DaveDash

If you issue a target order, it shows you the line. Not showing TacAI targeting is actually useful as you can see at a glance which orders you have issued. Having lines all over the place however would get terribly distracting and make for an ugly game.

Obviously there is a line, and that line is drawn where "Common Sense" sits. The game is sitll a game, but it tries to emulate real life in as many was as possible, not all ways. Target lines ruin the suspension of disbelief. They only add to the game if you're the number/stat geek type. Maybe BFC could throw such things in on basic skill levels, but I doubt they'd bother. I wouldn't. Seriously if you're having problems with seeing where things are shooting. Play WEGO. It's really not that hard.

In this game you are meant to be a Platoon, Company, or Bn level commander. Does such a commander have target lines at his disposal, nice and easy, in real life? No. You want a war simulator or don't you? Part of the realism of the game is having things shoot at you, and your units shoot back, without having a clear idea of what's going on. FoW is a real part of war, and CMx2 does a much better job of simulating it than CMx1.

I was RT in CMSF. The larger formations of WW2 however have moved me back into the WEGO camp. Sucks to have an entire platoon wiped out because to missed the spotting rounds coming in.

Lmao what the hell? I have studied three years of psychology and I have no idea what you're talking about. If anything they will ruin the suspension of disbelief, and thus tension. It's like watching a good movie and then having one of the film crew come out with a tape measure in the middle of an action scene, to see if someone got hit with a bullet. You sir, sit on the far edges the bell curve, me thinks.

I get what you mean. I write documentation (Solutions Architect) for a living, and it's extremely unprofessional to send work to customers filled with typos. However I don't think it matters too much here, given the fact that most people download and play scenarios released online, by the community, filled with typos anyway. It would allow for a more polished release? yes. Priority? no.

I also forget to mention..in BETA format upon release, right before Christmas, requiring expansion packs to fix.

What kind of spelling errors? Armour Armor? Missions were created by a bunch of different nationalities. Should they have streamlined it to US "English"? Probably, but I don't think it's a huge issue. If this is the main negative you've noticed about the game, then I think you should have confidence in the product, right?

Lol you're kidding yourself. A major developer would make it 10 hours playability, Xbox/PS3 friendly, and dumbed down so a retarded monkey could play it.

I found the game hard to get into. But after playing through the short training campaign (Task Force Raff?) the game went from "meh" to epic. I suggest what others have said. Give it a bit longer and see what happens.

I don't actually mind the micromanagement, but compariatively there is a large amount of it to a lot of other games. I found starting on RT was just tedius compared to WEGO, that's just my personal preference though due to larger formations, and not a belittlement to the game.

The interface is a large improvement from when CMSF was released. We got through the CMSF interface, you can get through this one. There is just a large amount of "micromanagement" in CM games whether you like it or not. I think it would take a diminishing returns amount of effort to actually make a "perfect" interface for this game. I've gone back to WEGO and find it considerably more enjoyable, especially given the large WW2 formations. Maybe give that a try.

My first impressions: I found the game hard to get into, until I did a few things. Sound mod, tracer mod installed. Back to WEGO. This was probably the main thing that made the game more enjoyable. The WW2 formations are just too big in many cases to have an enjoyable time playing RT (for me personally). After switching back to WEGO, I'm finding the game quite epic. I'm still over-protective of my units like CMSF. But I find this actually works well, the lethality of modern weapons teaches you harsh lessons which translate well into WW2. The only thing for me that is a bit of a let down are the graphics. Everyones raving about them but reallly they're not that much of an improvement over CMSF in my opinion, and in some cases worse IMO (Trees, grass, sometimes the colours look off). Models are definitely better, terrain is not.

This entire thread can be accomplished by the Scenario designer by giving the German side +1 leadership and/or higher experience to reflect the particular scenario at that given time.

I found out about CMBO probably 6 years ago on the abandonware site "home of the underdogs". It was one if their "top dogs" in the war sim section. They had a link to the demo - downloaded it - loved it. Bought the full game and have been a fan ever since.

Im playing this - DaveDash

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=94192 Ive done videos of up to Mission 06 of the Marines campaign. I've moved house and been waiting almost a month to get Internet hooked up before I can finish uploading the rest of the videos. Shouldn't be too long now though.

Cheers mate, glad I could have helped. My job is all about writing manuals as such (proposals, scopes of work, visio design, as built documentation etc).

