waclaw

IMO, you're right, G43 and MG42 are far more better now.

Great improvement, Thank you !

Awesome waclaw. I missed the latest updates but will check them out tonight  

Hi CMFI fans
 
This tweak was originaly for CMRT but could not resisted to try it in CMFI. Still don't own CMFI but it works in demo!
 
- this is modified Battlefront “War Movie” shader CMFI tweaked version
- this will replace the opt-M (alt-M) mode
- put the unzipped folder in "z" folder
- works also with CMRT, CMBN and CMBS
- little or no performance hit
- OS X and Windows
- screenshots are from demo version unedited.
- experimental stuff
- please don't edit shader if You don't know what You are doing!
 
Combat Mission FXShine mod CMFI tweak link:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yqic9aamxuqfbzi/AADTj7R-HbHXHgWWS8wuCdSYa?dl=0
 
Please check original Thread at Red Thunder section:
http://community.battlefront.com/topic/120795-fxshine-shader/
 
Please enjoy and post Your best sunshine Italy screenshoots!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/78g7kqyenwbyyn8/g43.rar?dl=0
 
g43, and new rain
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/77b6vmerx9co0hk/rain.rar?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5axa706sep0e98c/ricochets.rar?dl=0
 
improved and new ricochets, inspired by the film "Fury" - highly recommended!
 
copy and paste files to the directory: z / sound / bullets and shells / ricochets

All pics taken in-game on a Windows 7 based system with a Nividia GTX970 graphics card; all settings best.
 
Taken at around 0600Hrs - overcast and misty. Current in-game view (note game heavily modded)

 
Same view, same time, with shaders installed and in 'war movie' mode
 

 
Taken around 1400Hrs, clear weather. Current in-game view (again heavily modded).
 

 
Same view, time etc. In 'war movie' mode using new shaders.
 

Well, it certainly makes a difference - the accentuation of shadows is very marked.
 
Here are some before and after shots :
 

 

Hi All
 
To make a long story short, father in his middle 40-ties decided it's time to check are there any modern time "Close Combat" game for him and here we are. Finally:)
But on the road to Combat Mission it was obvious that some games are more "eye candy".
First decision was to make textures mod. But omg there are "billion" already top notch textures and community already provided great stuff here.
Then I discovered "War Movie" mode.  Why devs didn't made it default? But than again colors in movie mode are somehow too washed and not for everybody eyes. But Battlefront made right direction (they just weren't enough radical with movie shader settings) Textures are great we just need some fancy shader FX stuff. Being developed few iOS games myself I totally understand enormous amount of work small team like Battlefront can have with its own engine and all the assets.
As there is no SweetFX or Reshade for Mac OS X only solution was to try dig in into shaders and here we go:
 
- this is modified Battlefront “War Movie” shader
- this will replace the opt-M (alt-M) mode
- put the unzipped folder in "z" folder
- should work also with CMFI and CMBS
- don't know is this is allowed. Would be great if someone from Battlefront check it. Even greater if this is somehow putted in future official releases 
- tested on iMac OS X Yosemite with ATI 6750m
- little or no performance hit
- OS X only (someone can check it on Windows too -  not sure will it work)
- screenshots are unedited. Only used some community mods (aris mostly)
- experimental stuff
- please don't edit shader if You don't know what You are doing!
 
Combat Mission FXShine mod link:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/49hc7e5cn0lve4d/AADjTuXSsx6l35wtx_4g3mnda?dl=0
 
Oops - long story!
 
Please enjoy and post Your best screenshoots!

I agree with every answer from the posters above
- but would like to stress one thing:
 
CM will give you far more gaming time that most other games: I bought CMBN at the release in 2011 and got the every module/pack after that. And I am still far from having played every scenario I have on my hard drive, probably only one third of them.
 
In terms of gaming hours per dollar, Combat Mission is the cheapest game I ever bought. Seriously.

hello,
 
why is combat mission battle for normandy so expencive for a game thats really old
 
and i can't find the game on other websites eather.
 
sorry for my bad english.

Hi! Long-time fan of the series, first time poster on this forum, and very excited to hear that a new Combat Mission is on the way! I love the game, and think that on the tactical level it is better than any I have ever played, so the below is not just whinging. HOWEVER there are a number of things I would love to be improved about the underlying game engine. Maybe a developer will see this, maybe not, but I’d love to discuss it anyway.
 
Full disclosure –I have tried to be realistic, but I am no programmer, and accept that much of the below may simply be impossible. Also, I much prefer playing infantry (CM:Burma would be my dream), so nothing below on tanks!
 
1.       Retreating when sensible. Say I have a team behind a hedge coming under heavy fire. It’s time to fall back through the gap in the second hedge behind them, just one square away, where they will be out of site and safe. As is, very often the team will cower behind the first hedge, even though if they retreated they would be safe! Units should be much more willing to move AWAY from threats.
 
