Informal Poll Winner - Engine Update

[Probus]

Well it would seem that updates to the Combat Mission Engine is going tobethe clear winner in this little informal Poll. Thanks to all for putting your "two cents" in. That would be your "two As'es" in in ancient Roman coinage. Maybe "Bias" in Latin? I don't know, but I digress. 

Now without any kind of poll format, may I ask one more question?  If you could pick only 1 thing you would ask the developers to add to the Engine, what would it be?

For me it would be Field of View/Line of Sight enhancements. Buttons to show exactly what a unit could see in it's configuration. Optics, buttoned, weather, etc...  This could be shown in arcs like Graviteam does or what would be REALLY cool is you can see only the terrain that your units see. Anything else looks like a "paper" map or is blacked out. Using shaders to dim the view would be cool also in hazy situations. See attached without/with optics. 

Can Battlefront comment on anything in the works @BFCElvis?

 

Edited August 2, 2020 by Probus

[Glubokii Boy]

 

For CM3:

A new triggersystem that would allow AI groups to have MULTIPLE options for their next action.

For CM2:

More AI-groups.

 

And by the way... thanks for the poll

 

[John1966]

PTO!

[Bulletpoint]

17 hours ago, Probus said:

Thanks to all for putting your "two cents" in. That would be your "two As'es" in in ancient Roman coinage.

So if you get your "As'es" handed to you, that means you get paid?

17 hours ago, Probus said:

If you could pick only 1 thing you would ask the developers to add to the Engine, what would it be?

The list is so long, but I'd hope they fixed the technical issues at least.

Shadows that flicker on and off when moving the camera, hillsides that are lit from the direction opposite the sun, patches of terrain where no fog effect is applied, framerates that often run very low, shaders that crash the game unless you toggle them off.

I believe most of these are caused by obsolete OpenGL driver support, so a move to DirectX would be great.

[Probus]

4 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Shadows that flicker on and off when moving the camera, hillsides that are lit from the direction opposite the sun, patches of terrain where no fog effect is applied, framerates that often run very low, shaders that crash the game unless you toggle them off.

I believe most of these are caused by obsolete OpenGL driver support, so a move to DirectX would be great.

@Aquila-SmartWargames did a little video about combat mission settings and he mentioned a little app called Reshade.  Wow!  I had never seen this before.  Really made a difference to the graphics.  Here is a link to about the time he starts talking about it:

 

Edited August 3, 2020 by Probus

[Jesser]

I really love your suggestions for line of sight tools. That would be amazing, as figuring out line of sight was one of my biggest difficulties when I first started playing.

I'm kind of bummed that not many people wanted a Vietnam era game. Luckily there's a mod for that... just have to get CMSF2 one day.

[Probus]

3 hours ago, Jesser said:

I'm kind of bummed that not many people wanted a Vietnam era game. Luckily there's a mod for that... just have to get CMSF2 one day.

  I have a feeling a Vietnam game may still be a pretty raw subject for older US wargamers.  More because politicians dictated rules of engagement that were ridiculous (bordering on criminal), that the Army/Air Force had to follow.  The war would have been over so much quicker with so much less loss of life on both sides if the politicians weren't calling all the shots.  I was just a child at the time.  My dad and my wife's dad were both involved with the war.  I didn't really get angry until well after I was older and understood what RoE was.  I cannot imagine the level of frustration that was felt by our military folks.

  The only thing I can think of that is similar, in my lifetime, is the situation that caused the "Blackhawk Down" in Somalia.  When I found out that our troops were denied the armor they requested to stay safe(ish-er) and do the peacekeeping job I about blew a gasket.  I couldn't watch the movie for years because it would make me angry just thinking about it.

  I imagine there are still a lot of non-US players who would love to have access to both scenarios.

Edited August 3, 2020 by Probus

[Bozowans]

If I could only pick one thing, it might be an overhaul of the artillery system. 

