Is FB more optimized than the others?

[Battlefront.com]

For some people it is noticably difference. But certainly not for everyone. I can just about see the distance when they're put side by side, but I have to pay attention. Other people I know say they are completely unable to see any difference between the side by side 30/60 fps videos.

Conversely, for some people. 30 fps is really noticably jerky.

This is the thing I find most absent from the pro 60fps camp... any admission that 30fps can be acceptable.  They overstate their case like lawyers by excluding or dismissing anything that disagrees with their agenda of pushing for 60fps.  Reminds me of the "article" I read last night discussing the "pros and cons of tankless hot water heaters".  There wasn't a single pro listed in that whole article   Then I noticed it was from some sort of hotwater tank advocacy website.  And yes, there is such a thing!

So while there are good points about the cons of 30fps and the pros of 60fps, often times those arguments are either overstated or not properly put into context.  One example I've seen is a reference to some US Air Force study that showed basically that people can perceive 200fps.  They neglect to mention that the test was conducted on an ultra elite group of highly trained people who were staring at a very small space and knew exactly what they were looking for on a blank background with no other distractions.  Not very applicable to the 60fps arguments as presented.

By the time you hit middle age, your eyes will no longer be good enough to perceive the difference So I guess it's less of a problem on the whole for Battlefront's somewhat older customer base.

I think most CM players have their grandkids doing the tough work anyway.  "Hey sonny, can you move Grandpa's Tiger over that way?  There's a good lad"

Steve

[Kieme(ITA)]

 

If we were to go out and raise additional capital,

 

Would you consider rising the prices of future CM-related products as a source of additional revenue, and advertise this raise as a form of support (bypassing kickstarter)?

The above would shift the quality/quantity-to-price ratio at first, but that ratio could be restored as it is now thanks to the additonal Investments (maybe?).

I know I would accept this, if clarified.

[CarlWAW]

Since I am considering buying a new TV I was researching motion display a bit for the last few months. I want to add a few thoughts about the FPS problem.

It's true that movies are filmed in 24p. This fact has lead to the popular believe that 24 frames was enough for a movie like display.

But what is less known is the fact, that cinemas do not display only 24 frames. Each displayed frame is shut off three times which effectively triples the framerate.

During the time of CRTs the low framerate was no problem, because the picture of CRT TVs is built by scanlines and therefore never display a static picture.

This changed with LCD technology which is a sample and hold display. LCD (and also OLED) can display a completely static picture until the next frame can be displayed and the pixels are changed. For our eyes/brain this results in very unnaturally perceived movement, because our eyes expect a continuous movement (which in cinemas or CRTs is simulated by a display which only very shortly displays a picture, while during the rest nothing is displayed), but the LCD displays a completely static picture of movement until the next frame is displayed which also shows a frozen movement on a slightly different location.

So there is a big difference in motion display between 20 or 30 frames and 50, 60, 100 fps on S&H displays like LCDs or OLEDs.

Edited January 4, 2016 by CarlWAW

[Michael Emrys]

Would you consider rising the prices of future CM-related products as a source of additional revenue, and advertise this raise as a form of support (bypassing kickstarter)?

Of course there is always the possibility that BFC will be driven to do this at some point just to keep the doors open. But given that there is already a vociferous minority who feel like they are being overcharged already, it is perhaps one of those strategies that should be approached in fear and trembling. Raising prices can indeed increase revenues...as long as buying does not fall off too precipitously as a result. I think as long as BFC continues to deliver customer satisfaction, they will have a certain amount of wiggle room in this issue of raising prices. But if a certain point is passed—and it may not be easy or even possible to predict where that point may lie—that wiggle room could suddenly collapse.

Michael

[alwaysfish]

OMG.  Do you realize how absolutely insulting you just were?  You think after nearly two decades of programming 3D graphical environments, which even AAA games steer clear of because of their challenges, that we basically are bumbling around like kids in highschool programming Hello World?  C'mon... give us some credit.

Sorry, Steve, my intentions were not to insult you. You guys are doing a great job, no question. I enjoy your products immensely. I just wanted to say that optimizations could be done, but i also admit that it's time consuming.

