costard
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Posts posted by costard
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Lacroix, it seems to me the best solution is to finish building your machine, then install the game. It's a good game to have, but it likes a stable environment.
It is unfortunate (for you) that your peculiarity (tinkering with your machine) impacts on your enjoyment of the game, but the cost to Battlefront of addressing this blip in their marketing strategy is likely far greater than the likely income generated. BF tend to be pretty good at keeping their customers; if the only hassle is filling out application letters on your end, you can hardly blame them for wanting to keep track of activations. Welcome to the surveillance economy.
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The orchids are out, the pretties are getting ready for spring.
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Meet the Feebles - Peng rated PG.
Emrys the Insipid: "Oh, oh, my gracious me, [insert banal observation]."
Omnes: "Oh, ho ho ho! What excelsior wit, good sirrah!" (golf claps)
Manky Piker: "Duuuudes, listen up! Umm, forgot what I was going to say... um..."
Omnes: "For laughing!" (knee slaps and high fives. Several fall) The sound of a bucket being emptied is heard from the pit, then the noise of someone painfully retching wafts its way onto the stage.
Seanachai is bound to a spit roast affair in the background and rotates above his grave, 'ol Foul Joe is crying tears of despair behind a scratched and chipped 50's tv screen.
Manky Piker: "Duudes, I remembered my line! Its a good one, um..um.. oh: YOU SUCK!"
Emrys the Insipid: "That was uncalled for, Panzer Mike. You have no right to show me up with your superior grasp of comedic timing! Have at you, you no good ragamuffin!" (Attacks Punky Piker, slapping at his target with his eyes closed. Michael II stares in bewilderment at this turn of events, unsure of his next course of action.)
Omnes: cheers, jeers and assorted barracking noises. The chant "Fight! fight! fight!" quickly rises, a bottle is thrown at the audience.
Boo Radley (off stage left): "Fer Chrissake's, get the Donkey out there! Pronto! Ad lib your heart out baby! Weird is good, the weirder the better!"
Yeknod arrives, all look to him in hope as the bucket of spew flies from the pit and scones him on the fetlock. He falls into the pit, lines unsaid.
Peng the Not Yet Dead (off stage, the pit): "LOOK WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO MY CREATION!! SOD THE LOT OF YOU!! SOD OFF, SOD OFF, SOD OFF, SOD OFF!!!"
Curtain.
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There's no point in sounding like you have a pair, Michael.
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We all want to know, does le Grand Brassiere chafe, does he lend support and take the thistles? I'm guessing he'd be on the bottom, head to tail.
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Thanks for giving us the detail, JasonC. Always good to read your stuff.
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Yskonin, Hi.
With regard to your question:
I do a quick scan, get the features - hills, valleys, water/mud swamp, forests. Buildings and built up areas if any. I do a quick rough sightline analysis (after all, this is what 3D representation is) with different camera angles and heights, trying to remember good positions for covered fire (sides of hills, edges of forests, folds and saddles in the ground), good positions for observation and movement (i.e. places my guys can move without getting killed.) Find the places I can't move, or have to move (vegetation and water blocks, rocky ground for fast moving tracks, bridges and fords). I'll spend some time on this, the whole process might take forty-five minutes. Finding these positions becomes much quicker as you learn to recognise advantages of particular shapes of ground, but you are looking at moving to some of those positions with covering fire from another, different position, or through dead ground: the whole exercise becomes a little more intellectually demanding. So this is where I usually turn the map around and look at things from your opponent's perspective. Try to find the traps that can be set against you - kill sacks and suchlike. His covered movement paths might give you the start of a plan, an idea of his probable positioning.
You have a highly mobile force in an open environment. Use the early game to find out as much as you can about your enemy - his forces and their disposition. If your enemy allows, take your time, be patient, take your time - communications is more than just language and footpaths, it's eyeballs on targets and shell paths too. The less information you give away to your opponent the more events will seem to him to happen as a surprise. The more information you can get out of your opponent, the better your ability to shape the battle as you want it to happen. Take your time, be patient.
Practically, this means vehicles in full defilade and small binocular equipped teams moving in cover to observation points. Spare leaders are a boon here - those with radios and artillery privileges are precious. Remember that a probe can be a distraction, it is possible to mask a major movement, somewhat, by drawing his forces to a smaller part of your force in order to skew the main match up: threaten one avenue before taking another, but the highly mobile nature of your force means that your coup de main ought to be a fist of tanks and halftracks smashing their way through a weak point and snotting him mightily - setting that up, you'll just have to be creative. (Be aware that he'll probably have much the same plan, but might execute it blind).
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blah, snipped blah about blah
more blah snipped
Can Emrys do any tricks? Sing? Dance? Play the flute?
blah, etc
We're trying to teach him to roll over and die.
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The fertile chasm has caused a schism. Nobody wants to cross, we're happier standing on the twin buttocks of moral righteousness and hurling insults at each other: "Emrys for knight!" "Heretic!" "Scoundrel!" (**It's a no smoking zone**, **beware the crevice rot**, **don't eat the berries and have a nice day**)
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The enjoyment of cake is one true path to God.
Meeks was offered a gig as a pron star.
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I'd guess the BF crew is suffering from massive hair loss and project constipation - seriously, if we look at the amount of work they're having to get through (what with problems cropping up in the already released games and getting at least two new titles ready for shipping), we have to recognise that they're balancing their needs against our own. Ours are secondary - still important to the business, but secondary. Hang in there, they deliver (eventually).
That said, "Oi, BF, fix or do sumfink!"
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Yeknod - does that mean you got wings too? Oh joy, the possibilities! Donkey ploppers from on high, burying the Emrys in moist creaminess! Pics, or it didn't happen.
