"Twain - twacks."

[buddy]

Hey guys, after looking at your new screen shots I am amazed at the

attention to detail! You guys have really gone all-out on this thing!

(So much for the carrot, now for a small stick or two...) You guys

need vehicles to leave tracks so the gamer can look at the battle-

field later and revisit the battle. I was in the gulf war (combat support)

and the thing that amazed me was that, while traveling north at the

onset of the ground war (and right behind the armor), I could see

armor tracks and literally "read" what had happened! Tracks would

go to a certain point, a few shells would be lying there, and then you

could see where the vehicle backed up slightly and took off! Also I

think the graphics need to "haze out" in the distance - everything is

too darn clear (which makes it too unrealistic). The smoke could be

thinner and a lighter shade of gray, maybe? Destroyed vehicles

should have dead vehicle trash (ammo cans, parts, ball-bearings

and 10W30 oil) lying around them - the carnage of war! Battlefields

are like junkyards! Burnt vehicles are turned a orange-rust color.

Maybe you could soften up the hedgerows a bit - they are too

symetrical (hard flat edges - they look like walls!) But hey, THE GAME

LOOKS GREAT!!!!

[Thomm]

While I do not really care for the tracks, I think debris around wrecks would add to the atmosphere. As with vehicle shadows I presume that only one additional polygon as a base plate with some junk painted on it would be sufficient. The problem, as you might be about to point out, is the magnifying factor: The debris radius would increase with the vehicle certainly leading to strange effects. But consider it nevertheless for destroyed objects, please.

Regards,

Thomm

[Harold Jones]

Battlefields are incredibly messy places. My unit(3/37 AR) went into reserve after the second day of the ground war and I was amazed at the trail of trash and junk that a unit in combat or even headed into combat leaves behind. A brigades worth of combat vehicles leaves a trail of empty ration containers, ammo boxes, shell casings, duds and wrecked and burnt out vehicles that has to be seen to be believed. That said, I think it would be cool if CM could show that, but until they release a video card for a Cray super computer I doubt that it's really practical.

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If something cannot be fixed by hitting it or by swearing at it, it wasn't worth saving anyway.

[Guest Big Time Software]

I will say this again, and probably a hundred more times -> limited VRAM, limited CPU power

We could do ALL of the things suggested here, but ALL cost far too much VRAM for their game value. Lots of truly important stuff would have to be dropped out. This is simply the reality of the hardware today.

Thomm, your suggestion about a single big junk texture won't save on the polygons. You still need to either have lots little small ones for them to do anything graphically, or one big one with lots of polygons (don't forget, we have to mold stuff on the ground to the terrain, which must be assumed is NOT flat, and therefore many polygons). The problem with the former is too many polygons, the latter too much VRAM (a big texture would be required and transparency still counts for VRAM) and probably too many polygons.

Tank tracks on the terrain is a polygon issue, and one that we can not do with today's hardware. It would cost us THOUSANDS of polygons to do tank tracks for even a small number of vehicles. This is technically impossible for any computer to handle along with everything else it already has to do. It would be cool to do, of course, but it isn't necessary for gameplay. You learn what happens while watching the action, and that is all you need to figure out things out. Don't forget that when you were in the Gulf you were looking at things you did not see first hand, and therefore that was the ONLY way to get your information. Shell hits are shown, BTW.

In terms of the distance and terrain sharpness, remember this is a game. As such you NEED to look at the whole battlefield. If this were a tank sim, I would agree about the haze effect, but this is a strategic level wargame (tactical scale of course). You can, for example, look at the battle from a position of a recon plane, or from the trenches, or from about 2000m in the air, or from anywhere in and around this. Hazing out the distance would only hinder gameplay, so no go.

Smoke has been covered several times. Transparencies KILL framerate. Because we can not control the amount of smoke on the battlefield, we can't do up transparent smoke. We *could* get around this by making much higher resolution smoke textures, and making larger portions of them masked out (i.e. you can see through the texture completely), but we don't have the massive amount of VRAM necessary to do this.

While all these suggestions are cool, and certainly desirable from a "prettiness" standpoint, none are important to game play. Because we don't have the hardware available to do these kinds of things yet, none are going to happen for sometime to come. What we can tell you is that once you play the game you will see for yourself that they aren't necessary for either gameplay OR immersion. Remember that people playing Doom II in 1994 (or there abouts) never complained about the lack of half the stuff that people gripe about today. CM is on the cutting edge of technology for outdoor simulations, so do not expect Quake III possibilities from it. The two are not comparable.

Steve