nathan1776

I created four more extremely basic scenarios today and had my gf go through them. It seems that becoming comfortable with the camera controls is being a hurdle for her. Scenario: Camera Controls - Rotate Rationale: This lesson forces the player to use the camera controls. The player only needs to use the “rotate camera” button (the screenshot is of the student's initial viewpoint) and then this becomes the earlier "Move" tutorial. The camera starts looking at your unit so that new players get as little disoriented as possible. Scenario: Camera Controls - Down Rationale: Introduce the player to the “Camera Down” button. (The screenshot is of the student's initial viewpoint.) The player only needs to use the “camera down” button (the screenshot is of the student's initial viewpoint) and then this becomes the earlier "Move" tutorial. Scenario: The Setup Phase Rationale: Introduce the student to the setup phase. If the student just gives a “Run” order without repositioning their soldier, they won’t finish close enough to the flag to take control of it. Scenario: Two Turns Rationale: Introduce the student to the idea of multiple turns. This also gives the student more practice with using the setup phase, but I may take that part out to keep things simple. I haven't decided yet. The new scenarios are in the same Dropbox folder I linked to in my original post.

I did, but this idea is for CMx1. I haven't even played a scenario in SF2 to completion yet.

Are you talking about CMx2? This is an idea for CMx1.

Ok, thanks.

I was thinking recently about how in the real world, brush/fields can be so thick that you have effectively zero visibility (like, less than 1 meter). I was thinking it would be interesting to see that in CMx1: woods with thick underbrush, or thick open brush, or thick fields. Your units might make more noise as they move through it (i.e. they'd create sound contacts for enemy units from further away). You'd get sound contacts but wouldn't see the enemy unless you were right on top of them. But you could area fire at the sound contacts (and maybe the AI could be made to area fire at sound contacts within a certain distance of them?). And of course there could be intermediate levels of that, so you could have "moderately thick woods", or "very thick woods". The AI might need to be tweaked to handle this kind of terrain intelligently. That made me wonder what other kinds of interesting new terrain types might be possible. It seems like a smart way to do it is to think about the dimensions that terrain can vary on (speed of travel for infantry, effect on LOS/concealment, effect on incoming rounds, speed of travel/accessibility to wheeled/tracked vehicles, bogging likelihood), see where the existing terrain is along those dimensions, and then think about what kind of terrain might exist in some part of that possibility space that doesn't currently have a corresponding terrain modeled in the game.

I installed the "Intel Graphics Command Center" (which seems to be the official way to control my Intel Graphics settings) and set the "Anti-Aliasing" setting to "Always Off"; I also set the other settings to "Always Off". It didn't seem to have any effect on the blurry text issue.

It didn't work

His issue seems to be different from mine. This is what my options menu looks like (blurry text) His option menu seems to be fine (screenshot from the thread):

Thank you all for your help! I just bought the CM pack on Steam (CMBS, CMSF2, CMCW) and installed CMSF2, put all the settings as low as they could go, and used the turn-based mode, and it's running pretty smoothly. It doesn't look as pretty as in the Usually Hapless / Jeffrey Paulding videos, but it works well enough (even when running the biggest scenario in the game) to make me think twice about spending $1300 on a gaming PC (although I do want to play Graviteam Tactics, which IIRC is only real-time and was unplayably laggy when I tried installing it before; but I'll try it again, and I don't think it's worth buying a gaming PC just to play that game when I have a lot of other great games that run on my laptop that I haven't gotten to yet, like Command Ops 2). I'm not sure why I had a bad experience the last time I tried playing one of the CMx2 games (CMRT demo), but I'm thinking it was maybe that I was playing it real-time instead of turn-based. Here's my laptop's specs: CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6600U CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.81 GHz RAM: 16.0 GB

I agree that there are still a lot of things that could be done with CMx1. I would like to see bigger maps with more-realistic terrain (like in Graviteam Tactics). Personally I'm not as interested in the moment in bigger battles (in terms of points) because I find it to be too much work to micromanage all my troops.

Yeah I totally agree, this is literally just the first day that I'm working on it. I'm envisioning having hundreds of different very short tutorials like that. And my target audience is the people who would either get frustrated with the in-game tutorial or would go through it and then still feel like they don't know what to do.

Actually, I had the texture setting cranked up. I just turned that one down and it's now a lot smoother. Not as smooth as CMx1, and there's times when it doesn't seem to respond to my input, but it's definitely good enough that I'm not sure it's worth paying $1300 for a gaming PC for the marginal increase in graphics/performance.

I ended up buying the bundle on Steam (CMBS, CMSF2, CMCW). It's playable but a little jittery / unresponsive, even with everything on the lowest settings.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find any setting like that. I have an Intel HD Graphics 520.

Thank you for the tip but that didn't fix my problem I'm using an Intel Graphics like one of the last comments in that thread mentions, but the guy doesn't say if it's a fixable problem or not.

