TheVulture
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Posts posted by TheVulture
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Now, I get the idea in the current engine the current trenches are of course vastly different, being actual terrain. The question is why would be be so difficult to add trenches that behave like immobile APCs in addition to the terrain trenches.
Because the flat terrain is still there. Sure, you could add in a trench unit, and place it somewhere on the ground. And then be unable to do anything with it because the basic terrain mesh is still there. You want to walk in to the trench, but as far as the game engine is concerned, you can't move down through the terrain mesh (which is the lowest height you can be). To get around that you have to tear a hole in the terrain or deform it to go under your trench unit, and then the location is blindingly obvious even if the 'trench' hasn't been spotted.
BTW for all the "you see a trench and immediately HE it" talk about CMx1, fairly people took advantage of that and stuck trenches around as target dummies, and put the actual unit in cover near the trench to hit whatever fell in to the trap. (Or the even more nasty (and rather gamey) trick of putting a stealthy firing unit in the trench near some trees... when your opponent gets a sound contact near the trees, he assumes that's where the unit is (being too far away to spot the trench - was it only visible under 192m or something?) and area-fires the trees, while you plink away from the safety and anonymity of the trench in the open).
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Right. So change that...
You can only change that if all trenches are essentially mounds of earth on top of the landscape (like bunkers) that are high enough to act as trenches. And I don't see that as being a satisfactory solution at all. The unavoidable fact is that if you want trenches to be something that go in to the ground, then it has to cut through the terrain mesh, and that means a hole in the terrain mesh which under the current engine is always going to be visible.
Now I'd love to see 'terrain spotting' make an appearance (although following Steve's theme, the list of thing I'd love to see in the game is enough to keep them busy for a long time, never mind everyone else's wish lists
) - starting out with a 'low res' idea of the battlefield that improves as you actually get eyeballs on the terrain would be as much of a benefit as proper hiding of trenches etc. Not holding my breath on that one though... -
Addendum:
As a comment on my own post above, I have witnessed on several occasions instances where troops behind a wall WILL displace to a better defensive position...say the building a few meters behind them. But I have never seen them choose to displace to a building (or position) behind them because the building they are currently in is being lit up by enemy fire. In other words it seem they can't separate the desirability of one building position to another building position that may be out of LOS from the enemy.
Coding to recognise that a building is better cover than a wall, and allowing troops to move a certain small distance to get into better cover if under heavy fire, is one thing. A pretty simple thing. Is incoming too high for this cover? If it is, is there better cover within 10 meters? If so, get there now. If not, stay put. You don't even need to know where the shooting is coming from
Coding the pixeltruppen to figure out which of two bits of equal protection is better for them to be in is a very different can of worms. Which directions are we taking fire from, and how much fire from each direction (and position). Do the known firing positions have LoS to other nearby buildings. What about known enemy units that aren't firing (or their last known positions). And don't forget about LoS along the route to take between buildings?
Sure, it's not impossible to knock up something that works very roughly in a short time. Probably something that works pretty well for the specific scenario you have in your mind. But the problem is that it has to give sensible results in just about every scenario. And I'm pretty certain that you'll be seeing guys rushing out of buildings to go cower elsewhere when it is 'obvious' that they ought to stay put and cover their firing lane regardless, or getting flushed out of buildings and shot down in the streets (in far worse cover) far too easily.
I dare say that if they wanted to spent a week or so on it, they could make the system work pretty well, and be only marginally worse than what we have now
. Personally I think that seeking better cover is a reasonable thing for the AI to decide on. Chosing when to leave good cover is something that ought to remain in the hands of the player. Most people will remember CMx1 moments of units in trees / houses taking heavy fire and deciding to crawl out into the open ground where they make a nice, slow moving target in open terrain. It is one of the things people begged them to remove and give entirely to player control. -
Their ability to gain ammo after being destroyed and producing ever bigger explosions continues to impress me. The one in my PBEM has actually made a nice hull-down position for itself now. And might just have shown up another minor bug:
Note the red circle at the bottom, of a small wall that has just collapsed into a cloud of dust. It happened a few times in the turn, always coinciding with nice big bangs from the cooking off of ammo from the BMP. As you can see, the line from the explosion to the wall passes through a total of 4 buildings, and partly through a ridge in the ground in the grassy area. Fortunately the effect seems to be limited to trees and terrain, since a number of soldiers are a lot closer to that explosion (inside and out) and haven't died. The explosions reliably destroy one more segment of wall every time. Not sure if that is just the explosions getting bigger, or the walls are only counting other walls as cover between them and the explosion.
