HerrTom

Over promise and under deliver is never a good thing. One way to fix that is to stop promising stuff. Sadly that means less of a window into what BFC are up to. I don't know if the rancour out here is what motivated Steve to leave out details - he tends to not get fussed over idle bitching. I would understand if it did. I know it would demotivate me
 
 
@Artkin can correct me if I have this wrong but I think he means he would like a server where you can log in find people to play with - either with a simple request for opponents or from a list of people that have already agreed to play and push a button and the game starts with the scenario loaded. For RT play the two opponents are connected by the server and play. For WEGO files are created and transferred between players automatically and you can check the status of your game and play your turns by just visiting the server and clicking a button. All the file handling, notification and launching etc. is handled automatically without and additional setup or file copying required.
theBlitz and The Few Good Men are great places to find opponents but you have to manually create connections between players (shared dropbox folders) start up games and transfer files yourself. Tools like CM Helper and Whose Turn Is It? help with the actual file management but they cannot kick things off automatically or even start the game with the new turn loaded.
So, the current state of the art for RT it is less than half way since there is no easy source for finding RT partners and there are a lot of network configuration steps you need to learn about even if you use a third party tool to help. For WEGO it is sort of half there with two third party tools required. It sounds like @Artkin is looking for a full end to end solution that automates everything with not additional tools required. Which BTW I agree would be nice.
I am unsure if BFC want to go this way since operating servers requires 24 / 7 staffing etc. However there are already communities (the Blitz and TFGM) who might be willing to put the final pieces together if the game had a way to be automated. Then there is also Steam which could be used for this. My idle wish for this would be for BFC to create the needed hooks for starting games, loading turns and maintaining connections and then using that to hook into Valve's services on Steam but also allow others to use them too. Then BFC can stay out of operating servers and let clubs or Steam connect users

Happy new year!
Excited for F&R. Also good news all the BFC titles are going to Steam! So the CMSF2 Steam release was a success  🙂. 
 
I guess that's the feature which creates one 'movie' from all turns in a game? 😐
Personally (and I guess quite some others) would really like such a feature (unsupported), so that I can view / record a full AAR of a game without having to load each individual turn.
The required high-end system seems not that big of a problem (for me and probably other 'computer enthusiasts').
However, if it requires hours of number crunching it's probably fair to say that I might use it a couple of times at max. Perhaps I'd like to use it more often, but than comes reality.

OTOH for some of the better 'content creators' out there, who already investing many hours into putting together AAR video's, things might be different. Better to twiddle thumbs (or some nice napping) while the PC does the hard work, instead of loading/recording each separate turn and joining that in some editing studio program. 

Anyway that's probably just a very small portion of the 'audience'. In Dutch we have a great saying 'for nothing the sun rises'.
So I understand why you don't see it as a 'commercial viable' feature.
 

I found an interesting "scan" of a report from the 1960s about the protection steel plates provide against artillery shells. It can be found here:
http://tanks.mod16.org/2014/03/10/report-on-protection-from-fragments-from-he-ammunition/
Offers more... er.... ammunition on the debate on artillery's effectiveness against armored vehicles.
Also I believe @TheForwardObserver has posted the following article here before: ("Who Says Dumb Artillery Shells Can't Kill Armor?"
http://imgur.com/gallery/gIjCo
Perhaps also of interest is the STANAG 4569 standards for armor protection - though it's not clear immediately what "protection" means in their definition - does it mean unlikely to penetrate or impossible?  Usually these kinds of standards documents have definitions to deal with this kind of clarity problem, but I didn't see anything.
https://www.unops.org/ApplyBO/File.aspx/4569eed02.pdf?AttachmentID=52d5a7b6-37ad-49bc-b18c-c468ea81787a
----
I wanted to start this thread to build a fact-based argument on how artillery performs in Combat Mission so we can continue to strive for accuracy in simulation (or something like that!).  I haven't had time to read the first report in detail, but I realize it may be limited in utility for the discussion on armored vehicles since it talks about steel armor only.
The big thing I've gathered here is the importance of fragments - and especially the variability.  This seems to be one of the things that's missing from CM.  Using the fragmentation density, we could construct a probability function of a fragment hitting a given area at any radius, and using data from tests like above we can also generate a distribution of penetrations.  In my mind, this (as far as I know) relatively simple method may be a good way of "simulating" fragmentation in-game, especially compared to the brute-force approach of just shooting fragments everywhere!
I'm a little too busy/tired during the week to really pursue this further, but I'd love to see what else we can dig up.  Hopefully this weekend I can put together some plots to show what I'm talking about.

