Aldaros

Are the Mac and Windows versions supposed to work together for MP? When I tried, we could connect, but whenever one of us hit the done positioning button to start the game, the other's game crashed. Rebooted into my Bootcamp XP install, and I was able to play fine with the Windows demo.

I was surprised how ineffective the anti-tank fire was when I played the tutorial. My Shermans always seemed to brew up whenever someone just looked at them funny in CMx1. Only lost one to a panzerfaust near the end because I got lazy. Then again, I was on the default (easy?) setting. That mortar they have is lethal though; I think that caused about half my casualties. Taking it slow definitely works well for the tutorial; move up to a hedgerow, blast whatever's on the other side for a few minutes, then advance and repeat. The AT gun opened up on my infantry before any of my tanks have gotten within sight of it, so that helped a lot, too. And on-map mortars are sooo much easier to use than in CMx1.

Yeah, I saw that one too. And when I dropped the area target and tried to reissue it, I no longer had LOS to the barn at all (tank was right across the water from it, by the bocage). Didn't have any trouble anywhere else though (IIRC, I was able to target the house in the farm from a different position a little later).

Wow. Just wow. Just finished playing the tutorial mission . . . totally worth all those years of waiting. And like other people have said, absolutely beautiful graphics.

Hey, new mirror on the demo page. I wonder if this one will finish before the Germany one . . .

Yep, that's the corrupt version.

It took at least five minutes to start downloading for me, so you may just need to wait a bit. And then wait a lot longer, since the poor server is getting hammered .

Gotcha. Yeah, the German one is now running at 128KB/sec for me. I've left the English one going, but it only shows a file size of 365 MB. I'll let it finish at least.

The US mirror from Worthplaying is working for me; downloading at 533 KB/sec. I assume that's the English mirror you're referring to? Oh, I see, the size is wrong. Damnit. And apparently the German link is now full, because it's hanging for me right now. *sigh*

(Fair warning, here coming a long-winded example of why this is true; please feel free to skip to the last paragraph, or the next post, if you just don't care.) BFC has mentioned are already limitations due to the relationship between squads and teams in the game. So let's say that, as an imaginary future CM programmer, I decide I want to modify the squad/team/soldier objects for version 2; maybe we want a unified squad to spread out a lot more, not be bunched up all the time (sidebar, I've only played the CM:SF dome briefly, so this example is more from a CMx1 perspective of command). Anyway, as part of this change, we now want three levels of being "in command;" near an officer, near an NCO, and completely out of command (the old were near an officer or out of command). So I decide that, while storing leader info in the squad used to be a good idea, that just won't work any more, since one squad may have a different leader status per member. I really want to manage it for each soldier individually, but I don't have the CPU cycles to constantly update that data for everyone, so I'll just store it with every team, and share that between team members. It's a lot faster, and it's still better than what we had in version 1. Now, to handle old saves, I have to include some extra logic that says, if this is version one, get leader data from the squad section in the save file; version two, just get it from the team section with everything else. Now, a few years later, I finally get those CPU cycles, and by God I'm going to model it properly in the new version 3. So I move leader info into every soldier. If I don't have to support old saves, I'm done; maybe I'll go ahead and start working on aircraft physics, so we can draw them and fire AA at them. But if I support everything since the beginning, I now have to handle three possibilities whenever I load a file. And then what if Bob changed the squad object entirely two years ago in version 2.5, for some other improvement, say ad-hoc squads? Maybe we don't distinguish between squads and teams anymore, since we're doing so much processing at the level of the individual soldier now (things we just couldn't afford to do back then, even though we wanted to). So I have to keep track of what the original squad looked like (along with any intermediate versions), and be prepared to build a new set of units out of the appropriate old unit type, for any old saves I run across. And of course I have to test this for all possible combinations of save files, because I don't want to break things for some poor guy with an ancient save file or scenario he loves replaying. And that's not even worrying about things like making sure I never accidentally use an old squad in place of a newer one, or vice versa (say in my compatibility code). Again, completely hypothetical example, but that's the sort of stuff BFC would have to deal with. It's entirely solvable, but it's not fun, it cuts into time spent on interesting new features, and whenever something new changes, the extra work load increases (sometimes exponentially). The question comes down to, which is worth more; major new features, or being able to load old files? Autodesk and Microsoft can afford to pay for both, BFC probably can't, even if they wanted to. Anyway, that's my 2 cents (or 4 cents, as the case may be).

From a coding perspective, breaking the releases apart is a huge plus. Whenever BFC gets to a new release, they are completely free to change whatever they want. I think any software programmer would agree that, with hindsight, they would always have designed/written some part of their code differently. By periodically breaking backwards compatibility, BFC can make major changes much faster.

I do hope it's the Bulge (and I think they've said that's the current plan right now?). I've been waiting for Pershings and Comets in CMx2 ever since I learned about the problems of a certain four-letter OS 9 video API that shall not be named.

That was my experience as well. It seemed like my halftracks usually didn't survive MG fire-fights for more than a few minutes, even at a few hundred meters distance (for both German and Allied halftracks). They never seemed to get knocked out immediately, but they usually didn't last all that long, either.

