BletchleyGeek
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Posts
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Posts posted by BletchleyGeek
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5 hours ago, IanL said:
I think what is happening is the game is effectively running at a lower resolution but scaled by the OS. So the game engine renders things at 2160p and the OS scales that by the scaling factor when actually displaying it on screen. If I recall correctly my screen capture dimensions were not the full 2K size until I switched the scaling setting. That would explain the super ugly effects at least.
Re: the menus, there is now a checkbox that you need to check for the override options to be enabled.
Re: the resolution, it could indeed be the case that it wasn't rendering at full res, but I would say it is weirder that the OS dpi scaling "locks down" the resolution set by an application (in this case via the display_size.txt file).
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On 11/24/2020 at 2:56 AM, IanL said:
I recently switched to a 2K monitor and had some issues because I wanted to run at a scaling of 125%. That caused the game text to look odd. What I did to fix it was switch the game .exe settings to allow the application to handle its own scaling.
- Select the game .exe file - right click select properties.
- Click on the "Compatibility" tab
- Turn on the "High DPI scaling behaviour" and pick "Application" from the drop down.
This is only a fix if you are using a scale and layout other than 100%
I'd like to follow this up for reference of anybody having issues with CM textures looking blocky or blurry in "very high" resolution displays with DPI scaling.
A few months back I upgraded my system and got a new monitor etc. DPI scaling became set to 150% by default. When reinstalling my CM games, and following the instructions to enter very high resolutions on the "display_size.txt" file, I observed that all the game textures (including the UI ones) were featuring quite ugly anti-aliasing artifacts. The effect was quite weird, similar to what you get activating FXAA antialiasing with Reshade does to the game. Interestingly, the game UI was occupying a more screen pixels than I had expected for the resolution I have (3840x2160). This was no Reshade issue. Obviously, on a fresh system and install, this wasn't a matter of some lingering dll's or config files laying around. I did a bit of research - thanks @Lethaface for running some enquiries - and I gave up as I got distracted with the work busyness characteristic of the pre-xmas period.
After a few weeks off the CM world altogether I decided to look again into this issue and came up with this thread, and this post by @IanL. I overrode the DPI scaling settings as suggested above (the layout of this menu changes a bit if you're using Windows 10 pro with the latest patches btw) and voila, no more graphical artifacts and the UI is now as tiny as I expected it to be.
I find it very curious that the Windows DPI scaling post-processing was messing up the in-game 3D and graphics textures as well. I haven't seen anything like that in any "modern" games, but also none of those games are using legacy the OpenGL rendering pipeline. If @IanL hadn't mentioned the above I would have keep going in circles around this issue for quite a while...
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21 minutes ago, dbsapp said:
Dune success - as every literary success - remains some sort of mystery, especially after the novel was declined by publishers dozens of times (reminds of Harry Potter:). Usually it explained as the effect of mixing sci-fi and fantasy themes, which had never been done before.
It's kind of prince returning home tale in a weird science fiction setting. I thought it was based on Soviet invasion in Afghanistan before I found out it was written in 60s.
Good points there, but I would say that sci fi and fantasy kind of meet when the fictional science grants powers which are not quite distinguishable from magic. Quite a few books/stories dwell on this theme, not sure how many before Dune. There's a good essay here by J. D. Nicols:
"Science Fiction vs. Fantasy: The Choice Is Clear | Tor.com" https://www.tor.com/2019/11/06/science-fiction-vs-fantasy-the-choice-is-clear/
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On 11/8/2021 at 3:09 PM, ZPB II said:
Dune is such a topical evergreen with it's themes of consciousness, AI, superdetermism, free will, the concept of randomness and time, resilience etc. list goes on.
It remains a pretty interesting book. The world building always seemed to me quite amazing. Wasn't a very highly regarded book at the time, quite a few 1965 reviews found it was a cheap rip-off from... Asimov's Foundation themes.