So we can solve the THOR equations to figure out what kind of velocity a fragment needs to penetrate a certain thickness of armor:

As you can see, the heavier fragments (as expected) perform better at penetrating armor - requiring less velocity to do so.  As the armor gets thicker, the fragments begin to require prohibitively fast speeds to penetrate.  Typically on an artillery shell it seems the initial velocity is in the realm of 1.5 km/s.

Using the data generated for the angular dispersion plus some more to accommodate the shape of the shell, we can arrive at the fragmentation pattern for a shell travelling in the negative x direction.
The dip in the negative x direction comes from the nose of the shell obstructing some fragmentation, and the larger dip in the positive x direction is the same for the base - a more significant effect for the more significant blockage provided by the base of the shell.
This can all be combined together by some clever interpolation (good god it took a while to figure out how to massage the data to make that possible!).  If we select a fragmentation density - say 1 fragment per square meter, we can generate a contour plot showing us the thickness of armor required to generally have no perforations.

Note the axes are not the same scale - this is to provide a better visualization of the regions.  At this density, a single artillery shell is likely to perforate a BTR 12 times at ranges up to 7 meters.

If we set the criteria to only 1.2 perforations per artillery shell (on average), we can see that our BTR isn't safe even up to 20 meters away!

This can all be consolidated into a few lines showing the maximum distance that you're likely to penetrate a 1x1 meter target with 0.2, 0.4 ... 1.8 fragments per artillery shell.  The flat region at the top might be because I capped the maximum fragment size I analyzed.

This thread has a good discussion of the subject, mostly from the CM:BS perspective:
 

Thanks for the discussion everyone! Good to learn new things!
Angle is all there - I calculate the normals of all the polygon faces in the model to get the "angle of attack" of the fragments.  Thickness is the one that's currently 10mm all around for the BTR (which I think is fairly accurate specifically for the BTR).
 
Oh, I definitely take into account the variable mass of the fragments!  That was one of my hardest-fought victories!    To shed some light on it - I use a couple of arrays of random numbers to figure out if there was a hit, and what the mass of the fragment was.  Programmatically:
%%%% Figure out vertices that received a hit %%%%
% Roll a random number to check for hits
roll = rand(length(V),1);
% Ignore any rolls for angles of attack greater than 90 degrees!
roll(abs(incAngle) > pi/2) = 1;
% The probabilty of a hit is the density of fragments at the vertex scaled by the area of the vertex
probHit = fragDensTgt .* areaVert;
%%%% Now we want the mass of each fragment that hit %%%%
% Convert the "number of fragments of greater mass" to a list of fragment numbers and their mass
listN        = cumsum((NOverall));
% Roll a number from 1 to N_frags to figure out what fragment number would hit each vertex (V)
massRoll    = rand(length(V),1) .* max(listN);
% Interpolate against the frag mass (mx,listN) list to figure out what the mass of the fragment was
%     This is "fuzzed" in that I didn't pull an integer, and instead interpolated the fragment number
%    I also extrapolate to prevent it from failing if it rolls a zero (which actually happened!)
fragMassTgt    = interp1(listN,mx,massRoll,'linear','extrap');
That's good to know.  I made the assumption of face-hardened steel, rather than high hardness steel or mild steel.  I can't specifically set the hardness of the steel since the THOR equations for penetration take a set of coefficients that are curve fit to a specific steel.  I'm limited to "high strength" "mild" and "face hardened" in addition to other metals like magnesium or aluminium.
The BMPs do have much better armor than the BTRs do though.  If I remember correctly the sides are protected by fuel tanks as well as the armor plating, all acting kind of like spaced armor.  That's another pair of things I don't take into account with this model.  To do spaced armor I'd probably have to do some raytracing or something which is a lot more complexity that I don't want to get myself into.  After all, I'm not a programmer!   I might be able to generate a special set of coefficients to use from a curve fit of various spaced armor geometries...
 
