Kineas

Wow, it's amazing to see how we, wego bigots started to multiply these days. To be fair, wego playing (wargaming - "battle chess") is a different genre than the realtime simulation. No point in searching it in the realtime mode. Each has its pros and cons.

This was evident, just remember the many debate threads all over the forum. Personally I don't believe in design by consensus. Conceptual integrity is much more important. If this was the vision of the designers so be it. What surprised me that they allocated very few resources to test the wego mode. It contains pretty ugly bugs. I have only seen the demo, but the physical engine is superb, it could easily drive an old-style wego wargame too.

This was evident, just remember the many debate threads all over the forum. Personally I don't believe in design by consensus. Conceptual integrity is much more important. If this was the vision of the designers so be it. What surprised me that they allocated very few resources to test the wego mode. It contains pretty ugly bugs. I have only seen the demo, but the physical engine is superb, it could easily drive an old-style wego wargame too.

This was evident, just remember the many debate threads all over the forum. Personally I don't believe in design by consensus. Conceptual integrity is much more important. If this was the vision of the designers so be it. What surprised me that they allocated very few resources to test the wego mode. It contains pretty ugly bugs. I have only seen the demo, but the physical engine is superb, it could easily drive an old-style wego wargame too.

AMD Turion 64X2 dual core laptop with 128M ATI card: performance would be ok, but the demo is not playable. Timing issues, clock flashes during update, sometimes a red value of 1000-something can be seen. All the units of a company chatter simultaneously - quite scary. And eventually freezes. P4 2.8 + ATI X800: demo is playable (barely), lots of short freezes for keyboard controls. Ammo count doesn't get restored when a wego turn is played back. Performance, frame rate is superb on the rig.

Played the demo on a 2.4Ghz P4, ATI X800. Freezes a lot, barely playable. Especially likes to freeze for the arrow keys (camera control).

At the worst case an external PBEM-utility (splitter and joiner) can be programmed.

@Steiner you don't get it, sorry. Steve gave a different reason too. You can have all the randomness you want, provided you can replay it every time. You just need to store the random generator seed. In the second game you will have different ricochets etc.

Ugh...I promised not to start a debate but I guess it's too late now. It's not against BFC or something, especially because Steve understood me first and provided an explanation why they didn't go that way. To others: it's a widely (or at least much) used technology, and simpler than you think. You don't need no stinking registers, threads, concurrency etc. It just uses the inherent determinism of computers, and has nothing to do with realtime. You are probably concerned that a frame sequence captured on a computer will never play back on another computer with the same exact timing. It's not a problem, the user's brain will integrate the small changes. Actually it's a feature in the replay viewer that you can watch the replay quicker than realtime, as fast as your CPU can process it. The sad news this is not gonna take 2 months, this cant be just retrofitted, your whole simulation engine must be deterministic.

I don't get this, a random number generator just produces a sequence of integers. Computer games have been built in significant numbers using the deterministic approach (Starcraft, XWing, Age Of Empires etc). Floating point calculations and multithreading complicates the issue, but multithreading just enters the scene now. But by far not deterministic enough for game-replay. Think of the tremendously complex and non-deterministic cache, the register contents, the differing clock and clock-drifts and last but not least, the highly non-deterministic scheduler with non-deterministic c-tasks, sempaphores and so on. Simply impossible. It's difficult enough to build a deterministic hard-realtime system. </font>

Every random number generator is deterministic. They produce a sequence of 'random' numbers. The same sequence from the same starting point always. The Mersenne Twister is suited for scientific applications, games can use simpler (and a lot faster) ones.

Random number generation is not a problem, because rnd generators are inherently deterministic (strange, isn't it?). You need one for the determ. part, and other(s) for the effects. Floating-point calculations can be a problem, because there's no standard which prescribes identical results on the bit pattern level for numerical operations, so the results can diverge.

I don't want to argue or something I simply just don't understand why the deterministic-engine approach would not work for CM. You can compute everything in realtime, obviously you can compute everything in realtime during replay-time, user inputs taken from a file not from the keyboard/mouse. Replay file size is small. I'm a firm believer of this technology so I'd really like to see where does it fail for an RTS game.

SirReal, why don't you play? Is it true that the forum is the real game?

Could be a black Volga , with NKVD officers sitting in the back, watch out.

I recommend a new scenario in the first patch: Armored Assault on Paradox's HQ. Air support available.

SirReal, I think for the sake of greater goods stop posting about your game and wait till BFC resolves this with Paradox. Let's not screw up their release just now.

It's the mental asylum of the forums. Sometimes I too enter and post something totally irrelevant.

They are alive and kickin'. To be honest for me FPS singleplay makes more sense than wargaming against an AI.

I guess first they will have to rest the hangover from the release party (~3 days), and maybe 2 weeks after we can get a demo.

That's very good news! Can visibility be reduced to a smaller value, like 1500m? CM got this feature, Shift+W as I recall. That way you can play bigger maps on slower video cards. The LOS checks will still use the CPU though.

Regarding big map limits, there are some problems: - Earth surface curvatore - floating point number precision (computer programs use special numeric types, which are not designed to model 100km long trajectories precisely, though workarounds may exist) - nevertheless 20km x 20km is absolutely possible, but command time span will be the limiting factor Regarding CMx2: - 2kmx2km ~ 4km^2 area limit exists - 4km x 100m maps are possible! So we can have Blue on Blue armor battles (on an airport runway, but let's not demand too much at first)

Did you try the 'official' Battlefront toolbar? It has chat and a couple of other things

:S

Good Evening.