molotov_billy

I don't believe 1.02 looked at NVIDIA stuff at all. They plan to address it with the next patch.

Definately. It's sort of a per map thing. On this occasion, I just never had to go inside the compound sine they can be destroyed by fire from a distance. [ August 10, 2007, 01:58 PM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

Dirty lies! Unless you're playing a version where that bug is fixed? US MMG's cannot deploy their weapons on rooftops or inside buildings. There have been a couple threads about it.

Strange. This one wasn't too hard.. you're going to have some issues with the 2nd mission Leave two Abrams up on the berm for the duration of the mission. They'll take care of all armored reinforcements that the Syrians get without you ever having to touch them. Have them take out the MG bunkers with a single shot each. Use your FO to call in artillery on the trench lines - use linear fire (you'll have to zoom in to see the trenches) with the "personnel" option so that they use airburst fire. A short-ish barrage should take care of the majority of them. Form up the rest of your units at the front of the highway, use them to spot the trench lines on that side of the map. Again, use air-burst artillery on the trench lines covering the highway. Use "general" artillery munitions with whatever ammo you have left to level the two main lines of buildings, again useing linear fire. Use your strykers and abrams to clean up the rest until the syrians capitulate. You don't ever have to dismount a single squad, or have anyone enter a building. If you ever run out of artillery, the MGS strykers are just as adequate at taking out buildings. If you run out of ammo with them, have your teams grab javelins from the strykers and level whatever is left.

It seems to work fine for Syrian MG's. I think it's just the US MMG that doesn't work in buildings.

In my not-so-humble opinion, that just sounds like a lot of guess work to me. I'd rather just have the game tell me what asset's they use at each level.

More specifically, the bombs they drop - holy hell! It's a shame these aren't in more missions - I'm on mission 9 or so and this is the first time I've seen aircraft. But man, what a show. Whoever did the effects/sound/etc - well done! Felt like a mini-nuke. I called in about 4 fighters around the same time, and the bombs arrived all at once. There was barely anything left of the town. My only suggestion for the UI on these is that when I'm calling them in - "Light/Medium/Heavy" isn't very descriptive of what they do. It would be nice if it instead listed what weapon systems they use at each level - 500lb bomb? 2000 lb bomb? Or just cannon strafing? Anyway, very cool.

I'm sure it has to do with the simplification of some type of system - either the terrain itself, or the squad. Obviously, computers have come leaps and bounds since CM was first out, but there are still limitations. My assumption is either that the terrain is being simplified to reduce calculations, or the squad itself is being simplified to a simple box in terms of LOS and LOF. I assume that if you can see one part of the squad, you can see the whole thing. LOS and LOF going through simple objects like walls and buildings seems like a bug, though. I hope that one gets fixed.

Anything that's animation driven will have these types of things going on. The more complex an object is (for example, a human figure), the harder it is to prevent these types of things. If you've got a bunch of animations with all kinds of appendages going every which way, its fairly impossible to catch all cases where something would clip into something else. Simpler objects, like vehicles, are easier to fix. If you're trying to physically simulate something that is also being animated, the results end up looking just as strange as the clipping itself. An arm would be folded backwards to prevent it clipping through a door, etc. The smaller stuff that happens more often - an arm clipping through a wall, a head poking out of an ICV during dismount animations - is incredibly work intensive to fix, and shouldn't be expected in a game like this. You might see less of it in, say, a first person shooter, where your view is much closer to the action and these things become glaring issues. But in an RTS where you're generally viewing the action from 100 feet in the air - just doesn't matter as much, and not worth the time. In short, it isn't a technology that you can just plug in - it's just a matter of solving things case-by-case.

You'll notice that I came into this thread with suggestions for the poster - somebody else brought up an argument from somewhere else. I have a right to defend myself if someone wants to come into a thread and harass me for no reason whatsoever, such as yourself. </font>

Same. I end up pausing a lot, which really wouldn't work in multiplayer. I wish that my units would fire on their own more often - especially the strykers who have gobs of .50cal ammo. The most tedious thing about CMSF right now is manually targetting stuff for all of my vehicles. I think the AI firing routines are getting some fixes in 1.02, though.

