2022, the Year In Preview!

[Ultradave]

6 hours ago, danfrodo said:

English??  we don't speak no english.  We speak american.  And it comes in lots of nice flavors.  I for one do not appreciate how those folks over on that little island have distorted my native language with all their funny talk.  I gotta use subtitles just to see what they are saying on the telly.

Having lived in England I was surprised by the wide variety of accents there are in that "small island"  (Bill Bryson reference). We lived in the far northwest and there is a distinct accent in Cumbria. And across the way the Geordie accents of Newcastle. At work one of the admins asked the British engineer that I worked with "I can tell you are from Newcastle, but I can't quite place whether it's north or south of the river" [Tyne]  I thought, boy that's really localized accents. 

And then there were the engineers from Scotland working there, and one of them made it a point to speak slowly so the rest of us could understand him. And not just the Americans either - the British needed him to slow down too.

At lunches we had spirited fun conversations about language, pronunciations. All in good fun. It was a great experience. So different living there as opposed to just touristy visiting (which I had done before that). 

Dave

 

[benpark]

Now we need some Garry Tank Commander scenarios.

[Warts 'n' all]

3 minutes ago, Ultradave said:

We lived in the far northwest and there is a distinct accent in Cumbria. 

I think you'll find that there are three distinct accents in that area. North Lancastrian, Westmorelandish, and Cumberlandish.

In the meantime, getting back on track. What does 2022 have in store for me? Pretty much catching up on 2021 and playing Fire and Rubble, or The Balalaika Boys Take Berlin as it should have been called.

[user1000]

.

Edited February 7, 2022 by user1000

[Davis06]

On 1/16/2022 at 2:13 PM, Sequoia said:

Well the USMC has fought in the last 4 US wars without an amphibious invasion, so need to assume they would have to land anywhere in the Black Sea or elsewhere in the fictional conflict in the Ukraine.

Uhm, old Mattis may take issue with that.  In his book, 'Call Sign Chaos' he believes the initial Marine insertion into Afghanistan was the longest amphibious invasion to date.  It just used aerial assets from ships instead of ships and landing ships initially.

[Sequoia]

Okay, but even if I concede that's true, my point still holds.

[Darth Panzer]

Looking forward to the new updates... 

[Darth Panzer]

On 1/14/2022 at 12:10 AM, Battlefront.com said:

And a Happy (belated) New Year to you all!

A few of you have pointed out we have a tradition of summarizing the previous year and letting you know what we've got planned for the new year.  Since I'm the one that started this tradition I guess I'm on the hook for keeping it going.  I wonder if Santa Claus ever regrets thinking to himself "maybe it would be nice to make some toys and give them out to a few good children", not realizing it would become a thing for a few hundred years.  Nah, I'm sure he's as happy to keep doing it as I am doing this.  It is good fun (though I wouldn't mind some elves, or at least a reindeer with a frick'n laserbeam on its head).

To kick this off, let's review 2021 shall we?  It was a busy year for us for sure.  The big highlights were the release of the massive Fire & Rubble Module for Red Thunder and the carefully kept quiet Cold War Base Game.  The latter being our first release supporting Slitherine's PBEM system and laying the groundwork for the related Tournament system.  This on top of some significant work on CM2 Pro for our friends in the UK.  Yup, a lot of good stuff.

With that out of the way, I've noticed you guys are pretty much a "that's nice, but what have you done for me lately?" sort of crowd (kinda an inherent gamer trait, eh?).  Therefore, I'll get right to the fun bit of outlining what's coming up in 2022.  I'm even going to narrow down the timeframe for each release.  Think of it as a bonus this year and not a new tradition to expect every year

 

Updated Cold War (early February) - this extends the newly implemented PBEM++ system to include Slitherine's automated Tournament system.  Yup, you can now play for fame, glory, and at times fabulous prizes in a structured environment! 

Updated CMSF2 and Black Sea (1st Quarter) - both previously released Matrix/Slitherine CM Families will get the PBEM++ and Tournament systems as free updates.  Any bug fixes and what not that have come up from Cold War development will be rolled in as well.

Normandy for Matrix/Steam (March/April) - the entire Normandy Family of games will be released on both Matrix and Steam platforms with PBEM/Tournament features included.  Coinciding with this will be a new Battle Pack focusing on early D-Day combat.

Fortress Italy for Matrix/Steam (June/July) - all titles from the Fortress Italy Family goes out onto Matrix/Steam with the PBEM/Tournament features.  A Battle Pack is planned to be released at the same time, the specific focus not being fully nailed down as of yet.

Red Thunder for Matrix/Steam (September/October) - as you might expect by now, Matrix/Steam with PBEM/Tournament features.  A simultaneous release of a new Battle Pack is also planned.  The Pack focuses on Kampfgruppe Mühlenkamp's attempts to keep the Soviets from moving westward in July 1944.

