We Need Another "The Road Ahead" from BF.

[Michael Emrys]

Oh man I'm sunk - I constantly screw that up

 

And that's not all, either.

 

 

 

Michael

[Thewood1]

I may be a snob, but if some starts moaning about BFC whilst not knowing the difference between "too" and "to", then I find it hard to take their moan seriously.

Ha...maybe the person that says some instead of someone shouldn't point that out....or maybe its start vs starts.  I can't tell.

[Pak40]

Ha...maybe the person that says some instead of someone shouldn't point that out....or maybe its start vs starts.  I can't tell.

 

Ha! Warts got busted.But seriously, I to am sic of people mispeling stuf on the forem when their's a dam spell cheek bilt into the damn thing. And even if its spelled rite but uzed in the wrong grammer then they should have the commen courtsey to dubble check their text. Come on guys, were not in 3rd grade anymore!!!

[Thewood1]

I don't mind misspellings...just people pointing them out...with misspellings.

Edited March 20, 2015 by Thewood1

[BLSTK]

I may be a snob, but if some starts moaning about BFC whilst not knowing the difference between "too" and "to", then I find it hard to take their moan seriously.

 

Not to pile on Warts, but I believe the correct grammatical form of the possessive requires you to use "his" instead of "their". 

 

My two cents.

[BLSTK]

In other news, Steve lives!

[Warts 'n' all]

A busted wart... Now that sounds painful. That'll teach me to keep my big limey mouth shut. Exits stage right ---->

Edited March 20, 2015 by Warts 'n' all

[delliejonut]

Yes, to pinpoint unspotted ATGs to the exact action spot. Really great...

Chess vs checkers.

Trying to attract checkers players to play chess can only result in losing both in the long term.

CM is WAAAY to complex to be attractive for the masses EVER. It will always be a niche product.

Chess will also NEVER appeal to the masses. NEVER. One could pump up the graphics of chess and make it look like a FPS, but after the initial spike of shallow interest, it will again only be played by chess players who are not interested in explosions and action, but like the challenge of the mind.

The same is with CM. I think the core CM-player was interested in realism above all.

Now what will have the bigger impact on sales: those that like CM more because of hit decals, and therefore will buy the next game, or those disappointed customers who no longer perceive guns as threat after the first shot because of hit decals?

I believe each of a disappointed core customer is a customer who bought all their products - contrary to those who are quickly attracted by shallow visual effects like hit decals and other gimmicks at the cost of degrading realism. Graphical effects attract quickly but the same crowd is also moving on to the next shallow effect in the next game.

But beneath everything the core of the problem seems to be something completely different:

The main game designer plays the game not in the mode the vast majority of wargamers play his products. That's never good, if you develop something and don't know, what your core customers need. There are no ladders, no campaigns, nothing played realtime. One could say: realtime does not exist among the wrgaming community.

The result of this dramatic discrepancy could be observed since CMSF was released.

The spotting problems as a result of keeping the calculation affordances as low as possible to make realtime play possible. Spotting works good enough for realtime but often not good enough for turn based.

And I think this has dramatic consequences for potential new turnbased customers: they try the demo, recognize a strange spotting behaviour and lose interest. The 1:1 representation makes things even worse, since it leaves much less room for imagination than a symbolic representation. So again: 1:1 is attracting the visual oriented player, but if there are discrepances between presented action and results, itdegrades the experience of the customer who is interested in realism.

The majority of realtime customers cannot be attracted, because FPS games offer them the much better quick action and cooler graphics. Additionally the game concept is so extremely different, that 99% will only shake their head. So the core group is lost and the big part of the massese cannot be attracted because it is chess and not checkers.

I will never forget the disastrous relative hotkeys-concept when I tried CMSF the first time. What a punch into the face of WEGO-players that was.

Or the water-effects since CMRT breaking FOW. Sounds from unspotted units? A problem since CMSF. But in combination with hit-decals since engine v3 this problem has been even increased instead to become solved. How easily foxholes can be spotted. Bunkers and trenches breaking FOW. And much more.

I believe all these are results of a design process done from a realtime-player's perspective and therefore many of the problems are only discovered very late in the design process, or even too late after implementation.

Instead that Battlefront had followed their former clear path torwards realism and protected and taken care of their brilliant WEGO-child, they lost this focus and now, with an ageing engine, they are sitting between the chairs, trying to keep new shallow action-customers somehow interested while they lose more and more of realism-focused wargamers which one after the other slowly give up, because the problems persist year after year and game after game and sometimes even become worse.

 

What

what

....

what are you talking about?

 

Not sure if I had a stroke while reading this.

[Rinaldi]

 

 

Yes, to pinpoint unspotted ATGs to the exact action spot. Really great...