Indeed! Well observed.</font>

You'll notice that I came into this thread with suggestions for the poster - somebody else brought up an argument from somewhere else. I have a right to defend myself if someone wants to come into a thread and harass me for no reason whatsoever, such as yourself.

So one thing I'm confused about in that article - it describes the LAV III as being of "limited operational capability" - does anyone know to what they're referring to?

Will you be my friend?

Absolutely. My post was clear and honest - though taking one sentence out of context doesn't do it much justice. I'm just giving my opinion. You shouldn't take offense to it. I respect yours, though I think it's incorrect. Again, I'm not talking about the people you're speaking directly to. I'm talking about people who observe the way you speak to other people. No, not at all. There's plenty of good stuff in here. I'm giving you feedback on the stuff that, in my observation, needs work. It wouldn't really make sense the other way around.

Steve, This is just getting massive, so I want to just re-iterate a couple of points here that make most of what's being said irrelevant to the conversation. My casual observation of this forum for perhaps roughly a year has been that a lot of your posts have a poor attitude, or are just generally aggressive in nature. I'm simply relating to you that my observation has been that this has had a negative impact on my (as well as others who have been saying it) opinion of the company. It's my opinion that this type of behavior is poor customer service, and will turn away potential customers. I'm not necessarily talking about the specific people you're addressing - I'm talking about the people who in turn read those passages and process that into their opinion of the company, and hence their purchasing decisions. Why you make this a personal attack on myself, I don't know. I'm giving you feedback in as clear and honest a way as possible. I've re-iterated that what I'm talking about is the casual observer - the person who doesn't have nine years of experience on these forums, sees the way you treat people, and makes their decisions based on that. I don't pretend to know everything. I only know what my impressions of these forums (and yourself) are, and I'm relating them to you. Thats it and that's all. One can be honest without being offensive or overly aggressive. I think that's probably what you need work on. Sir, look on any forum outside your own and you'll see the same thing. It's just human nature. But how many people have you turned away with the attitude that you display, and the lack of respect you show for opinions other than your own? The difference here, as I've said, is that you are a representative of a group of people and a company. You're offering customer service, I am not. I'm just giving you feedback. You threatened to ban me. Call it what you want, it doesn't matter - the end user sees the way things work here and will make their own decisions. [ August 08, 2007, 12:37 PM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

Steve, You're actually behind on your ramblings. I re-rambled you already. But what does that have to do with this thread?

I'm sharing my observations taken from my own experiences and with the experiences of other people who have been posting on the forums - I don't know why that would offend you. If you disagree, chime in. My point in that thread was that the "Battlefront.com" monicker is a representation of the company, and his tone and attitude of postings is, to me, poor customer service. It's my opinion that his type of attitude would turn people away from the product, and I was merely giving feedback in that fashion. Fortunately for me, I'm sitting in my tshirt and jeans at home, not prodividing customer service for a game that I'm selling, but just trying to help a guy out who's having trouble with tactics in WeGo. How you think those two things correlate is beyond me. And no, I couldn't give a rat's behind about what you think of me.

It sucks to say this, but from what I can tell, WeGo just isn't a finished feature right now. Few have had success with it. Have you tried playing realtime with pausing? I find it to be far more intuitive than WeGo, considering I can stop the action during crisis moments. Move slowly, and in mass. Strykers have really good optics, so as long as you don't go rushing into an area, you will spot most of the enemy infantry with time. They also tend to open fire with small arms at your armored vehicles. Also, you have 3 platoons in the scenario. That equals about 48 javelins total. With each one being able to level a floor, that's a lot of firepower. Your MGS vehicles are also useful for that sort of thing.