[womble]

[Re crowdfunding]: The ones I'm aware of are pitching to a broad audience who won't get the game at all if they don't put up money up front.  For their investment they get the game in return, free or at least substantially discounted.  It amounts to pre-pre-pre orders, not true investment IMHO.   The crowd sourcing drives do not tend to be aimed at adding very expensive "bling" to niche games where the customer doesn't get a direct return on investment (i.e. something free of near equal value). 

I think Star Citizen is an exception to this. Sure, it started off as a "back us to get the game sans Publisher BS" Kickstarter, but the umpty-tens-of-millions they've raised since then have pretty much been all about getting more bling (aka feature creep  ). I'm not saying CM is feeding quite so large a niche as SC is, but there may be parallels: much of the money seems to come from a minority of really keen individuals with large disposable incomes. That sort of "imbalance" in the funding is something you can't easily account for by increasing the pricetag of the product.

[AttorneyAtWar]

This is the thing I find most absent from the pro 60fps camp... any admission that 30fps can be acceptable.  They overstate their case like lawyers by excluding or dismissing anything that disagrees with their agenda of pushing for 60fps.  Reminds me of the "article" I read last night discussing the "pros and cons of tankless hot water heaters".  There wasn't a single pro listed in that whole article   Then I noticed it was from some sort of hotwater tank advocacy website.  And yes, there is such a thing!

So while there are good points about the cons of 30fps and the pros of 60fps, often times those arguments are either overstated or not properly put into context.  One example I've seen is a reference to some US Air Force study that showed basically that people can perceive 200fps.  They neglect to mention that the test was conducted on an ultra elite group of highly trained people who were staring at a very small space and knew exactly what they were looking for on a blank background with no other distractions.  Not very applicable to the 60fps arguments as presented.

I think most CM players have their grandkids doing the tough work anyway.  "Hey sonny, can you move Grandpa's Tiger over that way?  There's a good lad"

Steve

Think of the possibilities Steve, people paid 15,000 dollars for an internet space ship they might not get (No I am not kidding), let us buy CM: Normandy King Tiger edition for an equal price!

[Battlefront.com]

Would you consider rising the prices of future CM-related products as a source of additional revenue, and advertise this raise as a form of support (bypassing kickstarter)?

That is, sorta, what the Upgrades are all about.  People are investing in improvements for themselves instead of expecting other people (i.e. new customers) to always pay for them.  There's advantages to this approach, not the least of which is the significant chunk that crowd sourcing enterprises take for their services.

Might we go with something more specific and do it through our website?  It's something I wouldn't rule out even though I don't foresee it happening.

So there is a big difference in motion display between 20 or 30 frames and 50, 60, 100 fps on S&H displays like LCDs or OLEDs.

Good points.  I went through the same process many years ago when I upgraded from a CRT TV to LED backlit LCD TV.  One of the things that was very apparent is that, like all technology, the devil is in the details.  Some TVs had awesome and even brightness, others were dark in spots.  Some had very smooth motion, others had "tearing" and/or pixelation.  So let's stick with this as an analogy...

A person who values special effect action films above all else goes down to Wally World and buys a big arsed LED TV.  He gets it home and finds that there's noticeable "tearing" during massive action packed, fast moving sequences.  There's nothing in the TV's specs to suggest that this should be happening.  What to blame?  It could be the TV, it could be the DVD player, it could be that the two don't play nice with each other, it could be that he has the wrong cables, it could be that he's expecting BluRay quality from a standard DVD... it could be any number of things INCLUDING the studio making the film using some sort of DVD format that isn't optimal for that particular player, which otherwise plays things great.

My point here is that it's not as simple as many think it is.  There's many potential points of failure and lots and lots of them have nothing to do with us.  Some, obviously, do.  The problem is people tend to heap all the blame on the game itself as a first reaction when that might not really be the case.

 

Of course there is always the possibility that BFC will be driven to do this at some point just to keep the doors open. But given that there is already a vociferous minority who feel like they are being overcharged already, it is perhaps one of those strategies that should be approached in fear and trembling. Raising prices can indeed increase revenues...as long as buying does not fall off too precipitously as a result. I think as long as BFC continues to deliver customer satisfaction, they will have a certain amount of wiggle room in this issue of raising prices. But if a certain point is passed—and it may not be easy or even possible to predict where that point may lie—that wiggle room could suddenly collapse.