• There should be a "repeat" function for fire missions. If you want to call in another barrage on the exact same spot you did before, you should be able to do it without having to wait for spotting rounds and doing that whole lengthy cycle all over again. They should already have the information necessary.
• You should be able to adjust the length and intensity of barrages on the fly. For example, say I have a battery of four off-map howitzers. I call in a long fire mission with low rate of fire (harass) using only one of the four guns just to get some rounds flying near a suspected enemy position. Eventually I realize that the rounds are landing right near a huge group of enemies I didn't spot before. I should be able to quickly bring the other 3 guns into the barrage and then raise it up to a high rate of fire. All it should take is the observer yelling into the radio to "shoot faster!". But no, you have to cancel the entire mission and then call a new one and go through the whole agonizing process of waiting for spotting rounds (which the observer might not even see) all over again.
• You should not be so limited by the spotter's LOS to the target. For example, as it is now, you cannot call artillery onto the middle of a forest because the spotter can only see the edge of it at any one time. In reality it would be a simple matter. You can just call spotting rounds onto the edge of the forest where you can see them, and then once they are on target, you tell the battery to adjust to 100 meters back or whatever and then fire for effect.
• In reality, artillery observers sometimes walked rounds onto the target by sound instead of sight. I read a WW2 memoir a ways back where the author did exactly that. He walked rounds onto a target in the middle of the night when he couldn't see anything. He just knew Germans were assembling out there somewhere in the dark (engine noises), and then walked some artillery onto them by ear. He ended up hitting something too, evidenced by the loud boom and column of flame and smoke shooting high into the air. Artillery explosions are obviously extremely loud. It's not like you wouldn't be able to tell if a shell landed behind that building over there on the left if you didn't see the explosion yourself. You can also hear the shells loudly screaming through the air overhead and sometimes even see them, like little black sausages in the air. Soldiers tend to pick up pretty quickly whether artillery is incoming or outgoing, and experienced soldiers can often tell if a shell is going to land near them or not just by the sound of it in the air. It should not be that hard to call artillery onto targets outside of LOS. I kinda wish they would go back to the way it worked in the CM1 engine, where you can call artillery anywhere on the map, but it's just not as accurate if it's outside LOS. Or perhaps they could make it so you're not allowed to do the "point target" or "linear target" functions outside of LOS, and only allowed to do really wide area targets or something. The point is that being outside LOS should not matter if you just want to saturate a huge area (like a town or forest) with shelling.

OK rant over. That ended up being longer than I thought it would be. Anyway, there are plenty of little nitpicks in these games that I can rant about. I would love graphics and sound improvements too. Someone else mentioned the glitchy shaders already. The shaders look really bad on my computer sometimes (especially if the scenario is foggy or hazy or at dawn or dusk) and I often play with them turned off. Those are only cosmetic issues though and don't affect the gameplay. I would much rather have the artillery system be more involved and realistic.

[John1966]

11 minutes ago, Bozowans said:

You should not be so limited by the spotter's LOS to the target. For example, as it is now, you cannot call artillery onto the middle of a forest because the spotter can only see the edge of it at any one time. In reality it would be a simple matter. You can just call spotting rounds onto the edge of the forest where you can see them, and then once they are on target, you tell the battery to adjust to 100 meters back or whatever and then fire for effect.

Yeah, this has always bothered me. You actually have to able to see the patch of dirt the shell would land on. Except you don't because once you've picked the centre (that you have to able to see), you set the edge as long as you can see any particular point on the perimeter. So you can launch a barrage while seeing only two points on the ground but can't properly target woods or even buildings unless you include those two points as above. Feels intuitively wrong to me.

I confused myself typing that.

[John1966]

And you can target a wood if you centre on the front of it and then pull your circle to a far enough forward point that you take in the back of the wood. So effectively targeting the ground you can't see by targeting empty ground (that you're not interested in hitting) that you can see. This makes no sense to me.

[Bulletpoint]

11 hours ago, Bozowans said:

You should not be so limited by the spotter's LOS to the target. For example, as it is now, you cannot call artillery onto the middle of a forest because the spotter can only see the edge of it at any one time. In reality it would be a simple matter. You can just call spotting rounds onto the edge of the forest where you can see them, and then once they are on target, you tell the battery to adjust to 100 meters back or whatever and then fire for effect.

This.

Also the other points you raise, but... This.