2.       NOT retreating when NOT sensible. How many times has this happened to you? Your infantry dashes from one building to another. A few metres from the door, a machine gun in another building opens up and kills half the squad. The remainder stall, hug the ground, and start crawling back across the killing zone, and soon your whole squad is gone. I am no soldier, but I would think that even a terrified rookie would know that he has a much better chance if he carries on forward. So I would hope that the AI could be improved to assess whether changing orders is appropriate when soldiers break.
 
3.       Dynamic reactions. The mission that sums up my frustrations is ‘Kiwi Soldiers’ from CM:FI. Although you were aware of where the enemy was, there was no way to get your soldiers to approach them in a sensible manner. The enemy occupied a building with another building adjoining it: the commander would probably want his soldiers to hug its wall until the doorway, keeping out of the line of fire, before entering with weapons trained on the door to the enemy building. As it is, the soldiers move in the open outside the building, and then move towards the buildings centre, and usually get massacred. I’d love units to be able to mark an ‘area of interest’, which they would treat as occupied and act accordingly.
 
4.       Formations. Infantry has a tendency to clump close together and move in long, vulnerable lines. I’d love some sort of formation system, so you could, for example, cross a field in a spread out line, just as a platoon would in real life. Maybe a ‘space out’ button would encourage soldiers to maintain distance between themselves and their comrades?
 
5.       Grenades. Minor point – I’d love to be able to order soldiers to throw grenades at a nearby spot regardless of line of sight e.g. over walls or into buildings. This would make urban combat more manageable, especially in conjunction with the previous point.
 
6.       Blasting. Minor point – please could engineers not automatically rush through the gaps they blast? Mine tend to get machine-gunned, so I’d love the option to stay in cover!
 
7.       Direct linear fire. Minor point – I’d love HMGs and mortars, for example, to be able to do linear direct fire missions e.g. spreading their fire along a trench line or hedgerow. This would especially allow HMGs to be better at their real-life job of area suppression.
 
So what do you think? What improvements to the tactical engine would you like to see?

When i take a look at community created content, it seems that CMFI got lowest amount of love from community. Even CMRT, more recent title, has higher amount of community created content. I've seen many comments that people love CMFI for its difference in terrain compared to that in CMBN, but CMBN is a "king" in respect to the amount of community content. Why so?

They keep the price as is to keep people like you from buying and playing the game.
 
Its a real elitist group with the price of the game so high.
 
No bargain basement players here'
 
 
Really, sad when someone cannot handle a one time cost to get a game that has some substance.
 
And really, you know the price is really not that expensive.

