JRMC1879
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Posts posted by JRMC1879
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Jesus. Not again. They have given us the greatest game ever, things I dreamed of as a young gamer and all it seems some want to do is bitch and moan about it.A new family but why.....
I wished BF would stopped making families or made just an east west family, it basically cancel out all the what if scenarios. Hell I would prefer just one family myself.
I feel like BFC is like the government telling me I must eat my peas with a fork not a spoon. In my opinion there is no logical explanation in my mind why they keep opening up new families rather then modules.
What if I want to play Normandy in 1945 then 1944 because, allied command delayed the invasion due to italy invasion being a disaster eliminating a lot of the landing craft that was used in Normandy.
Or market-garden happened with light snow instead of September, all these things cannot be realized cause I am confined how to play.
I am not angry with BFC here just very much disappointed because when we went from CMx1, where we had a whole front to deal with we were told modules will fill it out so by the end we should have the same front and it was more of a financial decision, now I am finding that is not the case. I feel let down from those conversations that were discussed many years ago when people initially raised these concerns.
I know I am just a voice in the wilderness on this, and will continue to support BFC game because on the whole they do good work, just a shame that's all.
This model keeps them in business , harking back to cmx1 days is just futile and dumb. Play the games and if you don't like it keep it to yourself.
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Ps ... 're Steve's post. Is it Dorosh or is there another self opinionated twat i don't know about?
And I also have no idea how hit decals reveal the location of hidden at guns. I don't want to know either. Maybe that's part of your problem.
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Yes, to pinpoint unspotted ATGs to the exact action spot. Really great...Chess vs checkers.Trying to attract checkers players to play chess can only result in losing both in the long term.CM is WAAAY to complex to be attractive for the masses EVER. It will always be a niche product.Chess will also NEVER appeal to the masses. NEVER. One could pump up the graphics of chess and make it look like a FPS, but after the initial spike of shallow interest, it will again only be played by chess players who are not interested in explosions and action, but like the challenge of the mind.The same is with CM. I think the core CM-player was interested in realism above all.Now what will have the bigger impact on sales: those that like CM more because of hit decals, and therefore will buy the next game, or those disappointed customers who no longer perceive guns as threat after the first shot because of hit decals?I believe each of a disappointed core customer is a customer who bought all their products - contrary to those who are quickly attracted by shallow visual effects like hit decals and other gimmicks at the cost of degrading realism. Graphical effects attract quickly but the same crowd is also moving on to the next shallow effect in the next game.But beneath everything the core of the problem seems to be something completely different:The main game designer plays the game not in the mode the vast majority of wargamers play his products. That's never good, if you develop something and don't know, what your core customers need. There are no ladders, no campaigns, nothing played realtime. One could say: realtime does not exist among the wrgaming community.The result of this dramatic discrepancy could be observed since CMSF was released.The spotting problems as a result of keeping the calculation affordances as low as possible to make realtime play possible. Spotting works good enough for realtime but often not good enough for turn based.And I think this has dramatic consequences for potential new turnbased customers: they try the demo, recognize a strange spotting behaviour and lose interest. The 1:1 representation makes things even worse, since it leaves much less room for imagination than a symbolic representation. So again: 1:1 is attracting the visual oriented player, but if there are discrepances between presented action and results, itdegrades the experience of the customer who is interested in realism.The majority of realtime customers cannot be attracted, because FPS games offer them the much better quick action and cooler graphics. Additionally the game concept is so extremely different, that 99% will only shake their head. So the core group is lost and the big part of the massese cannot be attracted because it is chess and not checkers.I will never forget the disastrous relative hotkeys-concept when I tried CMSF the first time. What a punch into the face of WEGO-players that was.Or the water-effects since CMRT breaking FOW. Sounds from unspotted units? A problem since CMSF. But in combination with hit-decals since engine v3 this problem has been even increased instead to become solved. How easily foxholes can be spotted. Bunkers and trenches breaking FOW. And much more.I believe all these are results of a design process done from a realtime-player's perspective and therefore many of the problems are only discovered very late in the design process, or even too late after implementation.Instead that Battlefront had followed their former clear path torwards realism and protected and taken care of their brilliant WEGO-child, they lost this focus and now, with an ageing engine, they are sitting between the chairs, trying to keep new shallow action-customers somehow interested while they lose more and more of realism-focused wargamers which one after the other slowly give up, because the problems persist year after year and game after game and sometimes even become worse.
