ZPB II

So, every once in a while something random and possibly chaotic occurs. I've come to think of WW2-era rifle grenades as an area weapon, not possessing the accuracy of modern systems. I've seen a lot of them fired in CMx2 and most of the time the result is an explosion in the general direction of the enemy and suppression. Sometimes a light tank or a halftrack or such is knocked out or damaged at point-blank range. Doing some testing, I saw a very skilled and lucky (or maybe they're always that accurate but I'm having a streak of bad shots) rifle grenade operator. I hope the video is not too dark, the original file was a lot brighter but the Youtube conversion made it way more dim. The site was nice enough to recognize the video as being dark and offered to brighten it up automatically but the end result looked like a heap of melted down plastic toys at a rave party. I'm too lazy to install video editing software on this machine right now to manually brighten it up. So, uh. Share those outliers. If you have screenshots or videos, even better. I wish I had taken some of all the random events in all these years.

Screw work, the Internet is more fun! You make a good point about winter. I've been thinking about it and I'm really curious how BFC will tackle the challenge that is fighting a war in wintertime. CMA had winter in it, but it was a bit lacking in that aspect, IMO. The coldest I've ever been exposed to personally is -50 celsius so that is, umm, -58F? So I wonder what the TacAI should do if you leave your men lying in the snow. They need to move or they die, but if they move they will get spotted and so on. There will be footprints and tracks. Heavy snow will affect explosive and ballistic performance. Unrealiable gear is notoriously unreliable in the cold. When your men sweat or their clothes soak in water, they will be so very vulnerable if they stop moving. How much of a morale and performance hit this should incur in the game is up to debate. Also of interest is how supply and winter gear is handled. A lot of this stuff ofcourse has to be abstracted heavily, but it needs to be noticeable. I want there to be high fidelity in the portrayal of winter so it is not simply a different set of textures with lovely christmas snow decoir. But I'm very confident that BFC will get it right, or close to right. I'm under the impression that Steve lives somewhere in the middle of not really much where man is still wrestling with nature. Or maybe he has a comfortable office in the city these days, I don't know.

Have you considered a change of scenery? I won my third wife in a friendly game of arm-wrestling and the fourth was simply a matter of me changing the oil and fixing the gearbox on her old man's tractor. That and a bottle of Koskenkorva. I kid, I kid. Never had a wife. Only seriously dated once. Commitment is a bad word. Being free to fly is the way to go. I'm actually pro-feminism but I make, uh, chauvinist jokes to, uh, highlight the discrepancy inherent in the system. I met this extremely hardcore leftist feminist lé artisté girl who wanted to crush balls, burn sacks and pillage nuts and...funny how that turned out. I should probably be working instead of writing unrelated off-tangent anecdotes on the Internet.

This point simply cannot be stressed enough. The way CMx1 worked, even though it was pretty realistic and cutting edge was very simplified compared to CMx2. The amount of data you need for a single vehicle to do it's thing is truly quite something. In CMx1 you needed a low poly model and entered in the parameters that in abstract dictated how the system performed. (for example, I'm fairly certain that CMx1 used rather simplified spotting values) In CMx2 I can see it taking several days, maybe weeks to model a single vehicle, depending on complexity. This whole vision block thing is blowing my mind, first you have to do the historical research to find out exactly which model had vision blocks where, did they have magnification, what quality was used generally, how accessible the ports were to what crew member etc...Then after having acquired this information, you need to figure out how to model it ingame and after that is done, you have to do profane amounts of testing to be sure that everything works properly. Then there are the few people who want a lot. I've seen the opinion that BFC should have produced the entire East Front 1941-1945 for 55$. BFC has said (IIRC) that CMBB almost was their economic downfall. It was simply so much work for such a little price. And this was CMx1. The workload for the high fidelity CMx2 engine...ouch, I'd rather not think about it. Also, relative spotting and how it affects the AI. The more I try to wrap my head around it technically the more it starts to hurt. It's no wonder pretty much, uh, almost no games at all utilize true relative spotting. Truly sourcery code. (These are just my uneducated guesses based on having observed both engines. I don't have access to the dev toolkit nor have I hacked the executable. And I'm not a programmer, I just try to think in pseudocode so I have a better understanding of what is viable and what is not. Sometimes a monkey slings poo at you if you do unreasonable requests!)

Sort of amusing reading the ramblings of "that guy who used to post here." It's not hard to see who has an axe to grind, that's pretty one-sided slam flavoured with some personal spin. Like the very strong insinuation that BFC has watered down their product to gain mass market appeal. That really is a first, usually it's the other way around. You know, how instead of water BFC mixed in growth hormone and peyote, scaring away sensible casual folk. Which I approve. The hardcore edge, not the illicit substances. I also like that he apparently has very limited insight on how game development works, going by quotes like this: "judging by all the features that they are now furiously trying to weld back into the game engine, after having proudly stripped them out" Good job, way to understand technology. It says "User Reviews" not "User Opinions." I feel mislead.