Final Blitzkrieg for Matrix/Steam (December/January) - last, but not least, the final CM2 Family of games will be released for Matrix/Steam with PBEM and Tournament systems.  At the same time we'll release a new Module that will extend the timeframe through to the end of the war and introduce Commonwealth Forces plus the last ditch forces of the Third Reich.

 

For those of you playing along at home, you might have noticed a bit of a theme going on here.  In case you haven't, it is that each time we release existing content on Matrix/Steam there will be new content made available for that particular Family of games.  By my count it's three Battle Packs and one Module.  But wait... there's more!

We're still planning on doing an Engine 5 Upgrade that focuses on performance improvements.  No firm idea when this will be ready to talk about more, not to mention when we'll release it.  Oh, and it will be a free Upgrade this time around.

At a time yet to be determined we're going to give Black Sea a long awaited Module of its own.  This Module will include US Marines, Ukrainian Airborne, and Russian Airborne forces with the usual awesome Campaigns and Battles that come with all Modules.  This Module is very far along in development, however we don't want to make guesses as to when it will be released right now.  We'll let you know soon enough.

You guys might have noticed through the years that we usually keep a few things out of this traditional post as a surprise for sometime later on in the year.  So there's that too.

And no traditional beginning of year bone would be complete without putting out some pretty picture bones to compliment the text.  In keeping with that, here's some vehicle shots from the Black Sea Module.

Ah, but before I do that I want to say that we're looking forward to another great year with all of you.  We wouldn't still be here after 22 years without your enthusiasm and support.  Thank you for continuing to enjoy Combat Mission!

Thanks!

Steve and the rest of Battlefront!

 

 

 

looking forward to see what engine 5 has to offer.

Edited February 11, 2022 by Darth Panzer

[37mm]

On 2/6/2022 at 10:55 PM, Ultradave said:

 I thought, boy that's really localized accents.

It should always be remembered that Liverpool & Manchester, each with very distinct accents, are only 35 miles apart.

Even so, TV & radio has 'smoothed out' a lot of the old dialects...

https://www.wimp.com/patrick-stewart-recites-a-poem-in-his-native-yorkshire-dialect/

[Warts 'n' all]

7 hours ago, 37mm said:

It should always be remembered that Liverpool & Manchester, each with very distinct accents, are only 35 miles apart.

Even so, TV & radio has 'smoothed out' a lot of the old dialects...

https://www.wimp.com/patrick-stewart-recites-a-poem-in-his-native-yorkshire-dialect/

Very true. Down here in Kent I haven't heard a local accent or dialect since the 1970's.

[Halmbarte]

On 2/6/2022 at 3:03 PM, Warts 'n' all said:

I think you'll find that there are three distinct accents in that area. North Lancastrian, Westmorelandish, and Cumberlandish.

In the meantime, getting back on track. What does 2022 have in store for me? Pretty much catching up on 2021 and playing Fire and Rubble, or The Balalaika Boys Take Berlin as it should have been called.

Black Lagoon reference or...?

H

[danfrodo]

I couldn't understand a word o that.  And the youtube close captioning couldn't either. 

 

[danfrodo]

(oops, was referring to the Scottish star trek above)

[Warts 'n' all]

2 hours ago, Halmbarte said:

Black Lagoon reference or...?

H

I've never heard of Black Lagoon, sorry.

[Thewood1]

I grew up in North/Central Maine in the US.  My mother has a very heavy Maine accent (Dolorus Claiborne attitude and everything).  I have only a slight hint.  But my brother, who is 10 years younger, has a much heavier accent.  The difference was I had an entire daily class on phonetics and it was removed by the time he went to school.  No one in my class or the years around me had a Maine accent.  But it has actually crept back in for the younger generations.

[Warts 'n' all]

Meanwhile here's a very heavy shunt in Maine ...

 

[Benk]

Quick question. Earlier it was said that the CMBN battlepack will not be included on the Steam release. Does that mean they will be available on Steam later  or are the packs limited to purchase from Battlefront directly?

[F1simracer19]

Is CMAK being updated?

[Halmbarte]

On 2/13/2022 at 9:40 AM, Warts 'n' all said:

I've never heard of Black Lagoon, sorry.

Insane manga/anime about some couriers in SE Asia running a PT boat 'delivery' service. Balalaika is the name of the head of the local Russian mafia group. Real fun people...
H
 

[Warts 'n' all]

In the meantime Flanagenski and Allanov perform a medley of their WW2 classics for the troops. Their set included "We're gonna hang out the washing on the Seelow Heights", and "Unter den Linden, I dream my dreams away".

 

 

 

 

[Geoff-Ludumpress]

Can we have the Black Sea update before the real war starts?

