Annual look at the year to come - 2023

[Shady_Side]

I thought about this a little bit more, which is not always a good thing. So for me CM is the only video game I have played since my teenage years. The graphics are almost as good has my Playstation was back in the day. So I am completely fine with them, also lets be honest this is not a game your playing because it looks really good. If that is what your after I am sure there has been a new Call Of Duty just recently released or one about to be, likely both. 

Sure the games have a few bugs, but my old doggie gets fleas from time to time and I still kinda like him. that being said I would like the game to be a little more user friendly though. I mentioned about being able to ammo up your force with a lot fewer clicks earlier, but there are a few things along those lines I would love to see. Something like a "follow me" movement command to help move out of a bottlenecked set up zone. Without giving a million pause orders to different units and still ending up in a traffic jam. While I am asking for things I probably wont be getting I would like to see a "shoot and scoot" target order for we-go  that worked something like hull down command does but in reverse. The only reliable way I can get a unit to pop up shoot and then back off is to use the pause order to get the unit to move at the end of the turn instead of the beginning. Yes I know you can move up pause target briefly then reverse. But a lot of times my unit takes forever to aim and so I get little to no fire where I wanted it or the unit hangs around longer than ordered and gets smoked. To somebody who knows absolutely nothing about how a computer works past waking it up and pointing a clicking my way to some entertainment or news. These things and I am sure the good ideal fairly will  drop a few more ideals on me that would help me get the same orders issued with half the number of clicks per turn. would be easy to do. Though I have no doubt those couple little things would be take hundreds of man hours to include in the game if not more.

I guess that is where the rub is with these kinda games though. The extreme attention to detail you can give to every aspect of a units behavior is a big part of the appeal but  also leads to some tedious turns of plotting every unit the same basic path thru some close terrain or fiddling with all the other endless details to get the perfect orders to execute the tactical masterpiece you have in your head. Just to see it end with your vehicles blazing wrecks and a field of little red crosses where your pixeltruppen should have been. Which leads to the very natural reaction "WHY DONT THEY GIVE US A BETTER GAME TO PLAY!!!"

 

[Simcoe]

On 2/5/2023 at 10:01 PM, Battlefront.com said:

No firm timeframe to announce.  We're presently assessing several options and whatever we choose will dictate when it comes out.

Steve

You mentioned that professional development has paused in favor of commercial development.

Do you think the focus on professional has caused releases to be pushed back?

Will the professional pause move other due dates up?

Finally, can you say what the focus will be with this new commercial focus? Bug fixes, new mechanics, new engine?

[Lethaface]

And FWIW I'd like to add to my post about my personal pet peeve CMSF2 (after all CMSF is how I got into CM), that whatever you do @Battlefront.com keep doing what your doing (not that I expect anything else lol). There's main and side issues.
Of course everything can be improved, but even a quick look at this forum/this thread mainly shows a bunch of people passionate about the game and all what surrounds it. The moment BFC turns into a AAA studio, CM has probably lost it's main assets.

That's my take / drop into the customer profile database building up in the thread ;-).

Edited February 7, 2023 by Lethaface

[Erwin]

2 hours ago, Shady_Side said:

I would love to see. Something like a "follow me" movement command to help move out of a bottlenecked set up zone. Without giving a million pause orders to different units and still ending up in a traffic jam. While I am asking for things I probably wont be getting I would like to see a "shoot and scoot" target order for we-go 

Yeah, this is the sort of features we've been asking for since CM2 came out in 2007.  So sad...

[Battlefront.com]

7 hours ago, Shady_Side said:

I guess that is where the rub is with these kinda games though. The extreme attention to detail you can give to every aspect of a units behavior is a big part of the appeal but  also leads to some tedious turns of plotting every unit the same basic path thru some close terrain or fiddling with all the other endless details to get the perfect orders to execute the tactical masterpiece you have in your head. Just to see it end with your vehicles blazing wrecks and a field of little red crosses where your pixeltruppen should have been. Which leads to the very natural reaction "WHY DONT THEY GIVE US A BETTER GAME TO PLAY!!!"

Yup, this is an age old dilemma for wargames.  Wargamers, especially the hardcore, resist any sort of constraint their abilities to fiddle with things, then when something goes wrong because they didn't fiddle correctly they blame the game for not doing things automatically.  It's one reason a game like Combat Mission will always have a limited commercial appeal.  The easiest way to fix both the complaints and the limited appeal is to follow the RTS model and drastically reduce player control over the details.  At which point we no longer have Combat Mission.

That said, for sure there are things we can do to make some administrative aspects easier to deal with without fundamentally undermining what makes Combat Mission special.  I do expect you'll see more of this from us in the future, but not with Upgrade 5.  Trying to tackle technical stuff and game stuff all at once is bound to make the whole thing take a lot longer.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, Erwin said:

Yeah, this is the sort of features we've been asking for since CM2 came out in 2007.  So sad...

