El Hombre

Heh, I just came back here after a hiatus of many months, and I tried launching 1.11+marines and it crashed (CTD) right at the menu as well. So I upgraded to 1.21 and still the same problem. Turns out I also use the latest catalyst 9.12. I also found out independently that getting rid of the prefs files solved the problem for me. I'm using XP, 1.21+Marines from Battlefront, 9.12 catalyst. It's clear the problem is in the interaction between 9.12 and CMSF.

No, not really. With a sim this complex, good luck making an SDK without dumbing things down enough that the... ahem... slightly demanding players on this forum will scream murder to the poor chap using that SDK.

There's something I don't understand here. The numbers don't add up, so I must be missing an important piece. Let's recap the costs: 1- Development cost (making the site) 2- Maintenance cost (making sure the site runs 24/7) 3- Hosting cost (storing all the files) 4- Bandwidth cost (serving the files) Development cost is a one-time fee (at least for a couple of years). Let's say this costs $30k (to be conservative) Maintenance cost for BFC should be almost nil, since the ops team already exists to manage and maintain the site+forums. I don't see the need for more than a couple of hours/week of maintenance on this, if at all Hosting cost: worst, case take Amazon S3: $0.15 per GB-Month of storage Bandwidth cost: same, take Amazon S3: $0.20 per GB of data transferred Let's assume the new mod site is VERY successful. Something like 10x the usage of CoG's site. We're talking 100,000 active users, 20 gigs/day of download, 170 gigs total storage. Hosting cost is $25.50/month Bandwidth cost is $120/month So in a worst case situation, you're talking $150/month of recurring non-people costs, pretty much peanuts. The missing part is the expensive human involvement, especially the development costs. Worst case, make a deal with CoG to get his source code and tweak the html/css. Anyway, to me this looks like a no-brainer for making the mod site totally free. It's not only costly to implement all these rules and regulations for downloads, pricing models, etc..., it also could reduce the chance of the mod site being extremely successful (and that's probably what you want, right?)

Once you've actually seen in real life Syrian Infantry, you'll notice that FightingSeabee is spot on. Unless you're talking Republican Guards / Special Forces, the Syrian soldiers are mostly going through the motions, and thinking "how do I get out of this thing alive?" You wouldn't believe me if I told you the state of their motorized vehicles... Horrendous.

IMHO there are 2 reasons why WeGo players through the course of the game end up doing a lot more management than RT players. The first of course is that you're given a pause every minute, which compels you to "do something" even if there isn't much to do, really. The second, and most important, is that you can't change anything during the minute of play. This pushes the player to be very very careful during those pauses, thinking through his commands because of the potential catastrophic results during the minute he has absolutely no control over. The RT player on the other hand can be flippant about it and say "if **** happens, I'll deal with it" (and that behavior can and often does result in absolutely catastrophic consequences). RT entices the player to be more opportunistic than WG which is at the other end of the spectrum, making the player potentially micromanage too much. I think that the optimal game environment is a middle ground that necessitates the following: 1- RT play with a pause feature (and therefore tcp play must have a pause) 2- A disciplined player who makes use of those pauses more often than he thinks he needs them Unfortunately while 1 should I hope be achievable, 2 is very hard to abide by Especially for players like me who actually enjoy the unexpected and unconsciously try to create a fog of war environment to reduce their godlike powers. Speaking of godlike power, ironically enough, I really appreciate the inability to do anything for a minute in WG. It makes the player feel more human. The closest RT gets to that is the morale feature which can and does put a monkey wrench in the player's orders. In the end RT and WG give you two different gaming experiences and CMSF should probably be played in both modes to extract the most enjoyment from it.

Out of curiosity, do you play single player WeGo as well? Never tried RT with the pause feature?

Or, said another way, "Without people taking on the job of the other people in the battle (since you're just the one commander), you have to think for everyone, at least until the level where instinct takes over." Still, I'd be very interested to look into a modification where the actions you give to your people become increasingly fuzzy as the lines of communication, morale, experience and control decrease.

Steve, I think your analysis of WeGo players needing rigidity is spot on. Great post. People are very different, and most people are more comfortable with more rules and rigidity rather than less. And regarding replay, no it isn't necessary in that if it were, RT wouldn't be used at all today. Of course an RT player would love being able to understand WTH happened to the tank offscreen that got wiped out while he was planning an assault in real time on the other side of the map, but as it stands, RT is quite enjoyable already. Don't get me wrong, I'd love an RT replay for long enough (at least 30s, better 1mn), but no, it isn't necessary to reach a more than acceptable enjoyment of the game for many. Then again, if I played PvP (and therefore without the benefit of the pause button), I might have a very different outlook on the lack of replay . As it stands, I've never felt the absolute need for replay when playing PvE, and I define absolute need as "I'll stop playing until there's a patch with the replay".

