moneymaxx

I'am under the impression that they play WEGO too .

Are soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms harder to spot or is it "just" eyecandy?

Speaking of arcs. Is there a safe zone around the tank where infantry can not be hit by the main gun and coax mg? In Elvis´ DAR a tank fires at a Schreck team at very short (too short?) range. http://www.battlefront.com/images/stories/CMBN/Elvis_vs_JonS/11-11.jpg

It all boils down to the differences between an old technology that has been honed to perfection where every minor improvement leads to increasing costs and newer technologies in their infancy that almost always start being inferior but have much more room for improvement . (Cmx1->Cmx2, tube television -> flat screen tv, horse cart -> petrol engine car -> electric car?, tape recording -> digital recording...). Many companies that did not recognize these shifts sustained huge losses or went out of business (google Kodak and digital photography). Is the new technology (Cmx2) perfect, e.g. does the TacAi find every cover and act accordingly? At this moment maybe not but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Some improvements (smaller action spots, more los checks) will come at the cost of more computing resources, but those will become (most probably) available in the future for "free". So if I understood many posts on this forum correctly the new engine scales much better with more computing power. Therefore it has at least the potential to become vastly superior than its predecessor. A last word on abstractions. Many times they only feel better since they gloss over their inherit shortcomings like low resolution old tv shows look better on an old TV because a high def TV reveals the actual low picture quality. Just one example. In CmX1 you get weak spot penetrations as a certain percentage of all hits. With enough hits you eventually get a statistically correct outcome every time. In CmX2 that weak spot might be blocked by a tree or the corner of a house. That is a much better "high definition" outcome IMHO.

Actually it's the requirement of most (all?) posters in this thread in favour of such data. "Some" seems to be an extrapolation of yours because you once met a control freak .

The database could be much shorter, since it does not have to match every gun to every vehicle. You have the gun data on one side and the armour data on the other. For those who are interested in how that looked like in Cmx1, I add a link to a page where you can find the Combat Mission Database by Chris Hare http://mysite.verizon.net/pchardwarelinks/cm/. Given the limited programming resources, I hesitate to say that something like this should be programmed into the game, but as a reference list it could be added to the manual.

+1 And in addition to that there is a game related issue as well. Since when the player gives an order to a inexperienced unit he effectively replaces the commander of that unit by a veteran/elite commander (the player). The player prevents them form making mistakes, he tells the bazooka man to wait for a flank shot, he looks for a covered way to get from A to B, orders them to not fire too soon... The player elevates their performance to a point that's far better than one could expect from that unit in RL and in some way or another should be punished for that.

Form must follow function, if earthpimpels are the only way to have FOW, so be it .

It seems they relaxed the NDA a little, a lot of info to be found lately .

I do not know the reasons for this position, and i do not need to know. I only wonder why the editor does not allow the import of a basic csv-file (comma seperated value) as Redwolf suggested. The file could be organized like this x-coordinate, y-coordinate, terrain type, height, x-coordinate, y-coordinate, terrain type....... and so on. Even without the terrain-type it would save a lot of work.

The argument was against spending A LOT of time. I would happily take a very elaborate delay system. But given the long To Do list I'd rather see that time invested in other areas. I do however think that a WWII setting without any kind of delay is undesirable. Much time has been spend to eliminate Borg spotting but Borg reaction time has been introduced. Therefore I argued for a quick fix to what I (and maybe only I) think is a problem. I would also like to add that "command delay" is one of the few areas where I think that the strive for realism yields negative returns after a while. If they are absent it's unrealistic, if they are a 100% realistic the game becomes no fun/unplayable. To go back to the topic: Love it? No, but they are necessary. Hate it? No, but they do have/had their problems. Should it ever return? As quickly as possible

I liked the old system, maybe it can be adapted? 1) This could be handled by the TacAI (in the way unarmoured vehicles backed up in Cmx1 when they encounter a tank). Even if the result of the TacAi´s decision was disastrous, I could live with that blaming it on the circumstances. 2) I always interpreted the command delay either as the time it would take the unit itself to come up with a plan or to get a plan to the unit. Somehow I found the implementation of the command delay counter-intuitive though. IIRC the delay went up the more waypoints there were leading to the problem of the "winding road" delay. I think it should have been the opposite way. A longer time delay for the first order reflecting the time it takes to form a basic plan/get the plan to the unit and much smaller (fixed?) delays for consecutive waypoints. (IMHO a small delay for cancelling orders should be considered). I do wonder though if a lot of time should be invested in a a more complex system that leads to more realistic delays, which then have to be toned down a lot because otherwise nobody wanted to play that way.