You guys have asked for a million things since CMBO came out and it's physically impossible for us to deliver it, especially given the tiny market.  You should be happy with what you have since nobody else is even trying to make such a game, but apparently no.  So sad...

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, Simcoe said:

You mentioned that professional development has paused in favor of commercial development.

Do you think the focus on professional has caused releases to be pushed back?

Sorta.  For sure every day spent on X means Y didn't get attention, that's just simple physics at work.  However, if anything the focus on commercial has pushed back releases for professional more than the other way around because the majority of our time has always gone towards commercial releases, not professional.  Remember also that we have a bunch of commercial releases competing for time with each other. 

Fortunately much of the grunt work goes on in parallel so I don't think anything has really caused harm to something else.  In fact, we constrained the nature of Professional work specifically to minimize the impact on commercial work.  That was done last year.  Which means...

6 hours ago, Simcoe said:

Will the professional pause move other due dates up?

Yes and no.  No in that the timeframes for the products at the start of this thread already have our 2023 workload baked into it.  Yes in that if we had not shifted our priorities last year then the dates for this year would likely be pushed out further than they are.

6 hours ago, Simcoe said:

Finally, can you say what the focus will be with this new commercial focus? Bug fixes, new mechanics, new engine?

To be clear, our focus has always been on commercial.  What we've done is constrained new Professional work for 2023 that frees up some time for additional commercial work.  Bug fixes and performance improvements are what we are planning on for this year.  The performance improvements are definitely going to be very involved so promising more than that would be a mistake.

Steve

[Simcoe]

58 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Sorta.  For sure every day spent on X means Y didn't get attention, that's just simple physics at work.  However, if anything the focus on commercial has pushed back releases for professional more than the other way around because the majority of our time has always gone towards commercial releases, not professional.  Remember also that we have a bunch of commercial releases competing for time with each other. 

Fortunately much of the grunt work goes on in parallel so I don't think anything has really caused harm to something else.  In fact, we constrained the nature of Professional work specifically to minimize the impact on commercial work.  That was done last year.  Which means...

Yes and no.  No in that the timeframes for the products at the start of this thread already have our 2023 workload baked into it.  Yes in that if we had not shifted our priorities last year then the dates for this year would likely be pushed out further than they are.

To be clear, our focus has always been on commercial.  What we've done is constrained new Professional work for 2023 that frees up some time for additional commercial work.  Bug fixes and performance improvements are what we are planning on for this year.  The performance improvements are definitely going to be very involved so promising more than that would be a mistake.

Steve

Thank you for the detailed answer.

[callada]

Do potential performance improvements include renderer performance improvements?  I'm not sure how tightly coupled everything is internally, but Cold War for example pushes the engine past its limits.  Trees stop rendering at a certain distance... but that distance is within possible engagement ranges.  Framerates are low even during the orders phases where presumably much less computation is happening.  This is evident even on the highest-end gaming systems available today.

 

I do wonder how much this would really matter from a business perspective, but it sure would make the game easier to play, and I suspect make it a slightly easier sell.  Hard to say on the latter part there since this is so niche to begin with.

[Vacillator]

1 hour ago, callada said:

Framerates are low even during the orders phases where presumably much less computation is happening.

If the cooling fans on my laptop are anything to go by, the loading phases (game, scenario selection and scenario load) are more challenging to the hardware than the action phases.  I confess to never having really understood that.

[kohlenklau]

23 minutes ago, Vacillator said:

the loading phases (game, scenario selection and scenario load) are more challenging to the hardware than the action phases

Maybe your PC sees the coming intensity and revs up in anticipation?

[JoMac]

@VacillatorCMRT, CMBN, CMFB, CMFI...Modern stuff, not yet, not yet.

Please...Don't go over the Dark-Side, and just stick with WWII

[Vacillator]

Don't worry Jo, not yet, not yet .  I don't have time for more titles anyway .

Hope all is well with you.

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, callada said:

Do potential performance improvements include renderer performance improvements?

Yes.  In some cases rendering quality and speed are the result of the same core issue.  Fix for one and the other comes along with it.

APIs, like OpenGL and DirectX, are great for developers until the standards are changed.  Usually the first couple of years aren't a problem as everybody pays enough attention to the old stuff to make sure it's well supported.  But as time goes on the incentives for companies making drivers, cards, or OS use older aspects of the AP diminishes.  Totally understandable, so I don't blame them one bit.  However, it does cause problems for us wierd-o gamers who continue to use games that are so old.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Vacillator said:

If the cooling fans on my laptop are anything to go by, the loading phases (game, scenario selection and scenario load) are more challenging to the hardware than the action phases.  I confess to never having really understood that.

Yeah, CM is loading in a lot of stuff at that point.  Think of all the terrain and vehicle graphics that have to be loaded into memory.  Then there's the terrain mesh, LOS mapping, pathfinding, and all the other stuff that the game needs to have ready to go.  Most of this is "one time" and that means your Action Phase turns are just focused on moving and shooting stuff.