Seanachai, good to see you back you old bastard. And by good, I mean really, really mediocre.
I watched a crocodile show today - a couple of louts tempting fate for the entertainment of the masses. I whiled away the time dreaming that the plucked pullet offered as bait was Emrys at his motherlovin' best. Sensible croc must have tuned in to my thoughts - wouldn't touch it.
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With every attempt at modelling realism BF has to judge whether or not they'll break the game. We already have a large degree of time compression in the mechanics of the game yet we have troops, vehicles and ordnance moving at reasonable or recognisable speeds through the virtual landscape. Balancing these things is not an easy task: in the end, the game is here to entertain us (a fundamental break from a realistic portrayal of war.) The fact that we are discussing the realities is... useful(?), but there is a limit to the realism that can be described by the game.
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...said the man with 22-odd thousand posts.
Tweet tweet, twit? Twat.
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Thanks Vanir. I'd really like to have a "drop off" option, ammo dropped going to the nearest friendly - with resupply like that you don't have to take teams out of the battle-line to get more ammo and you can use a team on more than one re-supply mission.
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In my last battle I used a 'schrek team (ammo depleted) to resupply a heavy MG42. They brought the ammo from the truck, then had to sit around while it was fired off.
If a mortar round takes out the 'schrek team, does the mg team have to buddy aid them to get the ammo?
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Hark, the Blue Twit sings!
ABC FM is broadcasting some favourite early music this week - Baroque and Before. Allegri's Miserere - get it while it's hot!
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Calculations of that kind - tracking the trajectory of the shell inside a tank and determining what module has been hit - are not especially CPU-consuming, and what is much more important - they are not calculated 50 times per second in every game frame, but are triggered rarely - only when some AP shell penetrates some armored vehicle. Only then a calculation taking 0.01s is needed.
The main problem here is not CPU power, but the fact that new collision-handling code would have to be written and tested, and a database of internal parts (engine, ammo, crewmembers, gearbox, fuel tanks) would have to be created, each one having several parameters (position in tank, size, shape, ect). For each tank. It's lot of work.
The current code is quite universal - it can handle any tank - when adding new one, you only put there a number of crewmembers, list of modules that can be damaged, maybe a coefficient or two (for tank size or something like that) and that's all.
With a shell tracking, adding new tanks would require more work - creating a database of positions of all internal modules.
Amizaur, thanks - a drive by post where I proclaimed my ignorance of the problem. My understanding of the way the numbers work was working from a probability tree - the program doesn't need to do all the extra calculations, it just needs to recognise when the extra calculations are to be done. I get that he calculations themselves are a fairly trivial workload for the CPU, but I'm saying (not necessarily correctly) that this process comes at the end of a number of others, needs to be 'woven' into the code so as to have a relative reference point from which to work and needs to provide a meaningful result in terms of the game: I'd expect that the 0.01s calculation to have some sort of friction effect through the rest of the code. As herr oberst pointed out, the time constraint that comes with adding another layer of detail and having it intersect with all the others isn't trivial: we're asking the game to keep track of yet another type of granularity in the object map, effectively create another set of LOS calculations for penetrations into the engine space of another unit. The number of non-trivial (meaningful in game terms) paths for an 88mm shell travelling through a 1.5x1.5x1.0m space, relative to an internal complexity inside that space is not small - if you don't want a probability table used (very fast), you have to define them all to see which you can safely ignore (very slow).The game keeps track of bodies, sure, for projectile calculations, but it doesn't tell me if the liver or the lung or the bowel is perforated, it just gives me an end state - dead or wounded (and degree thereof, crikey).
If the shell is coming in from the rear quarter, is it a trivial exercise for the game to give us the ricochet of the shell off the engine block into the crew compartment? How about a powered turret that now has to work on a hand crank? Battlefront, fix or do sumfink. Time constraints still apply, but they're BF's time constraints: I opine that they owe themselves time to do other stuff with their lives.
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Thar, she blows!
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Jason, greed for loot too. The whole nation was in on that one.
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Just a case of "We'd really like to have it too." I suspect. The game pushes processors pretty hard for numbers of calculations. The different sets of detail that are intersecting but not producing a meaningless output are all there by design and the level of complexity is running up against the number of calculations. Combinations and permutations get big, fast.
I'm pretty sure I watched an SU152 get knocked into reverse by an 88 last night, then get knocked into forward again - no stopping for that 45 tonne beast, instantaneous direction change (accompanied by a somewhat humorous boing as the shell ricocheted). So the momentum models might do with a little tweak.
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I play Real Time, which means that as I get bigger battles I dial down the difficulty, so I can better remain aware of what my overall situation is. Battalion+ size battles I play in Veteran, company+ in Warrior and platoon in Elite. The time constraint element is a real task multiplier for the mental work of remembering stuff and the icons and indicators are a real help. I think this is one of the areas where the game shines - it can become unplayable, so you dial down the difficulty and you're back in it.
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IF video games are a waste of time,
THEN golf, cricket, chess, football - you name it, it's a waste of time too.
This argument does not place a value on the time used or spent, nor does it state that there are not activities which would be difficult to identify as time wasters. It should, hopefully, quieten the other side for long enough for me to enjoy the games while they think about the complex deconstruction required to form a coherent argument addressing the original statement. (and if they can't be bothered, then neither can I - nothing wastes time like an argument that consists of "Is! "Is not!")
hope that helps
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Now you play the other side - learn how to take a tank out with AT infantry (or guns, or whatever). It's a twofer.
The Peng Challenge Thread The Chunder in Red Thunder!
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
Mung is appropriate nomenclature for a has-bean like Emrys. Or should that be neverwoz?