Wartgamer

Theres another good site about armored tank/infantry that list comprehensive casualties in a US armored division. The armored infantry and tankers took awful beatings and arty/HQ units had in some cases, no casualties. I will look for that site again.

Theres another good site about armored tank/infantry that list comprehensive casualties in a US armored division. The armored infantry and tankers took awful beatings and arty/HQ units had in some cases, no casualties. I will look for that site again.

Theres another good site about armored tank/infantry that list comprehensive casualties in a US armored division. The armored infantry and tankers took awful beatings and arty/HQ units had in some cases, no casualties. I will look for that site again.

Asynchronous player's get all the fine women's.

The 1x1m system means, in theory, that there is now the need for 20x more map data to be stored because there are in theory 20x more tiles. huh? you mean 400? 20m x 20m =400m^2?

Another interesting aspect of relative spotting is how the individual spotter's databse is going to be sized/filled. A neat thing is that there must be an upperboundary to it. Even a large unit of 12 guys can only sense so many units with that much detail. Something like a small mortar crew in a trench might actually be modeling one guy 'filling' the database. The rest of the guys are under cover. Each unit in the game must have some form of an ID number. Lets say that the game is a comapny based game and the upper boundary is 128 units. Even if every squad split up and all weapons detached as much as possible, they would still not number 128. Fine, so each side gets 128. But what about spooks? They come from nowhere. How do you fill up a spotter's database with spooks? Think about the spotter's database as it changes with time. It will be updated according to some clock tick. 1/10th of a sec may be too quick but every sec might be too slow. What will be in the database once an enemy unit is spotted? The 'ID' number of that enemy unit? And the actual 'sensed' type of unit? Is it going to be a map address and a spotting type? I see a spook at coord XXX, YYY?

AMEN. 56K PBEM is dead. Long Live PBAT!

You are grossly exagerating how much memory etc is involved. I'd suggest you leave this to Steve/Charles etc as this is way below the level of detail you should be concerning yourself with. Surely you don't think that Charles is so incompetant that he wouldn't have figured out this long ago. -------------------- Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity Steve has already said they may back away from the 1m^2 resoltion.

Lets say you wanted to just use a X Y coordinate to describe a soldiers location. Its a 4 km by 4 km map. Whats the resolution? 1/4 meter? So I would still need a 2^14 to cover that for both the X and another for the Y coordinate. Know how many bytes that is? But now you still need to relate that X Y to some 1 m^2 tile. Why bother, each tile will have its own address so that its state can be linked to that address.

Any unit in the game needs a location no? Perhaps even 1:1 soldiers might need a location BTW? How do you describe that soldiers location? He needs something to relate him to the map? How do you use a contiguous block of memory to overlay him onto the map? The map needs some address lookup I hope. The map tiles are going to have states. So how do you 'just' send changes (which I and other people have already suggested in the PBEM thread and I even mention it in the post above if you read it) when you need to have a map address to apply those states to?

I don't believe that is true. LOS just checks if one unit can see another unit. It does not crunch the whole map. When you use the LOS tool, its doing an on the fly calc and representing it to you. And relative spotting, which means that there ought to be a limit as to what each unit's database might hold, means that once a unit is full of spotted info, its done. It does not have to crank out LOS checks for enemy units anymore.

See? Now if Overlays were a Bone, then what Michael is suggesting would be a WishBone. Excellent running with someone else's idea.

Tell you what - the day you learn to use UBB code for embedded quotes like a normal person, I'll stop saying neener neener. -dale </font>

Of course if some sort of FTP server arrangement worked, that would be fine by us. But then it isn't PBEM any more. How purist do you have to be ? I send a mail saying game file downloaded and my opponent informs me when he is done. It would be nice if it were automatically opened for you as soon as you uploaded. So the game finishes a PBAT file. It opens the email and enters info in title and fields. When the file is downloaded, a email is sent to both parties also. So you know that at least its progressing. You get an email when its up there waiting for you. So it just pushes the game along with notifications. An interesting thought at this stage of the 'discussion' is: Could it possibly be faster to play PBAT then TCP/IP? Would it almost be the same speed? Given equal amount of time to plot turns, who would be faster? TCP/IP should allow you to watch one units movieturn as the data flows in. Note it would only be as fast as that data comes in. So if it took 3 minutes to get the whole turn over, then thats the rate you could see the movie at.

PBEM PBEM PBEM PBEM! Neener neener neener! dalem Dale is correct about our approach to customer relations Steve Well, he could be a little less repititive perhaps?

