Why can't Combat Mission look and run as well as Wargame: European Escalation?

[Battlefront.com]

No, I'm not dead

It's true that the graphics can be better than they are. We always prioritize the game stuff first, and nobody (nobody) has what CM has. Not even close. So we started there instead of the other way around. I'm pretty sure that was the right decision in the minds of our customers. Or at least it would be if we gave them an awesome looking game that played like all the other awesome looking games out there.

Fortunately, because we make good decisions we also have the ability to stay in business long enough to do things like... improve the graphics and performance

I chuckle when I see someone say CMx2 lack's a "soul". CMx1 had plenty of people voicing the same opinion. In fact, this played a HUGE role in the redesign of CMx2. 1:1 was a central part in that approach.

Steve

[Vanir Ausf B]

No, I'm not dead

Well I'll be damned.

I chuckle when I see someone say CMx2 lack's a "soul". CMx1 had plenty of people voicing the same opinion. In fact, this played a HUGE role in the redesign of CMx2. 1:1 was a central part in that approach.

I keep saying, people forget how much grief you guys got on the forums about the abstracted 3-man infantry squads and how it destroyed their immersion, made them lose the will to live, ect.

[Mord]

I'd say that is the soul of CMx2 (1:1). I feel the heat of battle and the casualties much more intensely in CMSF, CMA and CMBN than I ever did in any of the CMX1 games. Watching all the guys in a squad cower, fire back and drop from being hit is much more visceral this time around.

@Vanir...LMAO I was probably one of those guys losing his will to live! I could deal with the abstraction but I don't think I could've went another 3 titles dealing with them. Not in this day and age of comp gaming.

Mord.

[Battlefront.com]

AFAIK it shouldn't have to be an issue, as long as it doesn't deform the terrain, a-la foxholes. Given that it's just eye-candy that doesn't affect gameplay you could even make the tracks only visible to the side that makes them. They could also expire (disappear) after a short time if they introduce a performance issue.

Nope, doesn't work. Or at least not cleanly. We can easily hide tank tracks (or anything else, for that matter) from one player by not showing it for ever and ever more. Easy to do that. The tough part is dealing with Relative Spotting and FoW concerns. Think about this...

You are looking at a big field that has lots of ups and downs in it. All of a sudden you spot a small tracked vehicle. What about the track marks behind it? Gotta show them too, right? Here's where the problems start.

We can show the track marks now, but they should only be seen by the unit that spotted the tracked vehicle? Would look pretty silly to deselect your spotting unit and watch the tracked vehicle disappear but the track marks remain. Worse... what if that little tracked vehicle is moving while you can't spot it? Kinda stupid to keep showing the track marks with no tracked vehicle in sight.

Which means the track marks would have to be treated as if they can be spotted. Which means they have to be a part of the spotting system. You have no idea how much resources that chews up already, now we have to note and check for track marks too? And what happens if someone spots every other track mark? Do we just show those, not the ones connecting them?

And then it gets plain messy

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

I keep saying, people forget how much grief you guys got on the forums about the arbitrated 3-man infantry squads and how it destroyed their immersion, made them lose the will to live, ect.

I haven't forgotten, which is good because we can't afford selective memory.

CM never has, and never will, appeal to everybody who stumbles upon it. Like any product, some will embrace it more than others. Some will play for a long time, others only a short time. Our job is to keep enough people interested in playing that we stay in business without having to make the sorts of games we never wanted to make in the first place.

Steve

[General Lee Irked]

Our job is to keep enough people interested in playing that we stay in business without having to make the sorts of games we never wanted to make in the first place.

Steve

I think this is great... Kevin O'Leary of "The Shark Tank" may not however .

Good to see you holdfast to what you believe. I appreciate this game and all the efforts BF puts into it.

Gameplay should always trump eye candy. Valhalla is when they coincide.

Thanks

[Battlefront.com]

I think this is great... Kevin O'Leary of "The Shark Tank" may not however .

If he valued his soul as much as his bank account, perhaps he would see things in a different light

Good to see you holdfast to what you believe. I appreciate this game and all the efforts BF puts into it.

