SgtHatred

Ok, that's fair, but we aren't talking about new whiz bang features, we are talking about UI scalability. It's hardly something Combat Mission is alone on, especially in the video game world, but anyone writing software in 20xx that wasn't disposable and didn't take into account increasing resolution of displays was making a mistake. It frustrates me whenever I see it. Scaling a UI to a screen is not "whiz bang". Again, sure, I agree in principle. Bigger companies can put more resources and effort behind their upgrades than small shops can. That isn't what you had said though, you called these massive game engines disposable, which I can't agree with. You would absolutely see major sections of code that were identical. It was an excerpt from one of the TO&E storage files. It was pretty scary. Also in my experience you actually can make blanket statements about tech decisions when you see certain mistakes made. I see it all the time. Again, sure, I can dig it. I understand that going back and changing it now is practically impossible, I just object to the idea that when it was being built it was hard. Scalable UIs in video games are pretty easy when you are rolling your own. Look at it like the Ultrawide screen issue you see today. A new popular screen format emerges and some games don't work with it, and others crop the hell out of it, and some work perfectly. Combat Mission happens to be one of the games where the ultrawide format works really well out of the box. You guys did a good job with that, but I'm sure it wasn't really considered an issue, and certainly not something you put a lot of time into, you just did the renderer correctly. This comes and goes since 2000 really, especially near the end of console release cycles. The new Call of Duty which released this week is the same crap released 10 years ago, but with a truckload of garbage bolted on to make it passable for 2017.

They absolutely do not gut huge swaths of code game by game. Hell, many AAA games these days have yearly release schedules, they do not get gutted and rebuilt every year. EA's Frostbite engine still smells like a game engine from 2008, no matter how many buckets of paint they've added to it. Like all software. And many other types of games, and yes game engines get updated, not "gutted" and not "rewritten". Updates are a natural part of the game development cycle and any software. You've released 4 engine upgrades for CM2 after all... You can still find code written by Carmack for Quake in Source 2. You can still find code for Unreal 98 in Unreal4. At no point do these organizations just delete and start from scratch on these projects. I can't fathom how something being rolled from scratch couldn't have at least had the easy 2x scaling option, but I remember when Chris posted an excerpt from one of your data files and I could tell that you guys like making things hard for yourselves, which is pretty natural for game developers. I do understand that now that it's done it can't be changed reasonably. A UI built in a way that cannot scale would be a pretty static thing and would require replacing.

Oh come on, that isn't even remotely true. Game developers absolutely do not remake their game engine for every release. Hell, most don't even build their own but rather license them. The most popular game engines have decades of code behind them. They are absolutely not disposable. Combat Mission finds itself comfortably in the majority of all software in that it didn't give a second thought to UI scalability.

" For 2017 the big effort is a full revitalization of the entire CM Shock Force Family to current game engine standards. " I have already loaded my money cannon.

Well-built in a niche does not come cheaply. I use a 3440x1440 ultrawide curved display, which works fantastically for Combat Mission. Nice and wide field of vision while not getting unreadable without scaling. Both the TrackIR and Oculus Rift work perfectly as helmet mounted sights. It makes popping off R-73s a blast. Sounds like the DCS F/A-18 will have support for a helmet sight with the AIM-9x as well. Should be fun. I never thought I would live in a world where a Paradox grand strategy game would be placed on the popular side of the "popular vs quality" debate. lol.

I believe it is a reference to the fact that one of the participants in this discussion is literally insane. I was confused about it a year or so ago when I first started reading this forum and I saw something similar, but then I googled the right name and everything became terrifyingly clear.

I was floored when I saw a video of ISIS types calming walking up to M1 tanks that were in combat to do exactly this. You'd think they would show at least a little concerned while they stroll up to the rolling death machine, but that is apparently unnecessary.

I have 8 friends I play flight sims with. All 8 own some form of HOTAS joystick, with 4 people investing in the $500 Thrustmaster Warthog, the 4 warthog owners also own ~$100 - $300 rudder pedals. 5 of us own the ~$150 TrackIR set, and 2 of us have Oculus Rifts specifically for flightsims. We play Warthunder, IL2, and DCS, and with the range of planes we use, I'd say the range in module ownership for DCS means we've each put between $100 and $700 into DCS for modules. That's 8 people who've put $300-$2000 each into flight sim specific gear (this doesn't include the PC Hardware costs for these resource hungry games). What's the point of me mentioning that? Of the 8, I am the only one who has ever heard of Strike Fighters. No wonder they struggle. If you can't put your product in front of people who are willing to pay for it, you won't get anywhere.

A multiplayer system that works (WEGO) Target Briefly A toggle to turn music off. A quick battle system that won't pit 10 technicals up against 10 T-90s. Performance. CMSF runs like a dog on my mega-PC, compared to CMBS, CMRT, and CMFB.