TCP/IP play means that the whole stream, sent in packets in a btye/compressed form, may still represent a sizable flow if it includes, all the minimovies (actually all the data needed to display them). So one computer crunches out the turn, and for each timeslice, could flow that crunched info over to the other computer. This may take some time. But once the TCP/IP player has all the crunched info, does he not have to start watching all the movieplaybacks to get his situational awareness (I suppose he may actually start watching one unit's movieplayback as it streams in, at the rate it is recieved)? Relative Spotting has the effect of making a player need to revisit the battlefield anew in some ways everytime the turn comes. The natural inclination of a human when presented with multiple viewpoints, is to compare them and even review previous viewpoints to clarify things. My feeling is that teh human will spend much time analyzing the situation, not because he is insane or stupid, but because he needs to figure out what is going on. This will certainly slow down TCP/IP play especially if the game is very large. What is the point of TCP/IP play if it takes so long? Others can certainly answer the question better than me: Just how long would it take to TCP/IP 50 megs of data. The sender must crunch the time frame, store that data, send that data, recive a request for more data, crunch next time slice, etc? So its slower than just a strict download I suppose? [ March 06, 2005, 12:58 PM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

It never hurts to see what customers feel, do, will accept, etc. Plus I get to make a sex joke or two. It would not hurt to keep the following in the back of the mind of the designer... If we COULD keep the filesize under XXX Megabytes, THEN we still can support some form of non-56K asynch play. Thats all I want. I think 56K is a dead branch and lets move on. Lets be clear about that. Stop saying PBEM cause its inflammatory at this stage and is not responding to remarks others have made.

The question is though, is this even possible, and would it be an acceptable compromise. I worked on a very similar project and if you have followed some of my posts, and the designer can correct me, I do appreciate the state/time dillemmas and its implications on play. The need to play a movie from a bazookas perpsective means that the whole experience he had, at each time increment in the turn, must be sent over to the other player. He has a slew of data that changes during the turn. What he sees, ammo, facing, etc/etc/etc. Throw in 1:1 and the loader and bazookaman have position info also. It will be some crank of data. But my point is that I dont feel that the player needs all that anyway. Its really a Issue of what I think realism is and funnily enough, it helps get asych (and possibly TCP/IP play) more managable. In many cases, for many units, just the 'end-state' of that unit, at the 59th sec or so, is all that needs to crank over. That is needed to allow his relative perspective during the orders phase.

"Set the customer's expectations correctly." Is that in some Mission Statement somewhere? dale you are good for a chuckle. Whatever happened to We hope to meet or exceed your greatest expectations? And many did not percieve the tone that you layed out in 1. above. I believe that is the intent now but it seemed a bit more uncaring. The real problem is that 56K PBEM as many know it, will be just left in the dust. Why can't we just agree to that, and agree that any attempt to keep that from going under, is a waste of BFC's time?

This will 'encapsulate' this breed of player (mailing within countries/regions only). Much like the detachment of land masses drives species in very strange directions. The fact that they are very different to begin with, will just make matters worse. They will develop thier own form of odd play and CM-speak. They will be that 'strange northern CM types' or remarks like "What kind of Funny Down under tactic is THAT?". Its a Brave New World.

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, but save some juice to squeeze into your remaining enemies eyes after you have divided and conquered. Thats what Grandma always told me.

I think the number of PBEM games being played, not just the number of PBEM players is relevant. Lets say for the sake of argument, that 10,000 PBEM games are played by everyone, every month. Lets say that 5000 of them not chuggin at 56K. They have some means of dowloading/uploading with some speed. They at least have jobs we hope. You create a service where you can have 5 'PBEM' games hosted a month. You charge 2 bucks a month. How much of the 5000 do you need to capture to see the bank in this?? Lets say its a payoff after 6 months to one year. But what else have you done? You will really divide and conquer half the B crowd. You will have a feature to augment TCP/IP play and show good faith in keeping true to the wargames roots (and lets face it, theres hurt feelings here). The cheap price includes bragging rights, scores tracked, screenshot of the week, competitions, playtesting, whatever. Its a community. Buying the game includes 1 month free service. The people with 1 mHz computers, 56K modems, 15000 posts here and a case of red, white and blue beer will always be unhappy. They will literally have to play by mail. Burn a cd rw or send a flashcard? [ March 06, 2005, 09:49 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

I think that email should just send a one time password and a person can use that to download a file from some server somewhere. Perhasp someone hosting could be that server? Or a subscribed service. Many people have 56K but still access to broadband at work so they could download at work, take home on a card, do thier turn and send back from work.

I think that the B crowd may be better defined as perhaps a group that might need 56K to PBEM. I am sure the designer and others see that broadband users may have some inclusion as far as human-human non-facetime (TCP/IP) play is concerned. [ March 06, 2005, 09:27 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

Does the player REALLY need to be able to see the movie from the Relative Spotting perspective of EACH friendly unit? This may only be practical or doable for hotseat and solo play vs the AI. Beyond that I can't see how it could be workable for TCP/IP or PBEM (I am JUST refering to one FOW option for Movie playback where the player has chosen the option to be able to view the playback movie from the Relative Spotting perspective of EACH friendly unit). From a realism/God perspective, I think its too much. From a computer game design perspective, it may also be too much for human-human play. My 'vision' of what I want the game to be really focuses around what units get a full movie/interactive view (flying around watching all the action), which units get 'snapshots' (a sequence of frames every few secs during the turn, and which units get just a orders phase relative viewpoint before issuing orders (select unit/see what they see/give orders/move on). For a single company sized infantry game, I would want a movie from the company HQ standpoint. All the platoon HQ units get the sequence of snapshots and individual units get the orders phase relative view. Certain units being modeled with walkie talkies or field phones may also get a sequence of snapshots. This models having guys spread out and being OP duty.