Glukx Ouglouk
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Posts posted by Glukx Ouglouk
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It's great to see the demo! But I'm getting a rather slow download speed (100-300 KB/s - my connection tops out around 60 MB/s in practice)... Did anyone else have download speed issues ?
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There is a rumor/push/development of OpenGLNext, which takes some of AMD's Mantle api and utilizes it's better architecture. (DX12 incorporates a lot of the design elements of Mantle, leading to the rumor that AMD produced it, and pushed it, to force DX12 to incorporate it.)
Actually, this is not a rumor - it was officially anounced at GDC earlier this month, under the name of "Vulkan".
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I know how to pronounce sabot =) And yes I also know what a sabot does - its basically a big dart. The shell folds off in flight leaving a big @$$ dart with a lot of penetrating power.
It means shoe in French correct?
In French, it's more specifically a wooden shoe (a clog, I think, in English?). It's also the word for an animal's hoof, and then there's a whole host of other meanings which derive more or less directly from those. As for its use in artillery, my understanding is that wooden sabots were used with round ball amunition in the 19th century (the wikipedia article shows a couple examples), and you could say that thoses looked kinda like wooden shoes for the shells.
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So at closer ranges AK rounds would dominate going thru walls and stuff. US 5.56 rounds penetrate less have less kinetic damage but they can carry more rounds.
Nowadays, "AK rounds" in Russian use means 5.45x39, which has similar weight and size, as well as raw kinetic energy, to the NATO 5.56x45 rounds. Penetration (against walls or body armor) and terminal effects would depend on the exacts rounds used though (there are specific armor-piercing rounds for both calibers, but I don't know how widespread they are).
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With the default settings, you can access the function keys by pressing Fn + the function key you want. If you change the setting like argie said, it's the other way round - you access the volume up/down, the dashboard, etc. with Fn + the function key.
Let me get this straight - on a Mac, the function keys do not act as function keys unless you specifically turn them on to do that ?<Boggle>
It's not at all uncommon to have the function keys double as special keys for things like volume up/down and so on - most laptop keyboards are like that, and some desktop keyboards too (like my own Microsoft keyboard). One mode is set as the default, and the other works with a modifier key (Fn key usually).
Then, there are basically three possibilities :
- the keys perform some special actions by default, and you have to press the Fn key at the same time to get it to work as a function key - it's the default mode for Apple keyboards;
- the opposite (function key by default, special actions with the Fn key) - it's the default on my Toshiba laptop for instance;
- or you can have a key that permanently switches between the two modes (kinda like the num. lock key for the keypad) - it's how it works on my Microsoft keyboard.
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Isn't using Comic Sans a felony in most jurisdictions?
Honestly, it should be a crime. Murder is bad, sure, but using Comic Sans? That's much, much, worse.
But why bother even pointing it out, it's not like i was going to start a massive discussion about Carentan, i was just pointing out to Chek that the US paras also fought the FJ, i didn't expect an admonishment, i guess some people are born traffic wardens.Over-reacting, much? You made a comment that was correct but off-topic, he pointed it out - end of story. There's no need to get all emotional about it. There are plenty of far more important things to worry about - it's not like you were arguing for the need to properly model Bren tripods in the game.
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I'm just hoping and praying that the 'something special' includes fire as well as new terrain. By that time of the year Wasps were most certainly available and not all that uncommon while Crocodiles were around from the get go. Not to mention the German flamethrower halftracks and portable flamethrower back packs as well.
Regards
KR
To include fire, they'll need a new game engine. The Market Garden module will require CMx2 v2.0, which doesn't support fire. Maybe fire will be supported in a future version of the CMx2 engine, like v3.0, or 4.0, or whatever - but in the meantime, it can't auto-magically appear in a module...
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All of this are complete products. You are offering fifteen minutes of a movie, a dish for the lunch or sugar for the coffee.
Money is not the problem. Problem is a constant request for upgrades. If continuous release of free patches is an annoying habit, paid patching is a deception. Upgrades, modules, packs...create the euphemisms you prefer.