I guess that with that rule then The Wheel of Time (soon to be an Amazon TV series) is a cheap rip-off from The Lord of the Rings.
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1 minute ago, domfluff said:
We actually know how this part works.
If you have a link to the pseudocode feel free to share it. Peeps here will appreciate it.
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9 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Not definitive but those tricky lads at BFC appear to have linked spot time to scan distance, or at least this is a working theory.
I think either Vanir or akd (or someone else I can't remember) discussed a bunch (read in the 100s of samples IIRC) of exhaustive tests on this very same kind of issue, different matchups, like 5 or 6 years ago. It was quite clear that indeed, the area to cover by the spotter was a critical parameter. There is also some probabilistic model in place that allows to account for "better optics", "better situational awareness", and probably some combat psychology (how overloaded is attention of the crewman doing the spotter). Hence why you need very high (probably astronomical) sample sizes to reverse engineer the actual process programmed in the game. So unless Charles pops in to give us a one hour lecture on the subject I think we will all be long gone before anybody can actually reverse engineer CMx2 spotting.
I don't think BFC is doing raytracing plus physical modelling of the human eye and/or optical devices to determine that an object has been spotted.
Let's say that spotting isn't precisely the strongest suit of CMx2 simulation capabilities. I am personally content with knowing that 1) the scan area matters a lot, 2) comms matter almost as much, 3) equipment (both optics and design of turret) matters somewhat, and 4) psychological stress matters a bit (under fire, crew suffered casualties).
My intuition is that the OP just came across the heavy tail of the to-spot-chance "die roll".
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Me da que Rafael se refiere a CMBN 1.0, y el problema es que no ha comprado el upgrade v4.0.
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On 8/14/2021 at 8:06 AM, Battlefront.com said:
As I said in the interview, we are at a minimum committed to making Modules for Black Sea, Final Blitzkrieg, and Cold War along with several Battle Packs. Several of these are well underway already. We'll be talking about them in detail pretty soon.
Looking forward to these and the performance upgrades. And CM Pro sounds like solid, reliable business for you guys - well done!
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I really enjoyed First Clash @George MC, many thanks for that one and all the other scenarios you have pampered us with over the years.
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WITE 2 is a significant evolution wrt WITE and WITW. You have a more refined model of supply distribution (still abstract in jarring ways though), movement (more granular ground conditions, roads and rail transport), meaningful (allegedly) operational level air warfare (opposed to merely tactical), a notion of command inertia (preparation or ops planning points), combat delays/congestion (to more accurately reflect time and space constraints), and engaging campaign victory conditions (sudden death, high water mark rewards, vp awarded in function of how early or late certain milestones are achieved), and a significant overhaul of the user interface. The manual is very well written and it will be actually helpful and informative. A lot of effort went into it.
There are a few "contras" too. The AI is as smart as Gary can program it, no more and no less. So quite smart, but not magical. In a game with this scope, that means things can go off the rails in distracting ways. Also it is a 1980s AI: it cheats, way less than it used to, and doesn't feel ashamed of doing so. You can adjust the level of cheating but the settings (basically a knob that goes from "I win always"/ "damaged tanks are always recovered and fixed" to "AI has nukes"/"AI has Star Trek technology to move and generate supply") require experimentation. Given that you need to restart a game if you mess up settings, throwing away hours, I find this irksome. WITE2 is funnest against a proper human opponent, the AI is for learning the game imo, just don't look too close at what it does with the rules. The game has no HD support beyond 1080p, if you need big displays the game will be possibly unplayable (native scaling is being implemented and should be out soon). The event engine is underutilized imo, but offers a few welcome morsels of flavour (but nothing like HOI4 which I think is all flavour and texture). The UI has been greatly improved but still fails to explain well combat results.
If you're up for a big time commitment - a turn of the GC can take easily one hour or more of your time - and have a reliable war gaming buddy that is happy to play huge CMx2 scenarios to the end, then you can't go wrong with WITE2.