Steve

[kohlenklau]

4 hours ago, Vacillator said:

If the cooling fans on my laptop are anything to go by

Vacillator don't know, his PC's get-tin hot, at the body shop, processing somethin' un-HOLY

<pop song lyrics my grandkids are singing>

Edited February 9, 2023 by kohlenklau

[Vacillator]

10 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yeah, CM is loading in a lot of stuff at that point.  Think of all the terrain and vehicle graphics that have to be loaded into memory.  Then there's the terrain mesh, LOS mapping, pathfinding, and all the other stuff that the game needs to have ready to go.  Most of this is "one time" and that means your Action Phase turns are just focused on moving and shooting stuff.

Steve

Makes sense Steve, thanks.  I suppose I just imagined a lot of that being done right at the last minute i.e. after game 'front' loading, battle/save selection or whatever, and then the hard graft starts as the actual battle is cranked up.  It matters not to me though.  An effect of the above is that once a title has been loaded in a PC session, it will load up a second time far quicker in the same session - at least that's my experience.

I would also say that a lot of my Action Phase turns are focused on not being shot at .

[Battlefront.com]

Some of the things CM needs to do is brute force "read X MB from drive, load X MB into RAM/VRAM" type tasks and it has to do it all at once.  Other tasks involve CPU intensive calculations.  For example, the LOS map is generated at this point and that means CM is taking all the LOS information in the map and making a representation of that in RAM.  This is a onetime upfront hit that makes the countless LOS checks during the game possible.  Kinda like how you do a Google search for something and you get an instant result, even though it took years for all that information you are searching to get uploaded and indexed.

There might still be some things we can do to speed up loading, but a while back we did optimize to take advantage of new methods and capabilities, therefore it is possible things are as fast as they can be for a given system.  It is one of the things we're looking into.

Steve

[Bubba883XL]

7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Some of the things CM needs to do is brute force "read X MB from drive, load X MB into RAM/VRAM" type tasks and it has to do it all at once.  Other tasks involve CPU intensive calculations.  For example, the LOS map is generated at this point and that means CM is taking all the LOS information in the map and making a representation of that in RAM.  This is a onetime upfront hit that makes the countless LOS checks during the game possible.  Kinda like how you do a Google search for something and you get an instant result, even though it took years for all that information you are searching to get uploaded and indexed.

There might still be some things we can do to speed up loading, but a while back we did optimize to take advantage of new methods and capabilities, therefore it is possible things are as fast as they can be for a given system.  It is one of the things we're looking into.

Steve

interesting stuff...

[callada]

It's pretty wild that any of this works to begin with, really, particularly given the size of the development team, let alone well enough to sustain a business.  Writing a custom engine and all the component parts for a game of this complexity is in the "writing a compiler" world of difficulty.  When we're talking about graphics, it starts at the level of like -- "please draw me a triangle here on the screen".  And then somehow, a picture comes out... a picture of a Shillelagh missile punching a hole in my precious tank...

[Sunbather]

On 2/7/2023 at 9:38 PM, Battlefront.com said:

Working on something for that, so "yet" is the operative word.

Steve

May I ask if we can expect some news on the new FB module as well?

[massi9797Dz]

On 2/9/2023 at 12:08 AM, Battlefront.com said:

companies making drive

we  are still waiting for the updates to come to steam for all modern combat missions , steve what are the guys fro slitherine waiting for if the updates are ready in battlefront why are they taking so long to updates their games ? 

[Redwolf]

1 hour ago, massi9797Dz said:

we  are still waiting for the updates to come to steam for all modern combat missions , steve what are the guys fro slitherine waiting for if the updates are ready in battlefront why are they taking so long to updates their games ? 

They have a lot of other (non-BFC) games to take care of, too.

[Battlefront.com]

7 hours ago, Redwolf said:

They have a lot of other (non-BFC) games to take care of, too.

Yes, that and more.

When we make a build that is ready for release we put it on our servers that day because for us that's all we have to do.  For Slitherine, there's other competing tasks, they have to run it through their own QA (this is good due diligence), they have a more complicated release environment (due to the large number of products), and finally they have to deal with Steam.  The latter can delay releases by many days because of similar issues. 

Each of these steps involves people and people can make mistakes which cost a little bit of time to correct.  When you guys see a patch uploaded to our server that means we've already gone through all those sorts of problems.  For Slitherine they can only start after we've finished.  For Steam they can only start after Slitherine has finished.  Steam customers only get the download when Steam has completed their work.

The only way to have Steam release the same day as us is for us to hold back already completed patches for no reason other than to release at the same time.  That seems rather silly

I received an update on Thursday so I know they are in process for sure.  If I don't see them out early this week I'm going to make some noise.

Steve

[Rooks And Kings]

It's not as simple as "BFC Updates, Then Steam Updates". 

On 2/11/2023 at 6:19 AM, massi9797Dz said:

we  are still waiting for the updates to come to steam for all modern combat missions , steve what are the guys fro slitherine waiting for if the updates are ready in battlefront why are they taking so long to updates their games ? 

 

Edited February 12, 2023 by Rooks And Kings