Bulletpoint

I think it comes down to well-known fronts selling better than obscure ones. But since the US forces were fighting in the most famous battles - Normandy and especially D-day probably being the most famous - then there's an overlap. My point being that it's not so much about the nationality, as wanting to fight out the stuff from the movies. The test of my theory would be if they made CM:Stalingrad. Extremely well known battle, and not a GI Joe in sight.

??? if they read about the game on a mainstream game site or read about it on steam wouldn't they also realize it's not a casual game and shake their head and go back to their RTS BS? Yep, the whole thing was just a long way of saying that I don't see how any casual gamers would "accidentally" stumble upon and buy any of these games. So I don't think a large portion of the playerbase is made up of casuals. And thus I don't think the old idea about US players only being interested in US conflicts applies to CM.

Thank you very much. Changing the texture setting to "high quality" also seems to have finally fixed my crash problems in CMFB! Haven't had a single crash since I changed the setting, despite some very long sessions.

I don't know for sure, as I don't have access to any sales numbers etc. But how do casual gamers even discover that CM exists? It's not on Steam. Physical game stores are not a thing any more. Mainstream games sites don't write much about CM. That leaves Youtube, but take one look at any youtube CM video and the first thing you notice is that it's not a casual game. If I were a casual gamer, I'd just shake my head and go back to Call of War III or whatever it's called nowadays

I think @IanL has many good rational arguments against command delays etc. But I would still like to see an optional extra level of difficulty that somehow restricts what troops can do if they are leaderless, out of C2, and have no contact icons. No matter how it would be implemented (there are many different ideas), I think it would be nice to curb "instant over-coordination" a bit, give more rewards for keeping C2 intact, and more tactical penalties for when it breaks down. I hope BF would consider experimenting with adding more stuff like this, going forward.

I think the Americans are not all as narrow minded as that. It's an argument that comes up again and again, that Americans would only buy stuff featuring the US, but I think it's not that simple. For mainstream games that need to shift millions of copies, sure. But for niche wargames such as CM, I think many of the people who bought CM Red Thunder are probably Americans..

Source? I've never seen anyone complain about that, and I've been a regular here for years I remember pretty much every thing players have been clamouring for - MGs to be more deadly - done. The Stug bug - fixed. Tank commanders to duck down faster - fixed. Troops running in long lines and sitting on top of each other - fixed. Etc. The game has improved. But I can't remember ever hearing anyone ask for troops to get up and run away when under a barrage. Programmers have a strict technical definition of what a bug is, but to most regular people, a bug is something that doesn't work as it should. Call it a bug or not, the running-away behaviour was erroneous, because it happened only with off-map artillery, always triggered immediate fleeing no matter the morale state and quality of the troops, and no matter the cover they were in. Usually, CM models these things quite nicely, but not in this case. "Some players" objected to it because they realised it was not working right. The patch should be here any day now, and I'm looking very much forward to it. The issues haven't stopped me from playing, and they should not scare anyone away from buying the game either. But will be great to see the patch released.

Toggling shaders off helped, apart from still getting those weird patches on the ground though where the fog doesn't get applied. If anyone knows a way to fix that, please let me know.

What hardware are you using? Does everyone get the same problem with fog, or is it only a small group of players? If I used AMD instead of Nvidia, would it help?

Phil M was a BF coder? I've only been around for about 6 years

If CMFDR's file doesn't work, just say so and I'll send you a save. @CMFDR Thanks for helping out.

It's the second mission from the campaign Road to Bastogne. Conditions are light fog. Toggling shadows doesn't seem to have any impact on the glitches. I also tried turning down texture quality a notch from Best, to see if that would help, but it didn't..

Thanks! I don't know how I missed that the first time. So, thanks to you, here are the screenshots. Shaders OFF: Fog correctly applied to all scenery apart from some ground textures. Shaders ON: Hedges, fences, buildings and flavour objects now don't get covered with fog and stick out.

Ok, dumb question of the day: How do I upload my screenshot? I could swear there used to be a button for it or that I could just drag a file to the post window, but I can't find it now. There's only the option to add file from an URL or from an existing attachment. And when I click the menu option to view my attachments, it only lets me view them and delete old ones, not upload new ones as far as I can see?

Will try to make one later today.

I'm not the guy you replied to, but CM has lots of polygons inside the soldier models and the guns that could be removed without any problem, as they are never visible anyway and serve no purpose. I don't know exactly what kind of effect they have on performance, but if we're talking about reducing polygons, those are ripe for the picking. Games and movies are very different, because we control the camera in games. Here's an interesting discussion about it: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-look-smooth-at-24-fps-but-video-games-look-terrible-at-24-fps-Is-it-because-of-motion-blur-If-yes-how-does-that-affect-video-games-vis-à-vis-movies However, that being said, when I started playing CM, I had 5-7 FPS and it was actually possible to play the game. Not a very smooth experience, but I got hooked anyway. The real problem of CM performance is not so much if we get 30 or 40 FPS, but more that the FPS varies wildly. As I move the camera with the mouse, sometimes it will lag and I will lose control of the panning for a second where it just coasts along like skating on ice.

I find that hedges and certain buildings are not being affected by fog, so they stand out crisp and clearly against the foggy background. A bit of an immersion killer. Any way to fix this by changing graphics settings or otherwise?

I found a way to make the game do this strange lag/redrawing of scenery. Simply go into the briefing and wait about 30 seconds without touching the mouse. Then click the button to go back to the game. You should see the game lag, the trees disappear, the ground textures becoming blurry, then everything being redrawn and come back. Now, I get this occasionally without going into the briefing. That's the problem. But at least others should be able to see what I'm talking about in this way.. if the same happens for you, that is.

I think the game "compiles" LOS data when you load the scenario in the game. Basically checking every square's LOS against all the other squares. The editor doesn't do that when loading/saving map data (advantage being that loading/saving in the editor is extremely quick). Checking LOS should be a task that hugely benefits from multiple cores, because there's a finite workload that can be split up independently between threads. You won't get 4x loading speed from 4x cores though, as the loading process also does other things that happen in sequence and depend on data load speeds.

Devils' Descent is a quite small paratrooper based campaign for the base game. I think that should fit the bill.

I don't know what that would be, as I'm not really running any strange antivirus or other programmes. Only thing I have running is dropbox and CMhelper. There are other people posting about crashes: http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/thefgmforum/threads/cmbn-crashing.27372/

I used to be, but it's not any more unfortunately. It started to crash frequently, just today it's crashed three times. And it's not just a problem I have. @kendar Yes I've sen it happen again here too. It was a long shot but worth a try. If you find the solution I'll be very interested to know.

@kendar I am trying to troubleshoot this problem. Right now I'm trying running CMFB in compability mode for Windows 7. Playing about half an hour, I haven't been able to make the game do those weird graphics reloads ... yet. But I am not sure if I solved the problem or just been lucky so far not to see it. For me, the problem doesn't happen consistently. Maybe you could help me by trying to use compability mode for Win 7 too? See if it helps?

You're playing on Mac, right? And you too.. if I remember correctly?

Yes, it's an old game with an old engine. I never noticed it was due to sounds loading though. As I see it, it just happens once in a while, especially when panning the camera around a lot and zooming in and out. Seems like the game just randomly decides to flush all cached data, like textures, and reload everything again.