Thanks! But we're not completely altruistic. It just so happens that being a big fish in a small pond is really smart from a business perspective. At least in this industry. It's so bad now that people are wondering if the likes of EA and THQ will survive much longer without radical structural change. We're not getting rich off you guys, but we are also not wondering if our houses are going to be repossessed like the folks who were at the top of 38 Studios...

Steve

[sburke]

4 posts in this thread? OMFG I think we need to start a new thread trying to guess what it means that we have a fresh sighting of the mysterious Loch Ness Steve

CMx3 is pre order tomorrow?

CM-MG is .. pre order tomorrow?

BFC has been purchased by Microsoft as a secret plan to undermine another advocate of Open GL and CMBN will be re released as M4 Tank Platoon

Good to hear you are alive, now get back to work and stop goofing off by the water cooler. Oh wait that's no water cooler, hi Charles. Umm yeah I'll umm just uhh pour this back in there... excuse me Damn how embarrassing is that?

gurgle

Yeah I'll umm go get a towel

[MikeyD]

We've certainly had an object lesson on how not to run a computergame startup with Kurt Schilling and 38 Studios. Imagine, a 30,000 square foot downtown office space, 300 employees... and up until recently no product. While Steve's out behind his house chopping down trees for firewood during the winter. Hey Steve, I understand the John Hancock office tower is available for lease in downtown Boston!

[Mord]

First rule of business keep your overhead...underfoot.

@Sburke...so what's Charles juice taste like? I imagine sweat, silence, genius and maybe a touch of raspberry.

Mord.

[sburke]

I have defended CM valiantly over the years, but here's my personal opinion on it these days:

Good grief there's a lot of fan-boys defending their turf around here. Personally, I've grown a bit tired of CMx2, I had high hopes of it every time a new release came (SF, Afg, BN and all the modules). Well, needless to say, it was mostly a mediocre experience (more so since BF ceased ALL communication lately and we never got the fix for those ugly Commonwealth models). None of the feeling of grandeur that accompanied the CMBB release has ever been present with CMx2.

While CMx2 has and probably always will do a great job at simulating hard data, it lacks the oomph to keep players going (outside of the hardcore "i-only-playCM-and-all-other-games-are-stupid-cause-they-are-not-CM"-players). Quite frankly, it lacks a soul.

If you would leave your ivory CM tower for a minute what you see is a dated, sluggish game that in all honesty doesn't really do a whole lot. It has a mediocre campaign (oh dear, the AI is so easy to fool every single game); sure you can make your own maps, consisting of the same bland palette of textures and "stuff" every time; the graphics engine.. good grief.. what an abomination; the thing that made it fun to play online (WeGo) removed. Pff.. boooring and soulless.

The comment about CM not using "hollywood" colours and how WE looked unrealistic made me snicker, no, it made me laugh.. really loud. Have you ever compared CMBN to what is outside your window? The colours in CMBN are anything BUT close to reality! Now, having played W:EE myself - which is more than most of the fan-boys can say here - I found it to be a GREAT little Game. It was nicely polished and generally just a lot of fun to play around. Much more realistic than your standard RTS game, but not staring itself blind on hardcore data. Not to say it was the best gaming experience ever, as that place is still held by CMBB, Homeworld and Baldur's Gate, but it was sure far more enjoyable than any CMx2 I've played so far.

As for CMBN only having one programmer, that excuse is both lame and old (and totally not applicable since they have two these days). These days there's so many indie/one-man games with graphics far superior to CMBN with properly working shadows too! Single-core? x86? DX8? Old.. dated.. really no more excuse to use that crap.

Man I am so sorry. I read all this and all I could think of was Eeyore.. you know from Winnie the Pooh?

[Mord]

You are a fan boy if you like it or are positive...and a genius/martyr if you dislike it. Been hearing it since CMSF and will probably being hearing it ten years from now. No sweat off my nose...I have a blast with it.

Mord.

[sburke]

First rule of business keep your overhead...underfoot.

@Sburke...so what's Charles juice taste like? I imagine sweat, silence, genius and maybe a touch of raspberry.

Mord.

Well being a fanboi, I'll likely have to extol it's 1:1 realism and ballistic modelling over whether it shadows correctly as it arcs into the distance. The rasperry I think may be a hint of these guys spending too much time at a trappist abbey sampling the ales. Perhaps that is a clue that they are in Belgium and working on CM Bulge already.... right Steve?

