AstroCat

HAhaha! The funny part is the only actual girl/friend or otherwise who I've known to play or try CM games is my wife!  

Well, I'm not really threatening...for it to constitute a threat, I would have to have some expectation that the recipient (BF) would change its behavior based on my statements.  But I have no such expectations, I've been around long enough to know that BF is gonna do what it's gonna do...  But honestly, I would think that they would at least be curious why a long time hard-care tactical wargamer and customer is losing interest in their products.  Given that many people don't seem to understand the points I'm trying to make, I've had to repeat them several times, although I'll try to stop soon!
Well, yes...
Not sure about that any more.  While I only look at the CMRT and general forums, both of those are quite dead.  While I'm sure there will be a spurt of activity after R2V comes out, not sure how long it will last.  And frankly, a lot of what I would consider to be interesting conversations get shut down very quickly because people who raise any concerns are immediately branded as whiners, haters, etc. and disappear...

I used to love playing and modding the CM games (gen1 and 2) and still check in once and a while. I still have them installed even but I just can't bring myself to play them any more, for years now. My "criticism" is enshrined in the forums so need to rehash. Needless to say I still have a sadness about how I see the "death" or near death of the series. It's like a gaming relationship breakup, I probably shouldn't even be here, it's like checking in on an old girlfriend from years past, creepy! lol  
Now, "IF" we ever get a proper version 3 maybe we can rekindle the lost relations!   

The incremental approach for CM2 development has worked well for some years and put some very well deserved $ in BF's pockets.  But, I feel a boredom setting in.  Each module has virtually identical gameplay value as the previous - just adding a few new units, and perhaps a few bugs cleaned up.  Until there is another big step forward in evolution I predict a slow decline as we saw with CM1 over the past 6-7+ years.  The amazing work that Aquila has accomplished for graphics and the outstanding innovations of designer like MOS with his TOC and COUP scenarios has been exciting.  Perhaps the "Heaven and Earth" project will breathe some new life into the system for a while.  But, after playing the CM game series since 1999 for over 20 years, I find my interest flagging.  I have always bought whatever BF released immediately.  But, I just can't summon the interest to preorder the new CMFI module (as yet).  And am sad about that - like an old friend fading away...
 

Part of the issue is that BF does a fair amount of research, but for most players it doesn't actually matter. CM:FI is almost certainly better researched content than CM:AK. However, for 90% of players directly using the pre-existing CMAK TO&Es would be more than enough. Because BFC is apparently going through hoops to track down the correct information - so most players definitely aren't going to care. They lack the means and the time to do so and that creates a saminess to the proceedings.

(Clarifying the above) If BFC has to go through pains to track down the correct information for a time period then the player base isn't really going to care because they:

1. Can't verify or gain new information from the work that BFC has done.
2. Actually be able to tell when something is wrong or right

Once info is tracked down that information needs to be shared in some sort of consumable fashion with the audience for them to also become a stakeholder in that level of detail. Right now if the audience wants to be a shared stakeholder they have to go through the selfsame hoops that BFC did to find the info.

I was recently playing Graviteam's North Africa game and they have a section of the game that details some basic stats for each unit and also a few paragraphs of relevant info. So when I started a battle and found the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M6_Gun_Motor_Carriage I was able to say "what the hell is that" and then quickly become acquainted some history. All without leaving the match I was in.

That connection between the game and research can be content, but CM doesn't really do that. You select the year and month and a rifle squad appears from on high with an STG-44 why? We don't know. To an extant it makes me pine for the in-game information tabs of stuff like the original Rome Total War. Even stuff as simple as terrain differences aren't really known to anyone. If you made a CM:FI style map in CM:BS are there any differences?
I get the impression that a lot of people here exclusively, are almost exclusively, play CM. For folks who play other games those other games will offer different experiences and obviously we have limited time. The other day I was the Sherman crewmen who suppressed a German trenchline in Hell Let Loose. Its not CM, but many of the thrills that happen in CM happen in other games.

Other than that the tendency for PBEM games to become abandoned by people for various reasons, occasional annoyances setting them up, and the balkanization of the series all can make it a bit of a pain with various engine and module combinations now existing. PBEMs being abandoned or slowing to a painful crawl is my single biggest issue followed by engine and module upgrades. I don't want to come back to a match and wonder "what was I doing".