God. What a load of bollocks. If there are things that aren't perfect or make missing in the game it's because of limited time and resource and nothing to do with this garbage. Jesus, do I ever get sick of these kinds of post where someone comes here positing their own poorly thought out theories around building the best war game there is and all they achieve is to illustrate they actually know nothing about it at all. You would achieve more poking around with the fluff in your navel in the time it has taken you to write this crap.
Go out. Build and design the best war game ever made and out of which I get more value for money than anything I have ever bought anywhere for anything and then post your thesis. Until then I Will treat it with the contempt it deserves.
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I am easy - I will buy them all!
What he said.
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Uh never mind, they're 70k over the forum limit, I can't upload them.
That's a shame - because I think they look freaking awesome. Certainly gives a more modern feel - sometimes I still feel the CMBS scenery is a bit too red thunder. Hope you are doing something with the trees as they look awesome too. You seem a bit muted about what you have done but my wish would be for you to carry on as they look excellent to me.
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Thanks for the heads up Chris. Is there any re-design planned for the repository like the forum has received?
Yes I would like to know that - it was stated there would be - getting stuff from there is a tortuous time consuming process and its the single most frustrating thing in the whole battlefront experience.
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As many know ive had a lousy year. My.favorite war.theater of all time.is.ost front.and without.my.friend.mjkerner i wouldnt have been able to play red.thunder which he gifted me. Sburke gifted me the VP, MG, 3.0 BN. And now.mkjerner gifted me BS. Guys it really means a lot.to have people who,ve.never even met.me.in.person spend their hard earned money so i can escape what ive turned.into a semi bleak existence.
Thank u so much
Wow - didn't know. Huge Kudos to the guys who helped you out.
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Thanks for the link vein - you left the conversation so couldn't reply via PM.
Really do appreciate the work guys like you do modding these games and didn't want you to think it went unappreciated.
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I have used American UAVs (Raven and Grey Eagle) on two different missions, letting them observe suspected enemy positions... they couldn't spot anything, I am not sure why
Most likely trees blocking the view, I'd imagine.
Well I have only used the raven so far - US campaign - and they are awesome in what they give you from what I have seen A real game changer. Wont post why as it may be spoilers - but so far I would take one of them over a platoon of M2's.
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Just to repeat - those building look fantastic.
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Awesome - the buildings especially - when do we get them ???
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Battle Front amazing work! :cool:
I second third and fourth that. I load this thing up and have much the same reaction as to everything else I have bought from battlefront - which is a sense of amazement that I get all this for 30 odd pounds.
The games I used to dream about having when I was younger bought to reality.
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At 5 Gigs this should have been broken into smaller chunks with WinRAR and had a recovery record included or at least support resume.
Hmmm 4 hours to go @ 346KB/s
Absolutely...
This is friggin ridiculous - a 5gb file with no resume support ? They make superb games but lousy downloads mechanisms.
Am now 8 hours after buying the game on about the 20th try.
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Agua,
Look on the bright side. At least you didn't wind up with Shermans!
Regards,
John Kettler
No - look on the bright side - at least you managed to download the game. 8 hours of trying and still the server is Fubar
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Hear hear, well said.
It's what I wanted to say, but you said it better already
Thanks - but I suddenly realised that I do want some kind of early access - I want to be able to pre-order the freaking digital copy - so I don't spend a tortuous few hours listening to those who don't have stupid postal costs playing the game before I do. Arggghhhh
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I'm older and supposedly wiser now vs. the pre-CMBO days (yes, I have been here this long), but I am still fighting the urge to complain only semi-successfully in terms of how this product development cycle drags on and expectations continue to be somewhat not managed well.
I'm sure a lot of folks here on these boards work in software engineering or project management -- what is frustrating to some of us is that while some of the most exciting players in the game industry have switched to a scrum system (e.g. Early Access games on Steam) where they develop features as users request them, Battlefront still seems stuck in an older development model, waterfall. This is ironic considering how Battlefront was among the leaders in revolutionizing the marketplace with CMBO disintermediating the brick and mortar stores that kept the games we wanted from us.
Scrum is pretty great in a lot of applications, and I like it in game development, because it lets folks get buy-in early and vote, as the customers actually excited about and buying the game, in terms of features they want, how things are working, etc.
