Blackmuzzle

Yes it is micromanaging. And of course it's no guarantee for PBEM games that some idiot driver won't veer off into the countryside for a mile or two. We'll need visible (and editable!) vehicle paths for that.

I recommend you to try the demo. If that works for you and you yearn for more, buy it now. If not, check back in a few months. Despite the remaining problems, CMSF was worth the purchase for me, and I've played many missions through.

I disagree. I did a lot of testing on this issue and found that using both "fast" or "quick" is perfectly okay - if your waypoints are on a straight line. What you should not do is use anything other than "move" for 45-degree turns, and "slow" for turns that are even sharper. Allow a little straight line of "slow" before the turn so the vehicle can decelerate. If you don't, you'll get that infamous vehicle dance. I am quite certain that if BFC implemented a proper braking point (i.e. don't brake at the waypoint, but before!), most of the vehicle dancing should be gone.

I second that question. I'd really love to get some real gun recordings into the game for some of the weaker-sounding weapons (as in, AKs...)

Surprisingly, the shared memory graphics of the Macbook works excellent in OpenGL, even for a good amount of polygons. Of course shaders are out of the question here. I did notice that CMSF has an awful lot of polys rendered, and that will be a problem. In fact, I believe that terrain LOD could be raised substantially while unit LOD could be lowered even on the "balanced" setting. Another observation I've made is that buildings are much more expensive to render on my windows game machine (7950GT, I believe) than even a complex Stryker mesh, which is very odd.

Of course I had to try it I installed CMSF on a black Intel Macbook (no Pro) using Parallels. Why Parallels? Well, I have had good experiences running windows games on that machine, like the NaturalSelection mod, Tribes 1 and Paintball2. Licensing works too, no problem. However, the game throws an error message on startup, saying that it can't initialize the display and that it needs a minimum of 1024x786x32bit. I tried setting the display to 1024x768x32, still the same message. My bet is that there's something in the OpenGL init that fails, and I'm not sure it really has to fail (or rather, I'm sure there's a way around that error) I know for a fact that OpenGL works fine and very playable on that machine, even under Parallels. Of course I'm aware that bugs on Windows are priority right now (as well they should) that's why I'm asking you (the players) whether you got it running on a Mac, and whether you used Parallels, Bootcamp, or some VM.

We need a 500ml infusion of humor, stat! Someone's losing it! @jens: This is simply the fault-redundant version. To be honest, issues like these don't really detract from the gameplay value. On the other hand, you can say about ArmA what you want, but I have yet to see mutant tanks or other vehicles involved in a "close cuddle" like this there

I remember a crash (as in bluescreen) in the ATI Radeon drivers back in 2003. As it turned out the driver was too stupid to know how to make a mipmap out of a textures with a certain dimension. So yes, driver problems can exist with 99.9% of the games running happily. Plus, OpenGL is not exactly the game industry favorite right now (what with DirectX10 being touted as the universal salvation and everything). But fear not: Once ET:QuakeWars is released, ATI and NVidia will quickly patch up their drivers to fix all the things they've left broken because they thought everyone plays D3D-games.

VBS2, like VBS1, is a training tool. Not a simulator per-se, but a training tool for squad tactics and specific scenarios, like convoy ambushes and the likes. Where VBS shines is it's instructor interface and the AAR module, which is what sets it apart from the regular game. CMSF is a game. While it is a relatively complex one in some areas, it's also making a lot of abstractions and simplifications in others. It may or may not be suitable for training of command-level staff, even though is definitely less detailed and of lower "resolution" in its scope and execution. What it lacks is a detailed after-action analysis tool to become useful as a training device. Ultimately, CMSF is not better or worse than VBS. It simply "is". And regardless of what you think you know about VBS and it's success, I can tell you that it is doing rather well. For a military simulation, the budget is quite small. Get an imaging simulation system from Evans & Sutherland and compare their budget and their "retail" price with a classroom suite of VBS2. And again, SBPro is even cheaper, and has a higher quality than most manufacturer-endorsed tank simulators on the market, and it achieved that with a laughable budget. In summary, comparisons between these programs and CMSF are quite moot. Different companies, different ways of doing business and making products. We all should accept that CMSF is a fun game and leave it at that. Maybe fix a few bugs and optimize performance of course

I see. Well when you get to it, I don't think a few extra lines are going to kill us here. You could always make it a toggleable setting. Speaking of performance, the one thing that really sucks up performance right now are buildings, and very much unusually so. Probably worth investigating.

Here's a hint: The biggest performance-killer in CMSF are the buildings (!) So, don't be afraid of maps with many units. You should steer clear of maps with lotsa buildings though. At least until BFC manages to optimize that part of the game a little more.

Out of curiousity, how essential do you personally feel this ability is to a game like CM:SF set at the level of a combined infantry/armor company battle group commander? Do you think the artillery details - counter battery certainly - are best left abstracted? Fire adjustment and varied munitions (smoke too) are things that would be appropriate for CM:SF.

@thewood: I disagree with you. I'm a VBS1 licensee and, while they don't model thrown tracks or immobilized tanks (unless the mission designer sets it so), their simulation of armor and armor-penetrating rounds is more than sufficient. In contrast, one could say that the artillery in CMSF is very abstracted, whereas both Flashpoint and VBS1 offer a very detailed artillery simulation, right down to illumination rounds, adjustment, heck even the necessity to move your own mobile arty in case the enemy arty radar causes them to send something back at you.

Yep, it's coupled to the unit detail setting. You can see the grass "grow" in the distance when you press Shift + "]"

Huh? You have the terrain mesh in its original resolution, you have the actual terrain mesh with the LOD, It's easy enough which terrain tiles are on the path between A and B... what's complicated to calculate?