dan/california

We have beaten him to often, and to harshly. You would think this forum was composed entirely of picky bastards who would kvetch if they had a date with swimsuit model?! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh, wait, I forgot, it is.

Honest question, wouldn't 64 bit allow the use more memory, and therefore larger maps and scenarios? Or does the CMX2 engine consistently hit some other limiting factor first?

It has been mentioned a number of times that they aren't all that hot in real life either. And I think the game actually makes them a little easier to use than they really are.

I am %99 percent that their is both a German and an American campaign. There have been no major changes to the campaign system announced, that I am aware of. It has taken all they had just to get everything working in the main game for Normandy.

The only thing your so-called squires can be counted upon to do is drink themselves into a stupor, and acquire various incurable iterations of the pox. Oddly enough this inclines them to drink even more. Or they would so inclined and if it were physically possible. Which it is not.

It might be a little difficult to sort dead from wounded by the shell vs the truck burning. I seem to recall it smoked almost immediately. And how much ammo was on board?

I think they are holding out to do multi-core and 64 bit in one huge rewrite. Given that 64 bit does not have any thing like complete market penetration, and it will probably take several months of programming time to sort out, you can't blame them for waiting as long as they can. And that means no other game improvements for most of those months, remember. In my opinion may be best to wait until the ability to offload non-graphics functions to the graphics card becomes more common. Given the programming and memory management hassles in getting two cores to work on the same thing it might or might not be worth the effort. Offloading things like LOS calculations to the graphics side whereit's they can run on a 64 or 128 cores is, however, would result in a massive speed increase. But this possibility has just recently peaked out of the development labs and is some years from widespread adoption. A game company has to wait for fairly widespread implementation of a new trick like this before they design the whole game to work around it.

To put it simply, most of the people who like the game enough to do scenarios own one or more modules, I would venture to say that most of them own all of them. Your buddy may need to find the $25. It is not a lot of money, when coffee for two at Starbucks can run $10-15.

There has to be an AI plan written for each map, preferably more than one. The QB system just plugs the selected units into that plan.There no random anything to speak of, annd people would not be happy if there were. Even when we start to get some reactive AI, and they have said its coming, that will increase the amount of work that goes into each map because all of the possibilities will have to be thought out and tested. Any editor bones waiting to be tossed our way then?

We have also not been told if the truck was zig zagging, or just cruising along like it owned the joint. It really seems to me that Elvis misread what had LOS to where and paid full retail for the mistake. C3k will enlighten us as to various hit probabilities soon enough. That, and graphical errors with holster flaps, but I digress.

I had this error until I finally, no thanks to HP, managed to get different video drivers installed. This proved to be completely curative.

The CM community wants a great number of things that BFC would have to buy out an entire East European programming shop to produce. Too get them done in the next decade, anyway. I have repeatedly suggested this, in fact. For a lot of valid reasons they think it s a VERY bad idea. And it is their livelihoods on the line here.

It is worth remembering that the systems, in terms of both precision fires and communications, to do what is routinely expected of Western troops today were barely concepts in 1945. For that matter a lot of them were German concepts. Von Braun is merely the best known example. Truly useful engineering data and ability were the surest way to avoid unpleasant post war questions about how you had spent the last few years.

Check out this thread to get an idea of how intnticate a single map project can be. I grant you he has gone somewhat above and beyond the call, but it represents what is possible. And it is VERY cool. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=92372

Every map in CMX2 is handcrafted. A 5 mission campaign for the current system could represent anywhere between 25 and a 100 hours of work if it involves all new maps. The QB system is built by randomly picking a pre-existing map. A system to use pieces of handmade maps as randomly arranged tiles, like many board wargames, is on the to do list somewhere.

Mind you I am referring to the dung ball, not the perfectly serviceable beetle on top of it.

Better than I had pictured actually. I envisioned something more like this.....

Any meaningful map based "campaign" system amounts too a whole new game. The only rational approach that doesn't involve man years of coding would be trying to write some sort of interface between a brigade/division level game that already exist and CMX2, and then you are probably talking man months of programming anyway, with a high risk of failure to boot. The amount of detailed handcrafting a decent, much less good, CMX2 map requires is just too high. Maybe, someday, if we are very good boys and girls, we can persuade BFC to rework the editor to accept a standard GIS format, but they haven't appeared interested so far. Then it goes from impossible to just really, really hard.

And you were being charged with what exactly?

JonS, how did your troops C2 hold up during the course of the battle? Was it easier to maintain because you were on the defensive?

Elvis, you have mentioned a number of time that the troops on hill 154 were difficult to rally because they were out of command. What caused this? Did some of your HQs get blitzed, or did you get the troops to far from their commanders when everyone got pinned.

I expect CMBN to fully reflect the difficulty of staying in touch without all of that kit.

CMX2 uses a far more sophisticated C2 model, different forms of communication are directly simulated. Can they hear see their commander, can they hear, do they have a working radio. So there are lot of subtle things going on. It may be possible for a unit to be in command, on some level, one turn and out the next due to smoke for instance. CMSF glosses over some of this, especially playing blue, since it simulates the trillion dollars worth of equipment the U.S. and NATO have bought in the last thirty years to keep troops in communication. If a late model Abrams has no C2 links left its probably so beat up as to be combat ineffective anyway, with half the equipment showing red.

Is that why he's been so quiet? You guys finally issued him a secret pass key?

I think I would carry a couple of cases of VERY good beer and a small white flag. No one shoots the guy with the beer.