Should I be afraid of CMAK? A suggestion.

[Cabron66]

I wonder if I'm not wasting people's time with this post? All the talk of dust and Italian countryside is scaring me. What about including low-res graphics as options with CMAK when it's released? Or some way of catering it to low end computers without clearcutting the forests and mowing the lawn? Am I not the first to suggest this? Seems like a decent idea. Here's why I say it.

I just started playing CMBB again, but this time with my laptop which sports a lowly GeForce 440 4 Go graphics card (256 with 32 MBs). Top of the line just over a year ago and the latest in laptop tech, it has now become a source of shame for me. Great shame.

Anyhoo, I saw a lot of lag on big maps or large maps with concentrations of trees and had to go down to 800x600 res and shift ground detail and trees to low coverage. Hardly the end of the world, but as it turns out, a needless sacrifice. I got smart and downloaded (with my free AOL internet connection doing about 3-4 kbs) CW's low res grass. This allowed me to handle even absurdly huge maps with more trees than Canada without any noticeable lag. The grass made far more difference then reducing tree coverage, horizon or ground detail and, to the not too discerning eye, makes very little difference to the look of the game.

And now, the point. Should I be afraid of CMAK? Am I the only one with a weak vid card? Has the world moved on without me? Does CW's grass exist for this reason?

BTW, a glance at my member number explains the manic nature of this post. Please be gentle.

[Sergei]

I've heard there's not much of grass in Sahara to speak of.

[Donan]

Yes, not many tree's, but in Italy a few. But I think his concern is with the 'dust' and such taking a cpu bite. But if I remember correctly (always! a chancey thing), someone in another thread with this concern had a reply that the dust doesn't take a hit on your cpu. I can't remember the short, technical reply, but if you do a search you might find it.

Donan

[Jack Carr]

Cabron66,

Tough situation. After I read your post I wanted to respond. I don't think that I am making any earth-shattering discoveries by stating that new software will become increasingly demanding on existing hardware, especially games. I recently, within the last 8 months, put together a brand new machine from scratch.

My Machine: AMD XP 2700+ (2.17ghz) processor

1GB PC2700 RAM

Chaintech GeForce TI-4600 128mb 4xAGP

CL Soundblaster 5.1 Gamer Sound card

CL 5.1 Speaker System

WD 80GB hard drive 8mb cache 7200rpm

ASUS A7V8X motherboard

Not bragging about this rig because it's nowhere near cutting edge. The point is, 8 months ago this was a decent rig, now it's an average gaming system.

As an avid gamer, I feel gamers should be asking software developers to create more realism, not less. We should want the software companies to come out with more realistic looking grass, trees, men, tanks, ray-guns, etc. not dumb down the look and feel so that our out of date machines can deal with it.

As for now, my machine runs CMBO and CMBB like a raped ape! Don't know how CMAK will run on it. Time will tell. But I will say that if it runs CMAK at a less than satisfactory speed, you can bet that I'll be online at Googlegear.com to upgrade my machine so that my machine runs it good.

Will it cost me money? Yup. Would I like to spend the money on other things besides gaming PC hardware? Yup. It boils down to one thing, if you want it to run good, then get ready to spend the money to ensure that it does run good.

I'm sure that most of the gamers on this forum would agree that they want the games to get better. I for one would rather have BTS and other software companies spend their time and money on producing mind-blowing, out-of-this world realistic graphics than spend their time creating settings to dumb-down the graphics so that slow out of date processors, video cards, etc. are able to handle the load.

Good luck with your over-burdened machine.

[PeterX]

That's right. Some of the extant FPS shooters, flight and driving sims are far more CPU intensive then CMAK is likely to be. My Athlon 1900/512m would be considered about an average rig right now. But it's more than adequate for CM with all the eye candy maxed out.

BFC has catered to the needs of those with less than mighty systems in the past. Almost to a fault. How many sims of this quality can you buy in a Mac version? Maybe it's time to upgrade.

[IntelWeenie]

Originally posted by Sergei:

I've heard there's not much of grass in Sahara to speak of.

