rocketman

Target Arc in any other direction, or Face another direction? I hate balconies because of how exposed infantry gets if you're not careful.

You're damn right you will - and you won't regret it one second. You have years of content to immerse yourself in. What I like to do is read a book about the battle or setting I play to really appreciate how CM can be a realistic reenactment of those battles. It has come to the point that when I read about WWII to my imagination, the "inner eye" - it is most times in the form of CM.

I never liked WW2 era in gaming. Mostly due to its overuse for decades and how games, namely of a strategy genre, represented it.
Vehicles were little more than variations of same stats and shared the same function, be it a light tank or a heavy tank, they just dealt a different amount of damage, chipping off those health bars or armor digits. Most were just destined to be discarded as you raced for the best tier to rule the battlefield. Yes even Men of War was quite guilty of this. Same very much goes for Steel Panthers, Close Combat and CMx1 games - because of all the abstractions, even grounded in reality, but still abstractions, that these games had. Sure enough Graviteam Tactics made WW2 just 'acceptable' to me, mostly due to its awesome representation of tank combat, but I always felt like something was amiss.
That's why I like a modern era a lot more. Even in simpler games like Wargame series or Call to Arms due to era's sheer difference in weapon design and technological imbalance every side always felt like it had its own style. I was always playing Steel Panthers MBT and hardly ever touching WW2 versions. Even mediocre Close Combat Modern Tactics was interesting to me. And CMSF and CMBS just set the quality bar absolutely high.
But then I got CMBN. And for the first time in my life I felt excited about WW2 era in games. Due to a sheer realism and precise representation of everything - every single vehicle, or even every firearm soldiers carry feels unique. No "better tiers", even light tanks can have their moments of glory versus bigger and meaner brethren when lucky or used cunningly. All the weird looking armored cars, these boxes on wheels can contribute a lot to battles. If it takes part in a mission - it can and will be used and it will matter. And due to all the variety of OOBs that a full CMBN bundle currently offers - it delivers what Graviteam Tactics does not: countless ways to have the same battle in - and an amazing infantry gameplay to boot, making tank battles actually feel superior in Battle for Normandy compared.
Furthermore CMBN is, because of how many WW2 games are there and what they are, an example of why realism matters, why just having an abstract "frontal armor" receive less damage before an invisible health bar runs out, or just shrug off hits from calibers below some predefined penetration threshold - will never make an important difference that makes a game truly memorable. Exactly that difference between 75mm tank cannons of USA, Germany and UK.
Damn it, I'll have to buy all WW2 CM titles now, right?

You'd be surprised. Some lefties play wargames too

I know one pack I would buy for sure for BN, that is a "Commando/Special Forces Pack" - pretty please 

I know one pack I would buy for sure for BN, that is a "Commando/Special Forces Pack" - pretty please 

Yeah. I mean, after playing CMBS, how can I play CMBN? You want me to downgrade my Abrams to Shermans? /s
The engine 4 is vastly superior to 1. This is a huge shift. If the CMSF milieu is not your thing, then don’t buy. If you do buy, you’ll enjoy another CM experience.
 
Edited to add: Merry Christmas!

Glad you guys like the map. There is a story behind making it. I had played the "Ramparts of the Pallikoi" scenario in FI and was struck by what dramatic landscapes were possible to make in the editor. When FB was announced I read a book about the Bulge campaign in preparation for the release and there was a photo from the south west overlooking Ouren nested between mountains and the snaking river valley. I instantly felt I had to try to make a map of it. In part as an exercise to get to grips with elevation in the editor and secondary to expand it into a scenario.

It has been a long time in the making, and was previously known as the project "Man of the Our", but is now "Rittersprung H2H".
Scenario description:
After being severely decimated in the battle for the Hürtgen Forest, the 28th Infantry Division was sent to the rear to rest and refit. The 112th Infantry Regiment got located in the tri-country area of Lieler-Ouren-Lützkampen, spanning Luxembourg, Germany and Belgium – a six mile stretch of land on both sides of the Our river where the Siegfried Line had its westernmost fortifications, now occupied by the Allies. The 28th ID had just about recovered 100 % strength, with replacement units getting basic combat training, when the Germans launched their massive attack in the Ardennes on december 16th 1944. The crossing of the Our at Ouren would be an important part in the German advance and it was upon the 112th IR of the 28th ID to protect it as long as possible.
It is 10:30 on Dec 17th and the 112th IR was engaged in combat with German forces on the 16th and throughout the night. The morning fog has lifted but it is still misty from the cold and the wet ground. Visibility is reasonable but it is hard to make out units in the mist. Units in Lützkampen and Harspelt were swept aside on the 16th. Sevenig town was also attacked by a green force of Volksgrenadiers but was able to hold on. The Volksgrenadiers suffered a lot of casualties and many prisoners were taken. They are now presumed to be hiding in the woods west of Sevenig.
Semi-historical scenario which is aiming to capture a “what-if” combat based on units and turn of events that happened in the opening days of the Ardennes offensive.



