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Welcome to 2021!


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Congrats on surviving 2020!

Looking forward to all the new great stuff headed our way! I’m personally excited to see all the behind the scenes developmental stuff from 2020 come through to the commercial side to the benefit of all in 2021. 
 

Regardless of how 2021 ends up playing out, I think it will be a great year for Combat Mission, and that gives us all something good to look forward to. 
 

Happy New Year!

 

P.S Steve, hope all is well. 

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3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Happy New Year!

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way.  Despite last year being Battlefront’s 20th anniversary of its first Combat Mission release, we’re happy to say goodbye and good riddance to 2020!  The past year of pandemic, political strife, economic disruption, toilette paper shortages, record setting fires, 2 albums from Taylor Swift, and other near misses with the apocalypse are now behind us.  We look forward to a better and brighter 2021 to start off our 3rd decade of Combat Mission fun.

Despite all the bad stuff that happened in 2020, for us at Battlefront it was a very productive year.  True, we didn’t have much in the way of new releases and that’s no doubt a disappointment to you all.  Fortunately you won’t have to wait much longer for something new.

The first thing you’ll see in 2021 is an end to the long wait for Red Thunder’s first additional content; Fire & Rubble.  See below for some screenshots.  This new Module is huge and soon we’ll have the webpages up to detail specifically what’s in it.  Preorders will kick in at the same time.  We’re nearly there!

The next release is Slitherine's re-release of Black Sea.  You’ll see signs of the Black Sea release on Matrix Games’ website very soon.  Other Combat Mission games are scheduled to be re-released steadily at the rate of one Family a quarter, with Battle for Normandy being next up.  As with Shock Force 2, all Battlefront customers get automatic and free access to the Slitherine Steam versions. 

No doubt it’s been noted that we did not announce or release an Engine Upgrade for 2020.  As things look right now, we are headed for Engine 5 Upgrade later this year.  I can’t promise that any of the features being added to the military version will get into your hands, however I expect a couple will.  Definitely not the one that requires a dedicated high end system with 12GB of free RAM and hours of thumb twiddling time while numbers are crunched.  Oddly enough, we don’t see it being a commercially viable feature.

Speaking of the military contract work, there's more than anticipated.  I can’t say much about it other than it’s going very well and we are structuring our development time to make sure our focus remains on the commercial work that you all get to enjoy.  It’s a balancing act for sure.  That said, let me reassure you that we view you guys as our core business and that means if push comes to shove the military folks will have to take a number and wait patiently for our attention.

Let’s see… is there anything else on the horizon that I can tell you about?  Nope, not at the moment.  The year is still young.

And with that, a huge thanks to all of you who have supported us over these many years.  Without you we’d not be here welcoming everybody to another year of Combat Mission.

THANK YOU!

Steve

And without further ado… F&R Bones!

 

FR Bone 1.jpg

FR Bone 2.jpg

FR Bone 3.jpg

FR Bone 4.jpg

FR Bone 5.jpg

 

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@dontpanic! Pre-order is not open just yet:

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

The first thing you’ll see in 2021 is an end to the long wait for Red Thunder’s first additional content; Fire & Rubble.  See below for some screenshots.  This new Module is huge and soon we’ll have the webpages up to detail specifically what’s in it.  Preorders will kick in at the same time.

Edited by Vacilllator
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks!  We knew we could count on your pointless negativity to start the year off right.

Steve

The sharpest comment of the year so far. Of course if I accused the Arrogant One of making a negative remark I'd get labelled a "fanboi". Oh, I feel something wet, what's that? Ah, it's just water off a duck's back.

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BS-3 was a recent arrival to the title (yes, new content keeps getting added), I don't know if anyone wants to rework their finished scenarios to fit it in. I did a test of it using a converted QB map and it seems like a serviceable weapon. CMBS of course fields the MT-12 100mm gun.

BS3.jpg

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4 minutes ago, weapon2010 said:

beautiful pic of the uniforms and gun

I was going to say the same thing. When you're close up and hit the sweet spot for light and shade, CMx2 can look damn good. Those are some nice textures on the Soviet uniforms! Especially the hats  -- very natural.

Upgrade 5? ...

Oh, boy. I've taken a number of long breaks from my project in the hopes that an upgrade would come along. I'd sure hate to get it out only to have one land right after.

Hmm...