[Massinissa]

So no news an combat mission battle for normandy from slitherine guys ? 

[Da_General420]

I would absolutely love some sort of CMBS upgrade now that we have the real thing going on. I have the winter terrain pack mod and everything. Need more to play with. 

Airborne groups for both Russia and Ukraine are going to be incredible especially since they have seen so much use in the war thus far. 

[nox_plague]

On 1/17/2022 at 1:37 PM, Centurian52 said:

That's because the games aren't currently capable of taking advantage of the full power of modern computers. They are well optimized, and will run reasonably well even on a potato. But there is no noticeable improvement in their performance on even the most powerful gaming PCs. Engine 5 will probably address this.

@Battlefront.com

I've come to realize that AMD Radeon's decision to essentially "deprecate" OpenGL performance, Radeon GPUs are leaving a huge amount of performance on the table, especially when it comes to scenario load times.

I know you're not ready to share what the V5 engine improvements entail, but I wanted put in this request on the off chance you're not already overloaded .

OpenGL performance is likely to continue to degrade with Apple and AMD not supporting it.  That means eventually the CM engine performance will degrade and will likely want to explore moving to a different Graphics API.  Vulkan is the most open and portable option, basically being the "successor" to the OpenGL legacy.  DirectX and Metal are they other two, but both are proprietary with Microsoft and Apple, respectively.

Seems like the open source community is creating some OpenGL to Vulkan translators that you may be able to wrap the CM engine with and see a performance improvement.   Could be a shortcut on the path to full Vulkan implementation.

Check out Zink and Mese3D - additionally for Apple Metal API you can use MoltenVK to easily port Vulkan to Metal.  Mike Blumenkratz seems to be the developer managing Zink development, so you might be able to reach out and understand if OpenGL to Vulkan API is something your team could use.

Microsoft is working on an OpenGL to DirectX layer but I don't know that I'd want to bet my business on that being supported indefinitely, no idea if it's available to implement, but again could be a performance stop-gap.  What it interesting is Microsoft is using Mese3D as well.

Here are some OpenGL to Vulkan development articles:

https://blog.napframework.com/2020/porting-nap-opengl-to-vulkan/

https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/graphics-gaming-and-vr-blog/posts/porting-a-graphics-engine-to-the-vulkan-api

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6NWfznwFnMs

 

 

 

 

Edited March 21, 2022 by nox_plague
Fixed Youtube link

[Centurian52]

On 3/17/2022 at 4:49 PM, Da_General420 said:

I would absolutely love some sort of CMBS upgrade now that we have the real thing going on. I have the winter terrain pack mod and everything. Need more to play with. 

Airborne groups for both Russia and Ukraine are going to be incredible especially since they have seen so much use in the war thus far. 

I guess my opinion is they should stick to their plans for now and release the currently planned CMBS module whenever it's ready. But down the line I would absolutely be in favor of a dedicated 2022 module (or 2022-whenever this ends, if this turns out to be a multi-year invasion). Adding Javelins, NLAWs and TB2s to the Ukrainian arsenal, as well as some of the sort range AT weapons that have been sent like AT4s and Panzerfaust 3s. And some older Russian tanks which seem to be more common in the Russian arsenal. Looking over the tank losses suffered by Russia so far as tracked by https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html it looks like the most common are the T72B3 Obr. 2016, the T80U, and T72B. With significant numbers of T72B3, T90A, T80BVM, and T72B  Obr. 1989 as well. That is a dizzying array of different tanks, so I wouldn't be surprised if it took a while, but a guarantee there is a market for it. At least it looks like the vast majority of Ukrainian tanks are T64BVs, which are already in the game. I have no idea if it would be remotely possible to try and represent any units of the International Legion.

I know BFC already have their own plans in motion, but it wouldn't be a bad thing if it took them a little while to get around to a 2022 module anyway. That way more of it can play out and they can work with more information and have more historical battles to build scenarios around. Just so long as they can get around to a 2022 module eventually.

3 hours ago, nox_plague said:

OpenGL performance is likely to continue to degrade with Apple and AMD not supporting it.  That means eventually the CM engine performance will degrade and will likely want to explore moving to a different Graphics API.  Vulkan is the most open and portable option, basically being the "successor" to the OpenGL legacy.  DirectX and Metal are they other two, but both are proprietary with Microsoft and Apple, respectively.

Seems like the open source community is creating some OpenGL to Vulkan translators that you may be able to wrap the CM engine with and see a performance improvement.   Could be a shortcut on the path to full Vulkan implementation.

Come to think of it, the error message I get when I try to run CM in Linux using Wine appears to be OpenGL related. If moving away from OpenGL is something that can be done at this point I wonder if it might have the added benefit of making it easier to run CM in Linux?