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British forces?? Yes!! Is possible to send a new vehicle to battlefront in order to use it on game??
Sadly not. Feel free to lobby for any particular vehicles you'd like to see though. If you can make a good case why a particular vehicle needs to be in (within the scope of the game), they will at least read it, and you may get lucky...
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Hmm - BMP as a giant kettle. Novel idea. Maybe the Warrior IFV ought to have a large water tank with a few tea bags in it so if it does get toasty at least the crew have a consolation cup of tea as they bail out.
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Sound contacts are in the game, but they are indicated by the same '?' icon as units you've lost sight of. If you have sound contact on a unit, you can move the camera to that area and hear sounds too - I've been able to hear troops talking in a building without spotting them, but only when I have my own units close enough to hear them.
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A couple of dead BMPs are wreaking havoc on the small map I am playing a PBEM on, since the critters insist on moving forwards turn after turn too. One has destroyed every tree and non-building wall within about 80 meters now, some 20 turns after it was first destroyed (and still putting out a goor 4 or 5 big explosions every turn). The other one has already severely damaged several buildings and effectively blocked a large section of road: it is perfectly capable of causing casualties 30-40 meters away, and unfortunately makes a very good defence for my opponent, since it is sitting on my best route of attack
They are both doing a good job of excavating trenches as they go though.
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We did make some tweaks to v1.10 to reduce the chance of support soldiers in Sniper and AT Teams using their weapons. They should be using them only for self defense right now. If they are not, I'm interested to hear the specifics of the situations where they open up on the enemy (terrain, range, etc.)
Actually I just recently had an example of this in a PBEM (save available). My sniper team, on the roof of a 2 floor building, were wandering over to shoot a guy trapped behind a wall (the wall was getting steadily reduced to rubble by an ex-BMP that has now spent a good 15 turns exploding catastrophically, trashing an ever-wider area of the map, and moving a good fifteen or so meters since it was killed - but that's another story).
The sniper team is Syrian special forces, so is a 2 man team (sniper and spotter). The spotter was the first guy over there. What he spotted first was the unoccupied UAZ (or whatever the Syrian 10 man, unarmed jeep-like affair is), which was parked just below him outside the building. He proceeded to drop a few grenades on it until it was dead. The sniper duly arrived and finished off his intended target as advertised, by the way.
Okay, the UAZ was at very short range (two floors down, one or two meters away from the wall), but was unoccopied, and surely couldn't have been that much of a threat to the sniper team.
(Pictures also available somewhere in my ongoing AAR at: http://forums.mzocentral.net//index.php?showtopic=18737 )
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(edit) I'm not that John, but I'll have a go. (/edit)
It really depends how "tight" the solid angle of the beam is. A directed beam is approximately similar to a bullet, a wide beam would be more like shot, and a completely undirected beam - ie a source radiating in all directions - does indeed go down directly as the cube of the distance from the source.
An example of a directed beam would be a laser pointer, I guess; you don't see it from the side (unless it's going through thick smoke or something), you only see the reflections from the point it hits.
As I understand it the greatest problems with DEWs at the moment are the size, weight and power requirements of the equipment.
Actually it is inverse square, not inverse cube, for radiation. To get anything worse than inverse square you need to have some kind of obscuring matter (such as atmosphere
) that causes additional losses of energy from the radiation. This generally gives you something like exp(-r) / r^2 though.More importantly, the inverse square law holds true for lasers, and other directed beams too, at least for large enough distances. You simply can't exactly collimate a beam exactly (Heisenerg's uncertainty principle strikes again), so the beam spreads out, even if only slightly, by an amount proportional to the distance from the source. An unless you are talking about extremely high precision equipment in a carefully controlled lab setting, your beam width will likely be of the order of a few centimeters by 100m range, which is very much in the inverse-square law regime. Only very close in, where the amount of spread is less than the aperture of the laser (typically a few mm), is the beam strength approximately constant with distance.
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You ought to bear in mind that some of the release BFC QB maps had no AI plans for one or more sides - plenty of people complained about playing QBs on maps that came with the game and finding the AI units huddling in the corner at the end of it all.
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Just done a quick test with some M1A1 spotting syrian infantry from a hull-down position. In a position where both tanks just failed to have LoS to the syrian troops, unbuttoning one immediately allowed it to spot an enemy (and shoot him with the MG), where he hadn't been able to spot him while buttoned. The LoS tool still failed to give LoS to the spot (I believe it uses the turret center position).
