Fighting Armor

[Other Means]

Hallelujah brother.

[Lt Bull]

[Holman]

I want players to have all the information they can reasonably use. When the game starts displaying calculations for them (such as on-screen percentage-to-hit and so on), however, the gaminess begins to intrude on the situation being modeled.

One problem is that CMx2 is such a high-fidelity simulation. Telling the player that his Sherman's 75mm AP is likely to penetrate the side armor of a Panzer IV at a particular range is one thing, but what about when the panzer is offset by 29 degrees? What about intervening smoke and weather? What about the green crew or the fact that the tank is moving or the possibility of armor or shell flaws at this stage of the war?

I would just hate to see the game begin offering on-the-fly calculations that foreground the computeriness of it all. Fortunately, I don't think that's part of the CM philosophy.

[Other Means]

Witchcraft! Where would one get this?

[altipueri]

Exactly. Why should players have a glancing interest in WWII? Or rather, why restrict your audience to people who will already know how to play the game?

Imagine starting the game in front of a kid, and trying to get them involved? "Well done, you've spend 2 hours to set up an ambush on a German AFV column - I'll tell you what that is later - now, don't shoot at this lead one as it's an early version Panther and will have less armour defec - oh, you've...oh never mind. Yes, they do all look the same, don't they? Well, we'll have a better chance some time in the next year, potentially."

Why play to an audience you've got and not try and get a new one? I could lose a few pounds, move a bit more and drink less. God help BFC if they're relying on me to pay their pension.

I agree - and they are not the only game company that put new players off by making things difficult to the delight of their "hard men" fans who like kicking the daylights out of new players and showing off how much they know without having to look it up. It's all about realism - yeah right - as if sitting nice and warm at home playing wargames is real.

[Childress]

Witchcraft! Where would one get this?

Well there you go, a serendipitous mod! Now Battlefront doesn't need spend any development time. So everyone's happy.

[Holman]

I have always wondered about this mod. Where does it get the displayed information? In format it looks just like the old CMx1 screen.

[Other Means]

Mod on the repository.

[poesel]

Disclaimer: I did not do this mod

Japanzer uses a software which you can use to program other programs. I guess what it does is being triggered by clicking on a certain area in the game, then pattern recognition on the area (e.g. 'M1A1') and then pop up a window with the associate information.

Very clever, very well done. Unfortunately (for me) Windows only.

IIRC Steve once said that this is on his list but he wanted to provide more than just tabular information.

[Other Means]

Looks like it runs up against some W7 difficulties

[Vanir Ausf B]

I would just hate to see the game begin offering on-the-fly calculations that foreground the computeriness of it all. Fortunately, I don't think that's part of the CM philosophy.

As I mentioned earlier, BFC is planning this type of feature.

[Freyberg]

I liked that feature in CMx1, but I've come to like the absence of it in CMx2.

[LukeFF]

I agree - and they are not the only game company that put new players off by making things difficult to the delight of their "hard men" fans who like kicking the daylights out of new players and showing off how much they know without having to look it up.

That's a highly sweeping statement there and one I find hard to believe. Personally, I've played quite a few matches against people that I'd hardly call bumbling noobs. So, what's your source for making such a claim?

[altipueri]

Fifty years of playing wargames.

[Erwin]

I agree... the CM1-like pop up info screens should return. Nobody forces one to use em if you don't want.

And they were never 100% accurate, merely a useful guide as to what was probably going to happen with a certain gun vs a certain armor protection.

[GJR144]

Without doubt this should return, and there were numerous suggestions, that the data could be read from a TXT-file without the need for BFC even invest time on it to fill the data, the modding-community would fill the missing data in no time.

With such a slow development of the user interface and core engine, for me the attractiveness for buying the upgrades is shrinking from time to time. This is not a FPS which lives from new models, this is more of a sim, which lives from user interface and the engine improvements.

Now soon there will be another module out and still no movement paths will be visible without clicking a unit after so many years - and for another year to come.

And no unit data to learn one or two things about the units for at least another year.

If so tiny improvements take ages for a sim, it's no wonder that the community is not growing. They could bring out a new module every month and the community would not grow.

[ZPB II]

Whoa, talk about pessimism contrasting optimism. You make software development sound so easy, GJR144.

If BFC implements any half-assed feature there is bound to be numerous reviewers and customers complaining about it, calling BFC lazy hacks that outsource development to players. It's just the way things work.

