stoex

sounds weird....are you absolutely sure you were controlling the blue side at this time and not the red? i think we would have heard about this already if it was a common issue...

Stryker MGS can actually point its main gun through its own front slat armour . Looks like it's wrapped up for transport or sumfink

Well, adjusting fire IS usually a bit quicker than ordering a new mission in my experience, so there's the benefit of having it in there. Albeit it's a rather small benefit, I agree .

BlAin - in answer to your question about adjusting arty fire... I'm no expert but as I understand it making such adjustments in RL is not as easy as the result looks to you onscreen. It's not just twiddling a wheel and a button or two on the guns so the shells fall a little more to the right or whatever. Basically the whole firing pattern has to be recalculated, therefore it takes some time. Also there may be spotting rounds again and such. In short, in RL fire adjustment isn't really much different from cancelling the current mission and starting a fresh one. Sorry to the experts if this isn't 100% correct, but AFAIK it's not that far off.

Winrar also has this functionality. You're only supposed to use it as a 30-day trial but it doesn't stop working after 30 days, it just keeps reminding you to please pay .

MikeyD - I posted some words to that effect in the Blue Bar thread where this discussion started not 20 minutes ago. Hadn't seen this thread yet, silly me . OTOH, if anyone ever does send along that check, I think Steve, Charles and the rest of BFC (including all the other programmers they hire using said check) might be inclined to work on adding the things that the guy with the check wants and not worry too much about what people post here . If I ever have that kind of money, I'll be glad to send it along to BFC, but I know I'll just order the Syrian Sniperette on the horse-drawn motorcycle with the mine-dog in the sidecar. And I'll want the horse to be a Lipizzaner, and the dog to be my neighbor's stupid barking mutt. And I'd want a lot of mines .

How about putting a feedback reminder, or even an email address, at the end of the briefing when creating a scenario? I don't think it would hurt the immersion terribly. Just an idea though. Til we get that checkable feedback form in the debrief .

GSX. I think you have some valid points about the limits of CMSF as a training tool in its current form. OTOH, the way I understand what Steve is trying to tell you in response is that a lot of the things that CMSF would need to have to be an excellent training tool could be added if the resources for development were made available (mostly money for paying programmers besides Charles ), which as it stands they are currently not. This is where the investment comes in - what is necessary to take CMSF to where it could be as a training tool is an initial investment via a contract with an interested military institution. After all, that is how investment works - you invest resources in advance and on a regular basis to get a specified result a little way down the road. You don't wait until someone happens to develop what you need by chance (and with the 'limited' resources available to, in this case, BFC, who cater to a small niche gaming market) and then buy it when it's all ready. BFC can make stuff to order if someone orders it and pays for it in full. If nobody pays them in advance, they are forced to do the best they can and hope people (like you and me) will like the result. To go beyond the 'basics' of a military training tool, they need the military to give them specs and some money to do it with. As it is they have designed a game and not a training tool. And I for one am very greatful that civvies like me have a chance to use what they've created, 'cause it's a truckload of fun . Northrop-Grummon didn't just go and develop the B-2 for the heck of it and then hoped they would be able to sell it to someone either . Now, why the 'insert your nation of choice here' Army doesn't seem particularly interested in developing CMSF to its full potential as a training tool I don't know, since BFC do a heck of a job without support from people with a whopping big budget to spend on such stuff. Summing up, I think you and Steve are both right here, it's just the Armies that don't get it .

As far as I can tell, a yellow casualty bunker means it's abandoned but operational, and can be remanned by an infantry unit

Steve mentioned somewhere that no v1.10 saves will work with v1.11, but I can't find the post right now...best just try and see, if you back stuff up beforehand nothing should break .

It'S about 80 MB.

Yup. Sounds really sweet on all kinds of levels .

OH man, Normal Dude, that sucks realy really bad. I've been looking forward to TF Panther and more of your excellent work. Hope you can restore it somehow. Heads up!

A time-warp function - so that Real Time shifts back to where it was when I started playing every time I have to start over a scenario because of some dumbass mistake I made. Seriously, though: It would be nice if soldiers with RPGs could reload their tube while in the prone position. Their continued kneeling while staring down the tank they just missed at 100m makes them rather vulnerable at best, usually just DEAD. In general, it would sometimes be very useful (and IMHO realistic) for units to put off reloading some weapon and do something more appropriate in the situation (hide, fire on targets with other weapons, spot,...to name a few). I'm also thinking of the Bradley gunner who has just fired 2 TOWs and ignores everything else while he is reloading the tubes. Workaround for the RPG teams is to make them crawl for a few seconds and then rehide, but it's unsatisfactory to have to change their position every time they take a shot . I noticed this a while ago, then forgot about it because it didn't apply that much in the scenarios I was playing back then. Now I'm into Hasrabit and it's a BIG issue, since RPGs are the only proper AT assets I have in a lot of those missions, and I can't afford to let them waste much ammo by taking long shots due to the limited resupply. That said, I won't let this post turn into a gripe about my frustrations with Hasrabit (sigh), so here's something else: I would also like for soldiers to interrupt whatever they are doing RIGHT NOW when I give them a HIDE or a TARGET order...instead if they are aiming at something already they insist on firing that shot (or salvo) before hitting the dirt or redirecting their attention to the assigned target. Particularly galling in the case of ATGMs, which sometimes take quite a while to aim and have very limited ammo. I admit that micromanagement on a per-second basis is one of my stick horses now that CM offers RT play, and I know that is rather unrealistic from a RL military point of view, but it's my workaround for lack of strategic and tactical aplomb, and it works pretty well for me though it takes a lot of time . Any opinions on this? Flaming also welcome, of course .

