moeburn
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Posts posted by moeburn
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Yo, Steve and gang. We go back. Back to 1999. We love you, man. We all got heterosexual man-crushes on you guys. I mean, where you been? I checked the posts and all, but I searched and searched, but you guys haven't made a meaningful appearance since March.
I think Steve just yesterday popped in the thread I made complaining about CM's graphics engine, and his answers are always very enlightening.
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If you watch Gone With The Wind you'll see him playing himself.
I read that as playing with himself. I was very confused about what type of movie/series I thought Gone with the Wind was.
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Ranger33,
I agree, those shadows are horrid on your system. But that's just it... the problem is on your system, not others. Kinda looks like you have a lower end card or system by the looks of the rest of the screenshot, though that's just guesswork on my end of things.
Ehm, I'm running an AMD Radeon HD 5770, and my shadows look just as bad or often worse than his picture. At least the edges of the actual shadow that the tank cast on the ground is relatively smooth in his pic, in mine the edges are made of triangles. Lots and lots of big ugly triangles.
Side note, how do you deal with so much complaining and keep a happy attitude?
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Your statement:
"..it left the patch files remaining the data folder"
was a bit confusing then since it sounded like you had found the patches.
What is your ticket number ? I'm not seeing a ticket in the system at the moment regarding re-downloading of the Paradox 1.21 patch.
Ticket ID: KAC-187482
Subject: Cannot re-download v1.21 paradox patch
Department: Fulfillment / Shipping
Probably the wrong department, I had no idea what category to file this under, so I just figured to call it "order fulfillment".
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Terrain deformation could, like anything else I suppose, be made subject to FOW. But what list of features would you be willing to forgoe to have it?
None. Considering the huge amount of other issues, this shouldn't be a priority until there's nothing left to do.
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I'm actually much more annoyed by lack of anti-air weaponry than I am of glitchy shadows, and more concerned about the Tiger tank's mysteriously shrunk mantlet than texture resolution when zoomed out.
Maybe its one of those Tiger tanks with the end-half of the barrel painted in a wave camouflage pattern to confuse distant spotters?
I hear they did that because artillery often prioritised heavier tanks over light ones, and so they would make the barrel appear shorter at a distance to give the impression of a light tank. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different tank entirely.I've always thought it would be neat if vehicles left tracks and you could see the mud clods fling off a moving tank. I do hope they give us more options so that people with higher end machines can make the game look as good zoomed out as it does at ground level.
Just thought I should mention, Wargame:EE does a great job of vehicle tracks:
Those pictures don't do it justice, and I'm too lazy to take one myself, but if you zoom in the game you'll instantly see all the tall grass has been flattened by the vehicles passing over it, and in 3D too!
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Marketing? They need him to design some scenarios
That too, would be awesome, but appreciated by fewer people.
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According to it's Wiki page the company that makes IL-2 has over 700 employees.
Combat Mission is a hardcore wargame. Always has been. By hardcore I mean it emphasized the sim aspect over graphical "oomph". If you want oomph there are plenty of other games out there that offer it. In fact, most games are all oomph. I like oomph and play those types of games, but CM offers something they don't. If CM was just a Company of Heroes clone I wouldn't bother with it.
Wow, I didn't know 1C had that many employees! I was given the impression that it was a small company because the original IL-2 was programmed by a single guy called Maddox.
Also, regarding realism.vs.graphics, please read this post I made on the earlier page:
http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1370210&postcount=37
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After reading the comments section of the 96% review of Commonwealth at Armchair General, I found this little gem:
My Dad is an amazingly spry 93 year old man with an incredible history. He fought in both WW2 and Korea. His last 2 weeks in the service just happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis. His war stories are numerous and to the best of my knowledge, true.The craziest part is that he’s still a grognard. The game he chooses to play, and the only game(s) he plays is the Combat Mission series. He feels that these games model tank warfare better than most. Who am I to argue? I wasn’t there when Patton pissed in the river, Dad was.
It’s the coolest thing in the world to watch my father put together a custom map and play a battle he fought in real life. When I play one of his maps he provides a play by play which I cannot even describe the feelings that rumble around as I’m doing the usual sterile act of moving units around.
While there are some minor technical issue with this series, CMBN and the new expansion are considered by my Dad to be well done with more and better attention to detail than some of the more hardcore wargames. I’ll take his word for it.
