sttp

The setup phase of the new Berlin map has reminded me of how much I'd like some kind of overlay feature that we could draw on and mark key positions (e.g., for AT guns or heavy MGs), highlight important terrain, and so on. If not Engine 5, maybe in CMx3?

Thank you. That is a relief, as I don't have tons of free minutes these days. I know you've been working your butt off lately, so hope you wouldn't take what I said as criticism of you personally. I'm really enjoying both Fire & Rubble and Cold War when I can... which is late at night, at the expense of my sleep. Totally worth it though!

Oh okay, that is good to know. Thank you!

So it sounds like I've got to back everything up, download a 3 gigabyte file, do a complete fresh install of Red Thunder, then reset my key binds and all options again... just for a little hotfix patch? I'm not even at the "grumpy old man" stage of life yet, but my gosh Steam integration really can't come soon enough.

I do this as well, but you do have to be very careful with it. Many graphical aspects of the game (the thickness of wooded areas, for example) are abstracted by the graphics engine, so what you see from that soldier's point of view may not reflect what he actually has line of sight to.

Because in real life you're not ordering a squad to go to an action square. In real life you could order them to "go to the top of this hill, to whatever position will just barely give you direct line of sight to that building on the corner that 2nd platoon is taking fire from." That is why we need a good LOS tool. We in the game have to micro-manage, since we're the brains and eyes of every single team leader, squad leader, platoon commander, company commander, vehicle commander, etc., etc....

Yes it definitely would be more intuitive for new players that way. I've seen it explained why it couldn't be done that way with CMx2 originally -- maybe someone has that link handy and could post it? But it's pretty obvious to most people that a point-to-point line of sight tool should have one end of the line emanating from the place on the map you're checking LOS FROM and the other end of the line terminating at the point you're checking LOS TO. It's hard to believe anyone would argue differently.

First impression is that the title "Fire and Rubble" is very fitting, and that the maps are extremely well made. It's amazing how they've captured an entirely different atmosphere from any of the other modules... yet again. Kudos to the company, the designers, and to the testers. Also, whoever it was that used to always beg for the schwimmwagen may be very pleased with some of the content in this module!

Good lord... you're trying to rewrite history here, and are going so far as to blame the customers. That happens a lot around this forum, and it seems like it's always the same handful of people who do that. But here's the bottom line: the HE bug was a bug. Battlefront acknowledged that it was a bug, and they finally fixed it. It's really that simple.

I missed it. Does "very" mean "within days" or something more imminent than that? All else aside, I will be very excited to get my hands on this module!

There are plenty of people who considered the HE bug introduced by version 3 to be game-breaking. There was discussion of it all over the forums here. Here is the first thread I encountered about it when looking back in my comment history -- actually, this particular thread was about the hedgerow bug introduced with V4 -- but I'm positive there are plenty more: I don't know if I myself considered the HE bug to be truly game-breaking... maybe, maybe not... but it was certainly close enough that the company taking that long to fix it really did have me scratching my head there for awhile. That said, I am glad to hear that F&R is almost here, and I will almost certainly be buying it within the first week.

Exactly. And not all that long ago a major (some would say game-breaking) bug took over a year to be patched. Maybe that works for the developer and testers, but it didn't really work that well for me as the customer. Other bugs which have existed for years (like the bridge bug, and team-members-refusing-to-move) still pop up much too frequently.

I've played CMx2 titles with 3 or 4 different video cards installed, and shadows have been "shimmery" like that with each one. Shadows look pretty much the same on all the Combat Mission 2 AAR videos I've seen as well, so I'm pretty sure the issue is with the game engine itself, not your video card or any graphics setting. I guess most people have just gotten used to the fuzzy and distracting shadows? I have not, personally, and always play with shadows off. It's a shame, really, and is just one more reason the CM Engine 3 can't arrive soon enough, IMO.

Exactly. I see well-educated writers making the it's/its mistake very frequently. (The other day I even saw an its'... as in a plural possessive.) I think of the issue in terms of grammatical symmetry, like this: He's eating his dinner. She's eating her dinner. They're eating their dinner. It's eating its dinner. Possessive pronouns never have apostrophes. Ever. Instead, apostrophes with pronouns always represent a contraction.