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6 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:
Hope you guys will be OK in Melbourne.
Cheers mate. Me too
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I would like to recommend the excellent scenarios by Chris Maiorana
http://thesharpendgaming.blogspot.com/
Some of them using maps and estabs (tables of organisation and equipment) for projects that never happened: Stalingrad, Korsun, Pacific, all testing the limits of the ai programming and the simulation engine. I think all the stuff is on Steam.
My favourite AARs were those by Dazkaz, one of the few(?) that realised there was a lot of game beyond the "a game that plays itself" promotional line which, in hindsight, poisoned the minds of many players. Mark here is perhaps one of the best players ever, his tutorials for Highway to the Reich are a classic. I have all of the stuff he wrote for the game archived for reference.
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3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Just keep in mind that we still have to do final testing on F&R's installers and Cold War likely has more Final Candidates in its future. For sure at least one... a bunch of (smallish) things didn't get into FC1.
So what are we talking about in terms of time? F&R = days, Cold War = a week, maybe two.
Those are the best estimates I can give at this point. More exact than that is only possible after we've put the URLs into the store.
Steve
I guess that the fitting thing to say is both "Godspeed!" and "Well done team!".
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@dbsapp has a point: which is that the Red Army has been very often depicted in very unfair ways. If the same standard would have been applied uniformly across WW2 combatants... which is now starting to be the case.
A good recent book which I recommend everyone here reading is David Stahel's "Retreat from Moscow" which takes a 360 degrees view of one of they key campaigns of the Eastern Front: that of the Red Army counteroffensives in the winter of 1941 and 1942. There are many things to take home from that book, but one that struck me deeply and is 100% relevant to this thread was the analysis that the Red Army offensives were not very successful when comparing the gains made versus the cost.
In particular, it is noted that while the Red Army of December 1941 had more or less the "right brains" at the top (Saposhnikov, Zhukov and Vassilevsky) and a good chunk of the chaff had been weeded out from the army level command (which is basically like the German Korps level), division, regiment and battalion officers and staff were in general as green as anything can be. Which meant that tactics or competent employment of combined arms were rare, and often limited to units that had came from far away Military Districts (like the Transcaucasus or Far East). If you are forced to improvise an army - because the one you had was already destroyed in 6 months - the results will be apparent. The difference between an armed mob and a military unit is discipline, training, command and control. If any of those four factors are not up to snuff, bad things will happen.
The best kept secret of the Eastern Front is that for most German setbacks in 1941 and 1942, the usual explanation is that they came across a "veteran" (i.e. an outfit that had been active for a few years) Red Army unit which was well supported and sensibly deployed in good terrain.
What made and broke armies in World War 2 was having intelligent, well-trained officers at the division, regiment and battalion levels that were able to work in positive ways with their peers and with their superiors. In my opinion that factor alone trumps almost everything else.
And still, in some situations, mass will be right answer. For an example, consider the battles for the Anzio beachhead in January 1944. There you had plenty of examples of German (German!) armed forces using "human waves" to try and overrun the allied fortified lines (there's even one CM scenario about that, see "Lancing the Abcess"). We talk a lot about trying to hit the enemy where he is weak, and so on, but if the enemy is competent, there may not be weak points to exploit, unless you create them by firepower and attrition. While the German Army bled at Anzio very badly, the US, Polish, Indian and Free French armies bled profusely over the Rapido and the mountains around Cassino.
So you can find examples of using infantry as "cannon fodder" pretty much across every WW2 combatants. Some of those examples have become ingrained in popular culture more strongly than others.
Are these examples of military genius? I wouldn't say so. But I think that even Napoleon - a military genius and one-man-staff for the Grande Armee - would have had a hard time to overcome reliably and any given Sunday problems like having to crack the Anzio perimeter or breaking out of the Korsun pocket.
