sandman2575

+1. Amazing work on this mod all around.

An odd inquiry, perhaps -- but offhand does anyone know which FI/GL scenarios (or campaigns?) feature the Panther? I don't think I've ever seen one (obviously they're abundant in the other CMx2 modules).

Unfortunately the open top also means they're very vulnerable to small arms fire. Indeed, there really isn't anything they're *not* vulnerable to. Safe to say the sdkfw 250 wasn't a great weapons platform... But then, so many of the Wehrmacht's weapons by mid-war were less-than-ideal improvisations born of necessity -- like all the AT vehicles built on MkII and captured Czech tank chassis...

Direct fire support against soft / entrenched targets. Nothing more exotic than that. Yeah you'd rather have a MkIVF or MkIIIN than a halftrack with a 75mm gun, but hey, they're better than nothing. I agree they can be tricky to use because like you say, they are made of paper. But they can be used well with the 'target area' command where you think enemies might be lurking even if you haven't spotted them -- for example that high church steeple that overlooks the whole area -- little danger in using one of your "Stummels" to fire a few HE rounds where you suspect observers are located.

This is of course the correct approach -- and exactly the approach you won't have time to pursue. I really believe that an extra 30 minutes (1hr30min total) would make all the difference. I *hate* when missions like this are artificially constrained by a highly unrealistic time limit. While I understand that a hour of 'in game' time does not correspond to a real hour -- that 'game time' is in some sense condensed and abstracted, because what takes one minute to accomplish by the game clock would take 5-10 times that in real time -- I still feel 'an hour' for Lifeline is absurdly short. I actually found 2 hours for Stoumont to be quite doable -- I didn't try to take the Sanitarium on the edge of the map but did take all the other objectives with about 30 minutes to spare and managed a major victory. Right now I'm facing the prospect of racing my mounted platoons down narrow roadways into Stavelot, with all its blind corners and limitless ambush possibilities. If I got even 25% of them to the bridge I'd be surprised. Both my KTigers have their eyes poked out -- my Panther is still in good shape though. Oh well. Looks like it's 'once more into the breach' for me and my pixeltruppen...

I'm not sure there's any sure way to win Lifeline without some serious luck and benefit of hindsight (i.e. a second playover) -- even then I'm not sure it's doable. I'm at the 29:00 remaining mark and like you Doc I've only taken the Highway Screen 1st objective. I've also taken out the 6 priests but keyholed AT guns are everywhere. How I'm supposed to make it through 3 more objectives to the bridge, with 29 moves remaining... pretty much a lost cause. Unless I'm mistaken though -- ? -- this is where we're supposed to fail, in a sense? Did Peiper ever manage to reopen his lines once the Amis retook Stavelot? (I just read Beevor's Bulge book a few months ago but don't recall exactly -- I'm sure folks here will correct me though!) Just for the record -- here's a pic of one of my KTigers at the 29:00 mark. The other is in similar shape. Both still runners, both still with their 88s intact, but optics shot to hell. It's a good thing these things can take a beating, because that's what this scenario dishes out.

Kevin -- sounds like an excellent project. Can you give some details about size of forces involved and length of scenario? (I downloaded "Restless Night" for Stalingrad but haven't gotten to it yet. Looking forward to it though!)

That sounds like quite a minimal toll, actually -- you did well losing relatively little. I managed a major victory but it was more costly -- can't recall the numbers exactly (don't think it was 200 casualties for me but definitely over 100 dead and wounded) -- I lost 3 Panthers, plus chalk up another Panther as a mobility kill (and one more immobilized due to bogging), 1 MkIV, 2 "Stummel" half-tracks. I essentially lost an entire platoon of Fallschirmjaeger, and my pioneers had heavy going as well. Currently battling my way through Lifeline -- have to say, I hate that this is one of those battles where you are racing against the clock more than anything else. 1 hour for this scenario strikes me as deeply unfair. 1.5 would be a lot more reasonable.

Woghern, our little disagreement aside, I just want to reiterate what I said earlier, which is that you mod is superb, and that I (like everyone else here) am grateful for your decision to share your hard work with us. My apologies if the tone got a little testy - I wasn't implying that you or your mod was to blame for some of the issues I was having with the SweetFX. But enough about that. Your mod adds a lot to Final Blitzkrieg and I am enjoying using it.

Nowhere did I write or even imply anything of the kind. You seemed to be strongly implying in your earlier post that the performance issues I was experiencing were in part due to an insufficiently powerful PC. I simply disagree with this diagnosis, completely.