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Perhaps Engine 5 is being forced on them. By that I mean they're committed to keeping the game engine consistent across the titles. If the government vendor requested significant changes to fit their needs BFC's got two options, either let the commercial and private game engines drift apart or to play catch-up on the commercial titles so everything remains the same across the board. This is all speculation on my part. Not even the Beta testers get to play with 'government work'. Maybe we'll get a big red button in the middle of the IU display saying "NUKE 'EM!":o

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4 hours ago, weapon2010 said:

beautiful pic of the uniforms and gun

Even more beautiful pretty soon.  I'm going to tweak a few things so the headgear is varied between soft hats and helmets, as a mix seems to have been fairly common.  And the scenario designer will get to choose between two piece padded, greatcoat, or a mix of the two.

We'll post some more screenshots of uniforms, including Volkssturm, very soon.

Steve

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Great to hear that the Endgame on the Eastfront (Fire+Rubble) will be out soon, hopefully Q1/2021. But I´m a little bit underwelmed to not hear anything about plans of a commonwealth module for Final Blitzkrieg, taking that game to the 44/45 timeframe. Well maybe 2022, who knows? All the best and stay healthy!

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33 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Even more beautiful pretty soon.  I'm going to tweak a few things so the headgear is varied between soft hats and helmets, as a mix seems to have been fairly common.  And the scenario designer will get to choose between two piece padded, greatcoat, or a mix of the two.

We'll post some more screenshots of uniforms, including Volkssturm, very soon.

Steve

Is it possible to get a variation in the headgear of the wehrmacht/ss as well? Or perhaps modded? You often see fieldcaps sprinkled in with the stahlhelms. Especially in this timeframe. 

Edited by Anonymous_Jonze
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5 hours ago, MikeyD said:

BS-3 was a recent arrival to the title (yes, new content keeps getting added), I don't know if anyone wants to rework their finished scenarios to fit it in. I did a test of it using a converted QB map and it seems like a serviceable weapon. CMBS of course fields the MT-12 100mm gun.

BS3.jpg

great work.

are there any canteen,shovel,bullet box on the greatcoat in final release?

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40 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Great to hear that the Endgame on the Eastfront (Fire+Rubble) will be out soon, hopefully Q1/2021. But I´m a little bit underwelmed to not hear anything about plans of a commonwealth module for Final Blitzkrieg, taking that game to the 44/45 timeframe. Well maybe 2022, who knows? All the best and stay healthy!

I should have stated up front that we do intend on rolling out Modules for Final Blitzkrieg & Black Sea, and perhaps some Battle Packs for others.  But we're not quite ready to discuss the details so I skipped mentioning that for now.  I didn't mean to imply that precludes 2021 release dates.  We'll know better in a couple of months after a few more boxes are checked off.

34 minutes ago, Anonymous_Jonze said:

Is it possible to get a variation in the headgear of the wehrmacht/ss as well? Or perhaps modded? You often see fieldcaps sprinkled in with the stahlhelms. Especially in this timeframe. 

Ah, lots of debate about this.  We've been reluctant to do this because, with certain exceptions, it seems that German soldiers engaged in combat followed the rules and wore their helmets.  The common exceptions being mountain troops and leadership elements.  Oh, and a particular character, who definitely was not an officer, wearing a well beaten M-43 in a particular movie is yet another exception :)

Steve

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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Even more beautiful pretty soon.  I'm going to tweak a few things so the headgear is varied between soft hats and helmets, as a mix seems to have been fairly common.  And the scenario designer will get to choose between two piece padded, greatcoat, or a mix of the two.

We'll post some more screenshots of uniforms, including Volkssturm, very soon.

Steve

Great! A mix will really enhance things and is especially welcome for the Soviets, since the German squads already have a fair amount of visual variety (at least with mods, can't remember if that is stock or not.)

One thing that, IIRC, was mentioned a few years back as something BF was hoping to add in a future upgrade, was the ability to apply custom textures to specific wall facings. Any news on that? Given how busy you guys are and the crazy state of the world, probably not, but any word on something like that making it into Upgrade 5/F&R?

I got a bunch of real estate on my map that would really enjoy that kind of lovin'. 😁

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2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I should have stated up front that we do intend on rolling out Modules for Final Blitzkrieg & Black Sea, and perhaps some Battle Packs for others.  But we're not quite ready to discuss the details so I skipped mentioning that for now. 

You guys are doing great work.

In the last few years, the modules and updates are getting bigger and better - compare the CMRV module to, say, the Marines module back in CMSF1. I have no doubt that CMFR will be equally impressive :)

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