Ithikial_AU

@JonS @IanL Unsure if it's another bug/glitch introduced since the campaign was made or a prob with the OOB. Next mission I got an interesting 'Tommy' tagging along for the ride.

Yep.

Hopefully as well as an 'Undo' button. Certainly looking forward to some editor enhancements one day through an upgrade.

Cheers Ian. It happened again further into the mission whe some Sextons got into a traffic snarl and one dropped down into the drink. Same spot as the Shermans at the 'end' of the bridge as they tried to exit back onto dry land. Sadly, quite a bit of reloading of saves had to happen in this mission to get through it. Given there's only one path over river for the vehicles the bug sort of dictated the scenario. Still a good challenging mission @JonS .

When I somehow managed to knock out Four Tigers in One minute. Video proof:

PM with dropbox link sent last night. Hope it's enough.

... again. An old one but still alive a kicking by the looks of it. Unfortunately a smokescreen lifted a little too early and one of my tanks was pinged on the bridge. Not destroyed but crew dismounted. The traffic jam behind them decided to try and go around the dismounted vehicle and proceeded to drop down into the river below. Anyone need a save file I've got one.

<-- Persistent caller for a push towards early-mid war titles. I remember fondly the fun times playing Barbarossa era scenarios in the CMBB days. Some weird and wonderful kit that's already been discussed is a draw card for me but then there's also all the fun little Axis minor nations. Given the attention to detail we're getting in CMFI with the smaller Allied nations... no love in the future for Hungary, Romania, Finland... even the Spanish Blue Division? The biggest drawcard though is the array of new challenges for players fighting tactical battles in a different 'era' of the war. No panzerfauts/schrecks/zooks alone changes everything when you are playing with and against armour. Or when you spot a Panzer IV and shurg but then realise you're playing a scenario set in 1941 and you have AT Rifles and grenades. I'm just a bit concerned for BF and the sheer logistical nightmare of keeping so many base games updated with each engine upgrade. In my perfect world they would have modules pushing Red Thunder back towards Kursk and then start of a new family for the first half of the Eastern Front when the Germans were more the dominant power. Combat Mission: Grey Lightning?

Thanks. Yeah similar tables appear in his Battle of Arrcourt book he released last year. A big help but as mentioned in the OP it only focuses on the calibre of the gun rather than variants. Thanks for everyone for chipping in. At least I know I'm not going nuts trying to find a golden source when there probably isn't one.

A question I've asked in some different places in the past but am still hunting for some hard evidence. One for the tank grogs. Does anyone have any sources that talk about deployment patterns for the different Sherman variants as they moved from the North American factories to the US Armored Divisions and independent Tank Battalions? For example, (fictional example) the US 2nd Armored were provided and used M4A1's until around August 1944 when replacements meant the division were primarily armed with the M4A3. Most sources say a formation had Shermans and leave it at that. (A handful do however mention the take up of 76mm over the 75mm). This partly revolves around information for the Arracourt pack of scenarios a group of us are working on (sorry for those following, it's progressing slowly given RL), but also it would be good to have a handy reference for some future projects I have in mind. For Arracourt we're pretty clear on the 4th Armored Divsision's ToE as of mid September 1944 but this is mostly from the array of photographs taken from the time and varying second hand accounts rather than a written primary source. Any help appreciated.

I maybe seeing things but I just noticed my game got a bit smoother and my FPS jumped a bit with just one setting change. I've just been playing around with Nvidia settings trying to get OBS to work with CM. I haven't noticed this before but in the Nvidia control panel there is an OpenGL Render selector now for appropriate applications like CM. By default it's set to Auto Select. I switched mine to manually select my GTX980. Relaunched CMFB and I'm getting a pretty stable frame rate. 40 FPS for the last mission in KG Peiper campaign and a solid 25 FPS in the final mission of the much larger Aachen campaign (city map). My graphics are set to Best for both in game settings. The key difference is I'm noticing my mouse and keyboard input is a lot smoother than before and when I went back to Fraps to see some FPS counts it didn't jump around as much as I moved the camera about while some action played out on screen. Yeah definitely no programmer or techy, but could something in the game or the GPU drivers have been trying to use in part the inbuilt motherboard GPU (or computer just getting confused), rather than simply throwing everything at the dedicated video card until I told it to? I'm using the Nvidia drivers that came out in late October. (388.0) Can someone else test this? It can't be that simple.