On this website http://mysite.verizon.net/pchardwarelinks/cm/ databases can be found about units available in CMBO, CMBB and CMAK. Thanks Chris! It seems there was no Panzer III in CMBO.

"Thanks" for the adrenaline rush . At least I found a picture of Charles before being put into his jar http://web.archive.org/web/20000818050419/http://www.battlefront.com/about/about_us.html

Oops, and I thought I read the whole thread, comes with age I think .

As you say replay is a lot of fun, so any way of playing that does not allow replay is a lot less fun. And while WEGO with replay obviously gives you more situational awareness it does not really follow that this way of playing the game is "dishonest" or less realistic. Actually I'd argue the other way around. The better situational awareness playing WEGO does not at all balance the LACK of control you have for the following minute. In WEGO if your ambushed, attacked by artillery or your tank is about to move into the firing lane of an ATG that just has been spotted by another unit you are in trouble (of course more so if that happens at the beginning of the turn). In RT you just change your order on the fly or hit pause if things do not work out as planned (btw, giving less specific orders in RT is not something the game imposes on you since while paused you can give any order you like, there is just no need too since you can change them ant any time anyway).

Personally I think that WEGO without replay is not worth the effort, since it's the replay that's important. Even against the AI I would prefer RT if it had a replay function. Since it is obvious that TCP/IP WEGO with replay will not be done (anytime soon), how about "leveraging the existing code base" of PBEM and combine it with TCP/IP. So that while being connected, the computer handles the PBEM-file exchange via TCP/IP instead of email. While waiting for another turn one could watch the replays and with an added chat function it would somehow feel like TCP/IP WEGO with replay. At least for me that would be the better work-around. If the above seems to much trouble, a similar result could be achieved if the game automated PBEM-file sending and receiving like undead reindeer cavalry suggested. Instead of naming the file, saving it, sending it, scan if a new file has arrived, loading it...... the game would do that for me and without leaving the game it notifies me of a new file. That would make the PBEM crowd happy as well.

IIRC the rain setting in CMx1 did not only effect LOS and spotting but the ground condition as well. If they implemented this in CMx2 as well it would have quite an impact on tactics. Oh those sweet memories of my Tigers bogging down :mad:.

Normally BFC releases games "when they are done". Not so CMSF. Rumors say that because of Paradox (their partner at that time) they had to release a unfinished product. At that point all the future improvements were unknown and many thought that CMSF was not only unfinished but could not be fixed at all (I kind of doubted it as well despite of BFC´s track record of supporting their games). I found the game in its initial release unplayable (sorry Battlefront) and disliked the setting, not so much because it's modern but because I think US against Syria is very unbalanced. After waiting soooooo long after CMBB/CMAK I was very disappointed and since no other company releases games for my wargaming needs became slightly sad, others became depressed and many others angry. After some months I picked up CMSF on Ebay, still did not like it. But today, even though I have not changed my opinion about the setting, I find CMSF entertaining because BFC has improved it so much. Actually I'am even thinking about buying the modules (but only if there is a NATO/British/Marine bundle ). That I play CMSF despite of the setting says a lot about the quality of the underlying engine. Even more important is that CMSF proved once again that Battlefront does not abandon their games. Therefore I have high hopes for CM:N, even if it's not perfect on release it will only get better. BTW can we have a new CM:N bone ?

Never had luck with assault neither, usually I just use "quick". Is there an advantage using "assault" in any situation?

Actually I do not think that it´s a bad idea. Well, not this clip obviously but premade animations with game graphics. Once close combat starts, the game calculates the outcome "behind the scenes" while the clip displayed is eyecandy only. Obviously that´s only a workaround until the 1:1 representation gets better, maybe they already achieved it in CMN?

Isn´t that done because on a traditional CPU something like ray-tracing would be too slow? I had the idea about CUDA because I found this on the Nvidia website: "Line of Sight This sample is an implementation of a simple line-of-sight algorithm: Given a height map and a ray originating at some observation point, it computes all the points along the ray that are visible from the observation point. The implementation is based on the parallel scan primitive provided by the CUDPP library (http://www.gpgpu.org/developer/cudpp/)." I admit I do not know how fast this is compared to traditional calculations.

I have to admit I do not understand too much about programming but wouldn´t it be possible to use something like CUDA (use the GPU as a paralell computer) in the distant future? Thousands of parallel threads seem to be ideally suited for e.g. LOS/LOF checks, bullet trajectories and so on.

I just wanted to mention that we reached 300+ posts in this thread. Time to close this one Battlefront and maybe open a new one (hint hint).

It's more like PIIGGS now (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Great Britain, Spain)