Alchenar
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Posts posted by Alchenar
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Lol. It isn't like they have been idle the whole year.
Sorting out your shop is like cleaning your bathroom.
Yeah it takes a bit of time and a bit of effort and it's an under-appreciated job, but it should probably happen more than once a year!
On a more serious point: this kind of version housekeeping is something that Battlefront conspicuously lets slip (see: the poor guy in the Shock Force forum trying to work out what sequence of patches he needs from a clean install). I literally can't think of any other game that I could buy only to discover that I didn't have the most recent version.
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I think there's something to be said for the argument that the closer you get to 1:1 simulation, the more obvious the differences between the simulation and reality get whereas previously those differences would have been naturally accepted as part of the abstraction of the design.
Thus the better your game gets, issues arise that always existed latently but which people wouldn't have thought to raise earlier: see the ATG discussion currently going on.
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We will update Upgrade 2.0 and the various games and demos to current standards very soon. What you guys don't understand is that this is a massive time sucking PITA to do because we have to test everything fresh. Not to mention the several days of uploading/downloading that's involved.
Steve
That's really good news!
I do understand that it's a bit of a time drain and I appreciate that incorporating patches into the demo is a step above and beyond what anyone else does. I'm not sure however it's fair to imply I'm being impatient when it has literally been a whole year since 2.0 came out!
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On the topic of patching CM:BN: whatever happened to the plan to update the shop version to 2.0?
I get why it makes sense for the 2.0 upgrade to be charged for existing users (I happily paid for the Shock Force upgrade back in the day) but I made a decision way back to hold off on buying until I could just pay list price to get the most recent version... and then it never happened and the game just dropped off my radar.
It's really weird that I can't just buy the most recent version of the game straight up, because despite being more interested in Normandy than Italy, CM:BN has a $10 premium on it.
... except on closer inspection when you take into account the ongoing $20 discount on CM:BN then it comes out $10 cheaper than CM:Italy.
Which all just begs the question: why is the store set up in this horribly counter-intuitive way?
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Also bear in mind that if you are a committed fan then you've spent almost five years grappling with the CMx2 interface. Of course it isn't that bad to use now.
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"Everyone" is an excessively small pool and honestly, when do most people post? When they are unhappy. That is an unfortunate aspect of any survey process. People who are content generally don't feel the urge to comment, they have other priorities whereas people when upset tend to want to make sure someone knows they are disappointed. It doesn't say you are necessarily wrong, but it does make one want to make sure the data is reflective of what one is arguing it reflects. CMSF was a shock (no pun intended) for a lot of folks coming out and it did have a lot of issues. Given the theater and time frame for the game and the issues is it any wonder the reviews would be bad? On the other hand for BFC despite what you might see in those reviews it did quite well. Again is it simply a very vocal disaffected minority. Honestly I have no idea, but I suspect that to be the case. If it really were as bad as those reviewers say, why does the product in it's continuing additions do better?
In moving a little further and reading the CMBN user reviews we see some of our usual cast of characters trashing BFC and their direction so it is really hard to even include these for me.
Slight problem with your logic; a) the vast majority of users never post anyway; and
dissatisfied users don't generally vent on the forums, they just put the game away and never play it again.I would stick by my assertion that (while this is all a matter of personal opinion and therefore fundamentally subjective), when you get a preponderance of professional reviewers from different backgrounds all agreeing that the UI is difficult to use and poorly designed then that's as close as you will ever get to objective evidence.
e: ps. sorry Phil.
e2: also that last paragraph about grognard sneering wasn't about you but more generally - it's happened earlier in the thread
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*some words*.
Well given the problems of data gathering it would seem useful to look at an aggregate of review scores. Metacritic only has 4 for Normandy, but a few more for Shock Force, which is useful for our purposes because they share identical UIs and not that much has changed between them in terms of accessibility.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/combat-mission-shock-force
62% average from 15 professional reviews. And that's with a 95% outlier balancing the rather critical 45% from Gamespot.
If you look at the summaries, virtually all the the yellow (read:mixed) reviews mention either the lack of a real tutorial and the abysmal interface.
When everyone starts saying the same thing you have to accept that while you might not agree, you may not be right.
