New features/feature ideas for CM for the next few years thread

[Battlefront.com]

Furthermore it seems the good ideas have no end...

Sadly, truer words have never been spoken

Even on this one page I see a couple of months worth of coding/testing. And largely for GOOD suggestions that are, by and large, practical.

Something like Los' suggestion of a "command level" type game is also fine too, but unfortunately that's something like years of work because it's a rabbit hole type problem. You go down it and compounding stuff never stops coming out.

And of course there are plenty of suggestions which are better in theory than in reality. Either because they aren't easy to integrate into gameplay or because they aren't actually good ideas

I tell you, if you're the type of person that can't handle only being able to do only a fraction of what you want to do... don't ever get into game design!

Steve

[jackal263]

I would like that, at the end of the battle (eventually also during the battle), a simple .txt file is generated for player side (at the end of the battle for both sides) reporting the army composition and organization with complete unit info.

For example :

Battalion HQ (Officer name, initial strenght, KIA, Wounded, MIA, final strenght (could be calculated from previous values, but no reason to hide it in the output file), Kills, Prisoners taken, list of initial equipment and relative ammunition count, final equipment + ammo count + Tanks/vehicles destroyed) .. and so on for each unit composing the army.

All data are surely available (and tracked by the game engine) so it shouldn't be a problem to report them in a .txt file.

This could be done at battle end for both sides, but for own side it could be updated (rewritten) every turn with only FOW data (no kills, no tanks destroyed)..

This would help a lot all statistics "lovers" (like me) and also all people making an AOR of their battle.

Thanks!

Great game, never disappointed by this great Company products.

I own CMBO, CMBB, CMAK and all CMx2 modules (for Normandy and Italy front)

[Michael Emrys]

I would like to be able to shoot at sound contacts. It would make sense and would solve some LOS issues.

The troops know that there is something so given the circumstances it is not unreasonable to order them to fire at 'it'.

In urban combat it is often very difficult to get LOS and you cant fire at the second floor because you can't see the ground AS. The enemy who had been firing at you ducks and LOS is lost - turn over. Now you are left with a sound contact but no way to fire back. This is very frustrating.

Eh? Is there some reason why you can't use area fire? I use it all the time and even score a fair number of kills that way. And even if you don't hit anything first try, you might provoke them into shooting back or revealing their position via movement.

Michael

[Whiterider]

Sadly, truer words have never been spoken

Even on this one page I see a couple of months worth of coding/testing. And largely for GOOD suggestions that are, by and large, practical.

Something like Los' suggestion of a "command level" type game is also fine too, but unfortunately that's something like years of work because it's a rabbit hole type problem. You go down it and compounding stuff never stops coming out.

And of course there are plenty of suggestions which are better in theory than in reality. Either because they aren't easy to integrate into gameplay or because they aren't actually good ideas

I tell you, if you're the type of person that can't handle only being able to do only a fraction of what you want to do... don't ever get into game design!

Steve

I agree with you, there are plenty of good ideas in this thread. Of course I understand it will not be possible to use all of them (I know you´re a small group of programmers) because many of them are conceived by people without a deep knowledge in programming (like me!), but at least you´ll have loads of inspiration for the next 20 years. I´m not that kind of freak who wants things NOW : There´s no hurry, the game is good enough.

Me and my friends used to design rules for our own boardgames (wargames) when we were teenagers a long long time ago. We are really amazed with Combat Mission.

[Michael Emrys]

I´m not that kind of freak who wants things NOW...

Of course not. After dinner tonight will be plenty soon enough.

Michael

[Whiterider]

After dinner tonight will be plenty soon enough.

Michael

LOL. I´m sorry for you guys, take it like a daily sport . In spanish we have a proverb for these situations:

"A palabras necias oídos sordos" (Turn a deaf ear to foolish comments).

[poesel]

Eh? Is there some reason why you can't use area fire?

Yes - no LOS - no area fire. That is a problem mainly with buildings: you can't target the upper floors if you can't see the ground floor (or the ground of the AS the buildings stands on). As soon as you can see the ground you can target any floor. That is currently a limitation of the game engine.

Since that seems to be a bigger problem (its like this since SF IIRC) to solve a way around it would be to make sound contacts targetable.