A lot of your audience is (still) not fanatical. Outside of these forums people react diferently to your business desitions:
Those people should really consider how it works with other game developers/publishers before criticizing BFC's new release model... For the vast majority of commercial games, version 2.0 would NOT be a free update! It would either be part of an extension/DLC/whatever (so you'd have to pay for both new content and new functionality together, instead of paying for them separately - but you'd still have to pay for it) or a whole new game (and you'd have to pay full price, not update price). Also keep in mind that most of the time, games aren't seriously supported for more than a year or two - and after that time, they release a whole new game. Some developer go above and beyond the minimum and keep supporting their games for several years - but even then, they rarely release more than bug fixes and minor updates.
The exception is for some free-to-play commercial games: for those games, you wouldn't have to pay for the update, because the game engine is always distributed for free anyway... But those games generally come with very limited content and you have to pays for various DLCs to actually go very far with them, so it's a different business model. An example would be Rise Of Flight, which is free to download, but the free version only comes with two flyable planes - and additional planes can be quite expensive.
BFC has chosen an intermediate solution that seems to be quite rare in the gaming world, but seems quite reasonable considering the specificity of the CM series:
- The traditional business model, used by most game developers, wouldn't work because a new CMx2 game doesn't replace the previous one. CMFI won't replace CMBN the way, say, Call Of Duty X+1 will replace Call Of Duty X, because not everyone will want to stop playing in the Normandy theater to play only in the Italian theater (not to mention that BFC wants to keep releasing modules for CMBN). Keep in mind, that in a traditional business model, CMBN would no longer receive any support at all once CMFI is out, except maybe a few minor bug-fixes...
- The free-to-play model is something that could probably be tried with CMx2, but it would be quite different from the CMx2 games as they have been released so far (since the base games include a lot of content, and you can't cherry-pick which part of a module you want to buy), so I just don't see why BFC would try something like that without a really good reason.
So it looks like they will go with the same model used by most of the software industry outside of gaming. Paid major updates, free minor updates (and, when applicable, additional content paid separately) are what Microsoft, Adobe et al. do, and there's no reason not to try to do the same with games, if your games happen to look like they would fit that development model.
edit: About the price comparison with a movie: a full-price game on release day is much more expensive than a movie theater ticket (on the order of $60 vs. $10), so saying "it's like 15 minutes of a movie, it should be cheaper than a full movie!" doesn't make any sense.
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And in your final attempt at brilliance you completely proved my point. All I want is a basic component found in almost every online game thats been done before. So if, when, they finally implement an online match making system; I guess Ill just have to be happy sneering about that too.
And you want to talk about reality? The reality is that if you go buy an online multi player 99.9% of the time it will have a match making lobby. THAT IS REALITY. And there's probably a good amount of customers that don't buy the game. Because like me they read the games forum or as questions; find out there's no online match up system and do not buy the game. Like really, 65 dollars for a game with no match up system?
If you really wanted to talk about reality, you would also mention that those games either:
- sell several orders of magnitude more copies than a CM game can ever hope to sell, allowing the developers to afford many, many times more man-hours of development work than what BFC can spend;
- and/or have much simpler mechanics compared to a serious tactical wargame like the CM series, allowing the devs to spend much more time on the "candy-coating" aspects;
- and/or are simply focused on the multi-player experience first and foremost, so they set their priorities accordingly.
As for the good amount of people who don't buy the game (which, incidentally, means that they are not customers...), the reason why they don't buy the game isn't because it doesn't have a multi-player lobby. They don't buy it because CM games are part of a very niche genre, that very few people care about, unlike popular genres like FPSes, RTSes, RPGs, sports games, and so on.
Its like Sheldon from 'The Big Bang Theory' has given up his hobby of comic books and model trains and had decided to instead jump into computer wargaming.Unlikely. Sheldon Cooper would probably find the CMx2 interface to be far too user-friendly for his taste.
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Wow, that's a nice tool!
You do have to be careful with that sort of tool though, since it uses ballistic formulas to calculate the penetration rather than real world data: it's only a model, and it can be more or less (in)accurate depending on which real-world factors are or aren't taken into account (not to mention completely unpredictable circumstances, like a defective armor plate). But it can probably give a reasonable idea of a given gun/ammo combo capabilities, and the diagrams are just neat!
