Infantry Sprites

[Doug Beman]

Steve said: "One of the good things about not having dead figures is that your framerate increases during the course of the game instead of decreases. So you can start out with something that is a bit of a pig graphically, but then mid game it is just fine (we are talking slower systems here)"

(Excerpt from the CM Manual) In order to increase framerates on slower systems, simply allow about a quarter of your infantry to be killed at the start of the battle. The decrease in onscreen polygons should speed the game considerably. 8-P

DjB

[Brian Rock]

I've reversed my position on modelling individual figures. Originally I thought it would be a nice thing to aim for, perhaps by CM3 or 4.

Now I actually think it would have a detrimental effect on game play, not to mention a programming nightmare.

To do it in any meaningful way there would need to be a new level of AI for individual soldiers.

You could just have the inf running around in swarms, but that would simply attract the (just) criticism that the figures are mere eyecandy, and ahistorical not-suitable-for-grog eyecandy to boot.

Imagine the screams one would hear if squads have soldiers hanging half in/half out of buildings, on the wrong side of walls, not taking advantage of cover... can you say Close Combat?

Units would need to adapt formations for roads & paths, patrolling, advancing by bounds, assaulting from a base of fire, and so on.

Worst of all, if you represent individual soldiers, I guarantee that players will want to command individual soldiers... now it's not just CM meets CC, but we chuck in Soldiers at War for good measure.

Lastly, the extra computing overhead is nightmarish. The Shogun comparison (stunning as the graphics are) isn't quite valid - it is easier to program behaviours for units fighting in formation (do what the guy to the left is doing) than in a more dispersed environment.

So I actually prefer a representation of squads. But I still wouldn't mind a visual indication of where *casualties* took place.

[Pixman]

Dead men don't fight!! This is a tactical command simulation. I am only interested in those things that I can order to fight or that affect my units' ability to fight. Burning wrecks/buildings are important because of LOS, cover, etc. Dead bodies are just overhead on the system that take resources away from much more important areas.

BTS, please leave the dead bodies out. Also, if they make "The List", I humbly request that they fall somewhere BELOW white phosphorous!

Pixman

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The enchanter may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.

[Fred]

Pixman,

agreed, no dead bodies.

I had them in "The great Battles" series. After a few rounds the ground was cluttered with them and I decided to let the system remove the bodies.

Fionn (or moon?) wrote, that you are so involved in the battle, you remember the hot spots with ease. So no body piles for me.

Fred

[tss]

Pixman wrote:

Dead men don't fight!!

Agreed. However, early in the war in Eastern Front it was relatively common for a Russian soldier to start playing dead when the situation seemed to be too bad. Sometimes they would then start shooting or throwing hand grenades at Germans when they got near, trying to get officers if possible.

And no, I'm not trying to get this feature into CM.

- Tommi

[sage]

All I'm asking for a is a hidden option, that defaults to off, and is only exposed in the readme... I can't speak for the coding time. With luck it would simply be as easy as commenting out the 'remove body' routine when a guy falls over after being show & making sure that information is saved from turn to turn.

It would be a nice option in a feature enhancement patch down the line.

Sage

[Mike D]

My 2 cents worth on the display of dead soldiers. Forget about it, it serves very little, if any, purpose in a game like CM. In Close Combat series of games I have always turned dead soldiers off. They do nothing but clutter up the screen. Furthermore, the computing graphics resources in the game and programming resources at BTS would be much better spent on any number of other things. Simulating guys "playing dead" also seems like a waste of time and computing resources. They're either dead, or they're not.

Pixman,

The quest for WP continues I see. Go get 'em tiger!

Mike D

aka Mikester

[Colin]

Just a couple of thoughts...

I've been monitering the board for several months now and I just have to say BTS is great. They put in limited MG ammo for tanks.Good call. Anyway...

I am by no means a graphics professional but I was wondering if it would be possible to show more polygons if you raised the system reqs. a litte. Perhaps make it require a 3d accelerator.

Another question. Are the three men representing a squad always in the triangle formation or do they move around? What if a squad is entering a house (obviously 12 men can't fit through a door at the same time) and say 4 men of the squad get pinned outside befire they can get in? Will it be represented as 2 men inside the house and 1 out? I know it's a pretty unique situation.

Also can squads get split up if they are under intense fire?

That Jagdtiger screen looks great! Keep up the good work! Sorry, I haven't ordered my copy yet. I'm only 14 gimme a break!

Colin

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"The object of war is not

to die for your country,

but to make the other

bastard die for his"

George Pat

[guachi]

14, eh?

Welcome to the wonderful world of wargaming!

I'm only 25 and I sometimes feel a little young compared to some of the other guys here.

When I was 14, I only had one person to paly wargames with. His dad was an Avalon Hill junkie so we had many games to choose from.

Now there is the entire internet full of people to choose from. I hope you don't go through the problems many of us did in trying to find someone to play against.

Hurry up and pre-order Combat Mission. Only being 14 is no excuse

Jason

[Doug Beman]

YEAH! You should pre-order CombatMission. And then, you should get a job--being 14 is no excuse! Why, in my day, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy COMPUTERS to do calculations for our wargames. We used SLIDE RULES to figure out shell trajectories and blast radii, and we liked it.

