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AstroCat

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Posts posted by AstroCat

    Is FB more optimized than the others?

    in Combat Mission Final Blitzkrieg

    Posted

    Squad was pitched to a very niche set of tactical gamers based on Project Reality (A mod for Battlefield 2) and garnered 450,000$ on Kickstarter. It later when on to be released on (The S word in early access ;)) and made another 300K fully funding the development, which is awesome!

    Maybe someday CM can do the same...

    Don't shoot me, please.

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/offworldindustries/squad/description

    Double edit: Funnily enough theres a thread over on there forums talking about people who play CM, small world!

    Yeah I was thinking along the lines of Squad as well as a good example of a niche game that got good crowd funding. Still not saying it is the best thing for CM but I had to consider it.

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    Is FB more optimized than the others?

    in Combat Mission Final Blitzkrieg

    Posted · Edited by AstroCat

    There is a huge difference in perceived smoothness between 60 and 30 fps in graphics animation. It is very easy to "see" this in any game genre. I must add this is using an LCD monitor, in the Quake 1 days we had CRT's. Some of this is because of the refresh rate and input lag. So give it a try and you'll see what I am talking about...

    1) Run any CM game at vsync'ed 60fps... knock down settings till you get a locked vsync 60fps and then move the camera all over the place, zoom in, zoom out, up, down, all over. Notice the fluidity of motion, and how easy it is to move the camera around.

    2) Now jack up the settings and get a good solid 20-30'ish fps and do the same thing... zoom down, up, all over the place. Notice the sluggishness, and input lag, how that smoothness is gone? This is what I am referring to.

    3) Another great way to try this is to zoom down to ground level in an area where you are getting 60fps, like looking of the corner of the map, then rotate the camera in a circle as you pan to the larger map area your fps will drop, notice the big difference in the smoothness and visual appearance of the panning. When it comes around again to the edge of the map and fps hit 60 again it will suddenly become visually smooth and the sluggishness in movement will be gone.

    In a game like CM it doesn't make as big of difference to the enjoyment of the game as an fps true but the effect is still there. The bigger point being us with high end systems are expecting much higher performance based on our comparative gaming experience. This is not just against the huge studios either actually. There are lot's of more independent studios these putting out bigger releases, a lot of that thanks to crowd-sourcing, which is why I brought it up. 

    I know running a kick-starter is a lot of work, I've known people who have done it but if successful you could maybe get a major funding boost for the next iteration of CM. You guys know your business a million times better than we do so this is just a "fan's suggestion" of course.

    At this point I'm not expecting any "miracle patches" for the CMx2 engine but it would be nice to get a bit more optimization out of it. I'd be happy with a Medium size map at 50-60fps and Huge at 20-30fps, that would be amazing actually. Currently I'm often seeing way too many teens and 20s and for me it is very distracting to the experience and this is on Medium sized maps and smaller.

    Thanks for taking the time for the responses and I'm not trying to "attack" the game or the developers. I like the CM games a lot and I'm "in" for the long haul, I just want to see them keep growing and expanding and some of this I believe includes engine performance improvements relative to "modern" hardware.

     

     

     

     

     

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    Is FB more optimized than the others?

    in Combat Mission Final Blitzkrieg

    Posted

    Understood and yes I am aware that OpenGL is being used, and honestly I wished you guys would have gone with Direct X, at least for PC. Maybe something like the Unity engine does... OpenGL on Mac, Direct X on PC? I know your resources are not going to compare with the much larger studios especially those with massive publisher backings.

    Have you guys ever considered crowd sourcing for more resources? Maybe put out the feelers on a kickstarter? Perhaps that would be a way to get another specialized programmer or two on staff, at least for a while to do some targeted engine optimizations.

    As for fps... it's all down to "smoothness of motion". Straight up 60fps will be much smoother to look at and move around compared to anything less. The lower the fps the more "laggy" and sluggish the movement of the mouse, scrolling the screen and the animations will be. The difference is very noticeable between 60 and 30. Locked 60 vsync'ed is going to be your minimum for a "real" smooth visual experience. I know there is more to it than this but I'm just keeping it easy and to the point.