Well a game like Victoria 2 models the entire world working population. I'm sure it takes certain short cuts in certain areas, but for every "Pop" (population unit) it has to calculate a lot of variables. Promotions to different classes (of which there are about 10), migration to different regions or states based on life rating, employment (and the ENTIRE world is modelled), ability to purchase needs on the world market. Not only that, the great powers end up with hundreds of factories that are all competing on the world market for various goods, which are continously adjusting prices for those goods. Then you have the AI for every country in the world controlling 1+ million man armies in the late game, so if a war breaks out there is a lot of "thinking" to do. So basically, towards late game (the 1900-1936 period) when there is 1 Billion working people for the game to process in real time, numerous wars involving millions of soldiers, and thousands of factories all messing with the prices of goods on the world market (and thus effecting the needs of all the populations as well) you have A LOT of calculations going on. I doubt CMSF even comes close to doing as many calculations at once, thus why CMSF runs on my old laptop but Victoria 2 struggles, despite it being a very simpified game graphically. The CPU is directly responsible for all this. In programming you have statements such as: If X = n then Y else Z, the more complicated the calculations that the game requires (such as simulation type games) the more complicated these statements are going to be. You also have stored variables in programming, such as "enemy_morale = 0.1", or the X Y and Z in the above example. The more of these variables the game has the remember, and the higher the requirement that these variables go, the more RAM the game requires. The difference between 32bit and 64bit is how high these numbers can go, effectively. 32bit systems can only utilize up to roughly 3GB of RAM on Windows XP. Most games at the moment are 32bit, so RAM is usually not a problem now. So the CPU calculates these variables to give you output which you see on your screen. The faster the CPU, the more of the calculations it can do at once, and the bigger the RAM, the more the program can remember for the CPU to access quickly. Now take a FPS game, RPG, or RTS game. There is not a lot to remember or calculate in comparison to a flight sim, combat sim, or what have you. There is no complicated physics equations required to see if a bullet hits in a certain amount of wind over a certain amount of distance. I mean most RTS games just have a random dice roll vs some attributes to see if a unit hits or misses. You're looking at one paragraph of code vs one page of code for the CPU to process to determine a 'hit'. A lot of RPG, RTS, and FPS games though push the limits visually and require quite hefty video cards to run. Now multi-core comes into play when there is far too much going on for one core to handle. In most games, even 2.2gHz is fast enough to process everything that is going on. But as you can see in my Victoria 2 example, there is a insane amount of calculating going on and even faster CPU's (3.0gHz) end up being bottlenecked by the late game. So that means the load needs to be spread out across multiple cores. I am not a programmer (I am a IT Solutions Architect) but I imagine making a game to use multiple cores requires a lot more effort for very minimal gains. However, if you do have multiple cores you can assign a game to sit on just one core (and let Windows use the first), which will help performance in games with high CPU requirements. Task Manager, find the game process, right click, and set affinity to your last core only. Also set priority to "High". You can also see under performance in Task manager where your bottlenecks are in terms of CPU and RAM (and under Windows 7 etc it will also give you disk Input/Output under performance monitor). In the end, think of your computer like a highway: The speed limit is the CPU speed. The number of lanes is the amount of RAM. The number of onramps is your hard drive speed. And the video card is the weather conditions. So if you are trying to play a game, you might have great RAM, CPU, Hard Drive speed, but a poor video card. That means all your commuters going to work on your highway have poor visibility due to rain and thus can't travel fast. Or you may have great RAM, CPU, Video Card, but a slow hard drive. That means you have fewer onramps onto your highway, so it takes cars a lot longer to get on there, but once they are on, they fly down it. In terms of gaming, visibility is usually the most important factor these days. Hope this rather simplified explaination helps. There is more to it than this of course, RAM speeds, caches, buses, etc. But you should get the general idea.

Well, my understanding is that the GPU can far exceed to performance of the CPU due to the architecture being specifically designed for gaming. The architecture of the CPU needs to remain open ended due to having to support a wider variety of applications. Not only that, a lot of games don't really strain much CPU power anyway. Obviously games like CMSF (and other simulation type games) do to a certain degree. There is another game I play called Victoria 2 which calculates what the entire population of the world is doing every few seconds (promotions, migrations, needs, etc) which became unplayable on my old laptop, but would be a good candidate for multi-core. In terms of multicore support, maybe for larger developers they will throw in support, but until games start being bottlenecked by the CPU I don't see much of a point except for marketing purposes. Having said that, maybe processor speeds will get lower/stay the same, but core numbers increase.

Exactly. Compiling, servers, media work, etc are all useful for multi-core. With the increasing trend in gaming engines making more use of the GPU processor which can be tuned specifically for games, and thus do all the work (as opposed to CPUs required to be open ended) there is not a lot of point in making games for more than one core/processor.

My old laptop which has a T7500 2.2GHz processor ran CMSF fine on all maps on balanced settings. So I don't think his processor is a huge issue. I even recorded videos running fraps with an "OK" (10-20) framerate while playing CMSF If you read my thread you will see I got a large jump in performance by using the ATI control center to control AA and turning those settings to ON in CMSF. Having those settings OFF for some strange reason really hurt my performance. I'm posting from my phone so I can't link the thread, but it's called "New computer, CMSF runs somewhat slow" and it's about three topics down. Critizing CMSF for only using one core is silly. The vast majority of games are 32bit and single core. I think there is a serious load on GPUs when you use "best" 3D models due to the draw distance and amount of models involved over a large area. So try "balanced" 3D models but "best" textures.

Mike I've got a similar issue, started a thread in tech support about it. I found that by letting ATI control my AA settings for CMSF I got a much better frame rate. CMSF seems to be a real GPU hog on "best" 3D models (draw distance).

Hey mate, HDD speed only comes into play for two reasons in gaming: loading times and if you run out of RAM. I agree that you should use a SSD on your system partition, but HDDs are rarely going to be a bottleneck for gaming. These days it's 80% all video card.

The good news is though this card SLI's very well, and is cheap. I can probably get another -just- for CMSF. Yet these games thus far run on MAX settings at 60+ FPS @ 1920x1200: Far Cry 2 Dragon Age Fallout 3 BF Bad Company 2 Never would have thought CMSF would be the one that pushes my system!