@ Phil:
Agreed. I played wargames in my youth where I was calculating vectors and typing in headings for units, and had a ball. I even liked Crawford's Bulge title (loved it, really), so I'm pretty sure I'm an odd barometer for wargame UIsfrom the link I posted earlier (and have quoted already)
the games are only tested by people whose entire attitude is “As long as it is easier than pushing 600 cardboard chits around a paper map, it’s a massive improvement!, so the designers never realize the games are unplayable.This! You are this guy, you see!
I know it's really trendy in grognard circles to sneer a bit at the mainstream as 'kiddies' games (much the way the mainstream PC audience sneers a bit at the console audience), but the main thing to remember about mainstream games is that by their nature they need to be thinking about accessibility all the time, whereas wargames developers already have their audience.
That's why in say, the Command and Conquer series you can see the UI getting more streamlined with every iteration, whereas in wargames we have a UI that's arguably gone backwards while being part of a simulation that accurately models how a shell from a Panther will impact on a particular varient of Stuart tank.
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"Right-click on units = invoking the orders menu you get with the Spacebar" is indeed an step in that direction.
I've seen lot of fancy mouse-centric control schemes. Some of them are neat, other are - literally - a pain. Do you mean the kind of "wheel menu" that seems to be favored in some RPGs? Something like pressing mouse right button, a circular menu appears, you need to keep the right button pressed while you hover through selections?
Ever played SWAT 4? Nobody's ever done it better than that.
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It in no way improves the player's interaction with commanding the units.
Well this is completely untrue. The way you interact with your units is entirely dependent upon how and when the game presents information about them, and is a fundamental part of UI design. Right now the game requires you to interact with units in order to receive critical information about them. The proposed change almost completely removes the need to do that in the majority of cases. That's the critical difference and improvement.
The combination of space-bar and assignable hot-keys gives a LOT of flexibility to players. Hot-keys need a proficient player. I am a casual gamer. All the games I have that rely on arcane hot-key combinations soon gather dust. I am unwilling to put the investment into memorizing and staying proficient with hot-keys.
I would like to see a mouse-centric control scheme which spells out your choices so memorization is not needed.
Firstly, I think I need to to at least concede that you're position is probably an outlier and that most people find hotkeys extremely useful. The problem with CM is that a) the hotkeys are not intuitive and so require memorisation (you'll notice in the mockup that as far as possible keys are assigned to the first letter of the order, and where not possible - eg. with 'cover arc' the designer chose 'v' - the key that looks like an arc; and
hotkeys change depending on what (terrible) command tab is selected.The problem here is not with hotkeys per se, but with the fact that hotkeys are implemented in CM:N in a way that completely negates their theoretical advantages.
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Thanks for searching for, and linking to, those threads. However, my original query stands: how would you integrate all these ideas into a newb-friendly UI? And, based on the criticisms raised, how do you make the UI intuitive?
Remember, for the purpose of this exercise, all functionality has to be retained. Add whatever you'd like. The entire UI is yours to design. Go for it. I'm seriously interested in what ideas will come forth.
Ken
I would literally mash together the two mockups in those threads.
This gives me some space in the middle-left of the bottom bar to play with. A better fire support window and interface would be nice, for a start you should select the support unit you want first and then the game should highlight the units capable of calling in and spotting a mission for it.
Internal edit: This is actually major example in which the interface works in a way counter-intuitively to how the player thinks. The player isn't constantly hovering behind his observers looking for opportunities to use them. The player (or I would assert most players') thought process is: 1. Aha! That's a prime target/area for an artillery strike. 2. What assets do I have available? 3. Ok, now who's best positioned to call in this strike?
The game interface forces you to invert stages 2 and 3 unnecessarily as you stumble about trying to work out whether or not it's even possible to strike the area you want, much less with the asset you want to use.
That'll still leave some space which could be used for a number of things. Personally, I wouldn't mind a persistent combat log that would notify you of newly spotted enemies, reinforcements arriving and whether or not an objective has actually been accomplished (yes, magically knowing whether or not a factory complex has been completely cleared is not realistic, but nor is being 'defeated' because you failed to spot the one guy cowering in a distant corner).
e: on the topic of things being more intuitive, there's massive scope for contextual orders. Left-click to select, right-click to order. Simple. I right click on a location and a menu pops up next to my cursor letting me specify the type of movement order (or whether I want to shoot at that location). Right-click on a vehicle, I get the options to embark, acquire etc etc.
