Jock Tamson
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Posts posted by Jock Tamson
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What if the AS were split into more - say 3 by 3 - only for unit placement. The player would have greater finesse with the snap-to, but LOS calculations would be unaffected.
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I have often wondered if some of the edge cases could be removed by enabling units to "deploy" in such a way that they spend x amount of time removing obstacles from their line of sight. For example in RL, it is doubtful that the Sherman commander in the original post would have deployed in such a way that large portions of his line of sight were blocked by overhanging branches. Similarly, the other thread on ridgeline deployments.
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If you war gaming friend has a computer that he can bring to your home or you have 2 computer machines, you can direct connect the machines with a cross over cable and play against each other in by PBEM mode using a shared folder for file transfer.
Or, if he is remote and you know your way round your router, he can VPN in to your home network and you can use a shared folder.
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When I am at the supermarket with the wife and I wander off, I find myself wondering if I am now out of C2. Then I realise she still has Visual Contact (Distant).
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There are still two unspotted tanks
The QBs (and the improved AI behaviour therein) have garnered quite a few plaudits since release. I would hope that would provide some momentum to keep polishing the single player experience - which is still the experience for the vast majority:
Force composition by xml or similar. Would enable players to easily exchange forces to play against in QBs. Would allow QBs to be set up extremely rapidly - pick a map, browse to the XML.
Force composition chance modifiers - let me choose to face 2 to 6 AI T34s, rather than knowing the exact composition. Totally changes the way you play the QB if you don't know what you are facing.
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To this day, CMSF British Module is the game I have played most. The campaign was great and very immersive, and the game was just enjoyably....violent. Maybe the increased engagement ranges meant there were less of the TacAI wtf moments.
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Your machine is not using your graphics card. It is defaulting to using the integrated graphics processor in your CPU. It's a known Nvidia Optimus issue. Nvidia Optimus is supposed to let your computer run on the integrated GPU while you are in Windows, to save power, and then switch to the much more powerful graphics card (your GTX 580) the moment you start up a 3D game. Sometimes this doesn't happen, and you keep using your integrated GPU, which doesn't have enough memory for the textures.
I think Optimus is only laptops - I am not seeing anything in the thread that suggests he is using one though? On a desktop he will be outputting from an interface straight off the graphics card, the integrated graphics will have a separate output.
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It would be interesting to hear from Battlefront as to what if anything has changed in the tacAI. I have certainly experienced one or two surprises against the AI when trying to take a village - in particular AI squads lying in wait behind a building (on the "reverse" edge) and catching one of my squads as it went past.
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Having now recovered from earlier LOLs @Yeknodathon, I would add to this thread that if anyone is looking for a really excellent book on the pre '14 naval arms race and the associated personalities - from Lord Salisbury through Bismarck, three generations of Kaisers, Chamberlain senior, Fisher, Tirpitz, Churchill...a really fascinating mix of people, politics and technology - I would thoroughly recommend Robert K Massie's "Dreadnought".
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Looks great. It would be good if you could follow up with any learnings from your use of the new triggers.
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It's notable that even when riders seem to be handled nicely - like this -
some of the core issues are still present ie if you have a SOP that player and AI tanks dismount their riders when the tank perceives an anti tank threat, the tanks have to stop to do so, which significantly increases their vulnerability. -
Which he won't need.
Uhm, yes he will, he will just be unaware he is using it. It is called WOW64 and it is used by any 32 bit application running on Windows 7 64 Bit.
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wouldn't be too much of a hit to the framerate
Personally I would rather have more frequent cycles at the expense of Real Time. I have a a very high end system and real time is not really much fun on anything bigger than a small battle. 15 FPS is typical for me in forests etc so Real Time is not a serious option.
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If you really feel that strongly that the time allocated to you for a scenario by the scenario designer is too little (or indeed too much) there is nothing stopping yo from going int the scenario editor, loading the scenario data file, selecting the data option under mission and simply changing the length of battle o what you think the duration of the battle should be. If you are only playing the AI there is really no problem.
There is one problem. The AI plans are based around time, so if the player gives himself more time he may well not have progressed to areas of the map that the scenario designer had estimated he would be in at that point.
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There is a fashion in PC gaming these days for the single player game to be a necessary evil that seems tagged on to the core multi player game.
For me, as CM's graphical fidelity has increased over the years, the shortcomings in the single player game have become more visibly jarring. For example the mob rushes of infantry squads leaving a huge pile of bodies in the same couple of action squares as the AI relentlessly tries to carry out its time based plan. When this was more abstracted, it didn't seem to matter so much.
I really - really - hope that the new triggers will start to give a bit more love to the single player experience. There are wargames out there where the AI responds to the player, it would be great if CM could stand among them.
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There is room for CM and Graviteam Tactics Operation Star on my PC. When I want to play against the AI, I often turn to the latter.
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A couple of weeks ago I finished "Sniper One" by Sgt Dan Mills, which is written by the commander of the sniper platoon in Cimic House during the period of the siege. Quite an interesting read.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sniper-One-Blistering-British-Battle/dp/0141029013
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LOL .....