Okay, so again, where has BFC discussed this? The only (vaguely) relevant threads I can find that mentioned British airborne at all are a thread on the inclusion of the Poles, which contains nothing from BFC on airborne, and another thread on the future titles, which simply includes modules names. There's certainly an argument for leaving them out until Market Garden, and if they are under consideration for the first module, I'm sure they're close to (or at) the top of the "list of things to cut first if we start running out of time." You seem quite convinced that they've been cut already or were never going to be included. What I'm asking is, are you basing this on specific comments on airborne units by BFC (and if so, please let me know where I can find said comments), or on conjecture based on their comments on other related topics (e.g. including the Poles)?

Ah, I hadn't heard that there wouldn't be any British armoured units. In that case, I'd have to agree that British airborne are less likely. Although I still don't think it's quite as difficult as you suggest, seeing as they'd have almost no heavy equipment or combat vehicles of their own; aside from Jeeps, light artillery, and the mostly worthless Tetrach, anything they did have would have been attached, rather than organic to the division (and therefore wouldn't actually be airborne). Any chance of a link to the no armor statement? Makes it sound like the next module is really the SS/Fallschirmjaeger module, with some Commonwealth infantry thrown in for good measure.

Considering there were only 20 or so Tetrachs, and they were largely ineffective, I don't see why they'd have to be added. The Tetrach sounds like a perfect candidate for the random stuff module. 6th Airborne played a key role holding the British left flank during the first few days of the invasion, so leaving them out would be a pretty significant cut. And while the infantry models would need to change, and new TOEs be created, the weapons and equipment would largely stay the same. Besides, according to Steve they're adding SS and Fallschirmjaeger in the British module; those are about different as British airborne and regular infantry, so I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that 6th Airborne also be included. And since pretty much everything he confirms there for this first module will also appear during Market Garden (British armoured, SS, and Fallschirmjaeger units), the issue GSX brings up isn't restricted to just British airborne divisions.

6th Airborne Division dropped into Normandy, and stayed there far longer than either the 82nd or 101st Airborne Divisions, so I don't see why they wouldn't be in the British/Commonwealth module. It was 1st Airborne Division that dropped around Arnhem, not 6th Airborne, so they probably had a (slightly) different TOE during Market Garden. The Brit module could give you the 6th Airborne TOE for June through August, and Market Garden would then give you 1st Airborne's TOE for September. The 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions could be treated the same way. Ditto any other relevant units (XXX Corps, Fallschirmjaeger, etc.). And yes, I believe it's already been stated already that part of the Market Garden module is the necessary terrain and buildings for the Netherlands.

That sounds great to me. And thank you for the answer; it's always nice to know what's going on. Back to waiting quietly for CMBN, then.

Woops, I was too slow. What he said. And as an aside, I'm interested for similar reasons; I have a Mac with bootcamp at home, but would like the flexibility of being able to use it with Windows. It'd be great for business trips with my work computer, which is Windows, or (more importantly) in case 5-10 years from now Apple decides that they don't want to support Leopard software anymore, but I still want to play CMBN. Which is exactly the position I'm in now my with Mac versions of CMBO and CMAK. I've held on to a 900MHz G3 iBook for years so I could have something that ran OS 9; I certainly don't use it for anything else these days. In fact, I bought it over a better G4 laptop because it was the only laptop Apple still sold that could boot into OS 9 in the first place.

And, since it wasn't answered earlier and a quick search of the forums turned up nothing, will the modules also be sold for a single OS? This is a much more interesting question for me. I don't have CMSF, so I don't know how much of the typical module is new maps/models/skins, and how much is fundamental changes to the underlying codebase that aren't rolled out to vanilla users in updates (e.g. to maintain multiplayer support between versions).

I agree that Steam is a store; I was trying to use the various games sold in that store as examples of why Mac and PC licenses for the price of one game isn't completely absurd these days. As far as I know, those developers don't have to sell both licenses together, but they do so anyway; presumably they feel there's some benefit to doing so that outweighs the potential loss of money. I doubt they were all able to just push a "compile for OS X" button to create their Mac version (and if they were, maybe Battlefront could look into whatever they're using? ). There are probably several good reasons for why Battlefront shouldn't be compared to any developer selling games via Steam. Part of what I'm trying to point out is that those reasons would undoubtedly also eliminate companies like Adobe and Microsoft as valid comparisons for what is reasonable (unless of course Battlefront has a secret side project with a large development team that brings in billions of dollars each year). Anyway, I think I've said enough on that, so I'll let it go.

I don't know about that; a glance at the 50 most recent Mac games on Steam shows that all 50 have the "Steam play" icon to indicate one purchase gives you both Mac and PC versions, and the average price for those looks to be between $10 and $25 dollars. As a more concrete example, Torchlight was a dual version purchase, and I don't think Runic Games is a multi-million dollar developer. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand Battlefront's position on this; Battlefront clearly put far more time and sweat into CMBN than the average Steam game mentioned above, and it's their software anyway. And frankly, CMBN is pretty much the only game I'd be willing to pay $60 for twice. Heck, I'd probably pay $120 for a single copy if I had to. I'm just pointing out that, for games, getting both OS versions in one purchase isn't as unusual as it used to be (for both large and small developers). My question is, what will happen with the modules? If I do buy a second copy for OS X (which I expect to), would I have to purchase two copies of each module as well? And my apologies in advance if that was already answered elsewhere and I just missed it.