Jock Tamson

I have bought nearly all the CMx2 titles. I realise - and accept - that I will only get the full experience if I play H2H but, when I get in from work and have an hour or so, I am more likely to play something like WALB which feels less clunky and offers a fun - and varied - experience against the AI. I would trade all the Real Time and a fair chunk of the graphics in CMx2 for a better/more dynamic single player experience. Real Time against the AI feels like a cheat to me, and tends to make the nature of most good single player missions - carefully sited AT guns and defensive lines - even more obvious and a bit of a grind.

I was being sardonic. It's a British thing. The point is that if the abstraction for close assaulting a tank is that the assaulters are sticking a mine in front of it, putting a grenade bundle on the engine cover etc , being able to cross an impassible terrain feature to do this seems like a functional defect in the abstraction. Can infantry close assault a tank from the other side of a high wall?

Yes they do. It's abstracted. And that's the point, isn't it? We all have our own sense of what is being abstracted. It seems reasonable to me that knocking out a tank over a 20 foot built up hedge with an improvised device and little visibility of the target is an unlikely scenario IRL. But only Battlefront actually know if this is intended behaviour. Speaking as a software developer, I suspect it is an understandable oversight.

Guys, James has discovered what would be regarded as a corner case in most software development houses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_case I think we all accept that the bundled grenades etc are abstracted, but basically what James has described was probably not intended to happen - the bocage is impassible. Which means it is not part of the abstraction. However, whether this corner case is worth the dev resource to fix is something only Battlefront can answer. But it is, in software terms, probably a functional defect.

I've enjoyed the urban scenarios too. However a slight disappointment has been terraces of buildings where the adjoining buildings have windows on the "internal" walls. I know, old gripe is old, but it was a bummer to see my carefully planned breach through a terrace get mown down by neighbours who had a perfect LOS through the windows.

I think it would be a great enhancement to CMx2 if infantry could stack on the corners of buildings. I would envisage this working similar to the hide function: Issue the Stack Command with a Face command The squad crouch in a line following the facing If they are in an action square adjacent to a corner, the unit at the front of the line periodically gets a LOS and LOF 90 degrees left and right of the facing line, beyond the corner. I am presuming that corners are identifiable by the engine as an entity, to enable path finding. The lead unit could, of course, be carrying an AT weapon. Given what a boost the new urban warfare changes have given to this aspect of the game, worth considering?

Yes, on something like Rise of Flight where a good framerate is desirable, I generally find the minimum and then limit the FPS to that in the Nvidia Control Panel. I'd rather have a smooth 50FPS all the time, than peaks and troughs between 60 and 50.

What do you do if they finish deployment with 30 secs left on the clock? Is there not a risk of them giving away their position? (presuming that is the more common reason for using CA)

I'm afraid that all games forums have posters (I am not specifically talking about the thread you highlight) who will insist that you work around a bug or defect rather than have it treated as such by the developers, because they believe that addressing it will divert developer resources from something "more important". This is despite having no practical insight into development processes or methodologies. There is no incentive for the developers to correct any of these misapprehensions. They are not going to say "Hey, that's not how we work, we could branch the code and have that fix merged into trunk in a week". No developer wants to set an expectation unnecessarily. Having said that, this forum is not particularly bad for this, compared to something like the Arma forums.

For me, on a high end PC - i5-2500k @ 4.7Ghz, 4GB GTX680 - frame rates are still low on some maps at times while scrolling about in the planning phase (20FPS) in a heavy forest or large map, but it seems smoother.

Thanks for the info Phil.

ok, I guess I mean - might the outdoor shadows be calculated and rendered by a more GPU based process than currently appears to be the case, in the future? Based on the heavy hit that they currently have on the frame rate, I assumed that the CPU was doing a lot of the work.

Leaving 3GB for the 32 Bit application's process, assuming you have eg 8/16/32 GB of RAM (I have 16, perhaps I should have specified that.)

Do you think the shadows will ever be entirely calculated by the GPU in CMx2, Phil?

This is also a very nice idea. Combined with triggers for the AI and I would be a happy man.

I like the idea of different players controlling armour and infantry. Would you risk leaving your Shermans within Panzerfaust range of buildings if your partner's infantry were faffing about behind you? Probably not. This would be very similar to most trench eye view accounts where the author believes that the armour jiggered off at exactly the wrong moment.

32 Bit app on 32 Bit OS can address about 2GB, or 3GB if it is LAA flagged (which I presume CMBN is). 32 Bit app on 64 Bit OS can address the full 32 Bit address space ie approx 4GB. All of these figures are the maximum that Process RAM and mapped VRAM can add up to. Modern graphics drivers don't map the full used VRAM into the address space any more, they use an aperture. The 32 Bit address space is still a limitation, however the combination of 32 Bit app, apertured VRAM mapping, and a 64 Bit OS is the best combination until 64 Bit executables are the norm.

No problem, glad to share it. Other games it has worked very well for me are Wargame Air Land Battle, Rise of Flight, Men of War.

Yes what you need to do is manually add the resolution to the file "display size.txt" which is in the root of your CMBN installation. It will probably read 0 0 0 at the moment. Change it to your desired resolution and refresh rate eg 2880 1620 60 Keep your desktop at your normal resolution eg 1920 1080 You should find that in your other games the alternative resolutions you set up for GPU scaling are available to select, it's just that the CMBN interface only offers the three standard ones or your desktop so you have to do it in the file. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=111338

I am running CMBN on Win 7 64 so the app can address 4GB, which should ameliorate the issue.

Jim, one of the options when you do the install is to do a Clean Install- have you tried that? I think the option becomes available if you choose Custom/Advanced Also, when you install, have you got anything running - Precision X, for example - that is actively using the card's drivers? Alternatively there is a tool called Driver Sweeper which can be used to get rid of drivers and allow you to do a clean install. I had to do this when I upgraded from a GTX580 to a GTX680. Similar to the old days when you had to do the driver upgrades in Safe Mode.

Thanks for the screenshots George they are a good illustration. It's important to note that you are not setting your monitor's desktop resolution - that stays the same. Therefore your monitor is not operating outside of its range, nor will it be damaged. The GPU has more to do, and VRAM usage will increase. As I mentioned in my OP, I have 4GB of VRAM. I probably wouldn't try this with less than 2GB of VRAM.

Typically I downsample all my games from 2880x1620 to 1080p, re-scaled on the GPU http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=509076 I couldn't get this to work in CM, by modifying the "display size.txt" . This is on a 4GB GTX680 using the September 327 series drivers. An upgrade to the 331 series of Nvidia drivers has fixed this. If you have got the GPU grunt, the effect in game is very nice. For those to whom this seems gibberish, what I am doing is this: My desktop is 1920 x 1080. This is the maximum my monitor supports. The GPU is rendering the scene at 2880x1620, set in the display size.txt by using the values 2880 1620 60 The GPU then downscales this to 1920x1080, which results in crisper textures and improved anti aliasing. Given the game tends to be CPU limited when it comes to FPS, the impact on frame rate is negligible.

please disregard

My prediction is that one of the features that will become most enjoyable in OMG is the risk to AFVs in urban combat from infantry, courtesy of the PIAT. Which might just be enough to prompt another look at the rules relating to launcher use from buildings prior to further releases, at least for Panzerfausts. 70% of Russian tanks losses in urban combat in Eastern Germany were to handheld launchers.