I seem to dimly recall from posts pre-2007 that the basic engine is RT only. WEGO just pauses the RT engine every 60 seconds and adds the replay feature.
personnaly I never play RT, WEGO only for me.

Why Dont they?
Hire more people.
Increase prodcutivity.
Make more things.
Sell more products.
Make more money.
Repeat.

We can only hope one day, we get a graphics engine even at this level. I've upgraded to a i7-9700K@4.9GHz and an EVGA RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra and still get terrible fps! Talking hitting 20fps and below on just a simple medium hills quick battle, not even with many trees. Super sluggish and laggy camera movement. lol!
IL-2 Sturmovik - Tank Crew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwkTxyh21-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tQVifFTGKY
https://www.facebook.com/il2sturmovik/posts/2026223027455545?__tn__=K-R
 
 

We can only hope one day, we get a graphics engine even at this level. I've upgraded to a i7-9700K@4.9GHz and an EVGA RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra and still get terrible fps! Talking hitting 20fps and below on just a simple medium hills quick battle, not even with many trees. Super sluggish and laggy camera movement. lol!
IL-2 Sturmovik - Tank Crew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwkTxyh21-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tQVifFTGKY
https://www.facebook.com/il2sturmovik/posts/2026223027455545?__tn__=K-R
 
 

In July 2018 Steve posted something about game engines which I'm paraphrasing below: 
Eventually we will have a new game engine.  Obviously it will be written with contemporary technology in mind and won't be OpenGL as we view it as a dead end.  It will also benefit from 20 years of experience with how best to simulate tactical warfare on a computer.  It's only a matter of when, not if.   

That there is pretty much the wet dream of this entire community. Who knows, maybe they are secretly working on an entirely new engine all along and one day we will be pleasantly surprised.

As a new player to the series, I really appreciate the depth of the game and AI behaviour. UI is really neat too, it's fun to use. However,  I find performance and overall look of the game off putting. The 3D models of the armour are decent to very good, but terrain, especially lighting and shading is something which is grossly outdated and not up to the even low end modern standards.
The game performs badly and there is really no technical excuse for that by looking what and how things are rendered.  AI and pathfinding definitely takes some processing power, but on modern even mid-end hardware it's not an issue and a game like that shouldn't ever drop frames to low 20s. (8700k@5ghz, 2080ti, 32 gigs of fast ram, I don't have any mechanical drives)
I have shown it to a couple of my friends who are massive strategy fans and all I got was "sorry I can't get over how bad it looks and runs". 
I understand that small team, low resources etc. There are widely available graphics engines out there like Unity which would make the game perform order of magnitude better and look much better, even with very little change to existing assets. There is a cost to port, it's not as massive as it seems, assuming there is a will , long term the cost of engine upkeep/upgrades can be lower than maintaining a homebrew solution. On top of that, I'd happily pay for an upgrade like that.
Having said that, I do not regret my purchase, quite the contrary - the gameplay makes up for it, despite sometimes feeling like I am held to a ransom playing a badly looking/running game, because "niche games". This makes me very hesitant with purchasing other games in the series, I'd buy them all if they would look and perform better.

First off, I know the game runs on OpenGL. I don't know why that is but it is. I know the game performs hundreds of calculations for every soldier or whatever. But I play games like Command and Graviteam Tactics/Achtung Panzer and those run perfectly and Command simulates a hell of a lot more than CM.
So, I built a PC pretty much specifically for these three games and I can't get it to even work properly. I get maybe 10 frames in a battle and even when I get more than 20 frames the camera lags behind so ****ing much it's unplayable.
I have a i5 4690k, 32GB of ram and CM is installed on a SSD and have a GTX 1080. I am literally giving it every chance to run but it doesn't. People get 40fps on giant battles and I can't get 10 on Tiny.
Please help.
I made a post four years ago with a similar problem but my computer has gotten a lot more powerful since then and performance is a lot worse. I can't be the only person having this issue.
At this rate, modern computers may not even be able to play Combat Mission in a year or two. This game needs some serious optimization. 

