Jotte

CMA needs a game engine 4 upgrade to make it viable, IMHO. I’ll continue to dream on, only now with a little bit of hope!

I think that whilst we are waiting for Fire and Rubble, instead of moaning, we should have a little sing-song. All together now...
"We wish you a Happy Lockdown, we wish you a Happy Lockdown, we wish you a Happy Lockdown, and a Poxy New Year. Bad tidings we bring from Boris your king. But, we wish you a Happy Lockdown and a Poxy New Year."
Stay safe peeps.
 

You guys are doing great work.
In the last few years, the modules and updates are getting bigger and better - compare the CMRV module to, say, the Marines module back in CMSF1. I have no doubt that CMFR will be equally impressive

A 10 year fan here. ^^^^ This is exactly the attitude we should have.
It's all find to look forward to something new, report issues and desires but what a waste of time all this bitching and complaining is - about a schedule for f's sake. Go play CMRT or any one of the other games instead. Heck go build a snow fort in your back yard with your kids or grand kids.
Edited to correct how long I have been here.

To me what is surprising is not the length of time it takes BF to produce product given the tiny development staff, but the fact that BF is still in business after 21+ years and AFAIK the only and last surviving developer making realistic and brilliant tactical wargames for our tiny niche within a niche market.
We should not begrudge these guys from wanting to make some money from MOD even though that surely has delayed all entertainment product development.  My only hope is that BF is making the money they deserve and are not getting exploited.  My experience in the US DoD development game is that the sort of products that BF has been developing for us gamers would cost million of dollars - and many millions more when developing for a government agency.  These products would cost the customer many hundreds of thousands of dollars - very easily many millions.  We are getting them for $60-$70 bucks!  The biggest software bargain of all time.
The choice may be slow development of entertainment COTS vs no product at all.  Yes, we're all impatient.  But, we must consider the commercial realities.
 

I get that some people, a small vocal group of people,  are disappointed. I just wish they'd have the humility not to constantly flood the forum with petty bitching

I've been pleading for Uncons (& IEDs) across all the titles, designers don't need to use them if they don't want to, but there would be a metric s**t-ton of options for those who do.....If we had them.
IMHO it would be wise to add them for BOTH sides as I beleive Partisans are being added with this pack too.....TBH the core mechanics of CM:SF's Combatants, Fighters, Spies, Spy Forward Observers & IED Triggermen could all be used in any of the titles, as Maquis in CM:BN through to militants & paramilitaries in CM:BS.
VBIEDs maybe not so much though. 
PS - The CM:SF2 Uncons could use some tweaking TBH, they have no radio comms whatsoever as it stands, despite using taxis for their primary transport. 

And sturrrrrrrrrrrrrrm they do. Look at 'em go!

And sturrrrrrrrrrrrrrm they do. Look at 'em go!

Great wee vid showing T-34/85s being driven hard - they’re a lot smokier than I’d have thought!
Makes a change from the more common sedate 10km/h round in circles you normally see. 
 

So.....I'm one of those lucky people who immediately pre-ordered Cyberpunk 2077 and now I have finally played around with it. 
On this basis I can only say, "Battlefront.....I don't care how long it takes, please don't release it until it's finished and thoroughly tested, by actual gamers, doing gamer stuff." 

No dramas - although it did remind me of an old Army adage "don't volunteer" - it turned out to be quite an epic undertaking but it also gave me an appreciation of the level of detail and research expected by Battlefront, which I guess is why serious wargamers love CM titles.

I'm a big fan of CM:RT and play it more than the other titles I own. There's just something about it that made it my home base for CM. Here's an interesting, recent AAR showing a veteran Western Front CMer's first H2H battle in CM:RT:
 

It would also be interesting to play any game saves from others- something like a saved scenario, 25% of the way in (or around when everything gears up), for instance. Like the player is 2nd in command, suddenly thrown into the action (and in charge of adapting someone else's plan).