 
It can be downloaded here: http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/uncategorized/rittersprung-h2h/
Enjoy, and all feedback is very welcome.

It has been a long time in the making, and was previously known as the project "Man of the Our", but is now "Rittersprung H2H".
Scenario description:
After being severely decimated in the battle for the Hürtgen Forest, the 28th Infantry Division was sent to the rear to rest and refit. The 112th Infantry Regiment got located in the tri-country area of Lieler-Ouren-Lützkampen, spanning Luxembourg, Germany and Belgium – a six mile stretch of land on both sides of the Our river where the Siegfried Line had its westernmost fortifications, now occupied by the Allies. The 28th ID had just about recovered 100 % strength, with replacement units getting basic combat training, when the Germans launched their massive attack in the Ardennes on december 16th 1944. The crossing of the Our at Ouren would be an important part in the German advance and it was upon the 112th IR of the 28th ID to protect it as long as possible.
It is 10:30 on Dec 17th and the 112th IR was engaged in combat with German forces on the 16th and throughout the night. The morning fog has lifted but it is still misty from the cold and the wet ground. Visibility is reasonable but it is hard to make out units in the mist. Units in Lützkampen and Harspelt were swept aside on the 16th. Sevenig town was also attacked by a green force of Volksgrenadiers but was able to hold on. The Volksgrenadiers suffered a lot of casualties and many prisoners were taken. They are now presumed to be hiding in the woods west of Sevenig.
Semi-historical scenario which is aiming to capture a “what-if” combat based on units and turn of events that happened in the opening days of the Ardennes offensive.



 
It can be downloaded here: http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/uncategorized/rittersprung-h2h/
Enjoy, and all feedback is very welcome.