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So for CMFI purposes we need to know what the AP projectile was right before "T" came into service. It turns out to be APCBC, whose performance is 88 mm at 1000 meters, per the same source for the APCR numbers. A whole new projectile for a measly 2mm penetration improvement. Hardly seems worth the bother. My guess? The "T" was much better at penetrating face hardened armor than was the APCBC.
A measly 2 mm at 1000 m probably means a lot more at closer ranges : since APCR/HVAP rounds are lighter than regular AP rounds, they tend to have poorer long range ballistics.
edit: I have seen different figure on this site (quoted from "6pdr Handbook, Cromwell Handbook, AVIA 46 187, WO 185/178, DEFE 15 180"). For MQ armour (it's RHA, not face-hardened) at 30°, they give the following figures:
APCBC:
- 86 mm at 500 yards
- 80 mm at 1000 yards (-7% compared to the penetration at 500 yards)
- 68 mm at 2000 yards (-21%)
APCR:
- 109 mm at 500 yards
- 90 mm at 1000 yards (-17%)
- 75 mm at 2000 yards (-31%)
I don't know how comparable those figure are, but what is interesting is that we do see the penetration figure dropping more quickly with distance with APCR ammo compared to APCBC ammo.
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Shock Force 2 is a totally new game, so there's no discounts for Shock Force 1 customers. In fact, we aren't totally convinced we are going to call the next modern game "Shock Force 2". That's just what we're calling it for now, just like the other Eastern Front games are numbered EF1 (maybe called Bagration, not sure yet), EF2, EF3, and EF4.
Steve
With the new upgrade system, CM:SF 2 would sound like a v2.0 upgrade for CM:SF (something that won't actually exist), which could be a little confusing - so I think it's a very good idea to use a different name.
I bought a couple of games recently and finally got around to backing them up. Get my stack of CD-Rs and... wait... the files are over 750mbs. OK lets try zip or 7zip or winrar. Nope they won't compress.Do I go buy DVDs when rumor has it that CDs and DVDs are going away?
DVDs won't go away before quite some time. But please note that CD-Rs, DVD-Rs and BD-Rs are generally NOT reliable archival media. They degrade over time and can become unreadable after a few years (or even a few months in extreme cases), and you need to be very careful with several different factors (media quality, write speed, storage conditions) to have some degree of control over their "shelf life".
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You do make some good points DeeYay, but here's where I disagree:
Now I realize that I have to think twice before I buy any future products from Battlefront maybe?Do keep in mind that CM:A was developed by a Russian company who partnered with BFC, not directly by BFC. Not all of CM:A's shortcomings are BFC's fault (the campaign and scenario design, for instance).
3. Aphibious vehicles are amphibious and that big fact cannot be ignored can it?The CMx2 engine only gained support for water (rivers, lakes...) in CM:BN - it didn't support water when CM:SF and then CM:A were released. It's sad, but supporting water properly isn't easy for the programmers, and they had to set priorities.
Please keep in mind though that in the real world, amphibious vehicles are actually a very minor concern: in the Soviet arsenal, only the PT-76 could swim well enough to be tactically useful... Vehicles like the BMP-1 had much more limited amphibious capabilities, and its very debatable whether giving them that capability was ever worth it. It's worth noting that amphibious capabilities have pretty much disappeared on most newer AFV designs, compared to designs from the 1960's - because most of the time, those capabilities were too marginal to be useful, except on a few specialized vehicles.
4. Effects are seriously dull. I want to see my Drozd in action, my buildings blow up in a spectacular blast. Helicopters crashing to the ground when shot down. Parts of vehicles and bodies flying around when blown up by mines. I want this bloody war to really feel bloody and horrible!Let's face it: BFC is a small development studio and they can't compete with AAA titles on visuals. The same is true of all games from small, independent developers.
5. Airborne troops. How cool would it have been to see Mi-24s and Mi-8s dropping of infantry, either by paradrop or airdrop, maybe even vehicles.Heliporting/airdroping would be done outside the scope of a CM scenario in 99% of real-world situations. Airborne troops are never dropped right on top of the enemy, because it would lead to catastrophic losses. Besides, getting an airborne unit in position reasonably safely takes a lot more time than the typical length of a CM scenario.