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Hello everyone,
2. In real life one the advantages of the Javelin system is that its fire and forget. However in the game my Javelin tank hunter teams always fire their missile, stay in position and then proceed to get plastered by return fire from any surviving enemy armor or infantry until the one minute action phase is over. Is there a way to have them fire and then immediately move while in WEGO mode? Perhaps through the use of a pause command?
Javelin teams currently insist on reloading before they will move after firing, and there is no way to get around this. Future patches may or may not change this. (I seem to remember that in real life the javelin can be fired remotely too, so the firer can position the unit and get away from it before firing. You can't do that in-game either).
3. These two questions are related to, but not limited to the effective employment of ATGMs. A) Are hull down positions WYSIWYG?. B)From what point is LOS determined on vehicles such as Bradlys? Their optics? The middle of the turret or even, when the TC is unbuttoned, the TC himself?
Hull down is WYSIWYG
http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?p=1094570#post1094570 contains some info on this: there are 6 or more heights used for LoS determination (prone, kneeling, standing for infantry, and a variety for vehicles of different sizes. Very likely the middle of the turret is one. No idea if the unbuttoned TC or periscope can be used for spotting seperately - I have a vague recollection of 'no' on the periscope though.
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Discussing 'realism' in regards to command delays is about as meaningful as discussion 'realism' in terms of WeGo vs RT (or IGoUGo for that matter...).
No command delays break realism by enabling complex, instantaneously executed responses to events outside the knowledge of the units in question. Having command delays breaks realism by preventing simple, immediate responses by units that would be perfectly capable of it (AT gun? Think I'll reverse back around the corner. But I have to wait 20 seconds for the order to come through, 'cos I'm a bit stupid. And apparently also a bit dead now too...). Both break realism by still being able to co-ordinate troops overall far better than in real life, and in that units are still acting in response to information they just don't have. In an ideal world, the tacAI ought to handle the 'unit reacting to what's under it's nose' side of thing, like getting the hell away from a serious threat. As always, there will be inevitable complaints of the "you didn't read my mind correctly" type (see the driving on/off the road example from earlier in the thread). (And I wouldn't be sad to see the introduction of some kind of general 'stance' setting, of just how much emphasis it places on self preservation vs trying to get a shot off because it know it is the only unit you've got with a chance of killing a tiger).
Overall it is the same problem that came up in discussing area fire, where there are qualitative differences between 'valid' area fire a unit might put down on a suspected position to cover a move, vs 'invalid' area fire in the exact same spot because some entirely unconnected unit has spotted enemy there. (The problem which ultimately comes down to the fact that, as has been said many times, the player is not playing one role in the game, but it being variously the squad leader, platoon HQ, Co. commander and a whole lot of other roles too).
Expecting the program to be able to decide which role is the one you are issuing orders from, and assigning commands delays based on that, is obviously a non-starter. Sure, it could be done, but no way I think it can be done in a way that would drive people insane from the number of times it was clearly wrong and got half your men killed.
One proto-workaround thought: don't automatically lock the fog of war view to the selected unit. When I have a tank selected, I can chose to view the battlefield from the view of that unit, or any of its parent formation (platoon HQ, company HQ, battalion HQ). I select the view which gives me the information I need to decide on the orders for that unit, and the command delay is determined by the information level I am working it. Not workable of course, since nothing stops you from going up to the highest level, seeing everything you can, working out your plans, and then going back down to the lowest level to send orders with no delays. So it would be an entirely voluntary system (although one that avoids the worst 'realism' problems of delays vs no delays).
A far more complex development of this, which I'm pretty sure is outside the scope of anything that is going to be done with this engine, is something akin to relative spotting of terrain. Limit the view of the map to more or less what the unit can see, with vague (and possibly) incorrect low resolution terrain beyond that. So it simply isn't possible to issue orders about points outside the unit's LoS without moving up to a higher command level, because there isn't anywhere to reliably place waypoints or target orders.
But again, how much is it worth doing this. You will still be able to 'beat the system' in some or many cases, and still be able to co-ordinate everything to an unrealistic degree, and it is a lot of work for a fairly marginal increase in command delay realism in the 20% of cases where it does work as intended :S
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I'm very much like Steiner: I have no interest in real time. The enjoyment of the game is precisely in being able to watch the replay over and over, making sure I've seen everything that happened (and even then, I do occasionally get to the next orders phase and discover that the squad I was about to move is half-dead and pinned, and I have no idea why). I view each turn like a puzzle, and the issue is how to get the best result out of each turn. It's not remotely 'realistic', but is what I enjoy.
