dan/california

I remain unclear whether this reflects Steve's use low opinion of the Air Force, or is an actual bug.

the first and most important thing seems to be a detailed look at your video drivers. CMX2 to seems to be quite sensitive to obscure video card issues. I have only recently resolved my own mess in that regard. The game is a 32-bit executable so I don't think going past a couple of gigabytes of RAM really has all that much effect either. I do think that hyperthreading significantly influence games speed. Since it essentially speeds up the core that is being utilized. Obviously a higher processor clock rate is also helpful. A more powerful video card is also quite useful, subject to the above mention of subtle little problems, it is literally worth trying to get a firm confirmation that the card you want to buy runs the game well. That little – a at the end of a 32 character long serial number can really matter. Last but not least, and in reference to my own troubles, if you're buying a laptop be absolutely certain that it uses standard ATI or Nvidia drivers. My laptop's drivers had some odd little customization from the manufacture, and the manufacturing question hadn't updated them in two years. But there's a whole thread on that in tech support if you care.

A way to tune the Tac AI's reactions is far more important than the turn's time limit. My personal hobby horse is that the system needs to separate movement speed and response to contact. I want a command system lets me tell a squad to go somewhere quickly, but go to ground if they take fire. And I also want a way to tell them to go slow but did not stop for anything. The current system has the latter but not the former. The little pop-up box in Tac Ops where you could set up the ROE for your entire force or unit by unit would of course be ideal.

This is from the outside looking in, but my understanding of the multicore issue is as follows. The advantages to be gained by recoding the engine to run on only two cores are quite small, it barely breaks even at four cores from an effort standpoint. And since the customer base is nowhere near to being dominated by four core machines, it's going to be a while. It is my personal opinion that the real, order of magnitude level, performance improvement will come from offloading some things to the graphics processor instead of the CPU. LOS and LOF checks for instance are inherently suitable to being run on a highly parallel system. Which is basically what your graphics processor is. Unfortunately hardware and software support for this is even farther out than universal four core machines. You have to remember is not a question of what can be done, but what have most people already bought, in terms of system specs.

The simplest explanation of the Sherman's reputation, and this is already been mentioned above, is that first of all it was to a vast extent the primary Allied tank of World War II. It's production numbers dwarfed those of everything else put together as I understand it. The second uncontested fact, is that it's armor was about as resistant to the heavier German antitank guns/main guns as Iraqi T-72's were to modern US ordnance. I will note that those also have a lousy reputation. In short, the primary problem was German ordinance going in one end and out the other. All other factors are secondary to this one little fact.

A lot of the underlying debate is being driven by conditions specific to Afghanistan. The most significant of which is that it is perhaps the most inhospitable places on earth for vehicles of any description. Therefore the U.S. is fighting there without the vehicles that are a major part of its underlying doctrine. This is twisting the debate about the necessary range of the infantry platoon's weapons into rather large knots. I still haven't quite recovered from finding out that here is no railroad in the entire country. Is there ANY place else that doesn't have at least some rail transport?

I will point out that if Steve wanted to anything about a release date he would have by now. Just saying...

The Marines seem to be having the same debate. http://kitup.military.com/2010/11/infantry-automatic-rifle-could-replace-all-saws.html?wh=wh

But those are firing pistol rounds with an effective range of 150yds, if that. Modern body armor just laughs at them. There is a reason no serious military issues them to front line troops any more.

Steve has mentioned a number of times that explosion's kill radius is tweaked a little to offset the fact the engine keeps troops a little less dispersed than they would be in real life. It may be in this scenario its a little too tweaked. I know rubble makes a great fighting position after the dust has settled. I don't think it very healthy to be in buildings that are being caved in or flattened though. If nothing else it seems like the dust would choke and blind everyone for quite a while.

That is pretty much what happened to make me start this thread.

The other thing full auto does is convince less well trained people that they are doing SOMETHING. If it keeps a group of insurgents in a fire fight long enough to get that golden BB it might be worthwhile in that context. The smart thing for the insurgent to do may be to expend his ammo and discard or re-hide his weapon as rapidly as possible. But one of the measures of a really well trained soldier is how little they use it, if they are so equipped. This excellent British article on the subject was brought up in an earlier thread. http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Owen,_UK_Platoon_Weapons.pdf

Is returning new for 1.3 then? That would be a major change.