[Newa]

Kickstarter the **** out of this game, and hire more employees then buy a frostbyte 2 engine (drools)

[Ranger33]

All I want out of the shadows is that they don't do things like this. Mine have been like that since CMSF and I've had to turn them off, which sucks, since sometimes they look really good. Apparently not everyone has this problem, and some have only had it since CW, but there has been no word on causes/fixes.

[MikeyD]

Have you ever compared CMBN to what is outside your window?

My window is on another continent in the big city. and still the greens look pretty darned green. Here's a mid-winter(?) shot of Normandy I just randomly grabbed off google earth street view. would you call that grass Saving Private Ryan green or CM:BN green?

[Franko]

I agree. Normandy is GREEN. Its not "subdued"...its vibrant, almost comically, green. I was struck by it during my visits there. The only time I've seen it THAT green is near me, in wine country, Northern California. I know we LIKE subdued grass for game reasons, and perhaps because it looks more like SPR -- but SPR and Band of Brothers was deliberately altered to make the landscape more dreary), but Vanilla CMBN is closer to reality that we often given it credit for.

[Pak40]

Come on Mike, we know you ran that picture through photoshop.

[Paper Tiger]

All I want out of the shadows is that they don't do things like this. Mine have been like that since CMSF and I've had to turn them off, which sucks, since sometimes they look really good. Apparently not everyone has this problem, and some have only had it since CW, but there has been no word on causes/fixes.

Yikes! That looks absolutely horrible!:eek:

[Battlefront.com]

Ranger33,

I agree, those shadows are horrid on your system. But that's just it... the problem is on your system, not others. Kinda looks like you have a lower end card or system by the looks of the rest of the screenshot, though that's just guesswork on my end of things.

Shadows are one of those card/driver features that are very, very twitchy. The cause? Bad card/driver. The fix? Some developers get away with it because they have fixed/limited camera angles and they optimize for those angles. Other developers have programmers that basically do nothing but make fixes for specific cards/drivers. Most just accept the fact that some people aren't going to have a happy visual experience because card/driver solutions are like playing whack-a-mole; fix one, another comes up with the next card/driver release.

In our case we have done some reworking of the lighting/shadowing components, so maybe this will finally get cleared up for you.

But this isn't the place for a tech support discussion. You should file a report with the Help Desk.

Steve

[MikeyD]

I looked at the picture and immediately thought "ATI card", a.k.a. my old computer.

[c3k]

All I want out of the shadows is that they don't do things like this. Mine have been like that since CMSF and I've had to turn them off, which sucks, since sometimes they look really good. Apparently not everyone has this problem, and some have only had it since CW, but there has been no word on causes/fixes.

This is EXACTLY what it looks like on my machines which have AMD graphics. One is an HD6870, the other an HD6850. Nvidia cards do not suffer from this ugliness.

I agree that this should not be happening. It does.

The solution should not be to change graphics cards. That is far too expensive.

Ken

[moeburn]

Ranger33,

I agree, those shadows are horrid on your system. But that's just it... the problem is on your system, not others. Kinda looks like you have a lower end card or system by the looks of the rest of the screenshot, though that's just guesswork on my end of things.

Ehm, I'm running an AMD Radeon HD 5770, and my shadows look just as bad or often worse than his picture. At least the edges of the actual shadow that the tank cast on the ground is relatively smooth in his pic, in mine the edges are made of triangles. Lots and lots of big ugly triangles.

Side note, how do you deal with so much complaining and keep a happy attitude?

[Michael Emrys]

The only time I've seen it THAT green is near me, in wine country, Northern California.

I spent several years in Northern California, not too far from wine country, and especially on the first sunny day after a rainy spell, the green of the grass would veritably SHOUT at you. That stuff can be vibrant as hell. And recall that Normandy in the summer of '44 was a lot of rain intermixed with sun. I daresay it was pretty green that year.

Michael

[moeburn]

I visited Juno beach in Normandy a few years back during a period of overcast skies, and the green of the grass was still able to penetrate through the "gray feeling" of the air from the bad weather.