Every patch/upgrade has contained improvements to the engine, there have been improvements to the UI too...Every module release has come with a free patch that has contained improvements. Also, they are not simply new models. They all require plentiful data and statistics to implement followed by extensive testing. You make it sound like every tank is the same apart from cosmetic differences.

No movement paths visible without clicking a unit? To me that is a good thing, if movement paths would be visible that would clutter up the screen big time. It's not like clicking a unit is very hard or time consuming.

I don't really understand the unit data issue. There is already the small info box that gives a general sense of protection level and firepower. The manual contains a lot of unit data and since Alt+tabbing works like a charm with CMx2 I'm not seeing the big difference between checking the PDF manual or an ingame encyclopedia...Is the issue with hit probabilities? In my opinion displaying them would break the game (not to mention it is exceedingly hard to print out an exact percentage because of the immense amount of variables. How would it work for anything other than at the start of the turn? How will the game predict at what angle and in what position and in what kind of state will the units be 10 seconds into the turn?) I wouldn't want the game boiling down to a cheesefest where the player who has the patience to check out probabilities for every shot wins. Maybe if it was a toggleable option by the host, but then we run into feature creep...For singleplayer I can see why someone would want it, but for me part of the charm is the chaos of battle. I don't want to play a game like I'm an accountant. I recently took out a Jagdpanzer IV with a Sherman 75mm from the front at 800 meters with a single shot, the Jagdpanzer was on pavement so the shot hit the ground just infront of it and it bounced and hit the bottom armour plate, exploding and causing a "Rear Bottom Hull Penetration" and first shot KO. Portraying this complex stuff with a single number....sheesh...It sounds easy in theory but when you get down to the nitty gritty details and hard labour it suddenly isn't anymore...

I'm pretty happy with the way BFC prioritizes features. Stuff that is IMO "icing on the cake" takes second place to actual gameplay and engine improvements. Market Garden isn't just about pretty bridges, as has been revelealed it contains a lot of engine changes that likely completely change the way the game plays out. I can't imagine how hard it is to implement new features to an engine of such complexity as CMx2 without breaking something. Moveable waypoints and the ensuing bugs come to mind.

Every minor change to the engine has to be tested extensively so it works as intended and does not affect other areas of the game. Things simply don't happen overnight, especially when we are talking about a small company. Yes, even tiny improvements take "ages" because the engine is very complex. I mean very very very. How many games feature relative spotting?

[YankeeDog]

Without doubt this should return, and there were numerous suggestions, that the data could be read from a TXT-file ...

This is actually exactly the reason why there is *not* currently an info panel in CMx2 like there was in CMx1.

In CMx1, as far as the actual game engine was concerned, all vehicles were point entities; they didn't actually take up any 3D space on the map and the graphical representation of the vehicle that the player saw was simply for show. "Under the hood", a vehicle's attributes in CMX1 were represented by a fairly complex array of numerical data, such as "size", "front lower hull armor thickness", "front lower hull armor slope", etc.

So in CMx1, it was a fairly easy programming task to create a subroutine that accessed the unit data array, and then spit it out to the player as a readable table. The "Unit Info" panel in CMx1 basically presented the information that the game itself used as the basis for hit & penetration calculations.

CMx2 works totally differently. In CMx2, the game engine actually uses the 3D model of the vehicle as the basis for hit and armor penetration calculations. "Under the hood", a unit actually takes up 3D space in the game world, and penetration and damage calculations are based on if and where a projectile intersects with this 3D model.

So in CMx2, there is no easy-to-access "TXT-file" for each unit describing its attributes, but rather a complex 3D model of the vehicle, which specifies the overall shape, armor plate thicknesses, location of important systems, etc. As far as the CMx2 game engine is concerned, there is no numerical value for e.g., the "Front Lower Hull Plate" as such, but rather 3D data detailing the position and thickness of armor plate(s) that might be described as the "Front Lower Hull Plate".

Now, could CMx2 3D model data be used as the basis for some sort of "vehicle data" feature for the player? Absolutely. But it would take a much more complex program routine to do so, since the 3D model data would have to be accessed and then distilled into a form that could be displayed to the player. Not impossible, but a fair amount of work, and definitely not something that could easily be made accessible to modders in the form of a "TXT file" or similar.