I won't argue with you that CM is poorly optimized and therein lies most of the difficulty, not with your mod or with SweetFX. Unfortunately, you have no idea what you're talking about if you insist that the 780Ti is a "definitely out of date" GPU -- it is, as I said, a last generation GPU, but it still outperforms high-end cards like the GTX 970. Obviously the 980 and 980Ti outperform the 780Ti, but unless your definition of an "up to date" GPU means "absolute top of the line," then not sure what to tell you. I had enabled triple buffering already, per your directions in the Readme file.

Yeah I wondered that myself and have tested with G-sync disabled - makes no difference. Also tryes setting my monitor's refresh rate to 60Hz instead of 144hz - also no difference. I'm a little surprised by W's post showing the framerates for SwwetFx enabled w/ or w/o lighting enabled: 25 Fps vs. 15 fps. maybe that's the problem then - I don't really consider these playable framerates - I could maybe tolerate 25 if that was an absolute lower bound (never dipping below that), but 15 fps is just way to laggy to be enjoyable in my opinion. Will do do some testing with FRAPS later today to see if I get similar framerates. Also, the performance issues I'm seeing with SweetFx are definitely not GPU related - the GTX 780 Ti may be last generation but still an upper end card that is plenty powerful enough for me to play other graphics intensive games at ultra settings on a single 1080p monitor. By comparison, I get a constant 100fps when playing Graviteam Mius Front with this same system.

Unfortunately, no matter what I try, I still get crippling lag when using SweetFX. Have tried all of W's setting suggestions and others as well. Very puzzling, as my rig is plenty powerful enough to handle SweetFX (i7 3770k @ 4.6GHz, GTX 780 Ti SC, 16 GB RAM, Windows 7 x64; G-Sync 144Hz 1920x1080 monitor).

Thanks ht -- will give your suggestion a try

ht57, could you also tell us which SweetFX preset you are using, since you are not using Worgherns? I'd be very curious to give it a try. Thanks

Thanks for the explanation, ht57. I'm going to give your method a try, since the 'official' way is definitely not working for me. Just curious, but are you enabling the "Movie Lighting" Alt-M when you have SweetFX on, or are you leaving the Movie Lighting off?

OK now I'm confused -- why is any of that necessary? I thought all we had to do was unpack W's "Reshader" .zip into our root game directory -- the 4 files that CMFDR highlights in his post above. I didn't see anywhere that there was some extra initial set up that had to be done. ??

The lack of anything like a dynamic campaign in which the player has some input into what happens 'between' battles is a major weakness for CM. Really wish BFC would take a close look at what Graviteam has accomplished with Operation Star and now Mius Front -- by no means perfect games and CM still has an edge over them in certain respects (modeling of infantry combat chief among them -- it's far superior in CM) -- but Graviteam Tactics has a fully featured dynamic campaign that puts CM to shame. For instance, the fact that in CM you can't (between battles) consolidate sections of platoons have have been heavily attrited. 1st section has 5 men left. 2nd section has 4.. why not combine into a single section? I'd rather have one full-strength or near full-strength section in a platoon than 3 sections of 3-4 guys each. Or the fact that, like Erwin says, you have zero control over force makeup... so that instead of a relatively intact platoon of Panthers, say, you wind up with the one that has 2 tanks whose 75mm guns have been knocked out. Helpful. The HE rounds getting fired through woods also drives me crazy. I always try to give "Target Light" commands but sometimes a tank spots a new enemy unit and just lets loose with the HE... often doing more damage to nearby friendlies than to the enemy...

So, now that it looks like some people have been trying out the SweetFX package, I'm curious to hear if anyone else is experiencing the kinds of difficulties myself and Ethercan described -- serious lag and FPS drops when enabling it. Really puzzled by this because SweetFX (like ENB) should not have a *major* impact on performance. But that's definitely what I'm seeing. Even with all the settings in game and in nvidia CP set correctly.

