Having a ton of pretty grevious spotting issues lately

[LemuelG]

It's night time. You're peering out through possibly fogged, dusty glass vision blocks amongst buildings and you expect tankers to be able to identify a stationary Tiger? There's actually an anecdote about a sherman doing precisely what yours did in the days after D-Day, told by one of the crew, possibly even the TC, that I've seen on TV. That sherman wasn't a Firefly, and didn't stand and fight, leaving with a molten groove in the top of its turret and getting behind cover before the followup round could kill it. All sounds properly realistic to me. Might not happen that way every time, but if it did, I wouldn't worry much.

 

Yeah, night is dark - I don't want to seem overly patronizing, but some folk don't have a lot of experience with navigating unlit areas at night - even with moonlight in some areas it can be completely impossible to see anything, even after you stumble over it. Looking out over the paddock outside on a nearly full-moon night and I can't make out the neighbour's house 50m away, at all (usually it's clearly visible in daylight, but against a hill and a few trees it becomes invisible at night when the lights go out) - he could have a company of idle Tigers assembled in his driveway and I wouldn't know it until I was a matter of meters away, at best.

[Toblakai]

I didn’t make any tests but my experiences with the new v3 engine are, as far as the spotting, not so well. I have the feeling that with the new engine the spotting system is a little broken. Here is a good example (not night, but smoke). The Sherman had overrun the Panzerschreck Team and this guy’s only heard the tank

 

Video2 shows the view of the Panzerschreckteam (at the end of the video I deselected the unit two times for a short moment to show the Sherman).

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k4co4sdez2giy2n/AABBVNXvcGFa213f-F2xqHaea?dl=0

 

[Vanir Ausf B]

The schreck team is blanketed by a smoke screen. Were you expecting them to see through it?

[Daroc]

The spotting visability is really a non issue.  This is a AFV moving a fast speed you could hear it from 30m away and know that is was coming.

 

If this is not the case then that is a bug. 

 

If this was a infantry unit moving at fast/quick speed it should be heard at 10m.

 

If the AFV was moving at hunt/slow speed should still be heard from 10-15m.

 

This all at pitch black and hazy nights.

[Vanir Ausf B]

The spotting visability is really a non issue.  This is a AFV moving a fast speed you could hear it from 30m away and know that is was coming.

 

If this is not the case then that is a bug. 

 

The Sherman had overrun the Panzerschreck Team and this guy’s only heard the tank

[Toblakai]

The schreck team is blanketed by a smoke screen. Were you expecting them to see through it?

 

Yes, there is smoke, but the Sherman overrun the Panzerschreckteam and stopped 20m behind them (with running engine and shooting) and the Panzerschreckteam had LOS to the stopped Sherman.

 

Of course this is a difficult situation to trap with program code, but I don’t think (my experiences) that the spotting routines are free of bugs. Especially in the v3 engine.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Yes, there is smoke, but the Sherman overrun the Panzerschreckteam and stopped 20m behind them (with running engine and shooting) and the Panzerschreckteam had LOS to the stopped Sherman.

 

Given that the schreck team spots the Sherman twice for very brief moments before losing sight of it again I think it far more likely that it did not have LOS to the stopped Sherman for the whole turn. Also, one of the soldiers is positioned deeper into the smoke than the other. I suspect only one of them could see the Sherman and only for brief moments. Doesn't look like a bug to me.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Vanir Ausf B

[womble]

I am constantly amazed at the ranges people fight their tanks in this game. And I guess, so are the designers.

There is, and without a very rigorous testing program across engines there never will be enough information to say "spotting broke between v2 and v3" because so many other things changed as well. Unless you're fighting the exact same battle over and over again, for example any observation is going to be tainted by changes to the environment and your own learning.

There are always going to be holes in the spotting routines. If only from the fact that it has to be conducted as a polling routine becuase it's impossible to provide enough processor cycles to run the spotting of every unit continuously.