I pity the guy who has to take over after my guys have just rushed the objective way too early... 

If you ever find your self out in the Northwest--Seattle to be exact--IM me and we'll see what the local breweries have on tap. COVID permitting, of course. Stay healthy, amigo.

I took that from an actual WWII photo on the Russian front. Must have been Summer '41 even. Sad when you actually see it. The tank in the picture is wrecked and abandoned. That's not a person at the top but a hatch left open.

Oh and, Vacilllator, to off-topicalify this thread further I want you to know my wife and I visited your neck of the woods two summers ago. A walking tour to be exact, roughly around Taunton to Lynton. It was probably one of the best trips I've taken ever. First trip to England even. What I'd do for a real pasty now. Enjoy your little piece of paradise, sir.

Friday afternoon and finally off video conference calls.  Gawd I both love Zoom and hate it.
There are lots of reasons for delay and for those of us who have been around a while it is a constant joke on Steve's ability to wildly overestimate when a product will be out.  We love ya steve but I always double or triple your estimates.    Covid has impacted all of us and I really appreciate Combatintman's concerns.  My wife and I both have aging mother's that are very vulnerable.  In my case I can't visit her because of the risk, my wife is unable to even assume risk, she is simply prohibited.  Despite all the fluff from the orange man, a vaccine is a ways off and even then we are looking at manufacturing and distribution - and a possible mutation.  From a work perspective my job has gotten extremely time consuming and difficult and I barely even have time to play CM much less beta test it. For Steve etal sure they had requirements for their other contracts as well as trying to patch all the titles for various issues continue work on modules and deal with their personal lives.  Right now if anything we should all be giving each other leeway to deal with a difficult time.  Freakin sky is at least not yellow here today with smoke forcing everyone indoors.  I have a bottle of wine, some sashimi grade seafood was just delivered, my wife is healthy and it is the weekend.  I'll take it.

Greetings
I wanted to let everyone know that we at Developer Dialogue had the incredible opportunity to interview the founder & creator of Battlefront.com, Stephen Grammont. During the interview we dove into the history of the Combat Mission franchise, discuss the company’s latest partnership with Slitherine and uncover some bombshells.  We also uncover why Battlefront never released on Steam, until now.
 
Special thank you to Stephen for taking part in this interview, it was an amazing experience.
 
If you guys are interested you can listen to it here:
 
YouTube: 
 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/developer-dialogue/id1524192396 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/33DiH9pCrcV9bVw4WeDWmS 
Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc3ByZWFrZXIuY29tL3Nob3cvNDUwNTYyMi9lcGlzb2Rlcy9mZWVk

Download Gimp, then use the BRZ exploder that comes with the games to explode the brz files and expose the individual bitmap images.  Or download one of the US forces mods from https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/  and play around with editing those.  Aside from learning how to use Gimp, which largely takes a few hours of trial and error, the important bit is to make sure you save the bitmaps in the correct format - 24 Bit with no additional meta info (this will make more sense when you are using Gimp and try to export one of your edited images for the first time).
This is what a bitmap looks like.  This particular one is for a new Combatant that I did for CMSF2.  I have noted which bits are which.  The front of the shirt was copied from an image on the internet.  

In this example, I copied the texture for the shirt from the internet, copy and pasted the vest from the Syrian Special Ops uniform, recoloured the jeans.  You can see that you don't have to be super careful, so long as you respect the boundaries of each section.  I added a wave transformation to the sleeves.

Lastly, this is the Syrian Special Ops Uniform modded with the German forces trousers.  You can see where I got the vest from for the mod above.

Our review
 
https://www.awargamersneedfulthings.co.uk/2020/09/combat-mission-shock-force-2.html

http://www.baesystems.se/hagglunds/brochure/cv9035markiii.pdf
Thats a Mark III, not sure if it's eqvivalent to the NL version in game, but that info broschure put ammo as 2x35 ready rounds plus typical stowage as 140 rounds.