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Will there be any improvements in the the game using spare resources? I have a pretty decent PC( 8gig/4xcpu at 3.20ghz/ 64bit w7/9800gt card and updated nvidia drivers) yet the game seems to be poor handling big maps/lots of units/troops.

I just had a bash at the SPR campaign and during the Omaha beach map everything drops to a stuttering, pausing, crawl.

It only starts to improve slightly when units are destroyed and with everything at the lowest detail.

This is not the 1st time a big battle has become an unplayable stuttering, pausing, crawl. Then there is the OOM issue too.

Obviously I am talking about RT play

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it shouldn't be though should it? with top end specs pc's. hopefully it has been corrected by BFC

It's not something we can "correct", per se. We have made (and will continue to make) improvements that will help, but Combat Mission, whatever flaws you may attribute to it, is an extremely complex simulation and very large / complex scenarios are going to tax even top-end machines.

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It's not something we can "correct", per se. We have made (and will continue to make) improvements that will help, but Combat Mission, whatever flaws you may attribute to it, is an extremely complex simulation and very large / complex scenarios are going to tax even top-end machines.

LOL, hard to avoid when every bullet is tracked! I used to scratch my head why at times CMSF or CMBN would get overloaded, since I played IL2 Sturmovik and its progeny for 10 years without problems (unless there was heavy, heavy bombing occuring atm)...I mean, come on, the calculations for simulating flight combat in a 3D ernvironment and all. But when you consider every bullet is tracked and calculated, all the options for the environment (the grass sways in the wind, ferchristsakes), and the myriad other options for the AI (both theTac AI and regular(?) AI--you know, the one that runs the animations and stuff), I find it more amazing that I can play a tactical level, good-looking, very well done simulation of WWII warfare in 3D without more problems!

From cardboard counters to this sim in 40+ years is a big deal to me.

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55+ years (well, OK, wargaming for maybe 42 years) for me, too, and this is the stuff I couldn't even begin to dream I'd have on my desktop all those years ago, when I squinted into those Panzerblitz counters and tried to imagine what a Tiger tank firing from hull-down must have looked like, outside of book photos, grainy newsreel footage, or fakey looking war movies.

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55+ years (well, OK, wargaming for maybe 42 years) for me, too, and this is the stuff I couldn't even begin to dream I'd have on my desktop all those years ago, when I squinted into those Panzerblitz counters and tried to imagine what a Tiger tank firing from hull-down must have looked like, outside of book photos, grainy newsreel footage, or fakey looking war movies.

I started out at age 9-10 with the cardboard cut-out type games and have been playing everything from those, through RT video gaming and CM since its early days.

I guess I've never grown up, but having spent 17 years in the military, I guess it's a by product of that .... :D

Regards,

Doug

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It's not something we can "correct", per se. We have made (and will continue to make) improvements that will help, but Combat Mission, whatever flaws you may attribute to it, is an extremely complex simulation and very large / complex scenarios are going to tax even top-end machines.

Actually making the game use more than one core would certainly help. ;)

ATM the entire game seems to be bottlenecking the one CPU core it runs on, in the process having the same horrible performance with octocores with extremely powerful gfx cards... just as with an outdated weaksauce dualcore. I know that this is a huge task, but it's pretty much the only solution to the problem.

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Well, if we're going to clarify :D, I started at age 5 (in 1958) with my older brother's army men. He was 11 and devised a simple card system for lining them up, comparing cards, high card wins, red=dead, black=wounded. Funny how many times the winner won by one or two guys!:)

Cardboard didn't start for me until around the time Tractics came out...late '60's(?), plus there was a Civil War game in Life magazine during the Civil War Centennial years. Then Blitzkrieg, PanzerBlitz, and all manner of SPI/S&T games and miniatures beginning in the early '70's. Except for IL2 beginning in 2001, and CMSF (found quite by accident while Googling Chechnya combat footage!--I bought it within the hour of watching a CMSF vid of a Bradley firing at a target), this is the only computer gaming I've done, and likely the only I will do.

It's fun to reminisce and compare notes, eh?

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Well, if we're going to clarify :D, I started at age 5 (in 1958) with my older brother's army men.

Now that you mention it, I remember those green plastic ones too ... :D

They were advertised in comic books and I remember my mother buying a package of them for me.

Flashbacks .... :eek:

Regards,

Doug

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Ahh, that's right -- make it 45 years for me because that reminds me that I played American Heritage's "Broadside" (naval war of 1812, great fun) and Civil War at elementary school age, even before I discovered AH D-Day, etc., years later.

BTW, so much of this shared cultural nostalgia is American or Canadian -- makes me wonder how our older overseas friends here found their way into the hobby. With WWII still so much in local and recent memory, overwhelming desire to forget the war in Germany (compared to the constant romanticizing of it in US media and kids toys in the 1950s and 1960s), and these boardgames we grew up with probably not published or sold as much overseas back then. Maybe miniatures were more often the "entry drug" for Europeans in those days? Or something else?

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C'mon, you guys are ignoring the best one: The Guns of Navarone set! Now THAT was a good Christmas. 3 levels, movable guns, elevator, and gobs of tanks to rush out of the gararge door. You know, I had NO idea those were Panthers. As well, for a long time I thought the MG42'ers were carrying crutches over their shoulders, so I thought they were medics. It didn't help them.