To be honest, I never would have found CM if it hadn't been a turn-based game. I love turn-based, and have truly loathed every RTS-type game I've ever tried. (Although to be fair, I suspect that the more sedate pace of CM:SF compared to typical twitch RTS games might be more to my liking). I was looking for a new TBS wargame, and CM:BB came to my attention. I always viewed it as a TBS game which just happened to go to great lengths to create a dynamic representation of what happened in the turn, rather than a continuous simulation which happened to stop every minute for orders.
(BTW am I alone in thinking that a minute in CM:SF is a lot more lethal than a minute in CMx1? I don't ever recall a single squad wiping out a whole platoon caught in a road in under a minute in any CMx1 games - well, except for SMG squads in close range ambushes maybe - which makes me wonder if the turn length should be more or less adjusted for lethality. But there is always a trade off with the fact that in many fights, the high kill-rate action occurs in a pretty small fraction of the total game, and a lot more time is spent just moving around and regrouping, and making that take twice as long wouldn't be great, particularly in PBEM games).
But, getting back on topic, the two styles of play do create somewhat different requirements for the UI, if not for the actual game mechanics. In RT you need to put more emphasis on making the mechanics of issuing commands as quick and painless as possible, particularly for the people who like to play without pausing at all (gimboid alien freaks though they may be...). In WeGo you can live with a slightly more convoluted interface, and more command options, if it gives you greater flexibility. I'm tempted to say you 'need' more options, although you don't really in the sense that it is a level playing field and your opponent has the same limitations that you do.
Again, in a WeGo situation - particularly in PBEM where I tend to spend two or three times more time per turn than in AI games - the more anal players (looks at Cpl Steiner innocently) would probably want many more options. I mentioned in another thread a while ago about separating move speed from move logic. Select your speed (slow, move, quick, fast), your reaction to contact (keep moving regardless; stop, return fire and cancel move; stop fire, and continue when contact lost; go back to where you came from), and other triggers (stop when have LoS / hulldown to a specific point for example). Or being able to assign covered arcs with various conditions (kill anything, infantry only, armour only) - toggles for what weapons should be used, setting covered areas (fixed on the map as the unit moves, rather than arcs moving with the unit) . A whole heap of things that could be useful (even if only once a blue moon
, and which give you greater flexibility in giving your units sensible reactions during the middle of a minute that has just gone disastrously wrong. Of course, much of this decision making is offloaded to the tacAI at the moment, and it does pretty damn well (I've just seen a unit given orders to target a BMP decide that while the RPG guy is doing that, the rest of them can turn around and shoot at another infantry unit nearby, since they haven't got anything better to do right now).I'm pretty sure there is no way to make that interface usuable in RT - and likely no need to either, since for the elements you are actively monitoring you can do it all by hand quite easily. All you need is move speeds and the ability to stop automatically upon contact really - which is what you've got. Obviously the usability in RT is something that has to be taken into account, as long as the same UI is used in both. Possibly this hurts (slightly) the WeGo experience, by virtue of limiting the options, but to be fair, the current commands are enough in 95+% of cases, and it's a pretty sensible solution.
Would it be remotely possible to put in two UIs though. Not necessarily one for each - I don't think going down the path of branching the code into two lines for the two styles of play is a good idea: once you open that can of worms it can be easy to slip into having essentially two separate games being maintained. But the option to toggle between a 'full' and 'streamlined' interface, with the streamlined one obviously just including the most common commands. Mind you, the current interface is pretty streamlined once you've set up the hotkeys file. I never use the on-screen menus any more, except for one or two commands (splitting off assault or AT teams, marking mines, that sort of thing) that I use so rarely that I can't remember the key.
Since I am no longer sure if I have a point or you are just getting my train of thought on a subject inspired by the thread title, I think I'll stop now...
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Steve, you didn't answer the question that's on everyone's mind: are there plans to add command delay to WeGo? Or maybe you did but I didn't see it...
Go back and look at the second paragraph of the first post in this thread.
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Aha, very cool! I hadn't realized you could do sighting from a future waypoint. That will help tremendously in finding hull-down positions during the engagement, not just during setup. Thanks much.
Chris
It helps to also be aware that although you are finding LoS from the waypoint you clicked, the actual sight-line on the screen is drawn from the current unit position. Which is a minor annoyance, but is a display quirk only (BFC fix or do sumthink!). But is the reason many people don't know about this - it looks like LoS is only ever found from the current position, but is actually from the active waypoint.
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uhhh
I'm not sure what you mean by "Camera views 3 or higher" but If you select a unit, press tab, then your camera immediatly locks to that unit. Press 1 and you see the world from its point of view. press some other numbers and other view modes pop up.