Hello Gentlemen
I had hoped to delay the announcement of this until the new CMMODS site was 100% finished and all the mods uploaded however due to circumstances I am pulling the announcement forward to... well now.
After recent discussions between GreenAsJade and Battlefront it has been decided to relocate the CMMODSIII site to fall under the umbrella of The Few Good Men where The Proving Grounds and The Scenario Depot already reside. 
To this end work has begun on moving the modifications currently hosted at CMMODSIII to their new home at CMMODS IV.  As you can imagine this is a major job and will take a few weeks.  CMMODSIII will remain open until the full transfer has taken place so for now I request that no new mods be uploaded to CMMODSIII. 
Within the next few days CMMODS IV will be opening the requests section for folk interested in becoming Creators (formerly Authors) and at this time the new upload process will be implemented.  This will be under the Instructions section of the new website but I will post in this thread to keep you all in the loop.
A few points about the new website worth mentioning... all files will now be held in cloud storage so even a catastrophic website crash will not impact any loss of modifications.  All files from the old CMMODSIII site will be relisted and recently with the help of @Erwin I have acquired approx. just shy of 300GB of modifications with quite a few that slipped through the net between the Repository and CMMODSIII transfer over 3 years ago.  So as you can imagine Im going to be very busy over the next few weeks.
Please do not subscribe to the new CMMODS IV just yet or you will be inundated with copious amounts of uploads... I think I uploaded over 100 today... you really don't want that many notification emails dropping in your inbox anytime soon!
In closing I want to thank Martin for all his sterling work over the years keeping CMMODS running and it's an honour to pick up the gauntlet where he left off.
Without further ado, here is the new site, still a work in progress but getting their quickly.  
http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/
Regards
Bootie
@Battlefront.com
 
 

I noticed in EZ's various mods out there and the variations he always skips the "1" uniform, other modders do this as well. For example: smod_american_m41_uniform 1 is always missing, same for all the other groups and nations. Is there a reason for this? Is "1" skipped if there is a .bmp that has no numbers? Like this:
smod_american_m41_uniform 
smod_american_m41_uniform 2
smod_american_m41_uniform 3 
In modding the sounds we always use the "0"
sound 0.wav
sound 1.wav
sound 2.wav
Thanks!

Not a "lot worse" for me, but it is noticeable.
Also, I am not convinced that the apocalyptic scenario you paint "modern computers won't be able to play CM in a year or two" has a high likelihood. It is within the realm of the possible (and a given on MacOS X systems), but I refrain from taking the worst case scenario for granted.

I believe it's a lost cause, I got a 2080 which is a super fast card, loaded up CM on a whim after not playing for months/years... small quickbattle (with all kinds of the usual shadow issues and shimmering, etc...), lol a very sluggish and laggy 20fps...bahahahaha. I'll back for CMx3, if?!
Honestly I really wish they could stop investing in the current engine, it's so outdated and is struggling more than ever. It's so bad that to me the game is broken, so I really can't justify any more BF purchases or recommendations moving forward unless there is a major engine rework. And I want there to be, the "game" is great it just can't be successfully realized adequately any more for me.

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.
 
 

Thanks for the contributions all. After stripping away all the general gearhead talk 🤓, this seems to be the summary of CM specific specs advice to date, as far as this non-techie can tell:
- CM puts more stress on memory/CPU architecture
-  favour higher speed CPU cores vs more slower cores
- Buy K versions of Intel CPUs
- AMD backend cores are not full cores
- CM is happy with higher clock frequencies
- Nvidia (GTX) graphics cards are better than AMD, especially for laptops and  avoid Intel cards
- Consider an extra case fan in a desktop build
- Windows with bloatware removed leaves more resources for CM than a Mac OS (no doubt some Mac evangelist will argue this but please don't derail the thread!).
What else? 
I care *solely* about optimizing for CM performance here. I have other devices for general computing. Cheers! 