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Actually making the game use more than one core would certainly help. ;)

It would help, marginally, in some cases. It wouldn't solve the problem.

ATM the entire game seems to be bottlenecking the one CPU core it runs on, in the process having the same horrible performance with octocores with extremely powerful gfx cards... just as with an outdated weaksauce dualcore. I know that this is a huge task, but it's pretty much the only solution to the problem.

That's incorrect. "Seeming" to bottleneck the CPU, and CPU actually being a bottleneck, are two entirely different things. The CPU is not in fact Combat Mission's bottleneck in most cases. 3D games, 3D drivers, and operating systems are complex animals, and how they use / abuse resources collectively is rarely obvious.

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C'mon, you guys are ignoring the best one: The Guns of Navarone set! Now THAT was a good Christmas. 3 levels, movable guns, elevator, and gobs of tanks to rush out of the gararge door. You know, I had NO idea those were Panthers. As well, for a long time I thought the MG42'ers were carrying crutches over their shoulders, so I thought they were medics. It didn't help them.

Now THAT was a great set! I guess my first war-game was around plastic army men. One of my friends had this set. I was the "grey guys" and had the mountain set. He was the "green guys" and had control of the forces attacking this mountain.

Rules consisted of taking turns throwing a ball back and forth trying to knock guys down.

.... well, I guess he had a good arm ... on about throw #3 he laid a fast-ball right into my carefully prepared Navarone Mountain! ... It shook it enough to knock every guy on off of its feet! .... game over!! :(

.... Of course, quickly upon discovering this "bug", I re-programmed the rules to eliminate this from happening next game!!!!! hahahahah!

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Hehe, I have similar memories. Favourite WWII one was playing tank battles with a friend and his extensive collection of 1/72nd tanks.

He had a large room and we used to have to estimate the range by eye and then measure. Only an accurate estimate "hit". Amazing how often we got 1st or 2nd shot kills.

Now my PC does all that heavy lifting. Hats off to the BF boys ( and, possibly, girls ).

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That's incorrect. "Seeming" to bottleneck the CPU, and CPU actually being a bottleneck, are two entirely different things. The CPU is not in fact Combat Mission's bottleneck in most cases. 3D games, 3D drivers, and operating systems are complex animals, and how they use / abuse resources collectively is rarely obvious.

In short, horrible coding and optimisation on a bad engine.

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It's all good. I do remember the "Guns" set, but I had to "settle" for my Marx Civil War set, my brother's Marx Alamo and Fort Apache sets, and various and sundry others. After I got old enough for an allowance, it was the Revell hard plastic US WWII infantry which, along with many plastic models, eventually saw intense action against my BB gun (and firecrackers)!

Broadsword, good question and observations. In my small town of about 1500 people, almost everyone of the fathers of the kids in school were in the war; many, including mine, being combat veterans. When the old guys would be gathered around, say at the hardware store, or what have you, they'd eventually get around to talking about it a bit. Not all combat stuff, mainly about other related service experiences. But when they did start talking combat...my town had 3 killed, several score wounded, and a few several captured during the war. Alot of stories--from Italy, Normandy, North Africa, the Pacific. Then too, we had all those documentaries (The Twentieth Century, Victory at Sea) TV shows and movies about the war. Man, those were golden days for me.

We are old!

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That's incorrect. "Seeming" to bottleneck the CPU, and CPU actually being a bottleneck, are two entirely different things. The CPU is not in fact Combat Mission's bottleneck in most cases. 3D games, 3D drivers, and operating systems are complex animals, and how they use / abuse resources collectively is rarely obvious.

Maybe Combat Mission should make the leap to 64bit? 64 bit architecture is here to stay and 32 bit is going the way of the dinosaur (like it or not)

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In short, horrible coding and optimisation on a bad engine.

Negative conclusions drawn with minimal data (let's face it you do not actually have access to the code or what may be causing the problem.) are not real helpful as declarative statements. You may even be right, but you don't know and the folks who do know are telling you that you aren't exactly on target. Cut em some slack unless you have some real supporting data. If on the other hand you do have some hard data to help them, please share it as I think we all would like the game to run as smoothly as possible.

I am not saying you are wrong, I don't have enough info to draw a worthwhile opinion, but I don't think broad brush stroke statements like this help move things forward. Give them something to work with if you have it as I don't think BFC is saying they won't accept advice, they simply don't accept what they feel is misinformed opinion. Think about it, in that brief sentence you pretty much trashed all their efforts even if that is not what you intended.

For me this game is it. If it wasn't for BFC there wouldn't be a ww2 simulation that I would bother playing. My worst nightmare is these guys deciding they don't want to do this anymore. Whatever complaints exist about CMBN they exist in an environment where there is no reasonable alternative. As we used to say about the Grateful Dead "they aren't the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do."

Constructive criticism is always welcome and it is obvious you enjoy the game, so put some meat on them thar bones.

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For me this game is it. If it wasn't for BFC there wouldn't be a ww2 simulation that I would bother playing. My worst nightmare is these guys deciding they don't want to do this anymore. Whatever complaints exist about CMBN they exist in an environment where there is no reasonable alternative. As we used to say about the Grateful Dead "they aren't the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do."

Constructive criticism is always welcome and it is obvious you enjoy the game, so put some meat on them thar bones.

Thank god there IS an alternative now, a far superior actually. Namely Graviteam.

Which is why I won't shed a tear when BFC dies. :)

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