I ran the same scenarios as Hister using my system with the following specs:
AMD FX 8320 3.5GHz 8-core (4 modules totaling 8 integer, 4 floating point, up to 4.0GHz turbo mode)
8GB of DDR3 1600 (CAS 9)
MSI GeForce GTX 660 Ti  - 388.00 driver
Asrock 880GM-LE FX motherboard (AMD 880G chipset)
Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD
Windows 7 Home 64-bit SP1 (latest patches)
Running at a resolution of 1920 x 1200.
Using the default settings in CMBN 4.0 (Balanced/Balanced, Vsync OFF and ON, AA OFF) and in the Nvidia Control Panel I typically got about 6 FPS (measured with the latest version of FRAPS) in "Op. Linnet II a USabn UKgrnd" on the German entry side of the map (all the way to the edge) and scrolling right or left looking at the Americans in Richelle. In "The Copse" scenario it measured around 28 FPS behind the allied armored units at the start (scrolled around the map a bit).
Messing around with Vsync (both on and off), anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, Process Lasso (affinity, etc.), power saving settings in Windows control panel, etc. didn't seem to have a significant performance effect on the low FPS of 'Op. Linnet II...'. I overclocked the FX 8320 to 4.0GHz (simply using the multipliers in the BIOS and turning off several power saving features there too, such as APM, AMD Turbo Core Technology, CPU Thermal Throttle, etc.). With 'Op. Linnet II...' the FPS increased to only 7 FPS. Turning off the icons (Alt-I) did bump up the FPS by 1 additional frame (the option reduced the number of objects to be drawn in this view) to 8 FPS.
There are some Hotfixes from Microsoft that supposedly address some issues with the Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture and Windows 7 involving CPU scheduling and power policies (KB2645594 and KB246060) that do NOT come through Windows Update (you have to request them from Microsoft). I have NOT applied these patches to see if they would make a difference since they CANNOT have their changes removed (supposedly), even if you uninstall them. A number of users on various forums have stated that the changes made little difference to their particular game's performance.
I decided to compare this to an Intel system that was somewhat similar:
Intel Core i5 4690K 3.5GHz 4-core  (possibly running at 3.7 to 3.9GHz in turbo mode)
16GB of DDR3-2133 (CAS 9)
eVGA GeForce GTX 670 - 388.00 driver
Asrock Z97 Killer motherboard (Z97 chipset)
Crucial MX100 512GB SSD
Windows 7 Home 64-bit SP1 (latest patches)
Running at a resolution of 1920 x 1200.
Again using the same settings used on the FX system with CMBN and the Nvidia Control Panel I got 10 FPS in 'Op. Linnet II...' while scrolling on the far side looking at the American forces in the town. In 'The Copse' scenario the FPS went to 40 FPS behind the allied vehicles at their start positions. The biggest difference between the GTX 660 Ti and the GeForce GTX 670 is the greater memory bandwidth of the 670 since it has a 256-bit bus compared to the 660 Ti's 192-bit memory bus. So POSSIBLY the greater GPU memory bandwidth in conjunction with the Intel i5's higher IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) efficiency and the increased system memory bandwidth (faster system RAM) resulted in the higher frame rate on the Intel system, but only by so much.
I ran a trace of the OpenGL calls used by CMBN while running 'Op. Linnet II a USabn UKgrnd' on the FX system. This recorded all of the OpenGL calls being used in each frame. The trace SEVERELY slowed down the system during the capture (a lot of data to be written to the trace file). Examining the trace file suggests that CMBN is SEVERLY CPU BOUND in certain graphical views. This is especially true with views of a large amount of units and terrain like that in 'Op. Linnet II...'.
What appears to be happening is that some views in large scenarios of CM involve A LOT of CPU time in issuing instructions to the video card/'frame buffer'. The CPU is spending so much time handling part of the graphics workload (which IS normal) and sending instructions to the video card on what to draw that the video card does not have a full (new) frame of data to post to the frame buffer at a rate of 60 or 30 FPS (Vsync). At 30 FPS each frame would have to be generated between the CPU and the video card within 33.3ms. Instead this is taking around 100ms on the Intel system and about 142ms on the FX system (resulting in the 10 and 7 FPS respectively). Some frames in the trace file had hundreds of thousands of instructions, some reaching near 700,000 instructions (each one is not necessarily communicated between the CPU and video card, only a fraction of them are), whereas sections where the FPS was higher might only have less than 3000 instructions being executed. The low frame rate is a direct consequence of how busy the CPU is and this can be seen with both Intel and AMD CPUs.
So the accusation comes up, is the CM graphics engine un-optimized ? To a certain extent, it is. There are limitations on what can be done in the environment and with the OpenGL 2.x calls that are available. CM could be optimized a bit further than it is currently, but this involves a HUGE amount of time experimenting and testing. Working against this optimization effort is CM's 'free' camera movement, the huge variety, number and size of maps available and the large variety and number of units.These features make it hard to come up with optimizations that work consistently without causing other problems. Such efforts at optimization are manpower and time that Battlefront simply does not have as Steve has stated earlier. Charles could be working on this for years in attempt to get better frame rates. While this would be a 'worthy goal', it is unrealistic from a business standpoint - there is no guarantee with the amount of time spent on optimizing would result in a significantly better performing graphics engine. Other, larger developers typically have TEAMS of people working on such optimizations (which, importantly, does allow them to accomplish certain optimization tasks within certain time frames too). When CMSF was started sometime in 2004 OpenGL 2.0 was the latest specification available (with the 2.1 specification coming out before CMSF was released). Utilizing newer versions of OpenGL to potentially optimize CM's graphics engine still involves a lot of work since the newer calls available don't necessarily involve built-in optimizations over the 2.0 calls. In fact a number of OpenGL calls have been deprecated in OpenGL 3.x and later and this could result in wholesale redesigning of the graphics engine. On top of this is the issue that newer versions of OpenGL may not be supported by a number of current user's video cards (and laptops and whole Mac models on the Apple side).
As for the difference between the GTX 550 Ti and the GTX 660 Ti that Hister is experiencing, I'm not sure what may be going on. The GTX 550 Ti is based on the 'Fermi' architecture, while the GTX 660 Ti utilizes the 'Kepler' architecture. Kepler was optimized for the way games operate compared to the Fermi architecture which had slightly better performance in the 'compute' domain (using the GPU for physics calculations or other floating point, parallelized tasks). The GTX 660 Ti should have been a significant boost in video performance over the GTX 550 Ti, though this performance difference may not be too visible in CM due to the CPU bound nature of some views. It's possible that older drivers may have treated the Fermi architecture differently or simply that older drivers may have operated differently (there are trade-offs that drivers may make in image quality for performance - and sometimes this is 'baked into' the driver and isn't touched by the usual user-accessible controls). I have a GTX 570 I could potentially test, but I would probably need to know more details about the older setup to possibly reproduce the situation and see the differences first-hand.