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48 minutes ago, markshot said:
But tactical is just poor and I would rather be looking at a CM map. Unlike the other games, they and sandboxes with many options. This your only option is to win, and who wants to play Bulgaria to a stupid AI Hitler, Churchill, or Stalin?
I guess that in theory it is possible to have a smaller country subjugate the whole of Europe without cheating. In theory. In Europa Universalis there is an achievement called the Three Hills (?) which is awarded if you conquer the world playing the of Kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa)...
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I just see a blur... There is too much going on at the same time, all the time in that game. I see it essentially as a sandbox for alt history. Which is fine and means I don't play it anymore - I bailed out in 2018 or so.
HoI 3 - when they managed to get it running which certainly wasn't at release, more like two years after that - eventually became a decent strategic level war game. Still the air and naval war systems never quite worked or the AI was programmed robustly enough to handle them. I didn't like very much the HOI 4 system of "fronts" etc. that did away with having player defined orders of battle... campaigning armies in WW2 are more than a line on a map with a names close to them. I don't know if in the years since there have been any improvement in this area, or they have just gone heavy on the " nation roleplaying" aspects.
The strategic war game I have quite liked in recent times is the terribly named WarPlan.
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23 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:
Having a dedicated bug reports forum could be useful too. In that way I think it is possible for moderators/admins to remove posting privileges of users that decide to be deliberately unhelpful or do not abide by some straightforward rules on how to structure reports and minimum amount of data to provide.
There is actually a Tech Support Forum already, so maybe with some rebranding to make it more evident...
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34 minutes ago, 37mm said:
We'll agree to disagree over whether "slight delay" was an appropriate term... however I think this highlights the most likely avenue for improvement.
Create some more forum moderators, I suspect there's not enough for a forum of this size anyway, and as part of their remit they can manage a stickied reporting thread (keeping it clear of useless discussion or fake bug reports) for each game family.
That means you guys & the Beta testers will only ever have to visit that one thread to find issues that have been raised & we will at least know that an issue has been seen.
Having a dedicated bug reports forum could be useful too. In that way I think it is possible for moderators/admins to remove posting privileges of users that decide to be deliberately unhelpful or do not abide by some straightforward rules on how to structure reports and minimum amount of data to provide.
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7 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:
Would it distract the conversation too much for me to say that I love this screenshot?
The screenshot that I would love to see is that showing the progress bar for the upload of the Fire & Rubble installers onto the Amazon servers
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2 minutes ago, weapon2010 said:
what is the decision process to be "assured"? sounds like a risky and difficult decision to make.
Man, that's the business of making games. I don't know what is Battlefront threshold sales to break even - 2,000 copies, 5,000 copies? Those volumes, in the context of actual war games are "best sellers".
Hence why so much (board) war games now run campaigns on a variety of crowdfunding platforms, have "pre-order" targets (like GMT Games does), and so on. You make an elevator pitch, people put their credit cards on escrow, and then you get a sense how many more sales than the ones you already have in prep orders are statistically likely given historical sales data.
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2 hours ago, BFCElvis said:
it would be a stunning development
In the last year there have a been a couple of stunning developments (Steam distribution, Combat Mission in the Fulda Gap...). Next thing we know you guys turn up with a game on the war of Vietnamese Independence or the War of Jenkins' Ear...
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Sorry @stikkypixiethat was indeed for you. I confused your avatar with that of someone else's.
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Hi @Probus,
I get issues like this whenever the CM application loses focus while saving the file (as in when you alt-tab out of it). Sometimes this happens if you have Windows notifications popping up. Whitelisting the saved game folders for the Windows anti-malware service is a good idea, this issue also happened to me with the anti-malware service kicking in and slowing down disk operations to a crawl.
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8 minutes ago, Frenchy56 said:
What CM really needs on top of that is multiple players on each side or co-op so each can take care of their own formations
That would be nice.
Screen Resolution
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
As you can see there are more options now and the text/layout has changed a bit from what you reported.
This is on Windows 10 Pro.