Cool, that was probably the Parola armoured museum, a great place to visit. My father did his military service there and many moons ago he took me sneaking around his old hood. We almost got driven over by a T-72 on exercise. T-55s and T-72s have since been scrapped and replaced with Leopard 2A4s. A lot of the equipment used to be Soviet made, but this was part of the political game to please the Big Bear during the Cold War. Pretty much everything is Western kit these days, but I don't agree with all of it. Russian gear is proven to work in demanding conditions. But the current political climate is leaning towards NATO and NATO compatible gear. Offhand, I think we had domestic assault rifles and combat gear, Israeli radios and thermal vision, Swedish and German AFVs with US made primary weapon platform, US air support, Swiss UAVs, Swedish and Israeli ATGMs, French and US rocket launchers... PKM machine guns and a lot of the howitzers were Soviet era gear. BMP-2s are still being used in some units but I can see them being replaced very soon. Pretty much every training exercise, no matter how it is handicapped, the modernized CV90 mechanized units trump BMP-2 units with their old kit. Oh, even though the assault rifles are Finnish they fire a Soviet cartridge. You could say the kit is very international.

Great video! I will nitpick about the messed up audio channels, though. If you want military porn propaganda, although not directly CMSF2 related check out this channel for 181 videos with reasonably nice production values: http://www.youtube.com/user/DefenceForcesFinland There's a lot to watch there. I don't know what would be a good example. I liked this one. No, I'm not biased or anything. How could I be?

I had no idea you could get medical MJ in Arizona. Learn something new every day. If you want MMJ in here, hah, good luck! You'll be wrestling doctors and officials for years. And get harassed. And you still won't get it. Very progressive. But this is blatantly offtopic.

By the fanboy thing I mean ad hominem. Basically one doesn't listen to what another has to say because one thinks the other is a "fanboy/hippie/neo-marxist/republican/listens to ABBA/likes ice cream" and so on. I was a bit hasty in playing the double-contra-fanboy card. I have a mild concussion and quite the fever, so I'm easily irritated. I agree about the side effects, the community fragmenting and so on. But it seems like an inevitable thing that happens with everything when stuff expands and more variety is added. I guess there are ways around this, but. The big opinion difference is that I don't personally see CMx2 full price products as mere extensions. My opinion stems from having developed content and having fiddled around with game development. Content is content. Some people don't accept writing as legitimate work! I can only imagine the horror that is doing historical research and trying to please a grognard audience.

I have similar experiences. Partly I blame it on an old computer struggling to run the improved graphics, nothing new there only natural. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility of some shader related crashes as I feel more users have reported crashing than before. There are also some crashes in menus, QB menus especially, that I think have been reported to BFC by others and I assume will be fixed in the patch. Thankfully the editor has never crashed on me. (knock on wood) Also, I remember reading about the delete save game button. I have never used it but I think someone explained that it works in a counterintuitive way. Or maybe it's intuitive. Can't say since I haven't tried. Try selecting a save first then pressing delete, or first pressing delete and then selecting a save. Or sumfink.

I see what you did there, that's kind of the fanboy card being played. This is a hobby. Hobbies cost time and money. As far as hobbies goes, this is a somewhat inexpensive one. Another hobby of mine is making music. It is a quite expensive hobby. Some of the manufacturers I like have software product catalogues whose total price far, far exceeds BFC's offering. I don't see that as them pumping that money out of my pocket. I see it as them offering a wide range of choices that I am free to either purchase or not. You also have the freedom to decide if you want to purchase all the products, only some or none at all. And that's fine. Playing the fanboy card is not fine. It's a bit lame. If you want constructive discussion, please tell us in a constructive way at what point of the development cycle BFC is ripping us off and how. CMFI has one brand new army from scratch, existing armies had to be remade with new organization and graphics. The terrain graphics are new. It has a new version of the engine. And this is from a niche developer. Mainstream developers can charge you 20 bucks for 4 new multiplayer maps for an FPS game. And don't get that wrong, making a map for an FPS game is hellacious work. But still. "I don't like something and everyone who disagrees with me is a fanboy" is not constructive discussion. All the best. EDIT: Oh, and. Just to make sure we are all on the same page. We are still talking about herbal viagra, right?

No such thing as a free lunch. Content does not materialize out of thin air and I think a lot of people would be surprised by the amount of work that goes into creating a game. 55 dollars is a lot of money, but when put into perspective, everything is so very expensive these days. The most expensive movie ticket here costs 16,5 euros. The last time I went to a theatre, it cost me a single CMx2 game. You can get two CMx2 games for the price of a decent seat at the opera. Feeling like a bungee jump? That's two and a half games. Even a most conservative stint at a weekend techno festival can end up costing four to six CMx2 games. Take a girl to a fancy dinner, oh my... Hell, I just had to pay 9,5 euros for a 10-condom pack. A litre of fuel is about 1,75 - 1,85 euros. That is some pretty expensive entertainment right there. Don't get me started on the prices of the herbal and beer... For me, CMx2 has been a bargain. I'm glad there's plenty of choices to pick from, one is not required to buy all the titles. I have though, but I'm addicted. Besides, I'd much rather see the BFC boys floating around on a yacht than say, a stock broker or a rapper who has discovered autotune.