Yes, that is the big concern with concentrating too many resources into something that too few find value in.  Be it graphics, CoPlay, WeGo replay, better modding features, etc.  There's lots of narrow areas of improvement we could pursue, but perhaps shouldn't.  Or at least shouldn't to the extent requested.

Sorry, Steve, my intentions were not to insult you. You guys are doing a great job, no question. I enjoy your products immensely. I just wanted to say that optimizations could be done, but i also admit that it's time consuming.

Thanks for that.  No worries.  I don't think we really differ too much in our viewpoint.  I know better than most what a couple extra hundred thousand Dollars could do to the game's performance capabilities.  Therefore, denying that the game could be better would be asinine.  However, that admission doesn't suddenly change the economics of our niche products.

BTW, there's another major problem that other game companies don't have that we do.  That means as time goes on it is easier for them, and harder for us, to incorporate new programming techniques and/or API improvements because they don't have as many legacy constraints as we do.  Then add the resources element to the equation and things get even worse.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

I think Star Citizen is an exception to this. Sure, it started off as a "back us to get the game sans Publisher BS" Kickstarter, but the umpty-tens-of-millions they've raised since then have pretty much been all about getting more bling (aka feature creep  ). I'm not saying CM is feeding quite so large a niche as SC is, but there may be parallels: much of the money seems to come from a minority of really keen individuals with large disposable incomes. That sort of "imbalance" in the funding is something you can't easily account for by increasing the pricetag of the product.

This is the example I was thinking of most when I wrote what I wrote.  The funding flooded in because of who was asking for the money, the game design, the lack of competition, and the market being massive.  It basically got everything right.  However, they might still churn out a turd of a game or at least something that under delivers on expectations (IMHO that is inevitable).  Which is why many industry watchers are curious to see if this actually is a repeatable method for funding AAA games or if it is a flop in the making.  If Star Citizen bombs people might be very, very leery about kicking in money ahead of time for future game pitches.

Steve

[AstroCat]

Here's another frame rate comparison link

https://frames-per-second.appspot.com

At college when I did a a one minute hand drawn animation project 15 frames per second was quite enough!

Great example... this is basically visually what I am talking about.

Edited January 4, 2016 by AstroCat

[AstroCat]

Squad was pitched to a very niche set of tactical gamers based on Project Reality (A mod for Battlefield 2) and garnered 450,000$ on Kickstarter. It later when on to be released on (The S word in early access ) and made another 300K fully funding the development, which is awesome!

Maybe someday CM can do the same...

Don't shoot me, please.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/offworldindustries/squad/description

Double edit: Funnily enough theres a thread over on there forums talking about people who play CM, small world!

Yeah I was thinking along the lines of Squad as well as a good example of a niche game that got good crowd funding. Still not saying it is the best thing for CM but I had to consider it.

[MikeyD]

Out here on the east coast the proverbial cautionary tale is Kurt Schilling and his 38 Studios game company. Schilling's company had development money coming out of their ears including millions in taxpayer $$$ from Rhode Island. The one product that they produced was pretty impressive but they needed to sell three million copies just for the company to break even, and they didn't come remotely close. When the company finally imploded I recall a news report saying 38 Studios was laying off 300 employees. I joked that for BFC to lay off three hundred employees they'd first have to hire 300 employees! So there's a dark side to the concept of growing your company into a success, that's growing your company to the point where even success won't cover the overhead.

[Cobetco]

Several of my teachers actually worked on that game, and became teachers because of it. their general impression was that the art department was being run by idiots and most of their time was spent on "future projects" that ate up funds, their assessment (note they were junior artists not accountants, so take this with a grain of salt) was that the budget was so big because these "future projects" were taking up too much money. (also note this was the BIG HUGE end of the deal, not the 38 studios end)

Edited January 4, 2016 by Cobetco

[Battlefront.com]

Examples of Kickstarter money coming to the aid of addons to games with players in the millions is not very applicable.  The $450k for an addon to Battlefield 4 would probably be a few tens of thousands of Dollars for a CM project.  That's not enough to even pay for the effort to have a Kickstarter campaign, not to mention make whatever product we had in mind.