It's worth mentioning at this point that the model as it stands is far from being real-time enough to use, for example, in black sea.  It could be significantly sped up if a lot of the tables I generated were simply presaved and read in when needed, but it's still pretty slow.  Some of the slowness comes from poor programming on my part, I'm sure, as well as making the plots and things.  But it still takes 2.99 seconds to run - too slow even if a CS person could probably speed it up 10x.
But never fear!  I do intend on simplifying or building a schematic algorithm that would easily work real-time.  We'll lose a lot of specifically simulated detail in the armor facet angles and all these other goodies, but I think we'll all be happy if we can get a reasonable result and still be able to play a game!  My plan is to devolve everything into relatively small look up tables and interpolate along the surfaces - including turning a vehicle into a few numbers describing its resistance at certain angles.  If I can make it so that we only have to look up a few things at once I'll be happy!

@Sgt.Squarehead - as I've said before I think, stop noodling around with your stuff.  There comes a point where chasing the 1% is counter-productive.  Tidy them all up, write the briefings and square the maps away and kick them out of the door.  One released and 'good enough for release' product is better than 200 sat on your hard drive.
Taking Ap Bac or more correctly, 'A Miserable Damn Performance' as an example - it's done ... is it absolutely perfect - probably not, I don't know yet because it will bundle with the next H&E build so people haven't had a chance to play it and give their feedback.  However, despite the fact I felt that it needed a couple more play throughs and there were a couple of things that I felt could be changed, those changes and tests would only be marginal improvements.
The important thing is that the scenario fits the vision (which is why I banged on about vision in my Neptune Spear scenario tutorial) that I had in terms of its look, feel and outcomes.  Whether AI Group 1 plan could be tinkered with so that it moves between order 3 and 4 at 4:30 instead of 4:15 because it would be slightly more realistic or not is something I'm over.  The player generally won't notice the nuance if the overall experience is good.
It was gruelling getting to that point - as I recall, you said something like - 'flip - how did you knock the map out so quickly?'  The answer was simple - real world map, focus on getting it done and again I wasn't going to worry too much about whether a bump in the ground here or a tree there looked better or would create some sort of challenge or not.  The joy of real maps is that you don't need to think about the ground - you just trace the map.  
The graft was testing the thing because each test was about a week's worth of effort.  I reached out to our mutual friend @MOS:96B2P only when I had a pretty good idea that the thing worked and had a checklist of things that I wanted an opinion on.  He graciously spent about a week going through it and gave me some helpful suggestions.  From there, I incorporated most of those suggestions and tested again.  Then I had to deal with a couple of changes in the mod build and tested again.  By then, although not totally happy, I figured that it was good enough and I am confident that it is. 
I say the above, which is why I reached out to MOS, was because my vision was to replicate the frustrations and frictions of that day and I wanted to confirm that I'd got that right.  I'm pretty sure that some people will hate the scenario for this reason but I know that I've delivered the vision and I explain this in the designer notes.  I am happy enough that, despite some imperfections, I can explain to anyone who plays it - that:
I put a bit of thought and effort into it I know how the thing works I know how it is meant to work I know why it is meant to work that way. I think you just need the same confidence to accept that 'good enough is good enough'.
 

Okay, I lied.  One more picture.  While trying to decide what scenario to do an AAR on, I found I needed to really tweak stuff around to get nighttime looking good.

Video here: https://i.imgur.com/BggbJjX.mp4

My last bit of spamming this thread... I'm planning on doing an AAR in the near future instead.

Russian Razvedka approach a compound sitting on the commanding heights of the town.

The heights were remarkably poorly defended. A brief firefight saw the Ukrainian defenders handily defeated by withering cannon fire. (Anyone else notice that Razvedka are reluctant to use weapons other than the SVD? It seems to make them particularly vulnerable in firefights).  Strong points identified by the BRDM assault company are blasted by supporting artillery coordinated from the heights.

The BRDM company dismounts advance through the village.  Even though my Reconnaissance Battalion is facing an entire Infantry Battalion, heavy supporting fires have been instrumental in dislodging stubborn defenders.  Unfortunately, every single casualty hurts when all of my squads are 4-man teams, while the Ukrainians outnumber me two-to-one.

Thanks! It's not exactly how it looks in-game for me right now... but it could be.  I use reshade for the depth stuff and film grain - the real kicker I think is a colour lookup table I applied in Photoshop that transforms the colours to approximate Kodachrome film (my inspiration: I bought an old Praktica a few months ago and have been shooting a lot with that film).
It would be pretty straightforward for me to take that LUT and apply it back into the game, though.