I had no idea Makin was released. Good thing you posted that. Duh, I've been paying too much attention to the CMFI forums and neglected the CMBN forums. EDIT: The Japanese Army mod thread has 23 pages? This is going to take a while.

Were you visited by G-Men afterwards?

Isn't that kind of what firefights are centered around? Trying to find a place and conditions from where you can apply firepower while minimizing exposure while the other guy is doing the same thing. All the other stuff is just filler. Tactics are always easy. They're written down in textbooks and broken down into very simple components. Execution is what makes the difference that matters.

I understand the frustration. Personally I don't find LOS so problematic. Most of the time I just eyeball it and draw some vague LOS lines and that does the job. What has caused most of my issues with buildings has been my failure to check if the building actually has windows. If the building is intact and the wall facing the enemy is just that, a wall, there will be trouble. I assume there are many methods people use to quickly check which buildings are viable but I just skim around the map with control clicks and use V to have a quick look at the building faces. But, most of the time the LOS is logically straightforward and simple eyeballing is enough. If unsure about a few locations, a waypoint and a LOS check from there to confirm takes only a few seconds. I've played a lot of twitch games so I guess I'm used to pushing an UI to the limit. I don't find it frustrating, but I can see how it can feel like that.

Danger! Excitement! Loud noises! The cruel whims of fate touch your pixeltruppen and highlight the horror and chaos that is war! The tentacle monster from deep space has concocted a small scale scenario, a 700m x 500m hillside map where the attacking force is a bit less than a full company. Available are two versions, one for play Vs. the AI and another for H2H play. A company of US infantry is tasked with taking important high ground from the Germans under the cover of darkness in preparation for the morning attack. The Germans are enjoying artillery superiority in the sector, assault the hilltops and take out forward observers, command structure and field guns before the sun rises and exposes your men climbing up the hillside. The player is provided with plentiful time to plan and accomplish his objectives, the scenario clock is rather merciful. You may take your time but there will be tradeoffs. Last minute tweaking, testing and bugfixing is taking place, expect this to be available at the nearest Repository in a few days. Here's a few screenshots, they show up fine on my machine but may be too dark for some. It is not as dark in-game, but you can use Alt+B (don't know what it is on the Mac) to toggle the artificially bright night mode.

Here's a few screenshots I took while playtesting stuff: "Do you see him, Peter? I swear he was right there a moment ago!" They spent that turn shooting at their respective targets, blissfully unaware of eachother. It was dark (the screenshot is taken with Alt+B artificially bright night lighting), the entire MG team was suppressed as mortars rained from the sky while the breach dude stormed the trench. The next turn was rather interesting. That guy earned his medal, posthumously unfortunately. And here's an old screenshot of the occult Tiger that could.

Looks great, although the amount of buildings gives me a foreboding feeling that this won't run all that well on my machine. Keep up the good work.

If one sits down and watches this little film it may help in the eternal quest to understand the past, the present and the future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCtj9k6HqKE Perspective may change. Patterns might not. War does not.

Good one Mord! Though that is a bit of a gloomy namesake, I say. Now, this Hind Commander thing does seem interesting. It's been ages since I've played a proper tabletop game. Hhmm...A potential nostalgy trip... Reminds me, I once saw a Russian documentary about the conflict and it included interviews of a Hind commander (?) Need to do some digging...

Ok, disregard what I wrote earlier. This is no joke, after writing that post I went on to browse some Finnish news sites. A particularly gruesome headline caught my eye. It involved a hospital, a man, an eel...and...umm...The word rectal was used and, uhh. Anyway, what an unfortunate accident I'm sure. The man was treated and survived. The fate of the poor and undoubtedly distressed animal was left unknown. I don't think I need to mention the country where these events had transpired. Actually, after some consideration I concluded that such tragic accidents can happen to cool and nice folk so disregard this post too.

Now this is the kind of stuff that makes one want to do a fistpump and shout "Awesome!" I tried using a more Nordic expression but I couldn't get around the word censor. Also, I watched that video and now I'm thinking that Nuuzuland is the coolest place with the nicest folk. Surely Nuuzulanders can't be that modest and nonchalant. I had this mental image of an anarcho-feral society where beer is being drunk and stuff is being hit with clubs. Too much television, I guess. One of these days I'm going to have to read a book.

Killkess, I wasn't specifically referring to this situation. It's clearly wrong and I'd love to see it fixed. It was meant as food for thought for when this discussion enters the fuzzier areas of the game and AI. I have fired several belts with a 1/5 tracer mix from PKMs and KvKK62s in a LMG/MMG configuration at targets and inspected the hits so I have a limited perspective on machineguns.

Paper Tiger is not the only beta tester and external developer in this thread, therefore the statement wasn't exactly accurate. (This might also be an inaccurate statement, since I don't know how deep in the rabbit hole he or she or maybe it is!)