Except if you want to hit a vehicle that you know is there but can't get LOS on . The Brad's Bushmaster is pretty good at destroying unspotted vehicles, but to do that you may even want to set the area target a little further back than the action spot you expect it to be in, depending on the terrain.

Don't know whether this really helps anyone here, but I have noticed two things about the BLAST command that I find very interesting: First off, BLAST is VERY different in TB vs. RT play - in RT, the blasting unit doesn't have to move to (or through) the breach after blasting. As soon as the charge goes off, I pause the game and delete the waypoint for the blasting unit. So they remain put and don't run to look at the cool hole they made, then find some more or less adequate place to hide. One of the reasons I can't make my peace with TB anymore . Second, I have noticed that, when blasting adjacent holes in walls for vehicles to go through, after completing the first blast from an action point one away from the wall (and staying put), sometimes the blast team doesn't have to move at all to set the second charge, like they are throwing it at the wall from 15m away. Last seen in TF Narwick mission 3 (I think...the airport). Might have a save game if anyone is interested. Furthermore: I have seen this, but for me whenever it seemed to happen, the team hadn't actually used up one of their charges, though they do run up to the wall like they did. I think it is because I haven't placed the BLAST waypoint correctly...have you checked whether a charge is really used in the cases you described, Darkmage?

Ken, I have tried to move vehicles a small distance in the direction I want them to face, but it doesn't satisfactorily solve the problem...pathfinding problems more or less ruin that, particularly in dense terrain. It can work out in the open, though. I play in RT so I can circumvent the issue by heavy micromanagement, but when I'm moving a lot of vehicles to new covering positions I know I'm going to forget to do this at some point, so giving the orders I find I have to make the choice whether it's more dangerous to forget the target arc or to expose the sides of my Brads/tanks... This has become a classic save/reload situation for me, as particularly not setting target arcs can leave vehicles more or less blind to "obvious" threats.

marsod, please don't post direct links to CMMods as it causes the CMMods login popup to appear gratuitously anytime I open this thread. It has been said before and is an annoyance to many forum users.... It would be much appreciated if you would edit your posts to this effect. On a lighter note, I will be playing The Green Zone right away. Thanks for providing a rare base game scenario! Almost everyone (except me) seems to have moved on to Marines already

Since it's a laptop and this appears to be happening at regular intervals (particularly when watching vids), have you considered that your laptop is just conserving battery power by turning off screen refresh? Seems a little weird, I admit, but I knew someone whose laptop did something similar and that was due to a certain energy-saver setting....If its 2 years old the battery may be getting weaker, prompting some auto setting to trigger now which it didn't do before (or at least not so often)

Just a thought, Normal Dude....what are the "mini ground textures" for? I found them after rezexploding all the resource files except for version100.brz... I haven't done any modding myself so I really am just guessing, but it looks to me suspiciously like these small texture files were added in a patch to reduce the amount of calculations going on to get the "fuzzy" versions of the ground textures seen at greater distances. When I enlarge them they definitely LOOK very much like the fuzzy tiles I see in game beyond what I would call the "regular terrain tile draw distance limit". Maybe you want to check that out... EDIT: the "mini ground textures" are in version 104.brz. I'll leave it at that since I don't mod

Many thanks Normal Dude..starting my tests tonight

And I take it the leaders of such squads will have default names like "Mario" and "Luigi"? Will they also be able to throw exploding turtles?

hmmm....it might actually take a CLEVER modder longer to come up with that than it would a SILLY modder

A hotkey for "save game" would be really cool, as well as a way to show target lines/arcs for all units or maybe all selected units at once. Both of these were available in CMx1, I'm not quite sure why they were dropped. It may have to do with the fact that only part of the keyboard is mappable in CMx2 (a rather annoying shortcoming IMHO).

Angriest moment? Just now, playing TF Narwick, mission 3 ("Cancelled Flights" - the airport). I just kind of figured high walls would hide my Bradleys from enemies in second stories a long way away....boom, boom, boom, turns out they don't, and when I looked closely I found that the top of the turret DOES project over the height of the wall. Bummer that the MG gunner's head in the Humvee right next to one of the destroyed Bradleys is almost exactly as high as the Brad's turret, but can't see over the wall at all...never rely entirely on WYSIWYG; I guess . I play real time as well, and I'm never going back to turn-based in SP mode....RT gives me much finer control of my units' behaviour...like with pathfinding issues, pausing for a few seconds only, and such things. I do have to control myself more in the sense of "cheating", though...RT gives me BORG spotting without actual BORG spotting. I try not to make use of it too much, but sometimes the temptation is just too great