Whoever does marketing for Battlefront needs to get a hold of and interview this man before he passes. Do you have any idea how attractive it would be to gamers to discover a war game that an old man likes and finds realistic? It would set Combat Mission MILES apart from any other game!
[EDIT]: Whoops, I mean 93-year-old. My bad.
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Could you name a few?
Kerbal Space Program and IL-2 1946 are two games with smaller or similarly sized developers that I play right now, both use OpenGL and both enjoy better shadows and higher framerates on my PC than Combat Mission. IL-2 might have a bigger budget than Battlefront, I'm not sure, their latest DirectX flight sim suffered from huge performance issues at launch, otherwise it would have been a commercial success.
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WEGO has not been removed ??????????
Yeah, seriously, what the heck did you mean by that? Were you saying that because BF implemented RT, it became too difficult to find anyone willing to play WEGO? I exclusively play WEGO, simply because there is always too much going on in the battlefield for me to pay attention to at once, and the WEGO system allows me to rewind and review the same 60 seconds of combat for each section of the map.
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While CMx2 has and probably always will do a great job at simulating hard data, it lacks the oomph to keep players going (outside of the hardcore "i-only-playCM-and-all-other-games-are-stupid-cause-they-are-not-CM"-players). Quite frankly, it lacks a soul.
You could have said it all without offending the game's creators with that statement right there
Combat Mission is labelled as a "game", yet has always been geared towards realism, not fun. I have never played a game that fit this description that was a commercial success. If anyone here has ever played the ultra-realistic UT99 mod INFiltration - "This Is As Real As It Gets", you'll know what I mean. INF had the most dedicated fanbase I've ever seen; almost every single person that played INF regularly bought a copy when they made it commercially available. Even kids with no credit cards got their parents to buy them a copy.
But as you can see from the website, INF hasn't had a single update for 6 years. There were pretty much constant debates from the community over which aspects of the game were "realistic" and which were "arcade", and while the developers tried their best to please the community, every step towards "realism" made the game more unaccessible to new players.
I think we gamers like the idea of realism because it makes the game more immersive. When we ambush an M1A1 tank with a LAW from behind in CM, or when we suppress an infantry squad with an FN Minimi in INFiltration, we get the feeling that if we had tried the same thing in real life, it would have actually worked. To me, no amount of graphics, sounds, colors, or anything else will make a game feel more 'real' than realism itself. After all, why do we play games, but to play pretend? To pretend that we are actually soldiers fighting on the battlefield, without all the pain and boredom that comes along with that title.
If we took all the realism from the vocation of warfare, it would be about as enjoyable as real soldiers find it. The trick is finding which aspects of realism make a game more immersive, and which serve to only get in the way of fun.
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My guess at the speed issue is that the game wants to support RT and WEGO and have the same accuracy with both modes. RT is obviously more demanding than WEGO so the RT speed is the limit. WEGO is probably some kind of 'scripted' RT running at the same internal clock speed to keep everything in sync.
So theoretically these playmodes could be split and WEGO could look much better (given the same resources) but BFC would never do this. 'Why?' you ask: because the RT guys would complain why their game can't look as good as in WEGO. So more work AND more complains. Not quite the wise decision.
You make a very enlightening point, I would be interested to know if this is the way BF made CMx2. It would be strange to start from RT and program WEGO out of it, since CMx1 only had WEGO.
This was something they did in the CMx1 games and I don't know why they abandoned that feature. It's quite effective.One issue with CMx2 that may also affect this is the LOD draw distance is very short and oddly non-adjustable.
I thought I remembered seeing it! Man its been a long time since I played CMx1.
And you bring up yet another frustrating point about CMx2, the draw distance. Why does the LOD draw distance affect the way textures are rendered? Even if my video card is having trouble rendering the models the way they are programmed in the game, it should have no problem rendering the highest resolution textures all the way out to the end of the battlefield. Instead I get the high res textures about 3 feet in front of me, and then they suddenly and hideously blur into low-q textures.
Of course, I can fix the short texture draw distance by increasing the "model" quality to 'best' for some reason, but then my framerate suffers to about 5-15fps, which is unplayable in RT and frustrating in WEGO.
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Sounds like something went wrong during the patching process. I assume you're at the 1.32 patch now, is that correct ? 1.31 and 1.32 have NATO content in them, but that shouldn't come up in the game if you don't have that module installed.
