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Kineas

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Posts posted by Kineas

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

    Originally posted by Steiner14:

    </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Kineas:

    Every random number generator is deterministic.

    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>

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. Originally posted by mazex:

    Hmm, living in Sweden and having preordered I am right now nailed at the window looking for the postman. I know it's 8pm here right now but maybe a late delivery for me? Please? smile.gif

    Wait - there is a car coming!

    Could be a black Volga , with NKVD officers sitting in the back, watch out.
  10. Originally posted by C'Rogers:

    That is a generally true fact of pretty much any game to my knowledge. Like I can't imagine playing the Battlefield series against the AI but I know people who only play that way (or at most on a LAN with people they know but not strangers on the Internet). It is still I think common for all games, however those people are obviously less likely to post in internet forums. So if you always play online and visit forums they don't seem to exist.

    They are alive and kickin'. To be honest for me FPS singleplay makes more sense than wargaming against an AI.
  11. Originally posted by George Mc:

    It's a typo in the manual (actually it was me not fully realising how you could make the map bigger!). I can confirm that you will have 4Km by 4Km maps. Just a question of whether you can play anything on it - by that I mean CMSF is light years ahead of what we all know in CM. The maps alone will blow our minds, but they do take a while to make, and they have a hit on the frame rate of your PC. So although you can make large maps it might be more of a challenge for people to play out scenarios on them depending on what the spec is on their machine.

    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.

  12. 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)

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