[womble]

Eh? Is there some reason why you can't use area fire?

Often, yes. "Tentative" contacts are often tentative because of LOS issues. If you can't see the floor level at the centre of the AS where the sound contact is, you can't area fire on that AS. Happens frequently in urban combat as Poesel says, but also happens across crest lines or when the base of a linear obstacle isn't targetable, but the foliage above might be: "reverse slope - No LOS" targets.

[A Canadian Cat]

Yes - no LOS - no area fire.

This is the single biggest thing I would like to see addressed. The fact that the targeting tank needs to be able to see the centre of the AS to area fire prevents them from shooting up buildings that they can clearly see and have LOS to. My workaround is gone in the 2.1 build so tanks are back to not being very helpful in tight streets.

I am sure it is also a pretty big can of worms too.

[A Canadian Cat]

I tell you, if you're the type of person that can't handle only being able to do only a fraction of what you want to do... don't ever get into game design!

Totally true of most software development in my experience. We like to say that if it was up to feature requests we would all have jobs for life. The trick is doing work that actually makes the $ to pay for us:-)

[poesel]

Icons could convey some more information. Not too much - don't want to clog them up. But some would be nice - especially if it saves a click.

Examples (sorry, I'm not an artist):

empty bunker

occupied bunker

undeployed mortar

deployed mortar

(to be continued...)

[poesel]

infantry

hiding infantry

These are just the first three that came into mind. MG, ATGs could profit, too.

This would help to see their status on a glance without the need to zoom in or click on them. Helps to avoid stupid mistakes like not manning a bunker or forgetting to unhide a platoon after a barrage.

[Ithikial_AU]

This would help a lot all statistics "lovers" (like me) and also all people making an AOR of their battle.

Search through my old posts, something special there for you. In addition I've got a much more powerful battle statistics tool in the works that crosses over the CMx2 (WW2 era) games.

Economist and data nerd...

[JM Stuff]

An overview on the ground of actual Battle order, jump to this unit by clicking on it.

perhaps in a pop up window.

[jackal263]

Search through my old posts, something special there for you. In addition I've got a much more powerful battle statistics tool in the works that crosses over the CMx2 (WW2 era) games.

Economist and data nerd...

Hi,

i know your great work to collect battle data in Overlord Campaign on the FGM site, but what i search is something that extract automatically, from current pbem turn, all relevant data of own units (and also rebuild the current OOB).. at the end of the battle i would also like enemy data.

I searched through your posts, but probably i missed something more specific.

I found on battlefront repository a program (CombatRecorder) but i never managed to make it run correctly.

Thanks!

[GJR144]

Was a switchable terrain grid overlay mentioned already?

BFC, your customers have been waiting for more than 10 years for this very helpful tool, come on, show some mercy.

[Vanir Ausf B]

I would love to see that as well, but...

I can tell you guys that "gridlines" were explored in painful detail for Version 2.0. We gave up. You guys should know by know that we are pretty clever and that we don't give up easily. We wasted a couple of days on just trying to figure out a clever way to make it work and saw no hope. Investing more time would mean less features we knew could be done, which is why we threw in the towel on it.

The problem is there's only two basic methods for putting contour/grid lines on the map:

1. Pre-rendering them in with the map itself. In other words, make them part of the terrain graphics. A small hit up front when the map is loading, but after there is no speed hit or resource hit. The con is it can never be turned off during the game because the map is already rendered with it and there's no way even good computers can handle having two sets of terrain (one with line and one without) stored in VRAM. It's just too big for that and too time consuming to swap out from normal RAM or disk.

2. Have lines drawn on the fly. It can be toggled on and off at will because it's an overlay (of sorts). Since it's not baked into the map graphics then we neatly avoid the problems noted above. Unfortunately it KILLS framerate. Even on a really good system it's likely to have a very noticeable drag on framerate. Heck, we're not even sure if it would work even on a higher end computer.

Either method requires too much up-front work to even attempt to see what negatives come about after. Which is why you won't see me promising this feature for Version 3.0 or even later.

The only option available to people, right now, is to use terrain mods with the lines already baked in. Has all the pros and cons of #1 above, but requires no sacrifice of new game features because we didn't have to write code to do it dynamically.