The Soviet SMGs II thread (link here) started by Poesel piqued my interest.  The initial question was the perceived supremacy of Soviet SMG troops:  Is a real phenomenon?  Is it automatic weapons generally?  At what range do regular rifles gain an advantage over the SMGs?  Etc...   I ran a few tests and showed my initial results in the linked thread.  A few members made suggestions about how to structure valuable tests.   - c3k said to limit variables.  - Sgt Joch said to place the targets on pavement to eliminate micro-cover. - Poesel said to only test one thing at a time.  (i.e., if you're interested in testing accuracy, don't worry about ROF)   I took their advice and went back to the drawing board.  I built a range with five lanes for each of five range groupings: 60, 120, 180, 240, and 300m. (1)  The lanes are 11 tiles wide and divided by high walls.  The bulk of the terrain was the default editor "open ground" but I lowered the terrain between the shooters and targets by two meters to reduce / eliminate any LOS blockage figuring that none of the grass types would be six feet tall!  The firing lines are placed on a step at elevation setting 22.  All shooters are Regular.     The floor of the range is elevation 20 and the targets, to match the shooters, are placed at elevation 22 in the middle of three block wide stretch of pavement which slopes from elevation 21 to 23.  To emphasize the point, shooters and targets are at the same elevation. (2)     For the targets, I used five 2-man sniper teams: one in the middle of the range directly across from the shooter and two more arrayed on either side with an action spot gap separating each team.  All targets are Fanatic and given short firing arcs to keep the shooters alive. (3) Yes, it was more tedium to use five two-man teams in the place of a potential single 9 or 10 man squad.  The method to the maddness was that I wanted to focus the test on simple accuracy.  I worried that an entire squad placed in a single action spot would provide a target density that would disporoportionally benefit automatic weapons. (4)  As JasonC put it in the SMG II thread:   c3k - sure, one of the reasons I wanted realistic examples is that SMGs might be favored by massed targets, lack of cover, and movement, as all things that can be benefited by spray and pray and hits on targets *other* than the intended one, especially at close range.  Whereas a longer range shot at a stationary and small / single unit target in good cover should bring actual accuracy to the forefront.   So five two-man targets it was.  Point-of-emphasis:  I am (I hope it is obvious) NOT claiming this represents typical firing conditions.  These targets tend to lay prone and are therfore smaller than a standing or kneeling target.  On the other hand, they are stationary and marooned on a stretch of pavement without so much as a blade of grass to shelter behind.   I marched to the range and fired a combined 261,761 rounds from eight different weapon types.  Does "over a quarter million rounds" sound more impressive?  I tracked rounds fired per range per type along with the casualties caused. (5)  This is what I found:       Now remember, this isn't a promise or prediction that you should expect to fire N bullets at range X with weapon Y to achieve Z casualties in CMRT battle conditions.  I'm simply reporting my results for the given sample size under the admittedly artificial conditions I laid out.  The interesting thing to me is to see how the accuracy of a given weapon degrades with range and/or how different weapons compare at a given range.  All tests were performed on the exact same range and I have the stats per lane so we could see if a certain lane seemed to perform poorly over multiple weapons for example.   For those who prefer the raw tabular format:     Note that I'm not advancing 'Composite' accurracy here as a meaningful metric, but I just threw that in there so that I had something to sort by.  I'm not sure how interesting or useful anybody will find any of this.  My two big reactions were as follows:   1.)   My first-hand experience with shooting and ballistics is dominated by Basic Training at Ft. Leonard Wood in the Summer of '90.  I qualified Sharpshooter (the mid-tier), hit a few pop-ups at 300m, and by now have surely forgotten most of what I learned although I could probably still field strip an M-16 by rote.   So I'm nobody's idea of a shooting expert but I was expecting the accuracy to degrade expotientially with range.  But maybe that's not how it works or maybe that's only true at longer ranges and 300m and below is within quite reasonable ranges for these weapons and (mostly) iron sights.  I simply don't know.   In particular, it's striking how the accuracy at 180m is much the same as the accuracy at 120m for several weapons.  The range jumps by 50%, but the accuracy (judged by average rounds per casualty) degrades by only 21.44%, 3.08%, 3.53%, and 4.12% for the LMG42, DPM, PPSh/PPS-43, and MP-40 respectively.  Not sure what's going on there or if anything is going on.  Statistical noise?  I dunno.   The related point is how the accuracy of the weapon types relate to each other.  The snipers are best, then the bolt-actions, then the LMG, and finally the sub-machine guns.  Each type is grouped together in its expected place along the accuracy continuum which feels good.     At 180m, it takes ~ 84 Mosin-Nagant rounds or ~ 126 PPS-43 rounds to cause a casualty in testing...  So the PPS-43 is 50% less accurate but it's trivial for a PPS-43 shooter to exceed the rate-of-fire of the Mosin-Nagant by more than 50%.  I know I wasn't supposed to consider ROF, but you see the point here.  Just rough figures: Maybe a determined and steady Mosin-Nagant shooter gets off 10 rounds in a minute.  In the same timeframe, as soon as a shooter behind a PPS-43 exceeds 15 shots he's causing more casualties on average at 180m (according to the test results).   2.)  What's going on with the German Snipers?  Why are they performing so much better than the Soviet Snipers?    I believe I found the answer to this one hiding in plain sight.  Yes, the German snipers performed better than the Soviet snipers but my working theory is because the German sniper test shooters ended up with a freakishly large proportion of designated 'Marksmen' rather than the basic 'Soldiers.'   For the sniper shooters of both sides, I used Sniper Teams at 50% headcount in attempt to limit the teams to just guys with scoped rifles and avoid the SMG-toting buddies.  However, even at the 50%, I found a couple German teams still had the MP-40 guy so I placed those at the 300m range knowing they wouldn't fire.  (See thread about 200m hard range cut-off for SMGs here.)  So those teams would have had improved spotting abilities relative to the singletons but I didn't worry about that as I only cared about the resulting aimed shots and not if the snipers had spotting help.   As I placed the snipers of both sides I idly noted (mentally) that some were Marksman and some were Soldier but I didn't think much of it.  However, I later had the impulse to mark which lanes contained Marksman and it was then that the Germans' relative overperformance made sense.     The lanes with the m notation off to the side contained Marksman snipers and the ones without contained Soldier snipers.  The # symbols designate K98 armament; the balance were armed with G43.  (Digression, were G43 the predominant Heer sniper rifles?)   You see I ended up with only four non-Marksman among 24 active lanes. (240m Lane 1 is the NULL lane referenced in footnote 3.)  As you see, the accuracy of the non-Marksman snipers is significantly worse.  As for the Soviets:     You see they only ended up with two Marksman and they are the best two of their grouping although the effect is less discernable at 60m.  Ironically, I put those two in the 60m grouping on purpose as I noticed they were carrying only 55 rounds per man compared with 150 rounds for the bulk of the Soviet snipers.  My thought was that I wanted them at a closer range so they wouldn't run out of ammo and, at that time, I didn't make the connection between the Marksman designation and the lower ammo count.   Although the sample size is small, we see that the few non-Marksman Germans perform comparably with the non-Marksman Soviets at a given range.  So that riddle is tenatively solved.  The German Sniper "results" should then be accompanied with a big asterisk at the moment and are subject to revision.  But I thought I'd still show what I have for the moment to demonstrate the seeming weight of the Marksman-factor.  Plus, the Snipers are such outliers in the scheme of these results.  Even the regular Soldier Soviet snipers are 6 and 11 times more accurate than the Mosin-Nagant at 240m and 300m respectively.     (1) More specifically, the number of action spots between the deployed shooters and targets were as follows: 7 - 56m, 15 - 120m, 22 - 176m, 30 - 240m, 37 - 296m.  (Yes, I know you guys can do arithmetic.)   (2) I know it's a more challenging shot when there is an elevation difference between shooter and target.  That's not from experience, that's from reading Stephen Hunter novels.   (3) There was one exception.  In Lane 1 at 240m in the German Sniper test, I missed a cover arc on one of the Soviet sniper targets.  The result was a shooter that got shot...  So I threw out that particular lane and then ran another iteration with Lanes 2-5.  Every other test scenario featured 4 iterations per lane wheras that one ended up with 0 iterations for Lane 1 and 5 iterations for lanes 2-5.   (4) Naturally, in CMRT battles, there are occasions when automatic weapon fire DOES hit massed troops and multiple casualties are the realistic result.  But again, I don't want to confuse that with the question of accuracy.   (5) As with my earlier tests, I disregarded light wounds.  The casualties shown in my results are KIA and serious wounds only.