As for 38 Studios, my brother-in-law worked there.  Just saw him last week.  I could go into great detail about what killed the company based on his and other observations, but it boils down to the usual story... grew too big, too fast, without the ability to maintain the scale of production needed to survive.

Cobetco, your sources are missing the fundamental problem with game development.  If a company does NOT invest massively in "future projects"is 99% likely will be out of business within 1-3 years (depends).  The reason for this is that development cycles are a lot longer than the revenue cycles.  That means you had better have a new game ready to go pretty much each year.  To do that you have to start the game 2-3 years before you intend to release it.  Especially with artwork.  Heck, when I worked for Sierra Online we made the artwork for two whole games before the games were even designed!  I kid you not.

You also need to have more than one game in the pipeline in the event one bombs, isn't completed, or otherwise doesn't produce the revenue necessary to make it to the next product (which will no doubt have to be rushed to fill the void).

The 1% chance I mentioned is when the first game is wildly profitable and the developer has enough time to cobble together a sequel before the money runs out or (in the case of big companies) interest in stock ownership fades away.

Anybody think it is a good idea to make a strategic plan based on a requirement to be struck by lightning?  I sure don't   Which is why Battlefront has 2-3 products in development at any one time.  We were very fortunate to have been struck by lightning once (CMBO) and we're not expecting that to happen again.

Steve

 

 

[Cobetco]

heh, i said they didn't have a whole picture, and i understand everything you said (heck i do it on smaller scale, as outlet for when things hit a brick wall.) but i seemed to get the impression it wasn't like two to three projects, but like 12. but that might just be that they were overstaffed and had to find things to do, and its been a while since I've spoken to either of them. You seem to have a much better perspective than mine. and alot of mine also probably comes from my distaste for doing concept art (its horrible, emotionless work)

[Macisle]

 

...If we were to go out and raise additional capital, it wouldn't be to improve CMx2's graphics.  That's not the primary thing people complain about, it's not the primary thing that drives CM sales.  Extra, non-accountable investment would go towards things like additional content, gameplay improvements, and other things like that which we can't do or can't do fast enough...

Steve

Leaving aside the issue of outside capital, IIRC, around the time of the CMBN 3.0 upgrade release, you said that going forward, you'd like to devote about 50% of available development resources to eye candy and 50% to other. Has your thinking shifted on that?

I'm still hoping for enhanced (more varied and fluid) infantry animations at some point.

[MikeyD]

This conversation reminds me of the general topic of gambling and the differing personality types involved. Some personality types see gambling as a fool's game. Other personality types believe you're never going to win if you don't play. For some people the thrill of winning is more-than-ample compensation for those other times when they lost. Others see 'winning' as the carrot that gets dangled just beyond the reach of suckers to keep them shelling out their dough. It all describes the same pastime but with diametrically opposing impressions of what's taking place. Which brings us back to game development. Are you willing to bet the family farm in the hope of landing in clover with a big breakthrough game? Because remember, if you lose the bet you lose the family farm too.

[Battlefront.com]

heh, i said they didn't have a whole picture, and i understand everything you said (heck i do it on smaller scale, as outlet for when things hit a brick wall.) but i seemed to get the impression it wasn't like two to three projects, but like 12. but that might just be that they were overstaffed and had to find things to do, and its been a while since I've spoken to either of them. You seem to have a much better perspective than mine. and alot of mine also probably comes from my distaste for doing concept art (its horrible, emotionless work)

I don't know how many projects they had in the pipeline that were sucking up resources which could have otherwise gone to keeping the company afloat.  From what I seen in various reports and first hand tales of woe is the primary problem was the company did not grow organically around a core team.  They had to establish a culture from all that on top of all the other challenges.  That led to unrealistic expectations.  From what I remember the first game did pretty well, but not nearly enough to keep things going forward with the enormous overhead they took on.

I'm not sure there was anything fundamentally wrong with their business plan or management.  The dynamics of the industry are simply intolerant of mistakes or forces outside the control of the developer.  Most developers make those sorts of mistakes when they are small, hence the huge number of ventures that fail in the early stages (very often before releasing their first game).  Having lots of money and bodies to throw at learning mistakes can help, but it can also mask the need for other course of action (e.g. reducing overhead, shrinking feature lists, scaling back broader plans, etc.).

