Bagpipe

Someone's been reading too much speculative journalism. Either that or just bought shares in some AI company... BF are hardly the market leaders in showcasing innovative computer gaming technology so I think your words are all just bluster with little real thought behind them. Think a few deep breaths are in order and maybe some meditation or something.

Surely there is a rule somewhere about not necro'ing bug threads from years ago right? I just say what we are all thinking dont shoot the messenger

That's why I commented just before you saying it was a major (ok minor but could cause grief) oversight by the publisher. It's important that BF are aware of this as they are the ones giving away money to their publisher to sell their product after all right? I was always gonna buy F&R just not right now, but alas my arm was firmly twisted. I will have to go speak to Mr.Rutins over at Matrix and see what he is willing to offer me to cease and desist!

I don't use the BF store when the product is on steam anyway. Nor would most people who see a product on steam to be fair. Just a major oversight by the publisher

never mind, just saw a review saying it needs fire and rubble but the steam page does not indicate this. Kinda jaded with that to be honest but I guess I can stretch to another £13 to complete the full bundle at an extra discount... Eyebrow firmly raised!

Just bought Red Thunder and Battle Pack 1 on steam but the BP campaigns say i need Fire and Rubble which I was not aware of? Is this correct or is it bugged?

Ahhh i did not know this was your blog. It is one of my bookmarked sites. Cracking stuff on there!

Except Putin is a totalitarian dictator. Not that those are limited to just Syria and Russia mind you...

I agree with your opinion and would add that it's not comparing apples for apples either. GT and AB both have much wider control over the player force as a whole (strategic layer) as you progress which CM does not aim to provide because that's not their focus. I don't think either game is better than the other either and I certainly think GT and AB do a damn good job with their simulations of the actual ground based combat. Obviously infantry are less useful in AB but that's for another discussion lol Is it less detailed than CM in terms of the "resolution" of the simulation? Yeah possibly slightly, but that is inherently because CM is working at a lower level so has to provide higher resolution in doing so, and can do just that because of the smaller number of units and therefor munition trajectories etc. that it has to account for.

Can't wait for BAOR update to CW though I REAAALLY need that engine 5 upgrade because the game still runs so sluggish especially on the larger battles/deployment phases.

Well then in that case I am hardly surprised. Windows causes nothing but bother these days, I think they want users to try different systems

It's a hardware setting so not Windows exactly though I don't doubt that Windows in general does not help the issues one bit. Updates cause more problems every time lol

So to keep this brief, I recently was encountering crashing issues with what I thought was due to Windows 11 and the TPM not behaving with my Ryzen 3700x cpu. I got around that and it led me to continue having occasional issues but now only when the computer was doing very little. This led me to discover the CPPC or "collaborative processor performance control", or whatever it stands for. There are settings to control this in your BIOS though the naming may vary depending on specific hardware/brand etc. So anyway, this used to be known as "cool n quiet" or something and it basically allows your CPU to throttle the power (even on prefer max performance power mode) when it is idling or close to idling. There is also a setting that allows "preferred cores". Now, I am not an expert in this stuff but having disabled all of it I have seen my rig return to stability and just now I thought I would try out the ever heart-breaking "Bear in the Sun" mission from the CMCW US campaign. If you have seen my previous posts around this you will know that I have had a hell of a time with stuttering during set up, beyond what you would expect or call reasonable. I'm talking 2 solid minutes of non-responsiveness etc. Real bad. With this CPPC stuff all disabled, forcing my cpu to not go into a low power state when on a low load (which is what you find during deployment phase in CM i suspect), I was able to deploy and play some of the mission for testing and it never stuttered more than a couple of heart beats. So if you are having the bother I have been, this may be another thing to consider if you are handy with the BIOS etc. If not then please don't go messing around in there as you could really upset your rig if you change the wrong settings.

Regarding larger scenarios/maps - Designing and selling a game that allows users to create something the game cannot handle is in itself a flawed game. That's my opinion on that matter anyway. Scenario designers are not to blame for using the tools provided to them fully. The issue I face is usually at it's worst during deployment phase, trees and shaders on/off etc makes very little difference on my rig. Whether it is an issue with the repeated deployment zone texture, or if the code concerning deployment tiles is the issue, is not for me to say. There seem to be a lot of "apologists" (I use that term gently ofc) tip toeing around the subject of performance in the CM games though, I mean sure the games are great and you want to see them succeed and when someone questions their quality you get defensive etc. I get that but it doesn't actually help the games/devs/publishers/us in the long run. The conversation inevitably leads to people comparing specs etc when in reality a game of this scale should be easily run, individually computed bullets or no, on modern hardware, the facts are that the game does not properly utilize the hardware. Any quick analysis of your cpu/gpu/memory usage during a scenario will show you this. I feel pretty strongly about this one issue because I genuinely believe these titles would do massively better if it were rectified. Many, many potential new players try these games and hate the performance (performance vs. visuals) so pass on them when they don't realize what they are missing out on. You see conversation regularly about it on many social platforms etc. So it feels like this endless loop of lack of dev resources to fix the issue which is then antagonized by a lack of sales to accrue more dev resources which is ultimately a death sentence. Which nobody wants. I mean, I basically bought Cold War because I had money to burn and felt the pang of nostalgia from playing the original game way back in my childhood some time. After that I bought a further two titles, knowing that they don't perform well, just to try and support the devs a bit hoping that somehow my extra £100 or whatever might actually help lol. I hope this doesn't read as me raining urine all over things, that's not my intention. I have great respect for the devs and the community. I just think that maybe there needs to be more honest conversation about the issue and more pressure put on the devs/publishers to prioritize remedying the situation.

I have not bought any of the ww2 titles though I would like to. I think unit count is higher in those generally so figured it would be worse than the modern ones though I guess there are less sensors etc to compute and what not. I have tried all the things to try and alleviate it but nothing helped. The performance in general is pretty poor with CM games, that I can live with given how it is basically running off some ancient necromancy knowledge that the devs possess but when it grinds to a slideshow, and I mean 1-3 fps if you are lucky at times, during deployment phase and occasionally when playing larger warsaw pact scenarios... it goes beyond reason. I do not know if it is something to do with Ryzen CPUs or RTX GPUs... I think the more modern ryzen CPUs can have issues if games are not written in a way that utilizes their boost clock function etc. (to put it really basically lol) but even at that a base clock of 3.4/3.6Ghz should be more than adequate for something like this, at least to prevent a slide show issue. Task manager regularly shows almost no utilization of the hardware when this occurs too which is usually quite telling. I won't list the number of games I run perfectly fine, because that is tiresome for everybody and childish, but it is in the 100's and many are similar "kind" of games in terms of calculations and what not. Anyway like I was saying, it would be awesome to know more about when to expect the engine update because I am sure there was talk around the announcement period that it would help to mesh with the modern set ups a little better.