SSD does not help with combat mission gaming performance - THAT was the question (the rest is well known and ... obvious of course)
There is not a single post in this thread asking if a SSD will improve CM. The only question that has been asked is Erwin asking why a SSD wouldn't be a good idea for running his OS and games on.
So rather than jumping on someone who has provided useful comparative info for the uninformed on SSDs versus HDDs, why not wind the neck in a bit.
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SSDs provide very minimal advantage over traditional hard drives in CMBN/CMFI.
I speak from *personal experience*, not quoting a bunch of blah/blah.
If a PC boots up 2 minutes quicker on a SSD and you boot your PC up 300 evenings a year to do your PBEM turns, it will save you 10 hours a year.
Personal experience.
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When I had my desktop built 4 years+ ago I was advised to have one HD for the OS and a 2nd HD for SWAP FILES. Not sure what those are, but it was supposed to make things faster.
Jock noted he has 2 SSD's, one just for the OS. I assumed that SSD's would be so fast that there would be no reason for a 2nd SSD re speed unless it was for storage. My laptop has a 240GB SSD (and no 2nd HD) which seems to make CM run at least as well as on my more powerful desktop. (Altho' I admit I have done no tests.)
Is there a good reason to have two SSD's, one for the OS and one for apps? (I agree that BU 0.5TB-1TB HD would be good for storage etc.)
I only have 2 because my first (60GB) was a bit too small for putting anything on other than Windows in the long run. I suppose you could argue that if you have two SSDs then it reduces the reads and writes on each eg if you are installing / uninstalling on the games SSD, there are no writes to the OS one but honestly, these days, SSDs have a very long mean time to failure - these disks will outlive this PC probably - so I wouldn't bother setting out to have more than one of them.
One thing that is worth doing is putting your profile, temp etc on the regular HDD so that all those reads/writes - temporary internet files etc - are not on the SSDs.
Page file / swap file - if you have, say, 16GB of RAM you could put a 3GB page file on a RAMDisk created out of spare RAM. There is a a free download on http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk . Paging is when an application starts to run out of address space and writes data into temporary storage for access later. It happens a lot with 32 Bit apps on a 32 Bit OS, it also happens (less often) with 32 Bit apps on a 64 Bit OS.
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I've got 2 SSDs and a large HDD. One 60GB SSD for the OS, one 120GB SSD for games that read a lot of data off disk - eg Arma - and the HDD for games that don't eg Combat Mission.
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Agreed. Which is one reason why I dream of the scenario file being xml format - or at least the force composition. This way I could define a set of acceptable and realistic forces to fight against, then script their (random) insertion into a battle.
Scripting force composition in xml would certainly be a big step forward. Players could also swap manually created AI force compositions to play against.
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Great suggestion, which reminds me - There's something I've been working on for a while now: I set up a QB and choose all the forces. I then duplicate this, and vary the AI forces slightly. After I've got 3 or 4 QBs I put them into a folder, and have a script which randomly plucks one, and copies it with a new name into my scenarios folder/directory.
End result: I still get a sensible AI force to play against - but I'm never sure exactly what it will be. No matter which scenario was chosen by the script it copies it to the same generic name so I don't tip myself off, so to speak.
That is a nice idea. I was hoping Battlefront might build this into the force selector, so that when you purchase the AI force you could create randomization by defining the chance of a unit appearing, but they don't seem interested in the idea.
I can accept that the QB is what it is, in terms of AI plans etc, but the inability to get an interesting - surprising - small battle out of it kills it for me. The auto selector is never going to buy the AI a Pzgr company supported by a PzIV and 2 half tracks, you have to do it for it, which makes the scenario a grind against a known force composition where, once you have dealt with the known highest threats, you barely have to play properly anymore.
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I run a quad core i5 2500k overclocked at 4.7Ghz, with a 4GB GTX 680. This will run CM quicker than a newer CPU (say, 4770) running at its stock speeds.
If I swapped out the 680 for my older GTX580 with 1.5GB, the same would still be true. CM, and frankly most sims or games that I have played, is not GPU bound, once you have a relatively modern GPU installed.
So my advice would be that you don't need to go high end/this generation for either CPU or GPU, you need to get the best out of the CPU and get a half decent GPU. Overclocking a 2500k or a 2600k is trivial and only requires a reasonable heatsink and fan. At most, I would get an Ivy Bridge CPU - say i5 3570k. That will overclock easily to the mid 4s.
Newer Intel CPUs have concentrated on improving onboard video (Haswell), the actual raw CPU performance has barely changed since 2011. I expect my PC to still be at the front of performance in 3 or 4 years, there is nothing to suggest that Intel will bring out a new generation of CPUs with a step change in Ghz clocks.
Also, do yourself a favour and get a 64Bit OS and at least 8GB of RAM. Even if you don't have any 64 Bit apps, your 32 Bit ones will benefit from increased address space. Some would find my 4GB of VRAM overkill, but it allows me to play all my games downsampled from 2880*1620.
Also the trade off between RAM and video ram.
What trade off?
CMBN LOS mechanics testing my patience
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
My idea would be that it wasn't autonomous - you would have to specfically deploy them in order for them to do this. There would be a time delay, and consequently some risk eg reduced spotting ability while they were doing it. In effect, it is a sort of "prepare to ambush" command.