And we didn't have these pretty-pretty MONITORS, either. One of us had to be in charge of drawing all the scenes with CHALK! Poor Angus McBladderflot got nerve damage in his hands from trying to draw the scenes for a 60-second turn movie, but he LIKED IT! Oh, how we liked it.

And another thing, little Jimmy Hofflington-Waxsbury destroyed his brain from all the model-glue fumes from making all the tanks. But he didn't complain, NO, he had FUN! Kids these days don't know what real fun is...

{stomps off in search of a fresh can of Ensure}

DjB

[This message has been edited by Doug Beman (edited 09-20-99).]

[Guest John Pender]

LOL Doug, The ensure part was the best.

[Fionn]

For non-Americans like me... what's Ensure?

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___________

Fionn Kelly

Manager of Historical Research,

The Gamers Net - Gaming for Gamers

[Guest Big Time Software]

Colin,

Great to see that SOME of today's youth are looking for games other than RTS and FPS games. I think there is hope for the world now

The figures are always in the same positions. Squads are abstract in the sense that the figures are there to tell you what the unit is, what it is doing, and where it is. A unit is either inside the house or outside, never both (though neighboring terrain does count for cover and LOS breaks).

Computers today stink for 3D games like CM. Even the highend systems can't handle what we all would like them too. Point here is that a minor increase in polygons would kill off lower end systems which many wargamers have, yet there wouldn't be that much of a noticable difference for the mid-high end folks. A 3D card is already required for the low end systems.

Steve

Fionn -> if you have to ask, you don't want to know

[guachi]

Ensure is some kind of health drink supplement for old folks. The evening news here on the Big Three networks was spammed day after day with these commercials.

You'd think after all these commercials I would remember their tagline.

Jason

[This message has been edited by guachi (edited 09-21-99).]

[Pixman]

Colin, welcome aboard. I wholeheartedly second what Steve said about you being a sign of hope for the world.

Trust me on this, if you apply your brain to beating some of the guys here in a game like CM, the benefits will carry over into the other things you do (more than you might imagine). Mastering a tactical game is a function of continuous problem solving in a constantly changing environment. It requires excellent planning and execution, combined with the flexibility to adapt your plans to the actions of an unpredictable opponent.

Nothing in your school studies will exercise and develop your brain in the ways that this game will. That is not to say your school studies are not important -- they absolutely are (CM won't teach you English after all, although I'm not sure our schools are teaching English anymore either). I just mean that CM will force your mind to apply its reasoning capability to complex problems with specific goals and outcomes at stake. This is not something that school curricula are geared to do. In school you get a lot of theoretical problems. CM is applied learning and immediate feedback for decisions made.

Hey guys, maybe I should tour the country and give presentations to all of the state school boards on why they MUST buy CM as a teaching tool in every public school in America!! Think they would go for it? Probably not. Some idiots would jump in and start picketing because they think the game promotes warfare and killing.

For any of you laughing out there at my hypothesis, I give the following real world example:

I used to supervise a loading dock for Roadway Package System (RPS). My workers hand loaded trailers wall to wall and floor to ceiling with boxes of every possible shape, size and weight. The work was hard and the turnover, consequently, high.

One day I got a new guy and I assigned him to my lightest trailer -- Springfield I believe. I showed him the basics and left him, telling my ace next door in the Boston trailer to keep an eye on him. Well, about 20 minutes later my Boston guy comes over and says, "Pix, I think you better come here and look at this". I'm thinking "Oh God, what did the newbie do?" When I got to the trailer I was stunned to see that the guy had built two of the cleanest, straightest, most tightly packed walls of packages I had ever seen! It blew my mind. I asked the kid if he had worked here before -- no. Had he worked for UPS loading? --no. Then, how did you learn to load like that? He says, get this, "playing Tetris I guess", and shrugs his shoulders.

If you have never loaded a trailer, trust me, what that kid was doing was phenomenal. By the end of the day, I had him spelling my guy in Boston (heaviest destination by far), and he kept up fine without sacrificing quality. Tetris!! I called him my Tetris loader from that day forward.

I sent a memo to our training department at corporate on the matter, and recommended that we buy Gameboys as training tools for two of our hubs (Hartford and Syracuse) to see if there was any measurable improvement in load factor and damages. I never heard anything back.

My point is that the mind develops in the areas where we stress it, especially when we are younger. Tetris stresses the mind to solve a continuous spatial relationship problem. CM stresses the mind to solve much more complex problems. Just as the Tetris kid could step into the loading world and excel immediately, so too can a CM kid enter the real world and apply much of what he has learned.

Moral of the story Colin -- play CM as often as possible. Turn all of your friends on to it. And when you play, play to win! That should get you into Harvard by age 16 or so.

Pixman

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The enchanter may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.