Hotkeys usually speed up this functioning in games but they don't in CM:N because of the retarded decision to have keys do different things depending on which command tab is open.
e2: And I try to keep it mature but it blows my mind that someone actually sat down and designed that system and didn't realise how awful it was.
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Indeed, a really good article. I just want to note that WitE developers have been making improvements on the UI based on players' feedback. One funny comment about WitE just after release "Wow, this just doesn't like one of Gary Grigsby's games", because of pretty functional interface. TOAW is actually a community project, the UI (and the game engine) is now 13 years old. ATG, well, is ATG
For CM:BN the problem I see is that the kind of UI changes and improvements that have been discussed on the forums would require comparatively a lot more of programming work than in WitE (and I say, really a lot more).
Well, before WitE we had WitP:AE, where different teams worked on the land, sea and air components, with the result that all three work in completely different ways with no consistency between them.
Those threads that BletchleyGeek is keeping tabs on are excellent and address both the 'information is hidden' and 'buttons buttons everywhere but none I want to press' problem of CM:N. I also wouldn't mind getting a right-click pop-up command menu ala-Close Combat; now that was a game series with a good UI.
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Read it, found it interesting, but I guess I am still insane as making adjustments to the UI is still not at the top of my list. No amount of repetitive claims about how horrible it is are going to make it any more difficult for me to use. Sure there are things they could probably do to reorganize it, but it does the job for me and quite well. I don't know where we define killing the genre and putting off new players as there may be anecdotal statements by a number of individuals, but the only actual hard data we have for this particular product - BFC sales- says that is not the case and BFC is doing apparently quite well.
Here's the thing: if you were designing the Combat Mission UI from scratch, could you honestly say that you would do it in a way that looks anything like how it looks now?
The is the frustration that we come to time and again - the problem isn't spending extra development time on the UI; it's that the time spent is wasted on horrible decisions that make no sense.
e: mainly because:
"My contention is that it is poorly designed because of a feedback loop wherein the designers never test the games with new players, so new players never play the games, because they are unplayable, so the games are only tested by people whose entire attitude is “As long as it is easier than pushing 600 cardboard chits around a paper map, it’s a massive improvement!, so the designers never realize the games are unplayable."
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I rather liked the PC Zone descriptors of the scoring brackets: 90-100% meant a game that literally anyone within reason could pick up and enjoy without being a fan of the genre, 80-90% meant a game that was 'top of it's genre' and a must have, and 70-80% meant a game that was alright but had some glaring flaws that if you were a fan you would be able to forgive and enjoy. From that perspective 73% sounds just right.
Also everyone defending the Combat Mission interface is insane; it's a horrible, horrible system to use. The fact that many other wargames have worse interfaces is besides the point; all wargames have terrible interfaces and it's a problem that's killing the genre because it puts off new players. It's also especially hard to excuse given that as has already been pointed out - a bad interface takes just as much time to make as a good interface.
Also all wargamers should be forced to read this before they have opinions on what makes a good game or not.
e: yes, it's about operational level games but many of the rules still apply at the tactical level
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Given that the one absolute red-line for the Military was preserving the Imperial Dynasty it seems very arguable that a lot of lives could have been saved if the Allies had indicated that they were not planning to abolish the Monarchy. Certainly when dealing with a culture that placed so much emphasis on honour and 'saving face' that it conditioned soldiers to commit suicide rather than accept surrender it should have been recognised that getting a voluntary peace required offering an 'out' that would be acceptable.
Also too many people in this thread are committing the fallacy of viewing nuclear weapons from a post-cold war paradigm. Remember that at the time 'the bomb' was seen by all but a very few scientists working on the project as little more than an exceptionally large and efficient explosive. Too much is also being placed on the political dynamic of what Truman might have wanted. Truman's involvement in the dropping of the bombs amounted to little more than responding in the affirmative when asked 'hey, we have this really powerful weapon that we'd like to deploy, is that okay?' All the operational aspects of bombings were handled at a far lower level.
It seems odd living in a world where the US president has a briefcase giving him direct control of his nuclear arsenal near him at all times but the closest Truman was to the decision to drop the bombs was a polite note telling him that they'd probably be happening in a few days.
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Would it be so difficult to implement delays in pre-planned bombardments?
A scenario where you have to follow a rolling bombardment that you have no control over would be quite interesting.
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It is fixed. what ever issues are left are EXTREMELY minor. Hundreds of hours of great fun. You really can't beat that.