I would debate if inaccurate auto fire even generates much suppression in a full scale fire fight. Once the general noise and chaos reaches a certain level, rounds that aren't coming close probably will not even be noticed. The one real advantage of full auto is that it does provide a great deal more firepower at the very short ranges it can be controlled. Which with a bloody lot of them trying to overrun your position can be very important. Actual machine guns are a completely different issue of course.

That is currently correct, they are definitely planning to release the patch soon, as I understand it though. This is purely a guess on my part, but a few small issues popped up with NATO almost immediately, they may be waiting to do a 1.31 across the board. It would save doing some things twice, especially for installers and such.

It probably is not worth Charles' and Phil's time, but the skylining computation could mostly be folded into the initial computation of the LOS table and spit out as a precalculated modifier. It would reduce the CPU hit a lot to fold it in that way.

Has anybody checked if making the ridge line less than absolutely knife sharp helps.? It may be simple matter of slightly better map making. Not to say the engine shouldn't be able too handle it better, but it would define the scope of the problem.

I have a question about troops in buildings and version 1.3. I am throwing enough ordinance at things to collapse the roof and the second story floor onto the first level, and there are still people alive when I send a squad inside. My admittedly questionable memory tells me that once floors start collapsing it's usually safe. Has anyone else noticed anything in this regard?

I think Steve is trying to say that if they do something for Normandy that can be folded into ShockForce with very little effort, they will do it. But, SF is basically complete.

If the way they got ATGMed in 2006 can't make the case for tactical sim that at least teaches you to avoid obvious stupidities, then they are as bad as the Pentagon. If Normandy has half of the improvements I am expecting, multi-player and co-play really need some love for the next game. For that matter I would cheerfully pay the price of a module JUST for real multi-player improvements. And thanks for the technical guidance, or at least pointers, in unlocking my laptops video driver. I am finally playing crash free.

A less absolute spotting system is definitely on the list somewhere. I don't recall if it made Normandy or not. It is just a lot of fiddly programming tweaks to give graduated information. Steve did discuss at some point.

There were three things I want to bring up when I started this thread. First, these gentlemen seem to have built an extraordinarily detailed terrain model. In a hypothetical perfect world you could overlay the CMX2 combat system onto this terrain model and the game would be even better. I realize it might take 128 core server to run it. But hey, we can dream. My second thought is of Israeli procurement might not be quite as hard nut to crack as the Pentagon's. Especially if you carefully allied yourself with the right Israeli company. And it is at least possible if CMX2 gets taken up by a significant military establishment anywhere, we might get more of the features we all so desperately want. Co-play and better multiplayer come immediately to mind. And last but not least, the IDF does not lack for more or less unique toys. And in a completely unpolitical way, I want to play with them.

It's just one of those classic little sorry we forgot to mention that, bleep you sort of things. If they had to put on the front of the box in big red letters that there drivers locked down forever they wouldn't do it. But they don't tell you about it, at all. They just do it and hope most of their customers never notice. I guess I just put this down as a painful lesson learned. I can assure you that I'll bug the heck out of them with the question the next time I buy computer. No standard drivers, no sale.

Okay, I think I have figured out a way to jailbreak my driver's and solve the problem. It was somewhat radical. The critical step is a program called ReadyDriverPlus v1.2 that disables an overly paranoid safety in the Windows boot file. This joyous little file will only allow the laptop to run drivers signed by Microsoft, it is my assumption that HP is simply too cheap and/or lazy to either test new drivers and release them, or allow the standard version of catalyst to run. Ready Driver Plus disables this. The next step is a wonderful little jail broken driver from http://www.hardwareheaven.com/windows-7-vista-radeon-display-drivers/205186-dna-ati-10-10a-1-a.html. This guy seems to be borderline brilliant at working around the computer manufacturers attempt to make us crazy. If anyone else is having this problem please note this is a link to the link, and not the program itself. It all appears to work for me wonderfully, although I've barely had any time to play in the last three days. I am however going to repeat what the programmers themselves said, this is an as is, no warranty, it may break stuff, kind of thing to do to your computer. I would however like to address my appreciation to these gentlemen for helping us deal with the very worst sort of intentional planned obsolescence. I will never buy another product from HP, ever, not so much the printer cartridge. The fact that this bloody hack worked is more or less absolute proof I shouldn't of had to do it. Battlefront has, as always, provided the best customer support anyone could reasonably ask for. This is appreciated.

I sent the driver heaven people an email. I will relay their response. I am fairly certain I am not the only person with this problem. I may see if Costco will just regard the whole mess as a warranty issue. That might actually light a fire under sensitive portions of HPs anatomy. Or least make it not my problem. Thanks for the help.