Of course, the other option would be to simply ignore the complex "under the hood" 3D model stuff, and instead research and assign a simpler set of data to each vehicle with a more generic description of attributes like armor thickness, angle etc. This data could then be used as the basis for a "Unit Info" panel. This is actually effectively what the various UI mods that give more unit info do.

[Vanir Ausf B]

I would like to see the info panel return as well. But I predict that the tooltip they are planning to implement will be more useful for the non-grog players since it will do the ballistics calculations for them.

[GJR144]

YankeeDog,

since CM is a simulation modelled after the real world models, there is no need to access any ingame data.

Just a routine that calls a window and reads text from a txt-file. In this file anything can be written. From "Fans don't need any improvements" to the real world armor data of the selected unit.

Zebulon,

I don't know how long you have been playing CM, and I don't know how many platoons you are cramping into an action square, but in the thirteen years playing CM I never had the problem of too many movement paths, but the problem that a unit must be clicked to see the paths appears in every order phase several times. The system with paths shown without a unit selected in CMx1 IMO was way more user friendly and it takes years to see any improvements in this regard, while game content is produced faster than anyone is capable to play.

If you say that you don't know what the unit info data can be good for, then you probably do not care about the nuances of tank combat. This data is essential to know the safety distance or to get an impression at which distance a certain angle could be penetrated.

And besides this, i always found it interesting in CMx1 to study and compare the data, especially with rare or new units.

With today's computers it would be so easy to even load pics or video, or a history with production numbers. This would not only be very teaching, but it would add to the atmosphere, too.

Gladly Marco Bergman did what he could to get the data into the unit pics, otherwise with the factory pics, it is very arcade style and does not reflect the simulation aspect.

[ZPB II]

GJR144, I've played since the CMBO demo and numerous times while playing CMx2 I find myself toggling between "Show All Move Paths" using ALT+P. In large scenarios with bottlenecks and chokepoints, the move paths of different units will overlap and cause much confusion. The most common one is when I am moving a column of vehicles on a single road. The movement orders will overlap eachother.

While I do agree that being able to customize all these aspects of the UI would be great, having to click on a unit to see move paths never really became a problem for me. When I am giving movement orders to units, I am selecting them. When I select a unit with ALT+P toggled on, I see the movement paths of other units and this gives me the visual cues I need to help synchronize the movement orders. It works for me and I personally don't see it as a big deal.

Oh, I do care about the nuances of tank combat. I've even received training on it. But I don't know how presenting data tables from controlled environment firing tests reflects into the virtual battlefield. Unless you know the angle and thickness of every plate on the 3D model of the tank, what good will the degree of optimal penetration do? It might give you a rough estimate, but how much does this differ from a gut estimate I don't know. If you are able to deduce the thickness of the plate you are likely hitting, the meeting angle and all the other variables of the shot being fired to actually make effective use of the data tables, you can probably deduce a rough estimate of whether it's a good shot or not without needing that data in the first place. Guesstimates are guesstimates.

(I'm not saying it wouldn't be a great feature to have, especially for people who are new to the game or those who haven't yet realized that memorizing the armour and firepower values of vintage AFVs is the best way to get girls, I can't help but to think that effectively utilizing this information is a lot harder in the hi-fi CMx2 than the rather simplistic in comparison CMx1.)

[sburke]

(I'm not saying it wouldn't be a great feature to have, especially for people . . . . . who haven't yet realized that memorizing the armour and firepower values of vintage AFVs is the best way to get girls

Damn!! I wasted all this time when I could have been using this info for pick up lines??!!!

[ZPB II]

It's never too late to fix the game.

Try it the next time you're on the hunt. Go easy on her, only talk about the Nahverteidigungswaffe, Panzerbüches, Zimmerit and stuff like that. When you get the feeling you're reeling her in, go all in and seal the deal with the Pak44. It will clear all doubt.

Have someone video the encounter and post it here so we can point out any possible trivial mistakes.

[Fenris]

....but I have no interest in memorizing every single stat of all the vehicles and gear and I honestly don't think that should be the barrier for entry into the CM series.

Heresy!!

But more seriously, I too would like the pop up info a la in CM1.

-F

[ZPB II]

Making the Defenses tab of enemy AFVs viewable during gameplay would help.

One can always look in the manual and look at the Defenses tab of the target in question, but I do admit that it isn't the fastest possible way.

But if you need that info it is there in the manual, it's pretty good as far as abstract goes and it does help in guesstimating and sidesteps most of the pedantic grognard stuff.