Is CMBS worth buying?

[Battlefront.com]

51 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

That's quite a story, Steve. Thanks for sharing.

We apparently follow a "try before we buy" method for hiring people

51 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

That is understood. And it does sounds really great. Another area where you can iterate and get a significant quality of life improvement would be the editor (allowing to switch overlays without having to close down the app and shuffling the "special map overlay.bmp" file for instance).

Yeah, the list of "quality of life" stuff is long indeed.  One reason developers don't put tools out into the public is to limit how many things they are answerable to fix

51 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

That wasn't my intention - I meant heuristics/algorithms as the particular way the "rule of thumb"/"long hand" approach is implemented at every level and for every task and behaviour that applies.

Right, but we don't do that in a way that lends itself to the sort of ARMA 3 example we've been discussing.  Ordering a Company of mixed type units to go from A to B and then do something at B requires many levels of AI that are working off of amalgamated "rule of thumb" input with significant subdivisions within to account for unit type.  There's also a need for separate branches of logic specifically for coordination and task assignment within the units being moved.  This data, in a sense, must also be made available to the player in RealTime so decision making can be abstracted from the ground level to something akin to a 2D planning board.  ARMA 3 doesn't have these sorts of thing to worry about.

51 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

The kind of approach you understood I was referring to does work for the "dynamic campaigns" we used to get on Falcon, Eurofighter or Operation Flashpoint (this last one I am not entirely sure), where pretty much everything happening where the player wasn't physically present was "faked" (i.e. simulated with a more or less crude model).

There's tons of games from the past that used this approach.  All the games I worked on at Impressions (Caesar II, Lords of the Real II, and Civil War Generals 2 come to mind) all used this methodology to resolve tactical battles the player was either uninterested or unable to play out in tactical detail.  This was a standard approach for most split strat/tac games of the day, including one of my all time favorites... Reach For The Stars!  Ancient Art Of War also made liberal use of this technique. It amounted to rolling a bunch of dice, so the results were often infuriating.  For a complex game like CM we'd have to do a heck of a lot of work to consistently produce reasonable results.  It's something I'm certainly interested in doing sometime in the future, but for CMx2 it's never going to happen because the game mechanics were fundamentally not set up for this sort of thing.

 

51 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

1 case like that in 17 years is a pretty good record. Yet users can be even more dangerous as they can totally destroy your credibility, and here I am thinking of what happened to Harpoon makers.

Hence why we do not confuse the role of developer and customer in anybody's minds.  We listen and are influenced by customer discussions.  Many of the best parts of CM came from customer suggestions in some form or another.  Certainly we try to prioritize what we do to improve the game based on what customers have expressed as important to them.  Which gets us back to the problem of having roughly 4 different customer subsets

51 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Let me wrap up the discussion and reconvene at some point in the future.

Deal!

Steve