Battlefront still seems to be stuck in the waterfall model, where they build the game they think we want, spend a lot of time doing it, and then launch it and patch as needed. Admittedly in most cases this seems to have worked well (the CMSF issues being one where it didn't go as well initially), but I can't help but feel like at this point, given how niche this gaming product is and how enthused we all are about testing/playing it, that maybe it is time to switch to scrum development (early access) and let us help them build the best game. There's a certain amount of hubris in thinking your team alone knows what is good for us, as paying customers. Yes, it is they who are building it, and true enough, no serious competition has emerged, but it won't always be like this. My bet is that if a company finally does beat Battlefront in terms of servicing this particular, specific niche, it is going to be a company that gives what they won't -- early access and buy-in.
Well as someone who manages software development - what battlefront fail to do is work by the developers paradigm with regard to estimates of delivery. That is - estimate how long it will take you, then double it, then add another for safe measure. What this means is you never deliver anything late and you always garner praise for delivering early. Were BF to work under this model they would have estimated delivery around April, and delivered in what looks like Jan Feb and you would all be lauding them for the speed they deliver things.
Steam is not agile development - its a way of funding development before you have a finished product. And scrum development is not a method for delivering a finished product (which is what we all want) faster. Its a method - as far as game development is concerned, of delivering and unfinished one early. I purposely never buy into early access because what I want is a finished game - and all early access means to me is I am thoroughly tired of the thing before the finished product arrives.
They are a few weeks late - for a very small team delivering something as complex as this believe me that is nothing out of the ordinary.
I could care less that battlefront don't offer early access as - even if I bought it I would likely shelve it till the finished game arrives. I don't frankly see how what they are delivering suits early access in any case. Do I want to play black sea with one type of tank and a couple of trucks - that not only doesn't work its not what I want to buy.
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Are we nearly there yet?
Yes we are absolutely nearly there. When exactly would depend on your definition of Nearly though.
I would say though that the complete absence yet of the aforementioned joke "its here" post - would suggest not even the dicks who post those think we are close enough to let their dickedness get the better of them.
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I don't see any reason this game release should be tied up with world events.
First of all BFC already stated that this game development goes far back to 2012, if I am not mistaken, and this was advertised in various "heads up" articles and such on specialized internet sites.
Second, I see a list of reasons why this game release should not be influenced by current events:
-CMBS is not a picture of the actual conflict in ukraine, it's based on a different, yet similar, situation drawn by realistic and plausible geopolitical elements of that world area, involving necessarily the same countries. As a proof of this: there are no irregular units in CMBS, quite a note since, during these months and especially in the starting phases of the conflict, irregular units were and are a common sight on both sides.
-a conflict in that part of the world was not so impossible to foresee, and games dedicated to modern conflicts have a well defined and knowledge set of potential theaters to use, you can read a worldwide newspaper and pick them every day. So, given the proability of a conflict to happen in such stated regions plus the need of a modern setting tactical combat game to be plausible there's no way you can't untie the two things. You couldn't possibly belive a combat mission shock force depicting a conflict on Saudi Arabia being invaded by the USA, and for the same reasons you would belive a conflict like that brought by CMBS.
-parallel example: armed robbery is a common crime, people get hurt and die to it all over the world every day, but this doesn't stop a game about bank robbery, for example, to be developed and released. yes it's generic, but an open conflict is the same generic event in geopolitical terms.
There are games out there that let you steal a car and run on top of people, that's surely less morally correct than any CM game. There are books out there, written by geopolitical masterminds, who forsee every kind of potential conflict, among them something is bound to be proven right in the next few years, just because they take real events, real data and get to impossible to discard results, that doesn't make those Writers responsible for the conflict itself or lightly harted for what happened.
-you can pick either force to control. Given the real conflict in ukraine you can simpathize with any side but that doesn't reflect in any way on the game itself, so to speak you can control german units in a ww2 game but that doesn't make you evil or the game not politically correct because of nazi war crimes, which of course you cannot replicate within the game boundaries. CM game is just outside any of that scope.
-finally I'd like to stress that combat mission series game is more dedicated to tactical simulation rather than geopolitical/economical/strategic layers, this gives the game a sort of benefit when it comes to depicting actual situations. You can't kill civilians in a combat mission game since civilians are not part of the picture. Of course civilian casualties, mass murder, violence on p.o.w.s, are all real parts of any conflict but combat mission is not about that, despite being a combat simulation. I'd say a CM game is more of a game, indeed, an instrument to see how real assets would behave in a very confined and limited situation, much more "impersonal" than you could say. The "larger picture" such as the setting (Syrian conflict in CMSF, ukraine conflict in CMBS) is necessary to make the game plausible and verged to realism rather than just being crazy by depicting impossible situations.