Panzershreks?
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A compromise might be video tutorials where things are shown. Like an AAR but more detailed.
I think perhaps the most practicable solution is to just accept that Battlefront have limited resources and make a push to do this as a community project. That would require a generally less elitist attitude and more inclusive attitude though.
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It's way too expensive and time-consuming to do an "in-game tutorial.'
But, a written guide through a scenario explaining the basics is essential if you want to broaden the base. I get the sense that some folks don't really want "outsiders" (non grogs/milpros) coming in.
No, that approach is terrible and does nothing to broaden the base for the reasons given in the video and in the article I linked earlier. Written guides don't work because a) something unexpected might happen,
'show, don't tell' c) the game is fullscreen and most people will buy it online and not have a manual in front of them.It might not be realistic to expect an 'in-game tutorial' but there is no satisfactory alternative that will make the game appealing to new players.
I'd also take issue with the suggestion that Combat Mission is more 'complex' than games like Portal. It really isn't, just different. Portal is a game about taking familiar mechanics (everyone understands newtonian physics) and applying them to continuously unfamiliar contexts (portals allow you to do things that aren't possible in reality). Combat Mission is about taking unfamiliar mechanics (no, it is not an acceptable solution to 'go away and read some books on WW2 tactics') and applying them to familiar contexts ('oh, it's a village').
That's why a front-loaded tutorial is so important. Unless you explain why something is happening then it's entirely a hit-and-miss affair as to whether the player will realise that what they are doing is wrong. Hills are a good example. Most people have a vague notion that 'the high ground' is a good thing to have. Unless you explain what 'hull-down' is and show what the difference between being hull-down and silhouetted I'll wager most new players will park their tanks on top of the nearest hill and then get all upset when they die.
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Read some good WW2 books on small unit tactics...learn the basic fundamentals of combat...then try them out in the game...
I am abit touchy about things at the minute. I recommended a Sim to someone who found the one he had abit to difficult. I even found the patch needed and emailed it to him..they bought it and then without any real practice declared with in two days he was misled and the Sim is the worse he has ever come across...for one the Sim is highly renowned and the sim he found to hard he says is easier...which anyone would tell you wasn't the case...
Being accused of misleading him really pee'd me off....he wouldn't put in the practice and juts wirte the sim off as he wanted instant gratification...
My point is a decent manual explaining the UI and editors etc is all thats really required... and maybe some youtube videos (Battle for the Bulge by Panther games released several training movies which went down really well)...after this I honestly feel that practice and learning through trail by error playing a small scenario is the best way to get to grips with a wargame...also read abit about warfare (at the particular scale and conflict) the wargame portrays
Nonononononononono. You are very wrong. The game needs to explain how and why certain things happen or players end up just foundering about in the dark.
See here for an excellent article on the problem (that focuses on operational wargames but is largely equally applicable to tactical level games like combat mission).
Specifically:
Those Who Can’t, Don’t TeachEvery war game should have an in-game tutorial. Advanced Tactics, War in the East, and The Operational Art of War don’t.
This, for me, is such a basic element of good game design that I’m constantly surprised when I see it violated. A game without a tutorial is like a movie without popcorn; like sex without foreplay; like a hamburger without French fries. A game without a tutorial is incomplete.
Sure, let me skip the tutorial if I’m sure I don’t need it. But in a sufficiently complex game the tutorial can do so much heavy lifting that to skip it is madness. It can introduce you to the user interface. It can acquaint you with the basic controls of the game. It can allow you, as a software developer, to hide more advanced controls and still be confident that the user will be told where to find them.
All three of the games I’m looking at in this article do “Tutorial by manual”. This means that they provide a “tutorial scenario” which you use by reading the manual and following along. This is inadequate on multiple levels. First, it means that you are told what to do instead of being shown what to do, which is less effective. Second, it opens the possibility that the player may go off-script. Going off-script is a vital part of learning how to play a game well, but is a big mistake during the early parts of a tutorial. Many games split the difference by tightly scripting the beginning few turns of a tutorial, and then at some point telling the player “OK, from here on out you are on your own.” Lastly, I have never seen a manual-based tutorial that adequately helped focus the player’s attention on what was important, as opposed to what is simply present.