There could be some exceptions, but they would likely be very specific special forces/commando actions, or catastrophic mistakes - both far too uncommon to be high on the priority list compared to how much work would be needed to implement all that.
I dont want the editor to tell me how big my map should be. I want to make it 10km wide or 1m by 1m if I want to. Since when are operations bound to timelimits? The mission is done when the mission is done, regardless if it takes 30minutes or 15 hours to complete.Several points:
- Technical limitations: a 10 x 10 Km map would likely be too taxing for most computers.
- Scale limitation: the CM series are tactical games, and they just can't handle a larger scale well. You'd need a different game engine for that.
- Time limits are needed to balance scenarios (it's been debated to death in the CM:BN forum). Also, a 15 h time limit wouldn't make sense because the game engine doesn't support everything you'd need for such a long scenario (like proper logistics).
- I wanna personalize the campaign with my own troops. I am the Officer and i want to decide what forces are going to be in what battle and what forces are resting and repairing for another battle. I wanna make tactical decisions on what weapons I wish to use. Maybe a tankplatoon? Maybe its enough with just helicopters to deter an enemy attack?Those decisions are not taken at the level at which you're playing. They'd be taken at a higher hierarchical level. In the real world, a company commander doesn't get to chose what's available to support his company - and CM games try to be reasonably realistic...
About your other points, a lot of them come down to:
- BFC is a small company, with small resources, making games for a small market. Their games have a lot of limitations, but they are still miles ahead of most of what's available on the market if you like modern tactical wargames. If BFC could sell millions of copies and hire dozens of developers, there's no question that the CM games would have a lot fewer limitations, but that's just not possible - there just aren't enough people interested in that sort of games. The same is true of every nich genre compared to more mainstream ones.
- The CM games are wargames set at the tactical scale. It sounds like you want to play games set at a bigger scale... That's fine, but it's just not the same genre of wargames. It's just not possible to design games that are realistic, work well, and are fun to play, at very different scales. It's true of all wargames...
Of course, that doesn't mean CM:A couldn't have been better. We could really have gotten better campaigns and scenarios out of the box, at the very least. But a lot of your expectations are seriously unrealistic...
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The Brits only used solid AP shots, without a HE filler, so it seems reasonable that they would mostly shoot through the buildings. Americans and Germans, OTOH, usually preferred APHE shells.
As for APHE vs. HE against buildings, the best answer may be "HE with delay fuse" (if it can penetrate the walls of the building)... But I don't know what was available to WW2 tankers in terms of fuse options for HE rounds.
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World here :
I have never ever thought about this. All sports I'm interested in count upwards. But for CM that has never bothered me. In fact IMHO its quite useful to know that you have 23 minutes left instead of to know that the battle lasted for 23 minutes or that it is 14.23 (sorry - 2.23 PM for you
) - uh, how long was this scenario now?If you would complain about the compass - now we are talking!
Same here. The thing about the clock, is that a countdown clock is more intuitive when the time limit isn't always the same. A soccer game is always 90 minutes long, so it's easy to understand that there is 10 minutes left when the clock displays "80:00"... But a CM battle can just as easily be be 30 minutes or 2 hours long, so you'd have to remember the time limit shown in the briefing, or you'd need to see both the limit and the clock in the GUI. The countdown is easy to understand, without cluttering up the GUI. Good compromise IMO.
Of course, you still need to remember the time limit to calculate when your reinforcements are supposed to show up - but if you remember the reinforcements' ETA, you might as well remember what the time limit was anyway.
As for the compass... I think we just need to say a big THANK YOU to all the modders who have made better ones!
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This wire problem: does the crash only occur with saves during set-up or is it generally any time during the game.
In single-player WEGO games, I've only seen it happen when I saved a game during setup. I didn't have any issue with the same scenarios when saving after the end of the first turn. I can't comment about real-time or multi-player though.
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Amizaur, I've never heard of a APHE shell. Where are you getting your information? In any case, I'm quite sure these shells are not in CMBN.
