Steiner14
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Posts posted by Steiner14
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Damn, why must developers always overshoot, instead to break up into smaller, reachable targets?!
Instead to make an early release of CMC with no AI, but giving the Meta-campaign players what they need, they decided to code an AI for single-player, too with the result, that it will much too late, or maybe never see the light.
Reminds me about the 1:1 representation in CMx2 that is taking place on gridded 8mx8m action spots .
One step forward, three steps back.
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edit: double post
[ September 27, 2007, 12:45 AM: Message edited by: Steiner14 ]
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Why do you think, is that the case?
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As someone being put on the waiting list but already with access to the forums of the Germans, i can only agree. VERY interesting, highly professional!Originally posted by Bigduke6:You should see the planning communications and combat reports; it's very realistic and in some cases remarkably professional.
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I absolutely agree. If you have only one manhour, you can't begin to develop a new rocket.Originally posted by Phillip Culliton:Exactly. It isn't relevant at all (which, I might add, Sixxkiller, is why I haven't talked about it).
And your point comes back to our discussion regarding BFC's choosing not to devote enough development resources to the game to finish it within their release timeframe. I agree, BFC's decision is extremely relevant to the current state of the game.
If i look at certain aspects of the game and compare them, i clearly see, that some things are overmodelled (development time wasted in early stages), while others were obviously treated in a rush (time running out).
This is a clear indicator, that the development process did not estimate the needed manhours properly. As an extreme example: the vehicles show suspension effects, which may be cool for kids, but wargamers don't care about, but the pathfinding is poorer than in CMx1! :mad: Can this be true after 4 years of development?!
Since CMBO every player was hoping for the possibility to move vehicles on streets in columns to reduce micromanaging. But therefore we have suspension effects and cages around vehicles with a high polygon count! :mad:
Or take the sky: stars are moving on the sky correctly, but units don't find the holes in the walls! :mad:
IMO a complete wrong weighting of priorities. And what makes that so severe: the priorities of BFC's customers never lied in such graphical-FX. They invested time in things, no one was asking about.
And on the other hand, the graphics itself is not even up to date.
I suspect, some in the team lost the roots where they were coming from and started to believe, they know everything much better. And because of knowing everything much better - CMx1 was the proove for them - they aimed at complete other targets. But this assumption was already wrong: every wargamer always dreamt about a tactical 3D-environment. The critics were not about the idea, but if it could be done well enough! Because of the major rule for realism: before displaying graphical details unrealistically, no matter how beautiful it may be, it is WAY better not to display it and to symbolize it. Therefore wargamers were sceptical about CMBO initially!
And with CMSF they thought they can do even better and opened the can of worms with a half baken 1:1 representation - a barrel without a floor - and the rest that follows is only a conclusion of doing that.
What the developers expected and what they could achieve simply is not good enough for most wargamers.
And here comes the next aspect into play: the wargaming community was not big enugh anymore. Realtime was the magic word! And the realtime games outthere are not good enough, too. They thought they can do even that much better, too. The result is a strange hermaphrodite, but not CM anymore.
And CMSF makes me very sceptical about the WWII-release, if BFC strictly denies to go back to it's roots: Steve mentioned it too often, that they do not care about the hardcore wargamers anymore. They were a too small market for them. Great, but they sell CMSF for 10$ now and no one is interested in it anymore. If that is the future? I doubt that.
BFC, go back to your roots (means: before showing useless but nice looking graphical things, but tactical garbage, do not show it all), or this can not have a good end.
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I stopped playing CMBB one year ago.
Due to my disappointment with CMSF i became interested in CMx1 again - you know, the tactical, chess-like challenge in bigger battles.
I decided to join the meta-campaign of the battle of Lauban and yesterday i've set up my first training-battle and what can i say?
It's great! Finally exploring and learning terrain again! Thinking where the enemy may be, and where he may come along and where i need to place my troops. How will i conduct the advance? Will the Panthers take the lead? Or the StuGs with the infantry? Will i be able to bring the infantry guns fast enough forward and unhamrend through the woods?