Good lord.... Should have predicted someone would take offense. Either the bug can be fixed at its core but hasn't yet been, or it can't be fixed at its core. There is, logically speaking, no 3rd option. So thanks for basically confirming what I said. I guess we can infer from your message, then, that BFC's position is that the bug is just too complex to be fixed at its core. Okay then. So people can continue submitting (or re-submitting) individual instances of the bridge bug, and maybe they'll be fixed some day. Seems pretty straightforward.

I hear ya, Rocketman. We know they can solve the bug for specific scenarios and maps though, right? Because, IIRC, they have done just that. So that's the good news. What has not been forthcoming, however, is a general solution to the problem... one that precludes the bug's manifestation in the first place. Why does it matter, then, if they can find the general solution? Because third party scenarios would be much less likely to get any special treatment (or perhaps any treatment at all?) under the "fix the bridge bugs one at a time" approach.

I'd say the odds are pretty high that the game's lead programmer already knows exactly what causes this bridge bug everyone here is talking about. It's been an issue for the entirety of the 6 years or so I've been playing these games. My guess is that it is just too difficult to fix the issue at its core, or that it's simply (to BFC) not worth the time and resources it would take to finally fix it.

Neat video. Thanks! I will say, though, that if they can't get shadows to look better than that shimmery, blobby mess we see in this presentation -- which is exactly how they look on my PCs, regardless of video card brand -- they should just turn them off altogether. They're trying to attract customers, right?

This is my single biggest wish. It really is time for the next iteration of the CM engine, in my opinion, but the extra Steam sales and the new, wider audience could buy BFC the time to make CMx3 more robust and reliable than it might have otherwise been. I will trade wait time for engine quality any day.

This is great news. I think Steam is a good idea for many reasons, and hope Battlefront finds lots of success there. The influx of new players will be most welcomed.

They had a YouTube channel called Battlefrontcom for a long time, and then I seem to remember another one under a different name after that. And now there's yet another, I guess? I wonder why they keep changing channels? Cool gun, that Pak44. What a beast!

Animation text mod in your z folder?

The CMx2 engine is thirteen years old, and it shows. So I say let's drop the demands for new theaters and new features and instead urge and allow them to focus on an entirely new game engine, CMx3.

I, personally, would be very careful about assuming the bug will be fixed anytime soon. It took the company almost 2 years to fix the HE bug from 3.0, and all that fix did was introduce this new (now too old) hedgerow bug. Or maybe both bugs are different manifestations of some singular root cause. Who knows. The point is, over the last 4-5 years BFC has been in no apparent hurry to fix what are often times game-breaking bugs. The HE bug... the hedgerow bug... the bridge bug... the team-members-staying-behind bug... the halftrack-gunner / tank commander 'issue' (which I don't think can properly be called a bug, but is still pretty immersion-wrecking)... unbelievably stupid spotting anomalies (like the one discussed in rocketman's current thread)... and there are other issues I'm forgetting, too, I'm sure. Most of them, sadly, still exist, and that's despite literal years of discussion about them on this form. I've been playing CM a little more lately, after a much needed hiatus, and all I can say is... yeah, I'm remembering why I needed to put the game down for awhile. It's very disappointing. Hopefully BFC can either get it together and fix these kinds of things, or just call it a day with CMx2 and move on to CMx3.

Yeah, I have now played this scenario a few times from each side, and the force balance seems pretty lopsided in favor of the Germans. They have so many automatic weapons, plus much more deadly armor. Not to mention the fact that they can get into position more quickly. So, though technically a meeting engagement, it's really more like the Germans are defending. The extra number of pieces of armor you get as the French just isn't enough to counter it, in my opinion. Maybe if the French had some smoke they could rush up their far right and try to cause some mayhem that way, but as it stands now I think they have a pretty difficult task. I love the map, and still like the scenario, but yes, I think it is maybe a bit imbalanced.