So, did a little more testing with the SweetFX files tonight, having added the patch and updated SweetFX settings, and I can confirm what Ethercan said -- it seriously cripples performance for some reason. Really baffled by this. I correctly set the in-game settings as Worghern indicated, and also correctly set the settings in my Nvidia Control Panel. When I load up a scenario and hit "Scroll Lock" to enable SweetFX, FPS *plunges* and especially lags when panning the camera. Talking single-digit FPS -- unplayable. Confused as to why SweetFX should be severely hampering performance in this way -- haven't had that experience when using SweetFX in other games. I've removed SweetFX for now and am just using W's excellent retextures -- but I've noticed another strange thing. When I enable "Movie Lighting" (Alt-M), it introduces some severe aliasing into the image -- see below. You can see the 'jaggies' pretty clearly on the panzer's antenna and the telephone pole in the background. All from just enabling the lighting -- ? Strange.

@Bob W -- Root directory is the 'primary' directory where your game is, probably something like: D:\Games\Battlefront\Combat Mission Final Blitzkrieg This is where the 4 files in the Shader .zip should go, i.e.: SweetFX folder, opengl32.dll, ReShade.fx, and Sweet.fx Do NOT put the sweetFx files in the Data\Z directory. To get W's Environment mod working, take the files from 5 .zips you downloaded ("Worghern.Final_.Blitzkrieg.Env_.001a" through "Worghern.Final_.Blitzkrieg.Env_.003") and unpack them into a single folder -- call it "Final Blitzkrieg Environment Mod" or something. Then take the Patch zip, and unpack it directly into that "Final Blitzkrieg Environment Mod" folder you just created. It will ask you to merge and then overwrite some existing files. Select "Yes" to all. Take this folder and put it in your Z directory like all mods.

Really? I've long played with Aris's textures (and everything of Aris's I can get my hands on) and never noticed that it taxed my system at all (as mentioned, typically 50-60% GPU usage max) -- but playing with Worghern's, the difference was quite noticeable -- esp. as I was aware of my GPU's fan cranking up and I was getting GPU temps in the high 60 low 70 C range (typicially mid-50C with Aris's textures). Did you play on a medium / large Winter map? That's where the strain was most noticeable for me -- much less so on an autumn non-snow map. Also, re: 3D Model Quality -- to be honest, I've never been able to see any difference in terms of graphics quality whether this is set to "Best" or "Fastest" -- I have *no* idea why this single setting is so ridiculously taxing on my system. I play with "Balanced" but could quite easily play with "Fastest" for the pure FPS benefit without noticing any deterioration in image quality.

Just another tip -- From extensive (and frustrating) trial and error -- I've found that the *single* most important setting, in terms of what strains my system, is the 3D Model Quality setting. I never have this above "Balanced," and have often played with it at "Fastest." The 2nd most taxing setting is Shadows. Turning them off will give you close to a 10 FPS benefit. However, playing with Shadows off looks terrible, IMO. 3D Texture Quality I have set to "Best," with AA, Vert-sync etc. all enabled. The reality is that CMx2 is pretty badly optimized. There's no reason some of these graphics settings should be so severely straining on even quite powerful systems. EDIT -- another key setting is in your nvidia Control Panel: be sure to set "Vertical Sync" to "Adaptive -- Half Refresh Rate" -- this helps smooth out camera panning and map scrolling *considerably* -- I always am sure to have this setting on.

@Ethercan -- I'm not too surprised to hear that you are having framerate issues -- even with a powerful SLI configuration like you have. From my own experience using Worghern's new textures last night, folks should be aware that they make pretty significant demands on your system. CMx2 ordinarily doesn't use more than 50-60% max of my GPU (I have a reasonably powerful although not top-of-the-line rig: i7 3770k @ 4.6 GHz, Evga GTX 780 Ti SC, 16 GB RAM, Windows 7 x64, playing on a G-Sync'd 144Hz refresh monitor at 1920x1080 resolution) -- but it's now topping at near 100% GPU usage with Worghern's textures. It's especially noticeable on the snow-heavy maps. I think trying to play with W's textures on a 1440p resolution with max graphics settings is going to tax even quite powerful systems. Just to be clear -- I'm not complaining, Worghern! Looking forward to trying the patches later today and hoping I can get the new shaders to work.

First and most important, THANK YOU to Worghern for your tremendous work! I've installed the package and it's really impressive. However, is anyone else having trouble getting the SweetFX shader working? I followed the Readme file closely (I've used SweetFX in other contexts and know how sensitive it is) -- correctly applied gfx settings in-game and also in my Nvidia Control Panel. But something is very clearly not working for me. For example, on the main game menu, the background fades in and out with this 'static' pattern and the text is blurry -- never seen anything like it. I've removed the Shader for now but would love to know if anyone else has gotten it working without difficulty?