Reminds me of the fun I had making the ruined Carpiquet for the second half of my campaign. The abilitiy to import the state of a map after a 'battle' would have saved so much time and probably made the end result far more random than it was with me manually placing every crater. It's amazing how easy it is to see patterns in your own work once you review it in the 3D environment. I also hope for your own sanity whenever there is an early / mid war east front title there is someway to import this work across. Anyway impressive. Keep up the good word.

It's a little bit to the side of this topic to the above but is still relating to delays in waypoint movements. I'm not upset to see the end of the command delays from the CM1 days, (though appreciate their simulation intent), but what is annoying for me is the inability to purposefully delay one units actions until another unit's action reaches a set point. In other words - waypoint syncing. For example the ability for two fireteams to stack up on different sides of a building and then breach at the same time to mutually support each other. Yes you can try to do this with the pause command but it's an awful lot of guess work for the player, particularly when they are coming from different starting positions. You'd imagine it would be a pretty easy order to relate on the ground - particularly for troops with training. "Squad 1: Wait there until Squad 2 reaches X position and then move to position Y." The only way to take the guesswork out of this at the moment is to let the timer run down and then commence the next minute's commands seperately. It wastes an awful lot of time for WeGo players especially in urban environments with lots of buildings to clear. The above has probably cropped up before (probably from me), but I was reminded of the issue again while I was playing CMBS in the weekend.

Though I've appreciated BF's approach/policy on aircraft in game, over time there's a number of issues that have cropped up. But for the modern era namely: a ) their policy of not including aircraft on map assumes battles are fought in ideal circumstances for both sides. ie Just because a troop transport helicopter shouldn't be anywhere near the front front lines doesn't mean it can't be 'caught out' in the wrong place/wrong time. Or in another case maybe the defenders are caught out without any AA capability in a sector allowing the attacker to capitalise? This can limit scenario design opportunities. b ) the CM map sizes have grown considerably which would allow some level of helicopter manouver. Not just for helicopters potentially appearing on map to offload troops, it would be good to be able to tell a pilot in game to 'approach from the west' if you think they will get a better chance of spotting the target from that direction/receive less incoming ground fire. c ) having at least maybe landed/crashed helicopter/aircraft available in the editor for designers to program scenarios around would be a nice in between approach. Giving the player freedom to experiment (and make horrendous mistakes) shouldn't be discounted as a big draw for these games. Once the modules for CMFB are released you can bet many of us will line a battalion of Pershings and Tigers, grab some popcorn and hit the red button. For the modern era titles, if a player really wants to have a 'Ride of the Valkyries' moment and send a platoon of troops mounted in Blackhawks into the Russian lines, let them do it... and let them get a whole lot of corpses and scrap metal back in return. But I'm guessing the programming and artwork effort would be huge. My two cents including sales tax.

For the fellow weather grogs. I bumped into this website the other week. It's in French but pretty easy to get a handle on. It's a day by day record on minimum and maximum temperatures, and rainfall on a day by day basis across the European theater. http://www.infoclimat.fr/cartes/observations-meteo/archives/cumul-de-pluie-sur-24h/6/juin/1944/00h/france.html I'm assuming they reference old weather charts and have converted them to a digital based map/observation.

Um... it's been a while I may have been mistaken.

If you use Mad Mike's campaign extraction tool it should generate the campaign script text file you can edit as a template for your own campaign. Otherwise PM me in the near future with an email and I'll see if I can dig out the one I created for Lions of Carpiquet. It's pretty self explanatory once you get the hang of it. Formating became more a problem than the values.