I have seen a shell ricochet off of a tank and impact near two soldiers and actually kill them.
In CMBN, both Germans and Americans should definitely use APHE shells (except, I think, for very small calibers, like the German 20 mm guns). The Brits preferred to use AP shots (no HE charge) to get sightly higher penetration values, at the expense of behind-armor effects.
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I think the BMP-1 is the best thing since sliced bread..........in CM Afghanistan that is. For the time period, it's the only thing short of a tank that has direct HE support like you really want it. IIRC, it's not so much a 'gun' as it is a RR firing rockets correct??? When I pause the game in CMA it looks like an RPG round coming out the pipe.
More or less. It's not actually recoilless, it's just a regular low-pressure gun - but the projectiles are rocket assisted. According to wikipedia, the original HEAT round (PG-15V) has a muzzle velocity of 400 m/s, but accelerates to 700 m/s with the rocket booster.
I'm not sure about the HE rounds (OG-15V): a quick Internet search returns a muzzle velocity of 290 m/s, but no mention of a rocket booster. It may be that only the HEAT rounds are rocket assisted?
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I don't think the Germans could have developed a better heavy tank as far as the Allies were concerned. It was monumentally heavy, thus barring it from all but the heaviest bridges and could only move long distances by a rail system that was constantly being interdicted. Due to the weight and compromises in design it regularly broke down and was almost impossible to recover and used huge quantities of precious materials to build, and even more precious petrol, to move (12 Gallons to the mile IIRC).
Since we were talking of the Tiger I, the Germans did field a better heaby tank - namely, the Tiger II...
Interesting point. As the Tiger was considered to be an assault "breakthrough" weapon, after Kursk was that really useful anymore? Granted they were still the bad ass of the battlefield, but was it really going to have as much influence in that role as opposed to focusing production on Panthers. If the logistical train and strategic movement became that much more complicated one starts to wonder if the net effect wasn't really more detrimental than the tactical impact would warrant. A decent example is the relative lack of impact in the Ardennes.Regarding the Ardennes offensive, I think Germany no longer had the forces and the logistics to manage a successful, large scale offensive anyway - regardless of the equipment or tactics they used. Anyway, I do agree that heavy tanks were mainly breakthrough weapons and of relatively little use (for their cost) once the Germans no longer had any hope of retaking the initiative - my point simply was to avoid the confusion between a specific tank model (Tiger I) and the concept behind it (heavy tank).
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@ dpabrams: It wouldn't have made sense to choose to replace the Tiger I with the Panther anyway, since the Tiger I already had a replacement being designed - namely, the Tiger II... The only real question was whether or not a heavy tank was needed at all. If they considered that heavy tanks were useful, it made sense to design a better heavy tank rather than replacing it with a medium tank.
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@ Joji: One exception is the Carl Gustav, which is a recoilless rifle rather than a rocket launcher - but the backblast issue is pretty much the same as for rockets anyway. I think the RPG-2 was also a recoilless rifle design (though the RPG-7 is a rocket launcher).
As for why the PIAT didn't have a legacy... I can't say for sure, but I think it's because it's not a recoilless weapon, so it wasn't possible to design a more powerful version (with a bigger warhead and/or higher initial velocity) without increasing the recoil... And the PIAT was already known for kicking like a mule, so it likely wasn't feasible.
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@ para: AFAIK, if your troops have a covered arc in a particular direction, they will be more likely to spot things in that direction, and less likely to spot things outside of their covered arc. But it's not "all or nothing", it's just higher/lower probabilities.
Also, if one of your units does spot an enemy outside of its covered arc, and if they feel directly threatened (e.g. the enemy is very close), they can chose to ignore the covered arc order and open fire on that enemy. Your units are more or less likely to do that depending on some factors: motivation for sure, and probably experience and C2 status too (if someone can confirm...).
CMRT Alternate Silhouettes v1
in CM Red Thunder Maps and Mods
Posted
Sadly, it looks like this mod wasn't migrated to CMMODs III, unlike the other similar ones by Marco Bergman (at least I can't find it there)... Is there still a way to find it nowadays? Or does someone have it on their computer and could help me out?
Thanks a lot!