nox_plague

@Battlefront.com I've come to realize that AMD Radeon's decision to essentially "deprecate" OpenGL performance, Radeon GPUs are leaving a huge amount of performance on the table, especially when it comes to scenario load times. I know you're not ready to share what the V5 engine improvements entail, but I wanted put in this request on the off chance you're not already overloaded . OpenGL performance is likely to continue to degrade with Apple and AMD not supporting it. That means eventually the CM engine performance will degrade and will likely want to explore moving to a different Graphics API. Vulkan is the most open and portable option, basically being the "successor" to the OpenGL legacy. DirectX and Metal are they other two, but both are proprietary with Microsoft and Apple, respectively. Seems like the open source community is creating some OpenGL to Vulkan translators that you may be able to wrap the CM engine with and see a performance improvement. Could be a shortcut on the path to full Vulkan implementation. Check out Zink and Mese3D - additionally for Apple Metal API you can use MoltenVK to easily port Vulkan to Metal. Mike Blumenkratz seems to be the developer managing Zink development, so you might be able to reach out and understand if OpenGL to Vulkan API is something your team could use. Microsoft is working on an OpenGL to DirectX layer but I don't know that I'd want to bet my business on that being supported indefinitely, no idea if it's available to implement, but again could be a performance stop-gap. What it interesting is Microsoft is using Mese3D as well. Here are some OpenGL to Vulkan development articles: https://blog.napframework.com/2020/porting-nap-opengl-to-vulkan/ https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/graphics-gaming-and-vr-blog/posts/porting-a-graphics-engine-to-the-vulkan-api https://www.youtube.com/embed/6NWfznwFnMs

I'm very interested in folks experiences with Radeon GPUs, Windows, and CM. There seems to indeed (and based on searching these forums that appears to be the consensus) be a loading issue. As an interesting data point that it could be AMD Radeon Driver related I offer this data point: CM Red Thunder - Gog and Magog MacOS: 15.37 seconds Windows 10: 185.15 seconds That is a crazy 12x or 1200% faster performance. No Mods, all settings identical (Display 1280 x 960 (because MacBook has different display this is the best way to standardize), Vert Sync OFF, 3D Quality BEST, 3D Texture BEST, Antialias ON, Tree Detail HIGH, Shader ON) These computers are surprisingly similar, so I think it is 80% a software issue. I recognize Apple does special hardware optimization, but given these are both Intel w/ Radeon systems hardware alone cannot explain these differences. Additionally Apple writes their own drivers for MacOS, and they have even deprecated OpenGL (Battlefront please make sure you're ready for Metal/Vulkan.). So again seems like the Radeon driver on Windows 10 or how CM calls the driver is creating serious overhead. MacBook Pro 2019 16" specs Intel 9980HK 8 Core 16 Thread 2.4 GHz Turbo 5.0 GHz AMD Readon Pro 5500M 8GB NVMe SSD AP2048N 2TB PCIe 3.0 (Supposedly the memory for these SSDs is manufactured by Samsung) 32 GB DDR4 2666 MHz RAM macOS Monterey 12.2.1 Custom Windows 10 built PC specs Intel 9700K 8 Core 8 Thread 3.6 GHz Turbo 4.9 GHz AMD Radeon 6700 XT 12GB GDDR6 (Powercolor Fighter) Driver Version 22.3.1 NVMe SSD Samsung Evo Plus 1 TB PCIe 3.0 16 GB DDR4 3200 MHz CL14 RAM This desktop 6700 XT Radeon GPU runs circles around the 50 watt 5500M in the MacBook Pro, except in Combat Mission

Wow, that is a very unfortunate regarding MacOS Catalina. I have a 2019 MacBook Pro 16" inch, running 12.2.1 "Monterey" and I can say the Black Sea performance is great. Loads much faster than my PC which I am trying to diagnose.

@37mm Amazing looking. I need to purchase SF2 to play this. Do I need to buy the complete bundle (SF2, Marines, British, NATO) to play this fully?