Not necessary for playing the game. It's a very-nice-to-have, but it's not necessary.

What SgtMuhammed said. One additional point: You technically don't need to "give up" any of those commands (company, batallion, platoon or squad) as long as you're properly bound by the framework of each of those commands, and when planning the actions of a squad for example, you are automatically put in the framework of a platoon commander for tactical actions, or squad commander for situational actions... then again, that's also a whole new can'o'worms. BTW, the only reason 100% of players aren't playing RT is that there's no pause in multiplayer. Otherwise there's absolutely no reason to play WeGo (yeah I know, replay is cool but not really necessary) since, as SgTM pointed out, WeGo is RT with pauses every minute. And therefore, as a corollary, those RT players who say WeGo sucks should be required never ever ever to be allowed to pause the game for even 1 second and see how it goes. So once BFC implements multiplayer pause in RT and maybe some kind of last X seconds replay, WeGo becomes a special case of RT. Which brings me to the point that I hope noone playing RT has ever thought of disallowing pausing. Just the matter of dealing with reinforcements coming in the middle of the battle necessitates a pause (which btw is quite realistic, as you would already have formulated some kind of battle plan for these troops that would have phoned you in advance). So the RT/WeGo argument should switch to a Pause Accepted/Disallowed argument. And in that case, as far as I am concerned, disallowing pause is tantamount to going for an RTS clickfest. No good.

The core problem is that we are put in the position of the overall commander making tactical decisions, but we are given the ability to control with extreme precision the behavior of troops. Until and unless there's a method to modify the precision of control of troop behavior, none of the solutions will work. I suggest finding a user interface that would allow for fuzzier troop behavior control: you have a squad very close to the CO (shouting distance), you should be able to tell the squad to move to those specific 2 windows and aim at the 4 windows across the street. If the squad is further out, you should only be able to tell it to find a decent vantage point to suppress the buildings across the street. If the squad is very far, in the tail end of a complex manoeuvre, be happy the squad is somewhere around the original objective. So if that UI is doable, then you map the control precision to a fuzzy probabilistic algorithm whose inputs are the usual suspects (comm distance from CO, morale, experience, LOS, etc.. etc...) I think that simply making the endpoint of a command be instead a probabilistic disc of varying radius or even shape would work wonders. Just the 2 cents of someone who's pretty involved in UIs and probabilities.

Well if you're going to do "command delays" and you want to really push the realistic aspect, then you must simulate a full command structure. To start with, upon launch of the battle, you get as much time as you want to plan it (that's normal, you probably do have an hour or more in real life to plan some advance), as long as you're not the ambushee in an ambush situation. In the latter case, the scenario creator decides on a countdown to start. During that startup phase, you can assign orders to your command staff that simulate a tactical battle plan from the POV of the head dude. "platoon 1 advances towards x while platoon 2 flanks, arrive together from N and E to objective A, etc..." Once that startup phase is done and the battle is joined, here starts the fun. You give the player in WeGo a certain amount of thinking time between the rounds, definitely not unlimited. You also define for each command you give, based on how far in the communication tree it's supposed to go, the chance and length of it being properly understood and acted upon. You also weigh in the complexity of the given command, and make sure the player can't spam commands all over, as that would be unrealistic (how many orders can a single commander give in 10 seconds?). Then if you really want to be realistic, you then simulate being each person in the game in turn, knowing kind of what you're supposed to do based on what you are supposed to have been told over com. etc...etc...etc.... good luck. This is a game, where you simulate the actions (and thinking processes) of many, being played by one. That's the fundamental issue. It'll NEVER be correct, and it will always always always be totally unrealistic. Just live with it and play this very enjoyable game, basking in the positives and not bitching about "why am I a god, I shouldn't be a god."

Sorry if this has been rehashed many times, but here's a situation that I found myself in, and I was wondering what the consensus was on it: Playing Marines, on Veteran. I have a marines squad about 200 m from a hill. The squad is about 5 meters (no more) from a LAV. The squad spots a machine gun at the top of the hill and starts shooting at it. First there's a question mark of course, but quickly it turns into the icon of a machine gun. Problem is, the LAV sits there doing absolutely nothing for a good 30 seconds. I click on the LAV, and it doesn't even have a question mark where the mg should be. I had to manually target the area of the mg to provide suppressing fire (and killing fire, ultimately). Now I understand the whole chain of command communications thing, but can't the squad just shout to the LAV gunner "GET THE F****G machine gun on the hilltop, follow our bullets!!!!" Should I have been expecting the LAV to behave differently, or is this as expected? Thanks.

Didn't I read somewhere that unguided bombs were completely phased out? So I don't think we'll need the unguided/laser designation any more.

I just want Wurfrahmen.