And while i was setting up my units, i immediately knew, what CMx2 would have really needed:
Some graphical enhancements, like sun and shadows, alittle haze, soldier animations. Enough! No one was asking for and we didn't need hundreds of polygons on vehicles, if they can't follow realistical paths and we have to wait several graphics cards generations, until we can reach the level of gameplay again, CMx1 had reached already.
Then the core things, which would have been probably enough for each CM-player to make him buy CMx2: indirect fire of MGs and infantry guns (not in CMSF), calculations that respect the height of the turret when hull down (in CMSF you can even shoot through crests), a grid overlay (also not in CMSF), relative spotting, full battle replay (not in, thanks to unnecessary detail) to open a beer and watch a finished battle. Enough!
That would have been enough for a whole new engine and for several years of modules.
And here comes IMO the next very bad design decision into play: enormously reducing the scope. Ok, if you waste all your development time into useless 1:1 representations, that finally is not really 1:1, then you will have not enough time to build models, OOBs and scenarios.
If they would have gone an evolutionary way, which is the logical way, if you have reached such a excellent level, they could have started with a smaller scope in WWII, but not as tiny as in CMSF and extended it with every module. 10 modules? No problem!
And because of the evolutionary process, the engine would have reached it's final state much faster, too.
But now they have the tiny scope, a buggy and unfinished engine, and maybe 2 modules will follow (i doubt that even a second module will see the light of day, due to lack of interest in the wargaming community; the eye-candy players, have left CMSF already anyway). And then will come the WWII-release and will also have a tiny scope and receive only very few modules.
If i look back now with the new old CMx1 experience, BFC did everything to ruin the trademark CombatMission.
[ September 26, 2007, 02:05 AM: Message edited by: Steiner14 ]
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Following the arguments that programming time were too precious for a little but sucessful(!) company like Battlefront, one point becomes even more valid: then it was not an optimum decision to change everything in one huge step, instead to break it up into smaller ones and sell each smaller step seperately, probably equally sucessful like the huge step, because of the steadily growing community without losing old players.
IMO a new graphics and physics engine with even better pathfinding than in CMx1, and some of the other improvements like the arty-system, would have been way than enough for a new release.
But making everything new AND 1:1 representation and completely new AIs, is a bit much even for big companys.
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BeauCoupDinkyDau,
msg me, if you are still interested in a PBEM as Soviet player.
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Thanks for the replies.
BigDuke6, VERY interesting!
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Hoolaman,
I can't hear this anymore.One thing that some people don't seem to grasp is that the TacAI requires a lot of programming time and testing. It is not fundamentally broken, nor is it limited by the RT engine. It is just not sophisticated at the moment because not enough time has been spent on teaching it "real" behaviour. So the fundamentals are there, but the subtle details are not.4 years of development! With CMx1 they had TacAI wise already everything that was needed. A new engine with modern graphics, cool animations, that would have been everything needed to make CMx2 a hit, where the community would have stormed the shops to get all modules and releases.
But they decided to change the representation of soldiers with a 1:1 representation. That was the worst design decision, because it only works, if the result is equally good, as what CMx1 already achieved with the restriction, there is no place for imagination player wise anymore. Everything portraied in the game has to be realistically. Obviously a much to difficult and time consuming task for such a small company. It is good, what they achieved, compared to others, but hell, i'm not satisfied with "good enough", i want CombatMission level!
If i imagine what could have been achieved, if they would have kept the three soldier representation, i'm becoming really fed up. I'm so fed up, i can't stand to watch the single soldiers in CMSF running around like headless chicken anymore! And that says a lot, about the difference between CMSF and CMx1. I agree, CMSF is not CM anymore.
I have no hope, that they get the 1:1 rep. right - and with right i mean to the level CMx1 set and not "right" enough, to keep playing for a few weeks.
The only hope that is left for me, is that the engine allows them to leave the 1:1 rep. and to concentrate on the important things again. If not now, then maybe the dropping sales with the upcoming modules or maybe even the WWII-release will force them to, if they do not want to go out of business.
IMO the forum already shows, that there are not really much new players. Tactical discussions are very rare and can't be compared to the quality discussion of earlier titles.
BFC can only pray, that no other company will close the gap they freely opened. Or they recognize the mistake and solve it, before someone else will do it. Because if that happens, they will be out of business very soon.