In some of the earlier patches, selcting a unit and hitting 3, 4 or 5 for the preset camera views would give you a camera view which didn't actually let you see the unit you were locked to - the camera shift was just vertical , so the unit was lost off the bottom of the screen.
So to answer the original question, yes this has been fixed.
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Not very WEGO player friendly, is it?
No, but considering the 'acquire' command takes no time, it is arguably not too unrealistic to have to waste 30-40 seconds of your turn scrabbling around for stuff (depending on how late in the turn you board).
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Nothing persistent except the map itself. So yes there's a shifting front line, no to everything else.
But not dynamically shifting like CMX1 operations unfortunately, except in the rather crude sense that you can set it according to the victory level.
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I imagine that must have been quite... frustrating.
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Not exactly true.
In a recent PBEM AAR that someone posted to the forum (name escapes me) he mentioned repeatedly checking for smoke puffs and dust tracks from ATGM firings and AFVs to beat the FOW and guess whether the position and size of his opponents forces.
I suspect that was my AAR... I'm a dirty cheatin' sonofabitch
You (the player) can also see small arms muzzle flashes from enemy units which none of your troops see (no ? icon, no spot of any kind, but you can see to the inch where the firers are standing in principle). No idea if it is always there - it seems wrong somehow to go around hunting for the muzzle flashes for extra intel (although if both players know about it and are happy to do it, then obviously there is no problem) - but I do use the info if I stumble across it whilst watching a replay.
But I'd be very happy if the muzzle flashes and spotting of non-spotted dust were taken out. I just don't know how possible it is or how high up the 'to do' list.
2. WEGO. the ability to link waypoint between units to sync orders OR execute an order at a particular time. ie....setting up a chain of orders....culminating in a perfectly timed, multiple entry into a building....enter at 2.30:50am. or it can be used to crest a ridge etc etc
It would be a nice feature, to be able to select a bunch of waypoints and link them so that units wait at that point until all relevant units reach their selected waypoint. But again, since it is one of those minor tweaks that is a fair bit of work to implement, and only makes a difference (in results) vs manual synching of pauses etc. in a pretty small number of cases, so I doubt you'll see it any time soon.
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Might as well tag this on here:
WeGo bug I noticed (in single player), which I spotted in both the CM:SF stryker campaign in 1.08 (1st battle) and the USMC campaign 1.10 3rd battle (defending your hillside against Syrian counterattack with no AT assets to speak of).
At the start of the orders phase, when enemy reinforcements arrive, if the camera is pointing in the right direction you see a very brief flash of the reinforcements icons - probably just for a single frame. I saw it for the tanks arriving in task force thunder, and figured it was the tanks because I knew they arrived about then, and in the place I saw the flash. So when I saw a similar flash in Semper Fi, Syria, I figured reinforcements had just arrived at that spot. And sure enough, when I hit 'go' to start the turn, there were indeed 3 BMPs magically at that very spot.
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What is the quality of the FO? And what sort of arty is it? Usually the larger calibre stuff takes alot longer. Syrians always seem to have a disadvantage in this respect possibly to reflect their poorer comunications systems?
Regular quality FO. The rest of my guys are Syrian special forces, so I assume they are from a special forces TO&E. Arty is 122mm, I believe it is a 2S1 M-1974 Gvodzika self-propelled howitzer. This, admittedly, has a pretty slow rate of fire.
But 20 minutes is still damn slow. The FO is walking back there to point out the targets in person?
Right or wrong, it might also explain the observation re the AI being unwilling to use arty sometimes though - it's trying to use it, but the shells ain't landing 'till some time next week.
) - starting out with a 'low res' idea of the battlefield that improves as you actually get eyeballs on the terrain would be as much of a benefit as proper hiding of trenches etc. Not holding my breath on that one though...
. Personally I think that seeking better cover is a reasonable thing for the AI to decide on. Chosing when to leave good cover is something that ought to remain in the hands of the player. Most people will remember CMx1 moments of units in trees / houses taking heavy fire and deciding to crawl out into the open ground where they make a nice, slow moving target in open terrain. It is one of the things people begged them to remove and give entirely to player control.
Back at the Fire Control Center...
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
Paid enough attention (for once) to notice that this doesn't hold true in my current PBEM. Arty with 2 tubes currently has 5 out of 6 dots red at the end of a turn.
I'm sticking with my previous understanding of it showing how much extra delay is added on top (in addition to intrinsic firing unit / FO / communication net delays) for the next mission.