Hello,
 
can someone tell me why is the game so expensive for a game so old and still 60 euro

^ Ah, your mod, waclaw.  
 
Using it already. Maybe the new backround sound distracted me.

Here is a quick (err--not cinematic) video lark: thirteen minutes of turn-based play threaded together continuously from a single camera angle. It shows Phase I of a town assault (Huge SP QB Probe with a 20% advantage to the Germans). I’ve got a battalion of 43 Soviet infantry (ATRs, ATGs, and some MGs stripped), supported by two companies of T-34/76s, arty and some AA units. The Germans have a Grenadier battalion, supported by two Tigers, a company of 50mm ATGs, plentiful arty and two Stukas. All units are Typical.
 
Before I started saving the replays, the Stukas took out most of a platoon of my infantry in the setup zone. The MG team charging in the advance on my left flank is doing so because its MG was knocked out earlier. And, yes, there are a few friendly fire incidents with my tanks. I misjudged the elevation and they hit the trees near my troops a couple of times.
 
Enjoy!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5axa706sep0e98c/ricochets.rar?dl=0
 
improved and new ricochets, inspired by the film "Fury" - highly recommended!
 
copy and paste files to the directory: z / sound / bullets and shells / ricochets

Awesome, thx!

http://community.battlefront.com/topic/118413-hqs-22-black-sea-shock-force-afghanistan-final/

Hi all,
 
Does anyone agree that maps with lots of trees are horrible to play on? If I load a scenario downloaded from the Repository and the map is over 50% dense foest I am instantly put off playing it. Yes, I know you can turn off trees or reduce the nearest trees to stumps but to my mind too many trees on a map just looks ugly. I don't want to fight a battle in the Ukrainian equivalent of Endor from Star Wars!
 
Whenever I design a map I try to keep the number of tree tiles to a minimum and to limit most tree tiles to only one or two trees, with the centre of each wooded area being reserved for those dense three-tree tiles. I also tend to leave some clearings here and there just to break up the forest a little.
 
I am wondering if maybe the three-tree tiles are just more dense than is found in nature, as when I look at photos of real forests they seem to be a lot less dense than a typical CM:BS forest map.
 
Looking forward to your opinions.
 
 

I mean seriously. After spending 400+ hours, It's down to 10 cents per hour of entertainment.
 
All video game companies should charge more, say by the hour. Going to a movie costs $15 for 1.5 hrs entertainment. So games could be the same. $10 per hour!
 
 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/78g7kqyenwbyyn8/g43.rar?dl=0
 
g43, and new rain
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/77b6vmerx9co0hk/rain.rar?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ottnjmwuf79k2q7/mg42.rar?dl=0
 
 
optional sound for MG42 - It seems to me that much better   https://www.dropbox.com/s/huxplxeuuyws2lt/gun%20mp40.rar?dl=0     improved sound for MP40 - was too loud

just working on this, but it may take some time)