No fix for the teleporting mine issue that snuck past the other fortification fixes in 1.01? (TCP mode).

They built 5400 T-80s. If you ran into a soviet tank formation in East Germany in the 1980s there was a good chance it would be a T-80 unit. I would really like to see Battlefront start pumping out some modules for existing games, given that we are still waiting on the CMFI expansion, CMRT and CMBS are still waiting for their first expansion, and CMFB has also been added to that line. On the other hand, I would trade a substantial amount of earth coins for CM:Fulda Gap.

woof. Combat Mission is pretty bad as a singleplayer game. That's not really a knock against it though. All strategy games are terrible singleplayer games. The AI is as bad in this game as it is in every other strategy game, and I don't see any accomplishment in defeating it. Playing against someone who can (at least theoretically) outwit my dog is critical to enjoyment.

Mines appear to still have teleport capability. Here they are magically appearing in my spawn at the start of a quickbattle game. They were placed at start nearly 700m away. Saving and reloading moved the mines to their correct locations.

Are you using an Intel graphics chip?

Yeah, the Battlefront.com installer seems to just grab all brz files it sees and dump em in the target folder, which is insane.

software comes on optical disc now?!

That's a good point. I haven't witnessed any other odd penetration issues. I am extrapolating from this post. If the M36 models that suffer from the "exploding AP shell" have weaker penetration, but the M36s that don't suffer from it have fine penetration, it stands to reason that other vehicles that suffer from the same problem also have reduced penetration, but again I have no direct evidence of other vehicles suffering.

Definitely a bug. After October, both variants of the M36 lose a lot of penetration. also... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWBGX4Skj5o Also, I believe other vehicles suffer from the same issue, although not sure if they have the same penetration issues the M36 has.

Yeah, after October 1944, either the M36 gets armed with nerf balls, or the Panther gets neutronium inserts on its front hull.

Cool. My opponent in the flickering video posted above has an AMD Radeon HD 6800. To add to Danzig's post above, I was also trying out the M36 tonight. M36, January 1945, ~100-120m, the M36 has almost no chance of penetrating the front upper hull of the panther. It can still get lower hull hits though. M36, October 1944, ~200m, the M36 gets partial or full penetrations on the upper hull with every shot (honestly, even at 500m the M36 seems to easily defeat the front of the panther. Either The M36 becomes a lot weaker in January 1945 vs October 1944, or the Panther (I had one of every type of panther in the line) got some uranium inserts in 1945.

Also a minor thing I noticed this week that is probably incorrect. After putting several shots into hapless German infantry on a road, I had an m1 57mm AT gun fire its APDS round at an infantry man. The gun still had ~40 shots of regular ammo left, and I'm not sure discarding sabot is ever a good choice for man-sniping. I've noticed in the past that my m1's will mysteriously no longer have their apds rounds, so I assume that those are other instances of the m1 crew getting too excited to try their special ammo.

That's awesome, hopefully the fortifications fix can be back ported to Black Sea, Red Thunder, and Normandy, since it's definitely in those games (probably Italy too). Probably should have mentioned something way back when it was first encountered... 1. I don't know of a way to reproduce the flickering bug, but I went back to the video I posted and it appears that the triangles do not flicker. Also, enemy possible contact "?" do not flicker, only confirmed contact icons and friendly units. 2. In the video I posted, I am running an MSI Geforce GTX 780 SC 3GB. My opponent reported the flickering, but it was several turns of play before my icons started flickering. I shared the save file with 2 unique sets of players (neither set included an original player) and everyone saw the flickering upon loading that specific save file. In the unreasonable number of multiplayer Combat Mission games I've played in the last 2 years (I'd say 100, but that's probably too low) and many others I've been witness to, the flickering has happened maybe 4 times. Once in Final Blitz, once in Red Thunder, and twice in Normandy.

I tried, here are some highlights. Definitely got some kills with 81s, the last one is a 60mm penetrating the front. Its important to note that each of these tests involved a large number of shots, so it's evidence that it can happen. How often it can/should is another question.

I would insist on it.

We did some more testing Monday evening and determined that a defending player cannot use trenches if he is also client player. The trenches will fly all over the place for the host player, and once a save is reloaded, both players will see flying trenches. 100% repo rate on this. Foxholes, sandbag walls,TRPs, and mines seem to be more random. If a host places these items on the defense, a game will have to be saved and reloaded after the first turn, or the client player will not see where they have been placed during deployment, but still see them where they were originally placed randomly when the map was loaded. Reloading will resolve this (The host player can also reliably place trenches with this method). It is important to note that we have occasionally seen these objects suddenly move at the end of the deployment phase, when both players hit the red button, regardless of which player placed the object. This seems random, and a save/reload will not fix it. I can provide saves, video, or even live humans to experiment on to help reproduce this behavior if needed.