Spotting something involves getting enough of a visual fix on its location to be able to know it's an enemy target and fire your weapons at it. A fast-moving vehicle could well cover the distance from "hidden by the smoke" to "hidden by the smoke again" in less than a second. If the polling interval (dynamically foreshortened from the default of 7s because the observers are aware there's something there, and it's close) is longer than that, the "tenative contact" (which is not solely sound; they could well see a looming shape, too, it's just not clear that it's not friendly, and the sight picture isn't good enough to actually pull the trigger) could overrun them without ever being subject to a spotting check within "clear" visual range in the smoke.

Another hole in the game's systems is that a tank running over infantry doesn't turn them into greasy, bloody smears.

[Toblakai]

I wrote "a little"

I don’t want to start a discussion about it. Everybody has his own opinion and nobody knows it except BFC (I hope so    ). We just can share our experience and arguments.

 

There are always going to be holes in the spotting routines. If only from the fact that it has to be conducted as a polling routine becuase it's impossible to provide enough processor cycles to run the spotting of every unit continuously.

Another hole in the game's systems is that a tank running over infantry doesn't turn them into greasy, bloody smears.

 

Why is it impossible? It just a replay, the calculation of the turn happened before.

 

Yes, I should be lucky that my Panzerschreckteam survived this "back massage"

Edited February 8, 2015 by Toblakai

[Sgt Joch]

There are always outliers in any game.

I am pretty involved in a CMRT v1.03 PBEM and have not seen anything unusual.

Infantry/AT guns spot enemy AFVs well across a fair distance as long as they have LOS and they are in view for some time, usually less than 30 seconds moving.

I have a bunch of AT rifle teams which have spotted many AFVs, some quite far away. OTOH, I have one team which has failed to spot an AFV motionless for a whole turn about 20 meters away. They are prone and in a forest, the AFV is in a clearing.

What should I focus on, the 99% of cases where it sems to work fine or the 1% of cases where they may be a question mark?

[womble]

I wrote "a little"

I don’t want to start a discussion about it.

Well, you came to the wrong place for that. A discussion is almost inevitable on here.

Everybody has his own opinion and nobody knows it except BFC...

Actually, the framework of the spotting system has been one of the aspects of the game's systems that Steve has taken some pains to explain, because it is such a core component of the game. So some of us have at least a foggy understanding of what's going on under the hood. 

 

Why is it impossible? It just a replay, the calculation of the turn happened before.

RealTime play. That is calculated on-the-fly, and so all game subsystems have to be capable of keeping up. As the baseline rig that the game is meant to run on gets better, BFC will be able to tune the frequency of spotting calculations up, but they do tend to be conservative in their demands for the hardware you must have to play the game, so, as the lifetime of a tolerable gaming rig extends, the rate at which they can increase the frequency of spotting checks goes down. Edited February 8, 2015 by womble

[slysniper]

All I can say is the spotting imperfections within the game are they will likely always be there until a day someone tries creating a whole new program and try another approach to the challenge.

 

What I have noticed is the more I have played the game, the less issues I have with spotting. I know what to expect and I plan my moves to that expectation. seldom do I find spotting not working to what I now know to expect now. Thus not a surprise anymore, its just how the game works and I have learned to accept it.

 

Smoke is one of the biggest challenges for the spotting program when you have troops right within the smoke. (it is going to give you some unusual results.)  but if you have ever been in a real smoke screen, you might not think it so unusual.

 

In real life, you want to be behind it, or looking into it. if you are within it, you are at a huge disadvantage.

Edited February 8, 2015 by slysniper

[Toblakai]

RealTime play. That is calculated on-the-fly, and so all game subsystems have to be capable of keeping up. As the baseline rig that the game is meant to run on gets better, BFC will be able to tune the frequency of spotting calculations up, but they do tend to be conservative in their demands for the hardware you must have to play the game, so, as the lifetime of a tolerable gaming rig extends, the rate at which they can increase the frequency of spotting checks goes down.

 

Thanks for the explanation!

 

So the trigger frequency is limited by the real time system? Puh! Another reason I don’t like RTS’    and it explains why in CMx2 typical RTS tactics work more than in CMx1.