Steiner14

I feel with you, Charles. It's hard enough, to hold a deadline in a project. But if you are forced to deliver prior, due to management deisions and you are alone, and there is no team to bear the load on several shoulders, not even a second person, that allows to rest for the one or other day, with trust, that the other person is working on it, and then, when already all power was invested to hold the deadline, a wave of additional work comes back, that should have been done best already yesterday, without any hope of a free minute for weeks, then this is hard, really hard. I find it not ok from the management side, to put the only programmer that way under pressure with illusional deadlines. I hope this will be a lesson for upcoming releases.

Guys, don't be so focused on your personal wishes. There are driver/performance issues. Charles is working on the ATI/Vista problem, when a unit is clicked, that leads to a crash. Then there are many Geforce 8800 users with problems. So don't expect too much from the first patch. Otherwise you could be disappointed and the whining begins like on the first day. Give them some time for the TacAI. The better the results will be.

The Beast, don't forget, Battlefront are US. The Yankees prefer plastic money over their worthless $. Seriously, i don't understand the business scheme, too. I don't know how much Paradox gets for each box in stores, but if Battlefront would have opened a simple bank-account in a european country, paying a small fee to the holder of the account, payment - at least for Europeans - would have been possible even without Paypal.

The Beast, because you named the previous titles CM1 and CM2 i assume you are European? In that case you should find the game in stores. But the version on CD is v1.0 and you will definately need the current version v1.01a So make sure you have a broadband connection to download the update.

coda, i don't have a multicore CPU yet, but i guess you do this in the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) & selecting CMSF.exe & rightclick maybe could give the options you need

Stew, thanks for remembering us about these important facts. Indeed we need to give BFC time. But that brings up another question for me: they knew they had an excellent brand name with Combat Mission. They also knew, they have a community not many game developers have. What i don't understand is, if they knew how much work still needs to be done, why did they make the community believe, that a completely finished product, continuing where CMx1 stopped, will be released? A word from Steve, that they will offer a buyable beta, because the game needs to grow over time, would have been understood by everyone and i think the majority of the old CM-players would have taken the chance to get the beta in their hands. But how they did it, could only lead to the high expectations - built on Cmx1 - they have to cope with now.

I can't imagine a connection between TacAI problems and CPU ressources. That would mean, stronger processors, better AI. That is ofcourse not the case: if the CPU is too slow to handle all requests within time, the framerate drops. I'm sure the TacAI problems have nothing to do with CPU power. And compared to the necessary calculations for the graphics and physics engine, they can be neglected.

And i don't understand, why it wasn't made optional with a blanked screen and the famous blue progress bar.

That reminds me about the post, when Steve mentioned, that in CMx2 units will have a memory and therefore i.e. tanks being capable to remember where the last deadly threat was after they have broken LOS and had retreated. The imagination alone was exciting.

Nevertheless i would prefer a switchable terrain grid. A helping workaround for high noon sun or overcast weather could be, that with the push of button, the sun/moon is placed low, in case a grid is technically not possible.

Mikoyan, thank you for the info. Very appreciated. Helped me to decide for the X1950Pro. I trust in BFC they will solve the problem.

:eek: :eek: :eek: Unglaublich. Du bist ein Künstler.

:eek: Please tell me the famous CM-quality isn't completely gone!

Maybe it was a bit too much, with the new engine AND 1:1 representation down to each bullet. I already felt when i heard about it, that it must be an enourmous labour to do it realistically. And it seems, lots of development time was sucked into the 1:1 representation leaving not enough time for the "rest". I.e. allowing quickbattles with purchaseable formations when the StratAI needs scripting, was not a good decision. The complaints about QBs as they are now, IMO are worse, than killing QB entirely. Keeping the abstraction level, but with actual graphics, adding RT, and the sophisticated Arty- and Air-support would have been enough labor and IMO attractive enough for all CM-players - and more of them due to RT. But i still trust in BFC that they will be able to fix the bugs and technical problems. Because of that i have right now ordered my new computer and CMSF. Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.

I think i remember Steve argueing, there will be no grid-overlay necessary because of terrain shading.

KnockOnWood, how much frames do you get now and how are your quality and resolution settings?

C-key for 'cinema', right? OMG! That is in?! Long time ago i raised that feature wish for a far more natural wide-screen angle view with absolutely no response.

I didn't mention another idea, because i didn't believe it could make any difference, but with rlg85's discovery about thread priority, it could be be worth a try, too: in WindowsXP look into Systemeigenschaften (System Properties?) -> Erweitert (advanced?) -> Systemleistung (system power?) -> Erweitert (advanced?) -> Prozessorzeitplanung (CPU time planning?) and set it from 'Programs' to Hintergrunddienste (background services?) This is a recommended setting for audio-workstations and helps the audio-engines. Maybe it has a positive effect on the graphiccard drivers? Don't forget to reboot before try.

That's great! And what happened to the idea of multiple texture-sets per unit? Will the game look for alternative filenumbers (similiar to the winter-sets in CMx1), or is it fixed to one texture-set/soundfile per model/effect?

Obviously the quality testing was a total miss. Wherever you look, everywhere are DualCores topsellers, for many months already. Multicore CPUs are the future and CMSF is the first title with a new engine, built for the future, not for the past. Also the 8800GTS is very widespread, because there is no alternative in that range for months. And in the lower price ranges, but still advanced for gamers, the Radeon 1950s have the most entrys in pricecharts. They sell like warm rolls. And since several months it's difficult to get new preconfigured PC without Vista. You have stubbornly to insist on XP, to get it instead of Vista. For me it's hard to believe, that the most spread system-components nowadays were not tested. For two days i'm waiting for a response which graphics card i should buy to get maximum performance from CMSF. That says a lot. Before the game was released, i found it a bit strange, that there was absolutely no info to find, which components deliver maximum graphic details. And on the third day after release, it's still unkown in the whole cummunity which setup gives the best performance. I really hope they will solve the problems soon and verified information what works best with CMSF will become available.

When modelling asymetrical warfare, it would be quite important to be able to give hidden, ambushing units a shoot and retreat command (for the AI during scenario design maybe even depending on strenght of the incoming fire, or numbers of wounded in the squad). If that could be scripted with cover arcs and retreat paths torwards fallback positions (multiple fallback positions?), that could make the AI really dangerous.

Has nobody read that yet?! :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: What else could we want? Perfect!

rlg85, Ok, this can be overcome in RT (if you are fast enough), but i think it is also very annoying in RT, if the drivers of vehicles are plain blind, deaf and dumb. Who tells you, that the TacAI will not be improved? Steve already mentioned, it is quite high on their list.

Bastards, thanks for not posting a spoiler alert! :mad:

And what about ability weighting: Ability against hard targets? Ability against soft targets? Instead of one single value, there could be several categories, someone can spend his "points": i.e. soft, hard And each category has to stay below the chosen threshold. I.e. You have 100 points for hard target capability, 1000 for soft. So a T72 could rate 2 against hard targets. But 9 against soft. A M1A2 10 against hard, 9 against soft. And so on. That way, if you decide to get 16 T72 to match the hard target capabilities of the oponent, you will be forced to choose less infantry or weapons with less soft target capabilities. Would that solve th problem?