No business is fully transparent to the customer - especially privately owned firms. The customer 99% of the time doesn't give a damn about how the good or service is produced as long as they pay what they feel is a fair price and it meets their expectations. (There's a reason so may different marketing and research firms exist to help big corporations work this difficult equation out). Don't believe me? Many people will (rightfully) be outraged about the working conditions they see reported in clothing sweatshops across parts of Asia... and then they see a new sweater being sold for $10 at a local store and buy it without reading where it's made. They buy it because it's A) it's cheap, B ) it keeps them warm and looks nice. Most of us have no idea how software development occurs or in this case the guts of how the CM engine works and the amount labour required by BF for updates and new content. Most of BF's customers will look at the product and weigh up in their mind if the asking price looks good and if the product meets their expectations. The fact BF are still in business and don't have to lower their prices within months of release like a Call of Duty (or any other AAA title) being sold via Steam, it's pretty safe to say they have enough customers thinking they are doing a good job. ++++ Bringing this topic back on topic. It is still possible in the editor to reflect the different levels of reinforcemetns from Battallion/Regiment etc, however it is fully in the hands of the designer to determine when they should occur. The designer needs to be very confident in the state of the players forces as they go down different pathways of a campaign based on previous win's and losses. Having victory points assigned to reflect friendly casualties can be a big help in this regard and prevents the player being awarded a "Total Victory" for taking all the terrain based objectives but losing 80% of their forces in the process. The designer should in this case still push the player down the 'loss' track and apply reinforcements in this instance as it's doubtful what's left of the player's force could do much more in future missions. The secret to getting this 'right'? Plan, plan, plan, plan and then plan some more. Having a flow chart drawn showing each of the scenarios you plan to build for your campaign and how the player reaches each of them is a big help. Designing your campaign OOB in detail in it's own file (something you'll need to do anyway for a campaign) needs to be done with a very precise level of detail. (There's a reason some people around here call those who have made a campaign mad. ) I've also found writing the (first draft) briefings up front can help work out the general situation you as a deisgner expect the player to be in when reaching this scenario they are about to fight. I also created a 'Victory Point' calculator to help designers mess around with Victory Conditions and objectives and test the varied different outcomes players could potentially achieve. http://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/?p=4236 Hope that's a start.

Any chance of getting an FPS counter hot key added to the game for end users at some point? At least then the FPS result will be coming from the same source for when users report problems. Should add that I've always had issues with FPS across multiple machines I've played the games on, and I splurge on top end graphics cards (mostly for other titles) and CPUs when it's time for a new desktop. It's not as bigger issue for a game like CM compared to other AAA titles that's for sure, but with a 4GB VRAM card and plenty of regular RAM it does still jar a bit when the FPS counter dips and the draw distance for detailed terrain textures are so close to my viewpoint at some elevations.

Check your graphics cards settings. Turn off FXAA anti-aliasing for Combat Mission titles. It's the usual culprit for this problem.

I've never found much use for them personally, but if your battle plan relies on backing up a halftrack towards the enemy I think you need to rethink your plan. My (rough) understanding was they were more for adding extra lead into the sky against low flying aircraft - something a bit pointless given the time frame of the current titles. I'm also 99% sure that in game only dedicated flak units can shoot up at aircraft as they approach and fly over the map, making the extra MG moot.

Good to see it's being put to good use.

****Double post****

Yeah it was always in the back of my mind and would have been the big reason not to attempt to recreate Operation Windsor given the static nature of the 36 hour engagement, but the Vehicle Pack release and the new shiney toys made it all the more worth while. If the player follows the barrage instruction in the second mission, it should be roughly close to what you see in later missions but it was never going to be exact to the ruined version of Carpiquet map I made for later missions. The other option was just to start on a ruined map but that would take away from some of the atmosphere and be a bit of a break from history in the opening turns as the Canadians marched behind a creeping brrage. One of the sources I read quoted an NCO calling it "World War 1-esque" tactics for a WW2 combined arms battle. Even some of the BF stock campaigns have hit the same issue. The Scottish Corridor campaign springs to mind. I remember I magically received a free church for hard cover in Gavrus after blasting it to smithereans the mission before. Persistent battle damage/wrecks is certainly one of my top wishlist items as someone who likes scenario design (when I get the time ).

Plotting AI plans in the 3D Editor?