...And I got distracted while typing this and just did it.  Here's a split-screen including all of the effects.  Ambient occlusion is still the toughest to get right... I'm not happy with it yet.

Here is the lookup table if anyone wants it:

Greetings
I wanted to let everyone know that we at Developer Dialogue had the incredible opportunity to interview the founder & creator of Battlefront.com, Stephen Grammont. During the interview we dove into the history of the Combat Mission franchise, discuss the company’s latest partnership with Slitherine and uncover some bombshells.  We also uncover why Battlefront never released on Steam, until now.
 
Special thank you to Stephen for taking part in this interview, it was an amazing experience.
 
If you guys are interested you can listen to it here:
 
YouTube: 
 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/developer-dialogue/id1524192396 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/33DiH9pCrcV9bVw4WeDWmS 
Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc3ByZWFrZXIuY29tL3Nob3cvNDUwNTYyMi9lcGlzb2Rlcy9mZWVk

Okay, I lied.  One more picture.  While trying to decide what scenario to do an AAR on, I found I needed to really tweak stuff around to get nighttime looking good.

Video here: https://i.imgur.com/BggbJjX.mp4

@IICptMillerII


I mean really the whole thing is pretty simple - I would think it would be common sense;

1. Don't call people mentally damaged
2. Maybe don't go around complaining about moral virtue signaling after you called people mentally damaged.
3. If you can do neither of those then don't make the post.
3a. If you absolutely cannot help yourself remove the beta tester tag.

Because fundamentally if there are in fact these mental defectives obsessed with Combat Mission your posts will not dissuade them. However, your posts sure as hell paint Battlefront in a bad light.

So if you get your "As'es" handed to you, that means you get paid?
The list is so long, but I'd hope they fixed the technical issues at least.
Shadows that flicker on and off when moving the camera, hillsides that are lit from the direction opposite the sun, patches of terrain where no fog effect is applied, framerates that often run very low, shaders that crash the game unless you toggle them off.
I believe most of these are caused by obsolete OpenGL driver support, so a move to DirectX would be great.

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/battle-debaltseve-hybrid-army-classic-battle-encirclement
Interesting read.

Been away for a while... Decided to drop back into CM:BS with the excellent Wrong Turn at Albuquerque scenario.  Dragged the Russians into a real slug-fest since I didn't get my Javelins into good covering positions.  I found my M136s far more useful.

Though a Bradley at close range is a real threat to T-72s!

Okay, I lied.  One more picture.  While trying to decide what scenario to do an AAR on, I found I needed to really tweak stuff around to get nighttime looking good.

Video here: https://i.imgur.com/BggbJjX.mp4

It's been a while since I've played such a large PBEM or even one with so many vehicles, here's a little vignette AAR from my recently concluded match with @gardar15. 

Read it here: https://rinaldiaars.blogspot.com/2020/05/equilibrium-black-sea-vignette-aar.html

Now this is seriously cool   Unforgivable that I haven't played it yet.

Okay, I lied.  One more picture.  While trying to decide what scenario to do an AAR on, I found I needed to really tweak stuff around to get nighttime looking good.

Video here: https://i.imgur.com/BggbJjX.mp4

My last bit of spamming this thread... I'm planning on doing an AAR in the near future instead.

Russian Razvedka approach a compound sitting on the commanding heights of the town.

The heights were remarkably poorly defended. A brief firefight saw the Ukrainian defenders handily defeated by withering cannon fire. (Anyone else notice that Razvedka are reluctant to use weapons other than the SVD? It seems to make them particularly vulnerable in firefights).  Strong points identified by the BRDM assault company are blasted by supporting artillery coordinated from the heights.

The BRDM company dismounts advance through the village.  Even though my Reconnaissance Battalion is facing an entire Infantry Battalion, heavy supporting fires have been instrumental in dislodging stubborn defenders.  Unfortunately, every single casualty hurts when all of my squads are 4-man teams, while the Ukrainians outnumber me two-to-one.

Now this is seriously cool   Unforgivable that I haven't played it yet.

Okay, I lied.  One more picture.  While trying to decide what scenario to do an AAR on, I found I needed to really tweak stuff around to get nighttime looking good.

Video here: https://i.imgur.com/BggbJjX.mp4