BletchleyGeek

You guys need to touch base with Randy Cassingham's email newsletter "This is true" http://www.thisistrue.com

Possibly yes. But, given how LOS and LOF computations are handled in the engine, they probably can't be fired upon from angles they could IRL, I suspect that here BF has chosen not to double dip with abstractions.

I've got lower order numbers than Aragorn, and the license isn't working for me, mate. Order number 310082 and (possibly) 310088. Merry christmas!

Next April will be six years since the release of CMBN... a lot has happened in my real life since then too

That's exactly what I am getting when I try to activate CMRT using the "offline" option. Since you did already the bug report, maybe you will want to refer to this thread in it.

Hi guys, I have managed to activate all the games but CMRT. CMFB gave me some trouble, but as I was finishing reporting the issue via the helpdesk I tried again and it worked. In one of the still failed attempts to activate CMRT, I got a glimpse of a message reading "Could connect to online activation servers". This doesn't seem to be a matter with Windows 10 firewall or stuff, the CMFB issue happened on a laptop running Win 7 SP 2.

A similar feature was basically broken for six years on a game very well known for the capability of the AI of having their units to move in formation. It isn't an easy problem. Good to hear from you guys, and please, don't refund me more orders of the upgrade for CMRT v4 - I bought the bundle but the person I am buying the upgrade for only has CMRT PS: BTW, the new download interface is showing me items as available it shouldn't, like the full MacOS versions of the games.

Yes.

I am not sure it is precisely a silver bullet. Or at least the picture is a bit muddled. I have been keeping tabs on how war games have been doing on Steam for some time on http://steamspy.com, specifically titles like: Gary Grigsby's War In The East Graviteam Tactics: Operation Star Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front Close Combat: Panthers in the Fog Battle Academy Battle Academy 2: Eastern Front IL-2 Shturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad Ultimate General: Gettysburg American Civil War (Early Access) Command Modern Air Naval Operations Scourge of War: Waterloo Children of a Dead Earth Take the figures listed there with a grain of salt, they're unreliable, but sure they're more accurate than most recent exit polls and it gives you the variance of the poll :-) Also, keep in mind that: Publishers like Slitherine offer free of charge Steam keys, so many of the 'owners' listed actually bought the game via the publisher's store. All of the above, with the exception of GG's WITE, Mius Front, IL2 and the follow up to Ultimate General, have gone through very deep discounts (as much as 70% discount) since release (for instance you could get Operation Star with all the DLC for about 15$ a year ago or so). Not all the titles cater for the same public, but you can see that the people that like certain games tend to like very much as well certain other games with similar themes (that's why IL-2 is in there, it is a hardcore combat sim set on a theatre not very popular in the US/UK). Some communities have lots of baby boomers who seem to be very reluctant from using Steam at all. Price points seem to be fairly irrelevant for the audience, and other aspects such as theme/theater, continuing support, dlc/expansions released at a steady pace etc. seem to be better predictors for # "owners". The "peak concurrent players" statistic gives you a very good idea of how much people are actively playing the game and probably posting on its forums etc. So I don't think it is a matter of being on Steam or not, but rather a matter of knowing how to play in that market place without going broke. Note that these market places are designed to make money for their owners (Valve, in this case). It is not so much a dog's breakfast as the Apple App Store, but I can see people getting badly burnt.

Sorry for answering in two different posts, it seems that the forum software gets a bit confused when you edit quoted text. ---- Phil, I do think you're pretty much right on the money. I would be surprised that CMFB reached an audience needing 4-digits to write it down... CMBS probably was on the higher side of that. With that kind of money I just cannot see how: You can pay two full time experienced C++ programmers. A quick look for job postings around Boston, Massachussets gives away over 500 postings within 25 miles of the city, paying between 85,000 to 150,000 USD per year before tax. And that for jobs that include very entry level stuff such as from developing/maintaining low level web services, and would be a very poor match for the experience and very diverse expertise I can tell a programmer like Charles has. You pay an artist You pay a monthly decent salary to Steve, who acts community manager cum CEO cum webmaster cum producer... You pay a monthly decent salary to Chris community manager cum producer You pay the ongoing costs of hosting the website, forum and bandwidth associated with fulfilling orders served You pay software licenses renewal fees (i.e. InstallShield) and ongoing service subscriptions (i.e. source code repository hosting, file sharing). Lucky thing that now both the Microsoft and Mac development environments cost 0$. and so on... unless people are doing part time, or just working for the sake of the arts. To be honest, what we should be doing is opening an online jar tip for these guys to say thanks for the patches we appreciate your work very much. If I get a bank account for Battlefront, I am happy to wire some money right away.

It is called Folk Psychology and follows from our ability to work at an intuitive level with what some call Theory of Mind. We do this all the time: even if as you say, people is ultimately unpredictable, we try hard to make sense out of what we see them doing (or not doing). It is part of what makes us "people" as opposed to being just "things". If you want, I can even introduce you to a formal, mathematical model to define precisely what "curious", "uncharacteristic" or "surprising" is. Since BFC is made of human beings, it is a bit hard not to use these two tools in my everyday life to empathise and make sense of what is going on. And I can't help to worry about human beings, especially if I care about them.

I don't think that "disturbing" is the word I would be using, but from how things have worked out in the past, I was half-expecting some sort of news coming out regarding the Beyond Gustav Line module by September or so. Steve made some public comment on 4.0 about that time, but in a not very notorious fashion. So let's settle for "uncharacteristic", or at least "curious". I just hope everyone is in good health and shape. Personal mishaps can happen - I just learnt that Fury Software dev, Hubert, is out of action due to pneumonia, leaving a just released game without support for a couple months. Of course, these are private matters which may or not be disclosed at the leisure of the persons being involved.