[Guest Big Time Software]

Hey Pixman, you should have spent more time telling your drivers to go easy on I-90. Those guys MOVE out if you know what I mean

Pixman is oh so right about the brain thingy (hehe...) My wife is constantly commenting on how quickly I can take a new, complex situation and turn it into a couple of possible, logical solutions with a good balance of simplicity and desired end result. At the very least I can quickly figure out what the heck is going on. Of course my solutions are not always correct, or best, but the point is that I come up with a "plan" of action in no time. And as CM will teach you, any plan is better than no plan at all.

I fully attribute this ability to my strategy gaming experiences since I was about 3 (I could beat my parents for REAL playing the card game Concentration). It then led me to a History degree, which furthered my understanding of cause and effect relationships.

One important aspect of life, as in war, is that a fast, bold, and modestly good thinker is going to go further in life than a slow, cautious, and great thinker. This is true with coding too, BTW. Our Fuzzy Logic equations and values aren't the most brillant thing since the invention of sliced bread, but they work fast, are VERY robust, and produce the desired results. A masters from MIT for AI might be a really impressive thing, but I bet most couldn't write a functional AI like what Charles has written within the same timeframe and pressures.

Ok, 'nugh rambling

Steve

[This message has been edited by Big Time Software (edited 09-21-99).]

[Guest coolguy101]

just to say. i am only 14 and and i know many people that will play a wargame such as west front or something. I have yet to see a wargame acually fit my prefrences but i think this one will come really close.

THAT IS ALL

[This message has been edited by coolguy101 (edited 09-21-99).]

[Dar]

Just wanted to add my $.02 about practical knowledge gained from gaming. I know I became quite the geography whiz at a young age from playing Avalon Hill and SPI games. After poring over the map of Europe in AH's "Third Reich", I was running circles around my classmates when it came to locating where Cyprus, or Luxembourg, or Sardinia are. "The Russian Campaign" was another good one for learning Eastern Europe geography. When I meet someone from Odessa or Riga, I know right away where they live. Of course, I don't tell them that I've overrun their birthplace with Panzers many times...but you get the idea.

Playing "Sid Meier's Gettysburg" before I actually went out to the real battlefield was also very educational. After playing that several times, I believe anyone could walk onto the actual battlefield and find their way without any guide or map whatsoever.

Dar Steckelberg

[Pixman]

Sorry Steve, I never got into linehaul -- it was the kiss of death as far as I was concerned. Once I got into engineering though I did develop a dispatch availability model that predicted when specific trailers would cut from the load dock based on the unload sequence. This allowed for better linehaul planning, consequently reducing the pressure on the drivers to make up time out on the road. By the way, when I left RPS in 1994, we had just won the national safety award for a carrier of our size for the 4th year running. And all of our guys were owner/operators -- no teamsters. We were very proud of that.

Thanks for chiming in on the brain development issue. I am also living proof of my hypothesis. When I see a smart kid like Colin come along, I cannot resist the temptation to coach a little. My boy (Zachary) is going to be 2 on October 5 and he cannot understand my ramblings yet. I am just afraid of how early an age Zach is going to be kicking my butt in CM. Probably much earlier than my Oedipusly motivated ego can handle, lol.

Ciao

Pixman

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The enchanter may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.

[Colin]

Thanks

I've been playing CC2 for about a year now and I have learned a lot from that. Allied tanks are fun to use because killing krout tanks requires some strategy.

Oh yeah..I know this tank has nothing to do with CM but it would be cool too have:Sturmpanzerwagen A7V. They only made about 20 but they had 1 57mm gun and 6(!) machine guns. Not to mention it was 8x3x3 (LxWxH in meters) and had a crew of 18!! It would be fun to have in some scenarios. I know you guys are already working too hard but if you feel like offering that as an add-on vehicle it would be greatly appreciated. I can give more info if required.

Also if anybody here wants to get beaten at CC2 just email me.

Thanks again

------------------

"The object of war is not

to die for your country,

but to make the other

bastard die for his"

George Pat

[Fionn]

The A7W was built for WW I hence would be a little bit outside the scope of CM's 1944-1945 time frame.

For extra credit can anyone name the Nazi leader who famously crewed an A7W before rising to infamy as a nazi party member/department head?

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___________

Fionn Kelly

Manager of Historical Research,

The Gamers Net - Gaming for Gamers

[Pixman]

Himmler?

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The enchanter may confuse the outcome, but the effort remains sublime.

[Guest Big Time Software]

Nope, a then little known Sgt. Dietrich

Steve

[elwood]

I saw someone mention raising the hardware specifications to require 3-D acceleration. As a laptop user, I hope this doesn't happen. I am willing to give up some graphics for a better simulation.

I can understand a flightsim needing high end graphics, but I am always disappointed when I see wargame developers dedicate so much time to grapics at the expense of solid simulation. (Can you spell Atomic). My favorite games are still HPS's, eventhough the interface and graphics are about 10 years old.

[SGTRock]

Since everyone is all over the dead bodies thing and it's kinda cluttering up the Sprite vs Polygons thread, I made another Deadbodies thread to cover this battle in detail...and guys..try to stay on the topic

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Sgt. Rock Says " War is Hell, but games are fun "