I did some testing a while back and tried it again with the Linnet example above. To me it seems like one of the biggest loads on FPS are the amount of units on screen at the same time, which is exacerbated when panning. This might include fortifications like in the Linnet setup. One way to improve FPS in this example is to maintain a camera angle but zoom in. The less amount of units the better FPS. In a way this makes sense as in the orders phase no action or movement can put a load on the computer, but I suppose it needs to keep track of where the units are in the 3d environment while redrawing what is on screen when panning. The testing I did before, IIRC, also improved during the action phase, that is a lower camera angle and zoomed in a bit improved FPS. Now, I don't know if that is something that BFC can improve on given the current engine, but one can hope.

@Hister: PM sent with some info on Nvidia Inspector and some more stuff.

I think there is a setting in FRAPS to turn on/off FPS display and where on the screen it is shown. Try that.

That mental picture will be with me for every coming setup where stuff are bunched together. Great likeness

OK as promised.  I have found away for Fire Fox and Chrome users to tweak the forum web site.  There is an add in called Stylish:
For Fire Fox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en
With that add-in installed you can write your own CSS that will be used to style web pages of your choice.  I have created a package of CSS styles that reduce some of the white space - every where, return the avatars to square and remove announcements from the topic pages.
Here is what the Black Sea forum looked like in my browser before the change:

As  you can see no actual content is visible because of all the excessive white space in the header area.  Now after applying the styles using Stylish the site looks like this:

And now you can see the first five topics of the forum.
Once you have the add in installed you can add these styles to your experience by clicking the "Install with Stylish" button here: https://userstyles.org/styles/119012/compact-battlefront-forum-ipboard
You can inspect and modify the CSS at any time.  You can turn it on and off easily as well so if anything breaks you can get back to the default quickly.
Enjoy.

If you have artillery asset with both smoke and HE - if you use up all HE the smoke shells are lost. Which can be really annoying (but AFAIK realistic) if you first want to pummel a location, then put smoke on it and then advance.
 
It would be a great help if the UI could show how many shells the mission you're about to call will use, so that you don't overextend your resources.
Would it be difficult to program/implement?

If you have artillery asset with both smoke and HE - if you use up all HE the smoke shells are lost. Which can be really annoying (but AFAIK realistic) if you first want to pummel a location, then put smoke on it and then advance.
 
It would be a great help if the UI could show how many shells the mission you're about to call will use, so that you don't overextend your resources.
Would it be difficult to program/implement?

If you have artillery asset with both smoke and HE - if you use up all HE the smoke shells are lost. Which can be really annoying (but AFAIK realistic) if you first want to pummel a location, then put smoke on it and then advance.
 
It would be a great help if the UI could show how many shells the mission you're about to call will use, so that you don't overextend your resources.
Would it be difficult to program/implement?

Lieutenant rocketman reporting for duty - pledge made
Should be worth its money along with the fun of being part of a development process. IanL - you made the final selling point to up the pledge with the testemony about the added context and how it changes the view of a single CM battle.
Let's make this happen

Lieutenant rocketman reporting for duty - pledge made
Should be worth its money along with the fun of being part of a development process. IanL - you made the final selling point to up the pledge with the testemony about the added context and how it changes the view of a single CM battle.
Let's make this happen

Thanks RockinHarry.  TSDIII is released and just to toss a teaser out there to the community here is a page of The Proving Grounds II to prove it is actually nearly complete.  Been tied up with another exciting project at present but take a look below.  One of the things I will be incorporating is level of testing for new scenarios submitted to The Proving Grounds.... you can actually request a level of testing which should help getting scenarios cycled through TPG to TSD quicker as authors can be specific about what they want targetted for testing.
 

You'll never know - perhaps you are a scenario master in the making. Meanwhile, maps will do just fine
Or another great comic 

I really wish they would upgrade the editor for the next title. I would really like a preview slot for all objects, buildings, etc. in the 2d view to make it more accessible.

I'm about to finish research and planning for a 3-4 mission campaign for CMFI set during the two last days of the German evacuation from Sicily and will take place in and around Messina. It will feature both US and CW units as "the Race to Messina" very much is on. It will be based in historic events and situations, but will make the assumption that the Allied vanguard manages to interrupt the last units to evacuate in order to make as big a dent in the German foothold on mainland Italy as possible. For example take out the air/sea defenses to clear the straits for the Navy/Air Force and capture military barracks for information on the retreat and as a grand finale - secure the harbor.
 
I will start by making maps as I want to see what a future module will bring to the table. I'm hoping for British commandos and large caliber AA units.
 
Anyone who has tips on how to best approach a campaign project and avoid uneccessary pitfalls is more than welcome to post here or PM me.
 
In time I will start posting screenshots as maps begin to take shape. The main source I use is an excellent topographical map that the US army made of Messina with high value targets marked.
 
So, patience - be my friend ... I hope I'm not taking on something I can't handle. But no rush.