All in all the fact that the next CM game and the next one again that will be dedicated to modern warfare take place in a hot zone of the world is something you just can't avoid.
After 3 years of development a real crysis escalates in the same region your game is set, what can you do? Trash everything and set something completely different? I don't want a combat mission modern title depicting a conflict between france and germany, I wouldn't just buy it, in all senses.
I completely agree with what you say - but I am a wargamer and therefore understand the hobby. Everything you just said of course would be completely lost on someone outside the hobby which is my point.
I don't see the difference between BF brining out a game on the Ukraine crisis and bringing one out on the recent Israeli assault on Gaza - and I don't think they would even contemplate that.
And my original point still stands - we were in the middle of a conflict with Iraq when CMSF was released - but BF picked on a hypothetical conflict for a reason - I am not sure I see the difference between not wanting to do a game on an active conflict in which people were dying because it was reality at the time and bringing one out in the same way because you were a little too accurate in your choice of scenario.
All I am saying is a release of CMBS may go completely unnoticed but then again it may get spotted and someone with no knowledge of the hobby picks it and BF and the hobby draws a lot of flak.
I don't think I am saying anything BF haven't discussed internally - just saying it would be nice to know their position.
Not saying I have an objection and I would buy the game - am really looking forward to it . Not sure on my own moral stance on playing a "game" depicting a live conflict where people are dying - but I guess I have played scenarios in CMSF that are pretty close to live action such as Libya helmand etc.
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https://news.vice.com/article/ukraine-announces-that-the-russian-invasion-has-begun?utm_source=vicenewsfb
things escalated
and does the events going on in the black sea area have any effect on the release on the release of combat mission black sea
Well - my view - Of course it does. I fail to see how BF can release a game about this whilst it is an active conflict - and one that seems to be getting worse.
I believe they have to change the venue - releasing with this subject may bring more publicity to them and our hobby than we want - and all of the wrong kind.
There was a reason CMSF was about a then hypothetical conflict in Syria rather than a real one on Iraq or Afghanistan.
I should add - I don't want this game to be delayed but I believe BF are not insensitive to bringing out a game about a live conflict in which people are dying today and I wish they would just state their position on it so we all know.
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And maybe the train car object could double as an urban tram, if we can also get tram tracks that work on urban streets.
Theres a train car object ?
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Just to give you guys an update. Red Thunder's final push took more out of us than we had expected, so we're about 4-6 weeks behind schedule on the code front. So we're probably looking at late Summer and not late Spring. But we'll know better in a couple of months where we are at.
Regarding promotion... we tend to wait until the game is mostly done before we start promoting it. Red Thunder got it's official website just before we opened preorders.
You got that right
Steve
Thanks for the update Steve ... Am awaiting this one with absolutely bated breath - but nice not to be in anticipation of anything immediate if its not coming that soon. I still have about three years of stuff from CMSF I haven't touched yet - besides all the stuff from CMFI, Gustav, CMBN, Commonwealth, MG and now RT.
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Kinda hard to promote a game until we have enough visual assets to show off in the promotional materials.
Patience. We'll start the publicity machine up when we are good and ready for it.
Odd comment - when steve said this at the start of this thread.
"In fact, the game is largely done and testing is slated to begin in a few weeks for a late Spring release."
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Just glancing at a few of the maps provided for QBs, I noticed in several of them fields of gorgeous yellow flowers. Those are new.
Michael
And there are cabbages.
Two I believe new fence types.
New church and buildings
You know a hedge is a hedge - whether its in france or Russia as is a tree or grass - just what were you wanting ? In my view from what I have seen so far it feels very like Russia and different and some of the maps are excellent.
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Good to hear that you are making progress Oddball - I think that the sound effects in CM are absolutely vital to the experience, and the modders have done a fantastic job. Any chance of a Mac version?
Second this - after playing oddballs mod in CMBN and CMFI for months - returning to stock is a hell of a shock.
Kieme's Maps
in CM Black Sea Maps and Mods
Posted
Wow like those first pics.
Appears you are as good at map making as you are at nodding. Some of those first pics are friggin genius