Sorry, I think you misunderstood my post entirely. I cannot properly patch to 1.32 because I no longer have a copy of the Paradox 1.21 patch. So I just used the old "Version 132.brz" files left over on my computer from the previous uninstall as a temporary fix until Battlefront authorizes another download of the Paradox 1.21 patch for me (because it's been more than a year since I bought it so the d/l has expired), which they still haven't responded about :mad:
So to summarize, I'm really just here asking for someone to send me a copy of their $1 paradox 1.21 patch because I am whiny and impatient. Just the exe file, I still have my activation code that came with it.
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That's the other thing that really bugs me about Combat Mission; the shading of the hills. I've never played a strategy game that made it so difficult to figure out where hills are without zooming in to the soldier's level. I mean sure its nice to see what the soldier sees from time to time for a more realistic experience, but if you're playing an unpausable real-time game, you don't have time to be zooming or line-of-sighting every time you need to know if a unit can target an area.
I semi-found a way around this; by setting the play time to early morning/evening and having the sun right at the horizon, it just BARELY shades the ground enough to make it easier to tell. I'm not saying that high-contrast war movie filters are needed, I'm saying more realistic shading is necessary so I can tell that a valley is a valley.
Or maybe a system in which different elevation levels have different textures? Like the lower you get to the ground, the greener it gets, and the higher up you get, the rockier/whiter it gets?
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Since OpenGL has been targeted as a suspect in the performance hit question I figure this may be enlightening (it was for me):
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
Edit: I realize this blog is from a gaming site, but as a blogpost that is not promoting a product but rather BF's graphics API of choice I'm hoping I don't get any demerits for posting it
Wait... what? Live tessellation has been in OpenGL for 5 years now? F%!@ you Microsoft for making me believe that DirectX was better!
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DX vs. OpenGL seems the biggest difference. Then, hunting around the edges, I'd say there's a huge polygon difference in models.
Right, but polygons aren't the bottleneck in my graphics card. If I can play games with tessellation cranked to the max, than clearly the number of polygons is not an issue here.
Additionally, the ballistics/morale/behavior modelling in CM seems far beyond anything in any of the RTS' I've ever played (I've NOT played/seen the one referenced by the OP).
It might be more accurate than the ballistics/morale in WEE, but if its all calculated at the beginning of each turn, then no matter how accurate it is, it should have absolutely no effect on performance in CM, just how long you have to wait for it to finish calculating.
Finally, in WEE, how many maps can the player make using the in-game editor?
42.
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Send an infantry squad into a town in CMBN, now send an infantry squad into a town in WEE. There's your answer
I don't understand, answer to what? Both will go into a town, both can hide in buildings, although in CM you can actually choose which floor to go on, and WEE is missing the crucial "face direction" command, but other than that I don't see the difference...
I don't know how many people worked on Wargame, but the CMx2 game engine was written almost entirely by one guy. That's probably why
Really? I didn't know that, but if that's the case, kudos to him/her for doing such a great job! (please do not infer sarcasm, I am serious)
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"Look as good" is a relative term. CMBN opted for real world coloring while most games now go for a 'fake movie' color balance. You know, those washed-out sepia tone colors in Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, the 300, etc. I believe it was the George Clooney Kuwait war heist film "Three Kings" that first used high contrast filtering back in 1999, it caused a firestorm of indignation. Nowadays we're so accustomed to it in war movies we don't even realize how far from natural the color balance is.
Actually that's one of the things I can't stand about games nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I think attention to a color palette is important in developing a game, but sometimes these people just take it so over the top that it detracts from the immersiveness of the game. I think if they just used real-world colors, it would make me feel like I was actually in the game, rather than watching a war movie like you said.
First off, there aren't nearly as many calculations going on in the background of Wargame. Not to say it's a "simple" game, but relative to CMBN there isn't nearly as much going on under the hood.Secondly, CMBN isn't very well optimized compared to Wargame, and seems to have some sort of bottleneck. *shrug* If they had more funds, more coders, more everything, it would be better, but it is what it is.
You are comparing a high-budget game where the smooth engine is probably it's best feature, versus a low-budget game where the graphics engine is basically functional enough to work and everything else (ballistics, LOS, etc) is the focus.