As the old saying goes, the bigger they come... the harder they fall.  And let's not forget that there's been plenty of very large and spectacular failures which had loads of experience and success.  There's also been quite a number of huge companies that have been unable to avoid downsizing to stay alive.

Leaving aside the issue of outside capital, IIRC, around the time of the CMBN 3.0 upgrade release, you said that going forward, you'd like to devote about 50% of available development resources to eye candy and 50% to other. Has your thinking shifted on that?

Yes, to some degree.  Basically we've shifted most of our energies to putting out more content quicker than we have before.  However, when it comes to improvements in the game itself, I do expect that quite a lot of our effort in the future will be graphical in some way.  Perhaps 50%.  I just checked my personal Top 10 for Upgrade v4 and I see 6 of them being in the graphics area.  Not all specifically "eye candy" by most definitions, but still designed to make the game look better as well as play better.

This conversation reminds me of the general topic of gambling and the differing personality types involved. Some personality types see gambling as a fool's game. Other personality types believe you're never going to win if you don't play. For some people the thrill of winning is more-than-ample compensation for those other times when they lost. Others see 'winning' as the carrot that gets dangled just beyond the reach of suckers to keep them shelling out their dough. It all describes the same pastime but with diametrically opposing impressions of what's taking place. Which brings us back to game development. Are you willing to bet the family farm in the hope of landing in clover with a big breakthrough game? Because remember, if you lose the bet you lose the family farm too.

It might come as no surprise that I do not buy lottery tickets nor engage in any game of chance that involves money (I live 45 min away from a casino, BTW).  While it would be nice to win big without putting in the effort or expense, that's simply not the way gambling works.  I heard a really informative discussion about lottery tickets a couple of weeks ago.  Inevitably someone called up and defended playing the lottery by saying "if you don't play you can't win".  One of the panelists, a statistician and gaming expert, said something like this in response:

"I have just about as much chance as winning by not playing as you do"
 

The relevance of this is Battlefront is probably beaten the odds of staying in business for so long precisely because we do not believe in gambling.  The funny thing is when we went direct to the Internet in 1998 people thought we were gambling then since there was no proof that an internet only sales model was viable.  To us taking a calculated risk on internet only sales was vastly safer than teaming up with an established publisher.  Seeing as the established publishers that were courting us at the time (three that I can recall) went out of business within a few years of CMBO's release, it looks like we were correct.

Steve

 

[weapon2010]

I cant remember, what was the initial price of CMBO in 1998?

[Battlefront.com]

I cant remember, what was the initial price of CMBO in 1998?

We released it in 2000 for $45, which was more-or-less what games sold for at the time.  According to the US CPI (inflation) that is the equivalent of $62.02 in 2015 Dollars.  Hmmm... we're working twice as hard for less money?  Damn, just like everybody else

Steve

Edited January 5, 2016 by Battlefront.com

[weapon2010]

Has the price for CMFB been announced?if so what will it be?

[sburke]

Lottery = a tax on the math impaired

[Nercon]

BTW, there's another major problem that other game companies don't have that we do.  That means as time goes on it is easier for them, and harder for us, to incorporate new programming techniques and/or API improvements because they don't have as many legacy constraints as we do.  Then add the resources element to the equation and things get even worse.

Steve

Any chance on improving performance on 4.0?

[LongLeftFlank]

Great thread here, very informative both on performance issues and the industry economics. Thanks to all.

[RockinHarry]

My main issue with performance lies less in actual achievable FPS, but rather in the fact that I can´t load and play big maps. One example case would be the "Fire Brigade" mission or the "Huge rolling hills and village map" that always gets me a CTD. Generally I feel somewhat excluded from using and playing maps larger than say 5-6 square kilometers. If I could use any such maps, I wouldn´t that much care on low to very low FPS actually. And yup.....I know about my crappy PC (see signature below). 

Other than that, I´m fine with BFC marketing policy, prices ect.

Generally the games performance is sufficient for what it delivers. Just figured lately about the impact of trees when they would be set to not just cast shadows, but also receive shadows. I "imported" a tree *.mdr file into stump flavor objects successfully and figured I can bring the game to a virtual standstill, by just making a (small) forest from the full size tree "stumps".