BigDog944

Thanks for the clarity. As for purchasing the new installer? Not for me. I love BFC and I can't wait to give you more of my money, but buying a new installer would feel more like a donation than a purchase of value to me. Others may feel different though.

Classic post!

I heard somewhere that the effective range of a T-34 was limited not by how much diesel was in the tank, but rather by how much oil was in the crankcase! Watching the vid posted by Vark and seeing all that blue smoke blowing out of the IS-2 diesel engine I'm thinking there may be some truth in what I heard. Granted that is a 65+ year old engine cranking in the back there but it must have seen an overhaul or two in its time, so still... Also, I loved how it showed the flywheel spinning up to get the engine started. Must have been the best way to do it at the time for some reason. Made me think of the starting routine for BF-109s.

Yeah, that guy didn't really spot anything for me either. I just got on with the instructions for the level and used him to call in artillery on areas where my other troops managed to spot the enemy. I read somewhere that something changed somewhere along the line and the guy doesn't really do what the tutorial says he should any more.

I'm thinking that you've found a bug where the ammo bearers are attempting to board the truck (thus they translucent icon floating above them) so are in a non-order-taking mode, but the game decides they can't board the truck because something is blocking their path. Meanwhile, the truck is also not taking orders as it is waiting for the boarding to finish. I could see this being the case if the logic to trigger boarding mode in the game code is purely based on the straight line distance between the boarding infantry and the vehicle being boarded. All you could do to unstick the troops would be to demo charge the hedge in the action square that is immediately between them and the truck, making the that action square passable. I'm just guessing though. In future to avoid this issue again, I would park the truck next to the gap rather than next to an impassable hedge. This is all speculation on my part. I have no insider knowledge to base any comments from.

Looks to me like the ammo bearers were somehow "jammed" in the boarding mode, which would explain why neither they nor the truck would take further orders. Is the hedge separating the ammo bearers and the truck passable? Maybe the truck got too close to them and they entered boarding mode and are making a bee-line for the truck, but the hedge they are trying to get through is impassable?

From a marketting perspective alone, CM:Bulge must be released as a new stand-alone game. "The Battle of the Bulge" is too well known by the average American to not leverage the marketting plan for a new game off of it. Forcing a new customer to buy something labelled as "Normandy" when they want "The Battle of the Bulge" doesn't make sense and would be confusing to said new customer.

Huh? Are you in the right forum?

Two words: Hit Decals

Credit where credit is due: The C64 was built around the 6502 CPU. A classic that most people of a certain age on this board got their starts with.

What do you mean? That's how it's spelled! You Americans just don't give the letter 'U' enough love. :-)

Yeah, I'd never seen that one before. "May God have mercy on your soul" is a fitting closer for that CMBN review!

Yes, I agree. It wouldn't be necessary to model maps nor AI plans in the first stages as stock or editor made maps could be used instead. BFC currenlty allows stock maps to be selected for Quick Battles so the features needed to combine maps with unit information probably already exist within the CMx2 engine. Not that I can think of off hand! One question I do have is that should COO get off the ground and eventually interface with CMx2, would the interface format be proprietary and exclusive to COO? Or would it be more open and allow other projects to also use the same interface? My guess would the be former as it would likely be a commercial agreement between the two parties with exclusivity clauses embedded. Shame if that is the case. Interfaces should be open.

Unfortunately if scroll bars are too hard and not worth it I don't think tooltips will pass muster either. Agree 100% with what you're saying though! I just wish they'd used (or built) a better UI toolkit when building their CMx2 engine.

Now all that's needed is about 2000 man hours...

You are very kind! "Build it and he will come."

I had a feeling I would be misunderstood. When I stated " ..."clean room" reverse engineering their battle file elements ..." I didn't mean to somehow work out the encryption method used by BFC to encode CM battle files. That would be illegal in the USA at least (DMCA) and would not serve the community as it would open up CM games to cheating. What I meant was to reverse engineer the elements of a battle file, i.e. use the editor to determine all of the possible terrain types, then determine all of the possible elevations for a given action square. Then move on and determine all of the possible seasons, flavour objects, tree types, etc. that could be placed in the action square. Do the same for infantry, vehicles, setup zones, and even possibly AI scripts. Once that task has been completed one would have a novel encoding format which could be modeled using an XML schema (or something else) which would have the fortunate properties of being a one-to-one mapping to the secret BFC file format as well as not being encumbered with intellectual property rights owned by BFC. If the community then built an operational level game that saved files into this novel XML schema format, I'd wager that BFC would be tempted to bite as all they would need to do is provide a tool that they owned which translated this one-to-one mapping file format from the XML to their .btt format. Voila! An operational level game that interfaces with CM!

I love the idea, but I think BFC have made it pretty clear that after the failure of CMC they won't spend a penny on interfacing with an operational layer. This makes very good business sense as an operational layer that doesn't work in single player mode would in my estimation be used by less than 10% of the CMx2 players. Effectively zero return on what would potentially be a large and open ended investment by BFC. As a community we would be far better off "clean room" reverse engineering their battle file elements and then defining an XML schema to model it. After that is done we could open up to the community to build an operational layer that reads and writes XML files in these formats. Once we've reached this point we might get some interest from BFC toward writing a converter from the XML schema to .btt files. BFCs project scope would then be fairly narrow with a sharp limit on what they would be on the hook to support going forward. Have at her though choppinlt! If the app-game is good it will stand on its own without the need for any support from BFC.

Picked up a copy and had it shipped with my GL CD. I also bought the Strategic Command WW1 game bundle to average down the Canadian shipping costs per item. Just getting into your book now and think I'm going to enjoy greatly!

Looking back on the ultimate purpose of these public AAR threads being to showcase GL to the general public, I'd say this one has failed miserably. All I'm left thinking is that the game is buggy and not that much fun! Don't get me wrong, I'm a GL owner already and know that CMx2 is both fun and very clean on the bug side, but if all I had to go on is this AAR? I think I'd come down with a different opinion. I'm not making a comment on any of the participants as players or writers, but rather the battle and the results.

I agree. Michael Emrys is almost never wrong, so how could his former sig have been wrong all this time? Surely any error of his would have been pointed out earlier had there been one.

Lol! So was I. Dry humour doesn't translate to this medium, which is pretty hilarious if you think about it!

I think you mean Italian rather than German.

Many thanks, ArgusEye, for opening a window clear enough for me to see through into the world of set theory.

This page: http://weaponsandwarfare.com/?p=611 seems to say so, second to last paragraph. Southern units filled some spots in the line when some Allied divisions were transferred to France. Seems the northern fascist Italians only saw duty in an anti-partisan role.