You're actually playing more than just the overall commander. You're controlling every squad and section leader in the game - telling them which way to face, what targets to fire at, how much ammo to take from that stryker, etc. The issues with tactical AI make it a fair bit worse than that, too. You tend to have to babysit units far more than a battalion commander, platoon, or even squad leader would ever have to. Neither option is really all that realistic. However, pausing is certainly required if you want to give an adequate number of orders to anything above platoon size. Coordination, especially, goes out the window. Ordering your units one at a time will just get them shot up, piecemeal - the player isn't capable of mimicking realistic tactics without a pause feature.

Use Javelins. Destroy any floor that has an enemy in it. Bring as much firepower to bear on a specific target until it's dead and then move on. When dismounting infantry, use liberal amounts of smoke, and make sure to have area fire on every building that contains enemy units. Make sure you park right next to the door. Don't move infantry into occupied enemy buildings. There is no efficient way to do this - more often than not, you will take catastrophic losses. Infantry units cannot move and fire at the same time, so there is no way to assault. "Hunt" will often just have your units pause outside of the door, only to be slaughtered wholesale. Destroy enemy infantry before you enter the building. Most importantly, don't trust AI pathfinding in urban areas. Babysit any vehicle that is moving. Unfortunate, but it's simply the state of the code at the moment. Point targets for apaches will generally bring building sections down. Area attack for them seems fairly useless. Use linear attack with your artillery to destroy building sections. By the way, there's a seperate tactics forum that's already full of useful info. [ August 08, 2007, 01:55 AM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

Seems to me to be a moot point. However you present yourself on the forums is what your customers and potential customers will see, and they'll make their judgements accordingly - that's simply how customer service works. If you think it helps to tell us, then by all means, do so. [ August 08, 2007, 03:15 AM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

I do think that's the problem. You may not mean to, but you come off in a lot of your posts as having a really poor attitude. To be as blunt as possible, your posts are a tinge pig-headed about a variety of things - not just strykers, but game design and public relations as well. That's all we're really saying. I'm not trying to piss anyone off, which is why I edited my post. I like it here. I'm just trying to critique what I think needs work. I've noticed that you tend to dismiss the opinions of others, such as in this case when you dismissed the casual observations of a guy who read a forum and noticed that it was strange for an employee to be having such an aggressive, and (no offense) a bit childish, interaction with his customers. To say that it's "your forum, your rules, your game" is sort of in the same vein, and sort of displays to the masses what this is really all about. He's giving you perfect, precise feedback about the quality of your customer service. It's my humble opinion that you should examine that type of feedback and actually use it instead of dismissing it out of hand. I do understand that JasonC won't be offended by any of it. He's a smart guy and I imagine he laughs at most of the nonsense that gets pasted in here. The feedback that I was trying to give here is that the casual observer would be affected by the behavior in the forums, not necessarily a specific guy who's been around for awhile. I suppose my point is that you've been turning away potential customers for that duration of time, and needlessly at that. Color me confused. I don't know what good a threat will do, though I imagine it's just another aggressive lash at a community member who happens to disagree with you, a thing a casual observer will see, and something that just doesn't mean that much to me at all. It makes sense, considering that my first impression of "Battlefront" in reading these forums was just how often folks tended to banned for disagreeing with anything you said in a manner that wasn't to your liking. And you're right, it isn't personal because I don't know you. I'm observing blocks of text being thrown at eachother. Can you chill with the threats and name calling and just have an open-minded conversation, please? I would question why you guys are so concerned with individual forum members at such a busy time during development. Who's the mystery man? Maybe I know him, or maybe he just knows me, or maybe he doesn't like my name. Or maybe you just made it up? Have him come on and post. Let's chat. [ August 08, 2007, 02:51 AM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]

That probably has more to do with the fact that talented people are quietly working their butts off on the actual game while you aggressively attack potential customers on the forums. You've been hearing it for nine years because it's probably true. You're not doing those guys much justice by turning people away from the product. It's that kind of attitude that turns a lot of people away. You do realize that good management goes a bit above and beyond that, right? [ August 07, 2007, 10:50 PM: Message edited by: molotov_billy ]