I've been with the game series since shortly after the original CMBO release, I've been saying (in my way) the same kind of things for years and years and I'm still around. I am usually met with one form or another of dismissal or contempt for questioning the game developers in any way. It's very off putting to say the least but yeah, expand the base, gain more revenue, allocate partial new funds to a better user experience... sure would be nice... but I've told a "million" times it's not going to happen. "Stagnate and accept" is the mantra, take it or leave it works as well.
The game as an enitiy has such amazing potential beyond what it is now but most here don't seem interested. For most here, who have either been here a long time, or don't play too many other games it just is what it is, and they don't really appear to look beyond the CM bubble to see what it could be, or even care. /sigh

I disagree with most of what you have said and you haven't convinced me of anything at all that would change what I think about BF and their direction. I've tried to explain my opinions in a clear and concise way without personally attacking anyone. If it's been too abrasive for you then fine, that's how you feel, it was not my intention. I've been personally ridiculed for this, it's cool though, don't worry the last thing in the world I need is a "safe space". I've said my peace, I really haven't more to add on this issue at this point, and no I'm not going to do a full market analysis and present it on the battlefront game forums. Bottom line, I like the games and the company for a long time, I want them to continue to succeed and grow, I see some issues in the direction they are going so because I care I let them be known, that's really it.

Battlefront is like a grumpy old man yelling get off my lawn at some kids who offered to mow it for free. You know, because it's been that way for 25 years and that's how they like it... fine, it's your lawn, just trying to help. Oh I've been helping pick the weeds for the last 15 years (25 or so if you include my own lawn) or so but what the heck do I know about your lawn or anyone else's?
Seriously you don't think in this market you couldn't grow CM's business?! Seriously!? You don't give CM enough credit or its potential customers. Sure 15 years ago was 15 years ago, a lot has changed... maybe they were "on it" back then... and it kept them floating but the potential now is much larger.
Oh and I've tried every manner of constructive feedback angle, eventually you get frustrated at lack of development, even for old loyal supporters.

Feedback and constructive criticism isn't throwing a tantrum but I guess it is here. Fine, if customer feedback is irrelevant to Battlefront, fine it's a waste of my time. I wish them the best since obviously they are the only ones who know anything about anything to do with development, marketing, distribution or strategic planning. Not listening to your long time repeat customers because they are obviously just throwing a selfish tantrum, yep, ok. They don't owe me anything, who said they do? I never did. You are making me into some kind of a caricature... that's not me or my intentions. But I'm not billing hours either so why continue, right? Carry on and make sure not to listen to anything you don't like or agree with, that works every time.

I realize the reality of the economics but it's not the same development space as it was 10 years ago. There are new technologies, crowd funding, Steam distribution, other indie studios doing much higher fidelity presentations in the wargaming/strategy space. I think CM is becoming so insular and closed off it's missing a lot of opportunities. And, if you dare criticize or point anything out you get shot down. So oh well, it will become a smaller and smaller niche within a niche until it's just the old guard and it will slowly die off. This game needs to grow it's customer base, it needs more exposure, and with that new investment becomes possibilities, but some investment needs to be there to make the game attractive to new players (and keep loyal old ones happy). I want the company and game to continue to succeed but it's becoming increasingly frustrating to see it falling further behind with less of a chance for bringing in new customers. Strategy and wargaming gaming isn't as much of a dark horse as it used to be, CM should get it's self out there and get some exposure and don't be afraid to invest some more in the polish that will help bring in new costumers.
Ironically random thread I just came upon: https://www.reddit.com/r/wargame/comments/39x7jk/anyone_here_play_combat_mission/ Small example of how the outside world sees CM... this is from a year ago... 

It's easy to ridicule someone being reasonable, I guess, even though I was pretty specific how I think the game could be improved. How's this then, man this game really sucks, it could be cool but the devs didn't invest enough in the engine and it totally kills the game for me. What a total waste of money, these guys are the worst. Is that better, is that more to the point? Or is... hey I really like the game but I think they should invest some more resources to bring the game up to modern and reasonable expectations. Seriously... it's the internet so I guess trying to be reasonable isn't allowed. 
Oh and I put in a ton of time testing the game and reporting bugs, especially shader issues... so I'm not just whining, I've tried to help. I've also made sound mods and few texture ones as well... I've been invested since CMBO in the game and it's community... but hey f me... I suppose for getting fed up with lack luster bugged technology. This game isn't just a little off tech wise, it's way off and deserves criticism, especially from long time supporters. 
Added: check out Graviteam Tactics for an indie crew with a much more modern engine... plus it tracks ballistics and a lot of the tech CM does as well, so it's not an impossible inquiry. Not meant as a 1:1 comparison, just a quick example.