    Now CM can be played at below 60, down to 30 with "ok" results given the nature of the game, it's how I have to play it after all. But often it drops into the 20s and teens and then the movement because so labored it becomes significantly distracting to the experience and this is where I bum out because now I'm fighting the UI instead of fighting the "bad guys"! I play pretty much exclusively WEGO but in RTS mode the lowering fps would be a more serious issue.

    Thanks for the response and I appreciate what you guys are doing, looking forward to the newest release.

     

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    Is FB more optimized than the others?

    in Combat Mission Final Blitzkrieg

    Posted · Edited by AstroCat

    I have long been a Battlefront supporter going back to CMx1, I even helped them with a little bit of publicity way back. But understanding all things I do have to say the performance of the CMx2 engine is disappointing. I am tech savvy and have run multiple tests through the years and wish the performance was a lot better and feel it should be. Honestly a clean i72600k@4.2Ghz and a 980 ti GTX should not be getting sub 30 frames in this game... heck I often get a lot less than that and I turned down the model draw distance to better or less.

    Enabling NCP settings barely effects the FPS while increasing the quality showing there is tons of headroom bandwidth left on the card. Something seems to be working "incorrectly" in the game engine to take advantage of the CPU or GPU properly.

    Look, I will continue to support the company but as a long time customer I feel this is a valid complaint that I can voice with the hope that perhaps some resources will be allocated to "fixing" the issue.

     

     

    1

    sell on Steam?

    in Combat Mission Black Sea

    Posted

    Just a quick jump in... I think the CM games on Steam would be a great idea. Good for exposure, player base growth, sales, etc... I'm just a long time comsumer and fan of the series so I'm just one tiny opinion on the matter but I've always felt this would be a positive move.

    1

    Where is CMRT patch?

    in Combat Mission Red Thunder

    Posted

    Lol... I've played (and modded, created, tweaked and used) all the CM games for so long, taking breaks here and there so I figured with RT I'd just sit this one out till it got "up to speed", well looks like that's about to happen so good timing popping back in checking on things. :)

    ...but if all those shader and shadow bugs are still in there... that would be a real bummer.

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    Where is CMRT patch?

    in Combat Mission Red Thunder

    Posted

    Funny thing, I bought CMRT on pre-order, waited for the patch before playing, still waiting, never played the game yet. And, I'm a long time CM'er, going back to CMBO. My loss, they got the money but I won't play it till it works correctly. And, EF is my fav... double loss for me I guess.

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    Combat Mission and Steam

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Just adding my opinion:

    I like Steam, think it's been great for the PC market. I'd love to see CMx2 games on Steam, always have, I think it would open up the market even further. Matrix was the same way with Distant Worlds, now it's on Steam, boom! Huge jump in sales and new life for the franchise, also a niche game.

    So, yeah I really think CM games on Steam is a total win. And I saw some thing about $50 for a game being some kind of an issue or something, really? For all the entertainment hours you get, giving the huge costs of development, I say $50 is no issue at all.

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    Decals!!!!!

    in Combat Mission Red Thunder

    Posted

    In campaign mode, if a vehicle has hit decals on it at the end of the mission (but is still intact) and the vehicle is not repaired for the next mission, will the hit decals show up in the second mission? In other words, do the hit decals carry over from one mission to the next?
    That would be cool, not sure if they have that save state in the game or not?
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    2D Interface size

    in Combat Mission Red Thunder

    Posted

    This was on the short list of ideas for v3.0. Charles said "you have no idea how difficult this is" and so I asked Phil. He said "probably pretty tough, but I'll look into it more and let you know.". His answer back was "oh my God, please don't make me do it!". And so it was removed from the list!

    The primary problem is that OpenGL is not well designed for a 2D/3D game interface, which is what Combat Mission uses. Therefore, it's extremely inflexible and years of programming has made it even more inflexible. It is not going to change, unfortunately.

    Steve

    Can we at least use that extra space for more 2D interface data? Or at least fill it in with a tiled texture?
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