It happens even in the main menu:

I just bought CMSF2 to see if it would run on my non-gaming laptop and it does, but the text in the UI is all garbled/blurry. Any idea how I can fix this?

I don't have CMx2 because I don't have a gaming PC. But I may be getting a gaming PC soon, in which case I'll definitely be getting all the CMx2 titles.

I think just playing the games and watching a few YouTube videos can work great for some people, but I can say from personal experience that I found CMx1 pretty intimidating/anxiety-inducing, in the way some people find chess intimidating/anxiety-inducing. When I was first starting, I remember feeling anxious whenever I would play because I had no idea what I should do, and the thought of just throwing my units at the enemy to see what happened and learning through trial-and-error made me feel more anxious. I honestly think part of it is that Combat Mission feels a lot more real than RTSes like Starcraft; Combat Mission was the game that made me really understand in a visceral way why militaries discourage fraternization between officers and enlisted men (because officers may have to order their enlisted men to do things that are very likely to lead to their deaths, and that can be gut-wrenching). Anyway, if you look online you'll see a lot of comments from people saying Combat Mission has a steep learning curve. And I've tried the "just watch YouTube videos" approach for Command Ops 2 a few times now and I still bounce off it; I think I'd do better to just play very simple scenarios for 15 minutes a day to build up a habit of playing. I also highly recommend you check out Duolingo for an amazing example of how to teach something well. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Is that CMx2 stuff?

Hey everyone, Two years ago () I posted in the forums (here) asking about creating a non-free CMx1 course, as I think one of Combat Mission's biggest problems is its learning curve, and I think CMx1 is very well-positioned (because of its low cost and low system requirements) to be an entry point to the series for a lot of people. I got approval from the devs but I ran out of steam on the idea and never made much progress, I think because I wasn't sure exactly how to approach it. The idea has refused to leave my brain since then and after having spent lots of time with with the excellent language-learning app Duolingo and programming-interview-question website InterviewCake, and having played CMx1 a lot more, I feel like I'm much better positioned to create the course. Previously I wanted to have the course primarily be a bunch of videos, with scenarios as a nice-to-have, while now I think the learning scenarios are the must-have, with videos being a nice-to-have (maybe a must-have for certain things). Today I created four extremely short (1-turn), extremely basic scenarios to be used to teach people the following (in this order): How to start a scenario, how to proceed through the turns (i.e. hit the GO button), what the objective is (capturing flags), and how to interpret the result screen at the end. How to issue a "Move" order. How to issue a "Run" order. That you don't need to be right next to a flag to capture it (I'm iffy on how important this is to include this early in the course). I sat my (extremely computer-illiterate) girlfriend through the lessons as a way to get feedback and maintain my motivation, and I figured it was worth posting in here for the same reason. She managed to get through the first four (admittedly with a lot of hand-holding from me), so I'm excited to try to make more and see how far I can get her. You can find my brief summaries of each scenario here (e.g. a screenshot of each scenario, what the teaching goals are, notes from my experience having my gf go through them): https://nathanwailes.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MTOVT/pages/2602696710/01+Infantry You can find the scenarios themselves here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bs7ql62i377p9kk/AADx9puNM_lgy7rg4AYP3VoYa?dl=0 So, I'd be very interested to hear from any of you if you're willing and able to sit someone else through these (maybe your S/O, kid, parent, cousin, , etc.), to see what they get stuck on, what could be improved, etc. I'll keep looking for other students, and I'll post in here as I add new lessons/scenarios.

Thank you for all that information!

It's a big desktop PC, not a laptop. But does the point about high-frequency CPUs still apply?

Thank you so much for doing this! I was big into Operation Flashpoint in high school and a few years ago the main editing/scenario hosting website (ofpec.com) had a loss-of-data incident, and almost all of the scenarios, scripts, and tutorials were lost. It was a huge tragedy.

Thank you all for your advice! I'm being offered the following gaming PC by my local wargaming buddy, who is moving to Europe for a new job and isn't going to take his computer with him. Does it seem like a good purchase? (Meaning, not far beyond the specs I need, and a good price for the specs and age of the machine.) Device name ASUSDESKTOP2020 Processor AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor 3.79 GHz Installed RAM 32.0 GB System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor Geforce RTX 2070S 8 Gig He says he paid $2,000 for it (new) 18 months ago, and is offering it to me for $1,300. I told him it sounded like overkill but that I'd look into it. Also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but it'd also be nice to be able to play the Scourge of War games at a higher framerate, and maybe Arma 3 (I played so much OFP in high school that I feel like I've fully explored that game system).

I currently only have a non-gaming laptop. I'm considering buying a gaming PC specifically so I can play CMx2 and the Graviteam Tactics games, because neither series will run nicely on my laptop (I tried). I don't want to buy a larger and more-expensive PC than I need, though, so I'm hoping someone can guide me to understand what I need to get. I'd like to be able to run both games at their highest(?) detail settings at a good framerate.