Well I know there are lots more calculations going on in CM, but are they still going on when you play turn-based? I had the impression that all these calculations were done at the beginning of each turn, and then when you are watching it play out, pretty much all of the processing is being done by the GPU from then on. And Wargame is doing these calculations too; LOS, individual ballistics, front/side/rear armor, it takes all of these into account, albeit probably not as accurately.
Also, I understand that Eugen Systems probably had a higher budget from their success of R.U.S.E., but some of these optimizations that could be done seem like things that game developers have known about and have been doing for years now, even in free indie games.
Oh, if you've played the European Escallation demo/beta its really pretty laughable gameplay. I joked that it was CM with everything that the gorgnards demanded added and everything that made the simulation aspect even halfway decent removed.Actually I think it is pretty fun gameplay. But thats my point, Wargame is intended to be more of a game, whereas CM is more of a simulator. Practise at Wargame, and you might become good at Wargame. Practise at CM, and you might gain some real combat strategic knowledge.
Sorry, one look at that map screenie and I call BS on "greater realism".Not one car in sight, first of all. High-res houses and walls look very nice, fine, but there are absolutely no hedges or other vegetation other than big mature trees -- yes this friggin well matters, because all that clutter restricts LOS and can make a suburb like this a real b**ch to fight through in high summer. As it is now, you're either in a building, in a street or in a yard, and whoever has the big uber tank(s) or the infinite ammo chaingun strapped to his waist or whatever sweeps all before him within moments of the enemy opening fire. No "tactics" required. From a pure tactical standpoint, not really much evolution from the Battlezone arcade game I used to play as a teen 30 years ago.
True, a lot of CMBN maps also suffer from a lot of these same issues, but it is clear to me that a game engine derived from some real estate CAD program doesn't do much from a "realism" standpoint to compensate for slipshod map design.
I don't really understand what you mean, no cars? There are about a hundred cars in that parking lot on the second pic. Also there may not be any in the pics I provided, but there are actually lots of long skinny hedgegrowths in the game that often line roads and separate towns, providing excellent ambush cover for your anti-tank troops. Not to mention the fact that every single object in the game; hedgegrowths, houses, trees, walls, hills, EVERYTHING is considered in line-of-sight; both laterally and vertically when attacking from ground-to-air.
It seems like you haven't played the game? Cause whoever has the tanks does NOT win if they try to invade a town or a forest. Tanks are pretty much useless in this game for anything but long-range engagement. Try to send a tank into a city or a forest, and they won't see the hiding infantry units until the last minute, who will wait to fire a LAW at their rear armor from close-range. It is very satisfying to destroy a unit worth 10x more than yours so easily. And there isn't any "infinite ammo" in this game; ammo is very limited and often needs to be resupplied using trucks and FOB's. In fact, wargame included one realistic aspect that CM forgot: limited fuel. Maybe thats because in Wargame you often have to travel 150km just to get to the other side of the map, but it means you have to put careful consideration into every movement order you take.
I feel I should restate this: I am NOT comparing the "realism" of these two games, merely the graphics engine. Wargame did not intend to compete with CM on a realism level, and CM is not made for the casual player like Wargame is.
Is CM actually in OpenGL? Cause that would explain a lot. OpenGL appears to have reached its limits in terms of competing with DirectX in graphics/efficiency. The last game I remember that did it well was IL-2 Sturmovik, and even that old game chugs along on a powerful system with maximum settings.
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Well I discovered that even though I uninstalled CMSF a long time ago, it left the patch files remaining the data folder. So I just applied those to a reinstalled version of CMSF, and man is it ever weird. I appear to get the important fixes from these patches, like how the sound is completely broken on my computer in any version prior to v1.20 (ironically the last version I can get for free). However, all the in-game labels are completely fubared. I think it has something to do with the label indexes being changed to accommodate the new modules.
Because all my M1A1 Abrams are apparently G-Wagens now. And in their list of ammo, they have things like "Abrams - >1k", and "Air assault - 17". Cool, a little car that can shoot tanks and planes as projectiles! I'd love to see that in action!
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I have always been a huge fan of the Combat Mission series, right since the first Beyond Overlord game in '99. That game never ran well on any of my systems until my recent years. Now with CMx2, the graphical improvements are a beautiful addition; the amount of detail when close up on a Stryker vehicle is incomparable to any game I've yet played. Yet on any given average view with "balanced" model quality and "best" texture quality, I get an average of 20fps.