Thanks so much for sharing, it’s actually pretty amazing how much war footage they used. I’ve worked in marketing and can imagine the publisher wanted to drum up some attention and either the development team didn’t have something far enough along or wasn’t even consulted (happens) and so you ended up with a hack job. But given how little game footage they show, they knew it was a hack job and didn’t want to draw too much attention to it, hence the majority old Soviet footage

Recently purchased CM: Afghanistan and I’m really enjoying it, so different from CM Red Thunder. Yes, the older engine doesn’t have the elegance of 4.0, but I like the terrain and the challenges introduced by such mountainous engagements. I seem to be great at killing my own infantry with Hinds. I hope my purchase assures BF there is still interest in this title and a remake would be warmly received (via my wallet). And learning about the Soviet-Afghan conflict, wow, I hadn’t fully appreciated how the repercussions of this war have so greatly impacted Western foreign policy.

Did you get this book? How is it? What about the quality of the maps? High resolution and detailed? Topographical lines with elevation and such?

Can someone add those uniforms to CM Afghanistan, lol those are great.

I got a little confused, which of these scenarios have been released? Are they already part of the CMA All in One? Also I would be interested in a PBEM CMA game.

Did this DRA uniform mod get released?

Bump. I had this exact question, do I need to install 1.02 or just skip it and go straight to 1.03? For the record. Both must be installed in order. CM:A 1.01 -> 1.02 Patch -> 1.03 Patch CM:A is a gem!

I've pre-ordered F&R and cannot wait CM:BB was my first CM game (at 15 years old) and served as my introduction to combat sims and/or war-games. I haven't played in years and kinda forgot about the games, but Covid gave me time to dig through all old favorites and I remembered CM. Glad to see it's still in such active development. Sorry, this is a bit off topic, but I feel like folks here need a bit of an update on Steam. Steam is the largest PC game distribution platform and marketplace. Steam was released in 2004 as part of Valve's Half Life 2 release. I have had it since then and I have over 400 games on Steam. I also use GOG Galaxy which has better support for classic games, including CM1 games BO, BB, and AK. Steam manages updates. Everyday I have 3-5 game updates that download in the background. You have controls to tell it when you want updates to download/be applied etc. Steam provides cloud saves (mutli-platform support for saves too) so I can pick up right where I left off on my laptop from my desktop while I'm traveling. Steam provides a social networking and multiplayer frameworks so developers can tap into that for multiplayer matchmaking. It could make it easier to find CM online opponents and I can only imagine how using cloud saves with PBEM it could make the experience SO MUCH BETTER! Any friends that I have that game we pretty much all meet up and organize stuff on Steam, however for voice chat we tend to prefer Discord (Does CM have a Discord server yet?) Steam provides rich community mod frameworks and modding warehouse. Instead of having to manage Z folders, I can find a mod on Steam and immediately "install" it and use it in a game -with one click, and with a fancy UI to manage which mods I want on or off when I start a game. No filesystem management required. No need to worry about mod websites going down. It's all hosted by Steam / Valve. If a modder updates the mod it will auto-update just like game updates, so mod updates are managed seamlessly in the background. Steam makes it easy to backup games and to migrate games between hard drives. A personal favorite of mine, since I like upgrading my NVME SSDs and I dislike having to uninstall CM and reinstall it and going through support for activation. Steam is cross-platform. I'm using it on my MacBook Pro right now. From what I can tell, CM and Slitherine are only enabling Windows on Steam currently. All of this is to say, from the end user/customer experience of Steam is amazing. I do not know about the Developer/backend Steam experience. I don't know if those Frameworks have good API and code samples to build from. I don't know what Steam's sales cut is. I don't know how the Steam approval process works or if they'd want German military insignias modified. For a small developer like Battlefront Steam may not make sense. I have no insight into the cons. If Battlefront does decide to adopt Steam, I recommend really taking the time to utilize the modding, matchmaking, cloud saving, Multiplatform, and updating experiences, because they are pretty awesome for your users.