positions. Unfortunately the only historical example that I can think of off the top of my head are the old Israeli defenses along the Suez canal. But I'm sure they had things like that in WWII. And yes, I want the Maginot line ! I want multi-layered underground forts with many layers of sub-basements. And the reason I want it is not to play Maginot line scenarios, but for the eventual WW I fort-storming scenarios. I want to see a whole expansion pack built around Verdun ! I'll be quiet now.

But Uber FOW is playing with screen off too! But seriously folks Actually, when I'm sitting to play my 5 or 8 PBEMs, I'll forget to turn the sound on till after a few turns have been played and sent. I just think of it as standing too close to a 150 and going temperarily deaf. I never even thought about putting the camera over the enemy troops just for listening purposes. Isn't that CHEATING and GAMEY?? In real life, the commander can't listen in on what the guys over there are saying. The whole point of playing BFC games is that they attempt to simulate real war as much as possible for $35 a shot. If you want gamey try an RTS game. Maybe the commander has one of these Long Distance Microphones </font>

Hearing someone scream "Sani!" or "Keine muni!" in the middle of a battle may require exceptionally sharp ears in reality, but if your life depended on hearing your kids over the watertap, you'd probably not only hear them, but identify the watertap and how far open the valve was. On the other hand, cybersoldiers probably don't suffer from age and earwax. I've thought of another example of cue-less sounds that seem pretty convincing. You play a large scenario where the front lines are just starting to make contact. The problem is, the front is at least a kilometer long. Some shots ring out -- you know that somewhere, someone on their side is taking a few preliminary potshots at someone on your side. And because you hear the clack-clack-clack of a Maxim gun, you're pretty sure that if you could only figure out which part of your front is getting pasted, you could probably see the puffs of dirt as the bullets hit the ground. But where to look? So you replay it a few times from above his line until the gun sounds the loudest, and then replay it again at level one in the part of your line that was closest to this. And sure enough, that squad over there is tip-toeing nonchalantly through a fusilade. Your guys knew they were getting machine gunned. They heard it, they saw it, but they just got lucky and never felt it. You the player have no way of figuring out what they know (that someone is shooting at them), unless you eavesdrop on the enemy to figure out what part of your line to finetooth comb at level one. So I'm not really disturbed by the need to listen in on the enemy. Actually, one of my many regrets about the CM games is that the weapons sounds aren't unique enough. It has always bugged me that German rifle fire sounds like French rifle fire sounds like Russian, etc. In real life each weapon is sort of like a musical instrument, and if you know the sound, you can figure out that someone is firing an MP40 in that clump of trees over their. Which side he's on is another matter ... so be careful about using enemy weapons lest you attract friendly fire.