Now I just recently discovered a great RTS game (and I said game, not tactical combat simulator, I'm not comparing that aspect) called Wargame: European Escalation. It's based on the IRISZOOM engine from R.U.S.E., and I quote from wikipedia:
It features large maps up to 150 square kilometres in size, which can have up to 100 million scenery objects. It gives the player the ability to zoom in and out and to get, in an instant, from a large commander's view to a ground view closer to the combat.I run this game in DX11 mode, at absolute maximum settings in every category, and I get an average of 45-60fps in most scenes, maybe slowing to 30fps when zoomed in and the action is extremely thick. There are towns with hundreds of buildings. And these are no simple cubes either, they each have their own shadows, balconies, fences, streetlights, chimneys, every little detail is rendered at amazing efficiency:
Believe me, they do not skimp on the polygons on the vehicles either:
So why is it that my system can run this game without a single hiccup, yet when I try to play a game in CM with a few too many buildings it runs slower than that tesselation tech demo from Unigine? Keep in mind this occurs in wego AND real-time modes, so I know it isn't my CPU bottlenecking the system. Is there something very complicated going on inside my graphics card in this game that I just can't understand and appreciate? Or did battlefront simply not have the resources to create such an efficient engine?
Also, just out of curiosity, if an engine like that were for license, how much do you think it would cost battlefront to license it? A mix of the game mechanics of CM with the graphics of Wargame would be an orgamesm.
<<< System Summary >>>
- Mainboard : Acer FRS780M
- Chipset : AMD 780
- CPU : Athlon II X4 620 2.6Ghz (4xCore)
- RAM : 4096MB DDR3
- GPU : ATI Radeon HD 5770 1gb DDR3
- Hard Disk : WD5000AAKS 500gb
- Monitor : BenQ V2200Eco 22"
- Mainboard : Acer FRS780M
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I'm curious, what did it do exactly?
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So... I decided to re-install CMSF after finding some new free time. Unfortunately, my external harddrive just died, and it had backups of all the patches for the day I decided to reinstall CMSF. No problem, I thought, I'll just go re-download the patches.
Oh, right, I have a store-bought Paradox Interactive version of the game which uses a different DRM, and so requires a different patch for version 1.21 and above. No problem, I paid $1 for it (although I couldn't really understand why, how much could Battlefront have really offset their costs by selling a game update for $1?), so surely I could download it again.
But the download has expired.
Now, I can understand why you don't offer unlimited downloads after purchase for every title; the bandwidth costs on your end would be significant. But again, this is a single, intermediate update, it can't be more than 100mb, and it is only for a specific retail version of the game, surely it can't be in such demand as to make a dent in the Battlefront account books?
Well, I sent a ticket off to the help desk, but my free time is quickly running out. So I came here to post this message in the hopes that either the help desk would reply to me by the time I had run out of wind, or someone out their would be kind enough to PM/link me to a copy of the Paradox v1.21 patch. I will gladly provide the license key/order # I obtained to prove I paid for it.
I'm sure that in some small way this post is probably against the forum rules, but then again so is taking a single grape at the grocery store. I would gladly risk a forum ban to be able to play this great game again as quickly as possible
[EDIT] - I feel I should add that as I no longer have any credit cards, it is literally impossible for me to simply repurchase the file, otherwise I would have no problem paying the $1 to save me the wait.
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As the title suggests, it seems very difficult in CMSF to notice where a hill or a valley is. I find myself editing all my custom maps to be played during sunrise or sunset, so that the sun casts a shadow on one side of all the hills, allowing them to have some definition, but even that doesn't help very much.
I find myself having to zoom in all the way to ground level and then back out again just to see where the hills are, but when i move the camera higher up, everything looks flat. I never had this problem in CMBB.
Is there any way to increase the contrast in the different elevations? Perhaps a mod that can achieve this?
I hear they did that because artillery often prioritised heavier tanks over light ones, and so they would make the barrel appear shorter at a distance to give the impression of a light tank. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different tank entirely.
Why can't Combat Mission look and run as well as Wargame: European Escalation?
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
I visited Juno beach in Normandy a few years back during a period of overcast skies, and the green of the grass was still able to penetrate through the "gray feeling" of the air from the bad weather.