[Freyberg]

I would like to see:

• a more active and responsive AI
• persistent map damage and the ability to play over the same ground in campaigns and even in QBs
• more contemporary building types and fences in the modern titles

 

[BornGinger]

On 8/2/2020 at 7:14 PM, Probus said:

seem that updates to the Combat Mission Engine is going tobethe clear winner

Is this literally what is says? Updates to the existing game engine won over the option to get a new and up to date game engine? Or is the text I'm quoting just not written well enough and it should be saying that a new game engine won the poll?

If Battlefront is having a read of this thread and consider whether to follow the wish of the customers, I hope they decide that a new engine is better than updating the old one.

[Probus]

37 minutes ago, BornGinger said:

Is this literally what is says? Updates to the existing game engine won over the option to get a new and up to date game engine? Or is the text I'm quoting just not written well enough and it should be saying that a new game engine won the poll?

If Battlefront is having a read of this thread and consider whether to follow the wish of the customers, I hope they decide that a new engine is better than updating the old one.

I'm an engineer so explaining things clearly comes very... very hard for me.   New Engine or Engine Update.  It beat out new content, modding ability, horses, etc...

A new engine, I would think, would come at a high price with many new bugs to deal with.  A greatly improved, yet proven engine with many new features would be a more realistic request.  Who knows what Battlefront actually has up their sleeves.  I assume they wear sleeves and not cloaks or togas.

[landser]

On 8/3/2020 at 6:40 PM, Bozowans said:

• You should not be so limited by the spotter's LOS to the target. For example, as it is now, you cannot call artillery onto the middle of a forest because the spotter can only see the edge of it at any one time. In reality it would be a simple matter. You can just call spotting rounds onto the edge of the forest where you can see them, and then once they are on target, you tell the battery to adjust to 100 meters back or whatever and then fire for effect.

 

+1, and it's a point I have made too

 

 

But for me, the thing I most want out of Combat Mission is a new campaign system. Not necessary to go through in detail, but for me a new system and way to generate this content is what I would most like to see.

[John1966]

Can we have a movement order that's a bit faster than Move but a bit slower than Quick?

You know, when there is some urgency but they've got a lot of ground to cover.

[ncc1701e]

On 8/3/2020 at 2:14 PM, Bulletpoint said:

I believe most of these are caused by obsolete OpenGL driver support, so a move to DirectX would be great.

Better to move directly to Vulkan. DirectX is slower than Vulkan on Nvidia GPU.

[Zveroboy1]

Better trenches and foxholes that offer more protection.

[holoween]

27 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Better trenches and foxholes that offer more protection.

Foxholes already provide some of the best protection you can get.

[Zveroboy1]

I take it you have never played CM1 because right now in comparison they're barely adequate and offer nowhere near the same level of protection as they did before or should irl especially with half the pixeltruppen's torso sticking out.

[holoween]

30 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

I take it you have never played CM1 because right now in comparison they're barely adequate and offer nowhere near the same level of protection as they did before or should irl especially with half the pixeltruppen's torso sticking out.

Depending on where exactly you place them they have up to the same protection as buildings. Making them any better doest really reflect reality.

[Zveroboy1]

Hmm from artillery or from small arms fire you mean?

[holoween]

12 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Hmm from artillery or from small arms fire you mean?

Small arms.

I havent tested buildings against arty so i cant say for sure which is better but foxholes are massively increasing infantry survivability against arty.

[Zveroboy1]

Yeah I don't know, obviously it is better than standing in the open, but I find them a bit underwhelming personally even though maybe with the new infantry behaviour under fire introduced with the latest patch it is going to be better now. Anyway this has been debated to death. Some people find them satisfactory, some not so much.

[holoween]

47 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

 Anyway this has been debated to death. Some people find them satisfactory, some not so much.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o4nz0sHbp8Z03fFmm9CweH8P8Z8Nf0XiGHwAQvztsZ4/edit#gid=0

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/130RTbJ8HABwYqp4rTvsBU4NASTWebO3K4igNDxL1W28/edit#gid

 

They are great but you cant expect them to act like forcefields making your infantry immune to fire.