As long as OpenGL is the mainstay for rendering I think that's not going to happen, I'm afraid. The main problem is that the techniques that exist to "blur" the aliasing - which is what we perceive as a "moire pattern" - requires the application to access rendering data in a way which is not easy to do with OpenGL. "Easy to do" meaning "working well across platforms and drivers' vendors". To put it in non-technical terms, Phil C. did the very best that he could do given the resources available and the constraints he was subject to. Making shadows and aliasing to go away is a solved problem only for very specific geometric relations between lights, camera and objects rendered. I have no idea what Phil did, but I think I can see clearly that for some angles and altitudes of the camera the game looks ace, probably because Phil coded in some rules to activate these when the conditions are right. In other occasions, well, the heuristic just falls apart and doesn't look very good. Even in super-recent, lavish games like Total War Warhammer, if you get close to the action at certain angles, some textures and stuff looks bad (and that's with a GTX970, which isn't top dollar, but isn't junk). If the camera was way, way more restrictive and BFC had walked away from the Mac users who can't/won't upgrade their hardware, probably CM would look much better.

It does kind of illustrate the point Steve made re: semi autonomous weapons systems on that massive thread about that vapourware Russian MBT.

You would be surprised how often that is precisely the case. Not many people in positions of power and/or responsibility appreciate dissidents to speak up in public.

There's always variations. Batista had his own style of murderous kleptocracy, as every of those notable gentlemen you have put into the "African dictators" bag did. And also pretty much as it turned out to be all the military juntas that took over at some point in time or another every South American republic - with the notable exception of perhaps Costa Rica? - between 1950 and 1989. Or the military junta that still is in power in Burma (they keep all the assets, and give "all the power to the people" right). Or Suharto's Indonesian regime, under which the life of moneyed Chinese was forfeit, because you know, all Chinese obviously were mind controlled from Beijing by Mao. Or the South Korean generals that eventually stepped down and into comfortable positions in the chaebol cartels. And so it goes. But if you want to read about one who totally was on a league of his own, pretty much like good old Idi Amin, or Gaddafi, is Rafael "El Jefe" Trujillo head honcho of the Dominican Republican for nearly 30 years, between 1931 and 1961. His demise was brought about by a palace coup, which saw his limo being ambushed and riddled with submachine gun fire, in a mafia style ambush orchestrated by a clique of generals who weren't getting their stuff. Compared with Gaddafi's that was an awesome way to go. Shortly thereafter, the "leftist" government democratically elected was toppled by a coup-de-etat, and the following military junta government is toppled a mere year and a half after than. Then LBJ decides that enough is enough, and sends in the USMC and the 82nd Airborne Division to "pacify" the country and contain Cuban infiltration. That eventually leads to another democratic election, where a former associate of Trujillo goes on to govern the western half of the island formerly known as La Hispaniola for 12 years. That government spends a few years purging anybody suspected of anything like sounding vaguely "leftist", to cruise into the late 1970s and past the "red danger", as the realisation that communism in the real world eventually becomes a deeply nationalistic bureaucratic aristocracy sinks in. I do remember that the reflection/cartoon published by a famous political cartoonist, which I read as a teenager, when the Islamic Salvation Front won the elections in 1991 in Algeria. They didn't even got into office as a coup installed a military junta. The ISF then made it to the hills, very much as the National Front had did to the French 30 years before, opening up a horrifyingly bloody civil war that who knows how many lives took away. Eventually the ISF was crushed, but its remnants became later the embers for AQMI and other forms of organised banditry that run amok through the Sahel. The cartoon had two vignettes. One had a crossed ballot box and under it was written "Ayatollahs". Next to it there was another vignette with a ballot box in a cage. The caption under it read "Algerian Generals". Back then I found that cartoon rather depressing. Now I find it eerily prescient of what the 21st century is shaping up to look like.

That's very true Michael. Look up the term "Trusted Autonomy" and you'll see that one of the most common human errors that get very easily passed onto such machines is that of getting too attached to an optimistic narrative where the red force is supposed to be making the plays from the same book the blue force uses. Sorry for the obliqueness, that's because of contractual obligations.

For an interesting "cross examination" of Montgomery, two works Caen Controversy: The Battle for Sword Beach 1944 Andrew Stewart The above is a bit unfair with the troops and officers of Monty's command in 1940... but one can see how the grand return of the BEF to French soil was marred by a most disconcerting lack of preparation for contingencies, and contrasts with Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign: The Eight Army and the Path to El Alamein. Jonathan Fennell Montgomery has many merits that need to be acknowledged he had issues as well, pretty much as everyone has their own foibles. And as any interesting historical figure, he was an ambiguous and controversial one.

Thanks for pointing out that review, it was a great read. And this line (from the review) sums it perfectly: A great read D-Day certainly is; great history, however, it is not.

That is a fascinating historical period in what is nowadays Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Funnily enough, I first learnt about it on a novel by Michael Crichton, The 13th Warrior?

CM is accused quite often of not being a quick game, but really, setting up a quick firefight on a small map takes perhaps 3 minutes? Also, if I want quickness, I play in RT. It is a very different experience from WEGO, its scope is narrower, but also more intense. And you don't give a iota in accuracy in the simulation.

If you save your games during the orders phase, you should be able to upgrade and continue. Not sure about what you need to do with RT games.

Interesting, thanks Vanir. I was just wondering if the adjustment was one across the board or affecting very specific types of units.