 

Oh for heaven's sake...

 

Some people will never be satisfied, I'm beginning to understand why there's so much delicious passive aggression when the developers respond to posts like this.

 

Edit: Here it is, I'm glad I decided to read on after downing some stiff drink to steel my resolve;

 

 

Anybody smell something a bit "off" in one of these posts? Perhaps the stink that comes from someone who has been banned repeatedly from this Forum for grinding axes and carrying around big chips on his shoulder? I know I sure do! I am even fairly certain I know which one. Almost certain enough to just go ahead and ban him now. But I'll let the charade go on a bit longer if he wishes to.

Steve 

•  

 

Lipsmacking.

Edited March 21, 2015 by Rinaldi

[Battlefront.com]

Steve, can you tell us some more about the progress regarding the Bulge? Show some screenshots perhaps? You were going to at the beginning of this year, but something went wrong at the last moment. Give us some bones to keep us busy for a couple of months please.

It's being tested now. Much of the new artwork is already done, and because we are able to leverage a lot of assets from various other games, the game is fairly complete now. Mostly making scenarios and the campaigns. That takes some time to do, but not horribly long.

We really want to show off some new stuff first, but that's the stuff we're debugging now. It shouldn't take too long before you see some screenshots.

Steve

[Sequoia]

Will there be special snow effects. i.e deep snow unlike what we had in Fortress Italy that affects movement/combat in a special way?

[rocketman]

"...the game is fairly complete now."

That's great news. Can't wait for some screenies.

[BLSTK]

...and with it a brand new forum!

[weapon2010]

steve

 

what about ammo leveling for tanks, that was a feature touted for cmrt, but didn't make it in, hope to see that in

[Weee411]

Tank Rider will be added?

[c3k]

A busted wart... Now that sounds painful. That'll teach me to keep my big limey mouth shut. Exits stage right ---->

 

A digression, but I must share...

 

My grandmother (bless her departed soul), was visiting my mother's house. My grandmother was in her mid-90's at the time, sitting on the couch, and my mother was busy in the kitchen. The old golden retriever nudged up to my grandmother, who began to pet the dog. My grandmother found an engorged tick on the dog's back, between the shoulder blades. Being a worldly woman who worked hard her whole life, she said nothing, but gamely began to dig the tick out. It was a tough tick, and held out for a bit. Finally, my grandmother freed it. She placed the bloody thing upon a napkin and, bringing it to my mother, asked if the garbage was okay, or did my mother prefer it be thrown outside?

 

My mother looked at the bloody thing in the napkin that my grandmother was presenting to her.

 

It was not a tick. It was a wart.

 

 

THAT'S a good dog.

[Warts 'n' all]

At least yer nan didn't have a King Charles Spaniel.

[womble]

Tank Rider will be added?

That was the stated intention a while back, certainly. There will be outrage if it doesn't make the cut, I'm sure

[General Jack Ripper]

Parker Schnabel's post has given me some kind of brain seizure. I had something to say, but now I can't remember what it was.

[delliejonut]

Parker Schnabel's post has given me some kind of brain seizure. I had something to say, but now I can't remember what it was.

 

BF better have insurance for all the brain damage these dumb posts are causing. LOL

[t34577685]

we want "melee attack“！          

[Col Deadmarsh]

 

In any case, I love the game, and I hope to see it improved going forward. I don't want to see it end up like another favorite of mine, "Close Combat", that was a blast to play back in the day, but then fell into the routine of releasing the same game over and over again with very minor improvements. One day, I found another game and never looked back. Not because it was "newer", but because it was so much more detailed and nuanced. That other game was Combat Mission.

 

Close Combat ceased being the same game once they changed the CC2 engine. CC3 and everything after it sucked.

[Pak40]

Close Combat ceased being the same game once they changed the CC2 engine. CC3 and everything after it sucked.

 

It wasn't the engine that made CC3 meh, it was the terribly spread out campaign system. Once you finished the barbarosa campaign, you immediately started the next campaign which might be a year later, but somehow your forces were still depleted from the barbarosa campaign!

 

CC4 had a better operational map campaign system but the battles were largely a joke. Calliopes vs 5 Panthers, WTF?

 

Matrix has since acquired the code and released some pretty good remakes. The operational layer really shines now and if CM had something similar but slightly more realistic then we'd have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately it still suffers from a very basic tactical AI and a very poor setup AI, constantly setting up it's units in the open to be immediately mowed down.

 

Apparently they are working on a new engine for the next one, so we'll see how that goes.

[Ted]

Will the Bulge module take us to the end of the war?

[Michael Emrys]

Will the Bulge module take us to the end of the war?

 

It will not be a module, but a whole new family. And yes it will take us to the end of the war.

 

Michael