Advanced Tactics also ships with several “training scenarios” which set up simplified battles. For example, the first battle is on a featureless plain, with identical numbers of troops, but with one side using armor and the other using infantry. The next scenario is the same, only this time in forested terrain and giving the infantry player bazookas. The third scenario introduces artillery, and so on. This set of teaching scenarios did more to teach me about the game than the manual-driven tutorial. In my fantasy world, these scenarios would have been presented as an in-game tutorial that also introduced me to the various UI elements I needed to use to (for example) perform artillery attacks. The tutorials would have explained the effect that being out of supply has on a unit’s readiness. The tutorial would have explained how to generate political points and how to use them to create new headquarters, and how to transfer staff between them. As it is, I groped through the dark, eventually figuring all these things out.
Despite what the abused customers of ultra-grognard developers might tell you, figuring these things out by yourself does not make you a better person.
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If your coming from a Company of Heroes background your going to need a tutorial!
CMx2 is real tactical wargame.....
Speaking of which... Company of Heroes had an absolutely fantastic tutorial that introduced all of the significant game concepts to you in a very clear 'show, then do' manner. This should be emulated as much as is practicable and basic combat situations and the basic responses need to be covered.
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Your question to me was “not sure what you mean?”
I answered it.
I don’t intend to answer the broader question as many pages have already been devoted to it and if you not wish to invest some effort looking it up, I’m certainly not going to invest the effort to type it all out again just for you.
Way to be a massive dick.
Euri, the answer is that the windows you see are an abstraction and that typically everyone can shoot. No idea if a blank wall provides more protection than windows but it certainly provides concealment.
Edit: I mean really, wargames are hard enough to get into and it does nothing for the community when innocent questions provoke rude, sacastic and utterly worthless responses. If you wanted to be helpful, dig up the link and offer it. If you didn't want to go to that effort, type up that one sentence that I did there. If you don't want to be helpful, don't post.
Saying 'I won't help someone who won't help themselves' is a horribly selfish attitude to take because it just creates a catch 22 scenario where you are never obliged to be helpful because anyone who fulfills your criteria to 'deserve' an answer doesn't need help.
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As others have said, there's plenty of variety. Individuals can also be branded Fanatical, similar to CMx1. These guys get a Morale bonus which is, like CMx1, hidden from the player so you don't misuse/abuse the unit the particular soldier is in.
I think it would be kinda cool to somehow track individual soldier feats of heroism and indicate that, somehow, in the user interface so the player could notice and remember who did something extreme and out of the ordinary. Perhaps we will someday add this to the game as it isn't in conflict with anything CM stands for. However, it will require a bit of work to get this sort of thing to function since, currently, there is no sense of tracking individual accomplishments nor evaluating them.
Steve
I'm sure this has been asked before but: why doesn't CMx2 track individual kills?
It wasn't just fun, it was quite useful to come to the end of a scenario in CMx1 and discover that one unit in a particular place or used in a particular way was far more effective that you realised when playing.
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Correct. The end can be at a fixed time, or some variable amount of time after a fixed time.
For example, the scenario design could specify 30minutes/turns, and that's exactly how long it will last. Alternately, the specify 30+10 which means the scen will last somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes.
It would be nice to add the option for opponents to consensually extend the time limit, there's no reason to take control of that out of the players' hands.
"Okay so you won, want to play out the next five minutes and see how that assault I ran out of time for would have panned out?"
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I have seen quite a few pics of German tanks with their turrets blown off, but just how common that actually was I have no idea. I expect that the more spectacular images are the ones that get reproduced more often in more venues.
Michael
The number of times you come across references on all sides to tankers putting multiple shells into already knocked out tanks implies that the typical disabling shot doesn't actually look like anything. (barring notorious exceptions like the Sherman and T-34 tanks).
...the two most common tanks in the war. Then again those reputations come from the same people who kept putting shells into the tank until they saw that big fiery explosions so they're possibly to an extent not valid as indications as to whether a tank died, just what would happen if you hit it hard enough.
edit no 2: there's one obvious way to tell: check for survival rates of tankers. A tank that explodes is going to kill all it's crew. My vague recollection is that 3.5 crew usually escaped a german tank that had been knocked out.
dissatisfied users don't generally vent on the forums, they just put the game away and never play it again.
First impression
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
Having installed my gog.com copy of CM:BO the other day for notstalgia purposes I can't quite believe that anyone would genuinely want to revert from the freeform camera to the old-style camera.