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CM diversity update from UK MOD


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46 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:

The most surprising thing about this thread is that nobody commented on having a Steve sighting in the video and the award we got from Dstl.

Haha!  I went back and watched and now noticed!!  All these years and...that was not what I pictured the Great Oz to look like, hehe.  I had always thought of him in sunglasses with a boonie hat and wearing some obscure camo.  

And congrats on the award!  Very cool!  I've always loved all the language variations in CM games.  I've learned over the past 20 years how to yell, "my leg, my leg!" in many different languages.

Edited by Phantom Captain
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2 hours ago, BFCElvis said:

The most surprising thing about this thread is that nobody commented on having a Steve sighting in the video and the award we got from Dstl.

Even funnier than that is Steve is a dead ringer for my brother in law - retired contractor / carpenter in West Virginia.  Incidentally my brother in law's name is ... Steve.  No I'm not making this stuff up.

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6 hours ago, BFCElvis said:

The most surprising thing about this thread is that nobody commented on having a Steve sighting in the video and the award we got from Dstl.

I think quite a few of us 'developed' a beard since we've joined the CM community. I know I did. 

Congrats with the award. 

10 hours ago, Erwin said:

  One issue is that AFAIK one cannot assign specific voices to specific troopers. So, one is likely to have male troops speaking with female voices. 

And vice versa, exactly what we need. CM will be far ahead of it's time. So proud to be part of this. 😆

Edited by Aragorn2002
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Just to add to this "get kids interested in history" argument. I think the "diversity"-spiel is a chimera. No real follow ups are usually done on how it might achieve said goals, on the contrary. 

I feel it's more of a PR-opportunity for companies, government authorities and also in our case, the Swedish Defence Forces.

Again, it's a sign of the times. Kids want to hear this stuff to feel good, but I doubt it actually matters when it comes to actually garner real interest past that. 

 

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19 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

A perfect example of diversity enhancing the game experience is in CMFI Rome to Victory where we included Sikh models and textures, but didn't make specific voice samples for them.

That was a big plus - I've really enjoyed playing Indian Army, including Sikhs.

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20 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

we do care about it as part of our desire to simulate battlefields as realistically as possible.  That includes things such as race, gender, and language/dialects. 

This could maybe be another good reason to develop a CM3 game engine and make sure a male soldier doesn't speak with a female voice or have a West-Indian accent to a soldier who doesn't look like (s)he's from the West-Indies (although (s)he of course could have been born there and grown up with speaking that accent although having a very pale skin).

Edited by BornGinger
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13 hours ago, MikeyD said:

Steve has a beard now? How long has it been since we've met? :o

It's been a long pandemic for everyone.

 

Also firm confirmation that Steve is in fact real and not an AI that congealed from bits of dead HTML code. 

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On 10/1/2021 at 1:27 PM, MikeyD said:

MoD's diversity request was super-easy. it was already 80% done before they even asked. The problem was their request for female faces. I had my doubts about being able to properly texture the generic soldier model. I was VERY surprised when it actually worked! Here's a couple women soldier heads being tested in CMSF2.

 

167713659_womenfaces.jpg.254a287e5a0dd38b7775e9f6567431b2.jpg

MikeyD,

The female face doesn't look very female to me.

Russian and Ukrainian CMers,

Am feeling confused, for I have contradictory information on Russian women today in the combat arms line units. The US CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) in a 2020 article said Russian women were prohibited from the combat arms (bet they're in comms at HQ, etc.), but then how I reconcile that with:

Female VDV trainees for BMDs 1,2 and 4

https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/women-russian-military

VDV Female BAttalion

 



Female military mountaineer team in what appears to be months old footage.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=318509702345573

MoD authorized female pilots.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russia-now-letting-women-become-fighter-pilots-21968

Where, o Russophone CMers, do things stand today? What I'm seeing is highly contradictory. Tere is NO doubt in my mind that women can carry out combat roles today, because their ancestors served in line combat units during the GPW: infantry, artillery, tanks, not to mention combat aviation.

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited by John Kettler
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BFCElvis,

Had to go back and dig to find it, but it was worth the hunt! Really like the facial variety and voice variety being implemented (retrofittable to our CMx2 games?), but I would love to see height and build reflected, too. To put it in blunt terms, 6 foot tall Gurkhas are not on! Having everyone the same height and build is ridiculous in reality and really doesn't look right, either. This is one of my pet peeves when it comes to miniatures, too. Taking things further say, CMx4, maybe things like shoehorning bigger people into AFVs designed for smaller people would be worth addressing. Am 5'11, and my limited experience in Soviet AFVs was revelatory. I fit in a T-55 but had a horrible time in a T-62, for want of headroom and design that seemed calculated to effortless injure tank crew through overhead obstacles, sharp edges, rails with ends like tool steel cubes, etc. The back of the BMP-1 was hopeless, and I really tried to make it work. Too long in the torso. The back of the MTLB was doable. Barely. 

Here's the video to which you referred, and I think this is the first image I've seen of Steve in the best part of two decades. Never heard of getting a coin as an award, other than a military challenge coin. Congrats in any case!
 


In closing, something I'd like to note about the British that I've noted from UK and CW shows, as well as various overseas news coverage, is that it''s quite common for all sorts of ethnic groups to sound posh British--e they black rappers, an Indian (SW Asia) spokeswoman or even an OxCam educated Kenyan official. Absent visuals, fairly often it's hard to tell anything about the race or ethnicity of the person speaking. In other cases, you can't miss it. But if they want voice diversity, they really ought to look into depicting UK regional accents, for they stand out and are found across races. Would also note that, generally speaking, black people in the UK don't typically sound or speak like black people here in the US The differences are dramatic in idiom, word choice, pronunciation, pitch, pace, pause, etc. And on a separate puckish note, imagine a soldier with a thick Scottish burr making a call for fire and sending the grid refs--through jamming!

Regards,

John Kettler

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18 hours ago, John Kettler said:

. And on a separate puckish note, imagine a soldier with a thick Scottish burr making a call for fire and sending the grid refs--through jamming!

Regards,

John Kettler

Aye there’s a Scottishvoice already in the sound files ;) Also did a sweary voice mod for @Mordwhich used a lot of err… vernacular words…

Edited by George MC
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Well done BFC for your well deserved award.

An idea would be to scale the soldier models and their carried weapons by , let's say, 90-110%. This might create the illusion of different sized soldiers without the CPU and VRAM taking hits and screwing up the soldier animations.

p.s. I am not a coder!

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