[ September 23, 2007, 02:13 AM: Message edited by: Steiner14 ]
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I've stopped playing CMBB quite some time ago, but now the interest is coming back again.
Does anyone now, if there are any meta-campaigns going on somewhere?
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But CMx1 was not fun. It was passion and dedication. You slept one night before deciding for a tactic against a good oponent, you learned the map and thought all day long while doing other things, where it would be best to place certain units. You thought, what the oponent will do and how you can overcome his plans. It had the potential to ruin your social life.
On the other hand i'm happy this did not happen with CMSF again. In the meanwhile i've even lost interest and don't even wait for the next patch. The ol magic is somehow gone but my wish to install CMBB again, is coming back now...
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This was something i was afraid of, since BFC announced 1:1 represenation.
The missing representation with the abstract squads was imagined subconsciously by the player (similar to chess, where you don't move dead, wooden figures, but figures with capabilitys and "personality").
In CMSF there is no room for imagination anymore and every shown unrealitic behaviour destroys the game experience, right were CMx1 shined by giving room to the player's imagination.
After some playing, i'd much more prefer this engine with abstract squads. I don't even want to imagine, how much development time was sucked up by 1:1 rep and what could have been done with that time otherwise.
I don't know, how long i will keep CMSF installed. I already lost interest, because i'm missing the kind of magic CMx1 had and i think the 1:1 representation killed CMs magic.
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Did i miss something? Why don't you use the 1.03 version?
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Getting rid of Vista is indeed a wise decision.
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Because a bigger adress room needs longer adresses and longer andresses need more computation if the computers can't handle the long adresses natively.
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From what i know, you need XP 64Bit to adress all 4 GB of RAM.
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One exciting aspect seems to be, that it's not just programming spaghetti-code with dry algorithms and calling subroutines, but it's about modelling the real world into classes and objects (you create indeed the object "tank", or "soldier"). Then you give the objects attributes and capabilities, they send messages, do something and receive messages from other objects.
And if you need a more specified object, they can inherit their capabilities.
Another very shining aspect is a technique called encapsulation. In OOP you do not always set values of variables and then get confused, what was set and how often in the program that variable is set. In good style OOP the changing of variables is done via the capabilities an object has. Imagine you have an object "bicycle". You do not change it's gear variable from ouside, but you give the bicycle the capability to change its gear, you define what it needs as input data, to change the gear (i.e. the number of the new gear). And then, if you want to change the gear of that bicycle from the outside, you simply call the specific bicycle and it's capability (the function) to change the gear: bicycle.changeGear(3).
Good OOP programming can be almost read as normal text.
The dry and hard to understand algorithms are buried within the functions of the objects. But once defined, you only call the function's name of a certain object with the input data and receive the result back from the object.
[ August 25, 2007, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Steiner14 ]
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If you would ever get in touch with Object Oriented Programming, you would probably change your mind.Originally posted by thelmia:Oh God, I would never program. I'd rather dig ditches. I'm not kidding.
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@BFC:
maybe it would be helpful, if people would post the kind of software they hafe installed, too (i.e. Firewalls, Antivirs, other background tasks).
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On the point. Kills CMSF for me, too.
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Why don't you read Battlefront's posts about the topic, instead opening a new thread?
Is CM:SF fundamentally flawed ??
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
I can't look into the future, and maybe i'm wrong, but Huntarr sorry, i don't believe you, things will change fundamentally. How could the infantry behavour be solved, without solving the underlying restrictions? The 8mx8m grid?
In the meanwhile i assume, the engine is indeed flawed, because of the counterproductive design desicions, to use 8x8m action spots and reduced LOS calculations, but to represent action at 1:1. This can never fit together, since there is by far not enough resolution, to give the engine enough information and freedom to place the pixelsodiers in a realistical manner.
Fact is, while you play it's obvious, that the 1:1 representation is just a gimmick, and that is, what makes CMSF unplayable for me. Anyone remembering BFCs credo, that realism comes first? A tactically completely uselss 1:1 representation should be enough to recognize, that CMSF has left that path of success.
Getting rid of the 1:1 would solve many problems, or at least make it not jump into your face while playing.