Playing with lighting conditions is the only possible solution I can see, but it will likely be very ugly looking and might not be a good enough solution. Which is why we've not explored it yet.

Steve

[GJR144]

This does not convince me. I don't understand why this must be done with the map? Why can't the textures of the terrain that are sent to the graphics card be exchanged?

For example the graphics card receives instead of the different green ground textures a plain green texture with white stripes. Streets and rocks could be colored with a grey texture and wood or fields with a brown texture with white stripes. Three tiny textures loaded into RAM, that are displayed instead of all the different beautiful terrain textures when the grid overlay is switched on. When switched off, the real textures are used again.

The engine seems to use on the fly different textures anyway all the time, depending on viewing distance and performance.

[poesel]

I guess Kohlenklau will recognize the situation: a building with three rooms in line after each other. You are on room 1, the enemy is in room 3. Now you can only target room 2 but since your guys fire mostly on the floor that will not irritate room 3 very much. Hunting into 2 is suicide because the guys in 3 have the drop on you in spotting.

In this kind of situation there is no way to get your guy to fire horizontally over room 2 into 3 or for 3 to fire back unless you spot someone. You can not area fire over one room.

I suggest to give infantry the ability to area fire an AS beyond LOS (similar to mortars) in these situations.

[sburke]

I guess Kohlenklau will recognize the situation: a building with three rooms in line after each other. You are on room 1, the enemy is in room 3. Now you can only target room 2 but since your guys fire mostly on the floor that will not irritate room 3 very much. Hunting into 2 is suicide because the guys in 3 have the drop on you in spotting.

In this kind of situation there is no way to get your guy to fire horizontally over room 2 into 3 or for 3 to fire back unless you spot someone. You can not area fire over one room.

I suggest to give infantry the ability to area fire an AS beyond LOS (similar to mortars) in these situations.

I like the idea, but to temper it a bit, you are in building 1, they are in building 3...there may actually be several rooms between you and them. CM unfortunately doesn't really model interiors. Still I think the idea has a lot of merit considering the interaction with building interiors is limited to start with. It would contribute to a bit more finesse in urban combat than we can currently achieve.

[poesel]

Double tapping the 'zoom in' or 'zoom out' key immediately zooms to x12 or x1. Just a convenience thing.

[GJR144]

On-map guns and mortars:

1. If a forward observer or HQ is near (within talking distance), the time to adjust for the target should be as short as if the unit was operating on itself (team leader's commands = HQ's in shouting distance).

2. Shouldn't the team leader of mortar units be able to split from the team, take the binocs and move a few meters away without losing his ability to command the unit?

[Michael Emrys]

On-map guns and mortars:

1. If a forward observer or HQ is near (within talking distance), the time to adjust for the target should be as short as if the unit was operating on itself (team leader's commands = HQ's in shouting distance).

I like.

2. Shouldn't the team leader of mortar units be able to split from the team, take the binocs and move a few meters away without losing his ability to command the unit?

Theoretically, yes. Whether the code is up to that level of sophistication yet might be another matter.

Michael

[womble]

On-map guns and mortars:

1. If a forward observer or HQ is near (within talking distance), the time to adjust for the target should be as short as if the unit was operating on itself (team leader's commands = HQ's in shouting distance).

I'm not sure this assertion is true... "voice" command range is a) quite long and can have the commander and commanded with very different frames of reference. As it stands. I think there would have to be some additional distinction drawn to qualify the process of an FO giving "direct fire" orders as speedy as that for the organic team leader doing the same. It should be faster than shuffling up the comms chain, for sure, but not, I think, as fast as an inherent "direct lay".

2. Shouldn't the team leader of mortar units be able to split from the team, take the binocs and move a few meters away without losing his ability to command the unit?

"A few metres", I'd agree.

Whether the code is up to that level of sophistication yet might be another matter.

There's already a "Driver" order available to split a single man of some eligible teams, isn't there (I think it came in in GL and I don't have that or anything later)? If there could be restrictions like I allude to above, it wouldn't be that much different from the "FO giving direct fire orders"

[GJR144]

I'm not sure this assertion is true...

Where's the difference if "Plus 50!" is shouted from 10 meters further away?