The concern should be "ground cover BMPs". Whether it's grass or some other substance (like steppe), it covers the entire map. Since there are different BMPs for each shade(elevation) of grass, that can come out to a LOT of texture memory being used. This will hold true of sand as well since there will be the same number (even more since there might be more elevation levels available?) of BMPs as in CMBB for each base terrain type.

I think dust will be handled differently; more along the lines of how fog, rain or smoke are now.

[MikeyD]

If you want a bit more help with CMBB try MikeyD's (my) 1/2-Res doodads at www.cmmods.com

There's also someone's lo res snow out there too..

I rather suspect if CMAK starts straining the systems out there there's going to be a pretty quick turn-around of reduced-res 3rd party terrain mods for the game.

My attitude towards downresing (I've got an ancient 300mhz G3 mac) is even at its lowest res it looks better that any 3-D tank warfare game for the mac I can buy!

[Cabron66]

Well there's some pretty interesting opinions here and apparently a lot of people with money to burn. I'd especially like to react to the post from Jack Carr whose thoughts I found pretty interesting.

Of course I agree with you on games improving. I love eye candy and am just about climbing the walls waiting for Half Life 2 and CMAK with all those juicy new effects. However, I disagree with you on some other points. Firstly, a realistic game does not require realistic graphics. It makes the game more dramatic and visually stimulating to play, but here there is a question of what you want from a game. I like realism. Not sparkly explosions and trees that sway in the breeze, but realism such as the very fine work done by BFC dealing with tanks firing and penetrating the armour of other vehicles. Perhaps this is why I can still play and enjoy a lot of older games like Panzer General 2.

Second, I don't think the use of the term "dumb down" is appropriate in this case. I want the game to be more intelligent and in depth. However, I also want to be able to enjoy that depth without lag. Simplifying the graphics does effect realism in certain ways, but it in no way effects the genius of the game. Would I like CM less if it were not so nice to look at? Probably not, in fact it's not that nice to look at. Half Life 2. Now that's nice to look at.

Third, I don't want to get into the subject of companies misrepresenting the system requirements of games (which BFC has NOT done), but I do not think the average Joe or Joan should have to learn the ins and outs of a game's inner workings to be able to fully enjoy it. So here back to my original point. CM is a great game because it is great on different levels and fans of it probably differ greatly on what they like most. I for one am not impressed by the graphics, but man do I love to dig in and ambush them tanks from the trees!

So, why not make the game even more accessible to people who do not have the monster rigs of the wealthy of the first world? In this case it could be done fairly simply. By including around 10 megs of low res graphics usable as optional bmps which do not even have to be installed. Many other companies have done this with textures and in a lot of cases have done it so well that you hardly notice the difference.

Lastly, I did not compare CM to any other game because in my opinion there are no games that compare to it.

Also, Sergei, you are obviously a master of the art of sarcasm and yes, there is very little grass in the desert, but as you can see that was not even vaguely my point. Besides, the actual appearance of the Sahara and the Italian countryside are not relevant. The way they appear in the game is. Here I refer you to the post from IntelWeenie who does, I believe, have a clue.

[IntelWeenie]

Originally posted by Cabron66:

By including around 10 megs of low res graphics usable as optional bmps which do not even have to be installed. Many other companies have done this with textures and in a lot of cases have done it so well that you hardly notice the difference.

I second this motion. In fact, I think it would be nice to have it as a runtime option so you don't have to spend several minutes copying BMPs when/if you want to switch from a small hi-res battle to a huge lo-res battle. In fact, if the graphics were organized into directories by type (Allied, Axis, Terrain, Interface, etc.) it would be easy to just make a mirror image lo-res terrain folder that the game could switch to on the fly. (Allied, Axis, Lo-Res Terrain, Hi-Res Terrain, Interface, etc.)

Take that one step further and the terrain could also be divided by theater. Finland, North, Center, South for example in CMBB. CMAK could have N. African, Tunisian, Sicilian and Italian terrain. That would be a neat way around the problem of getting buildings to look different in Benghazi and Naples... :cool:

[BaD JoKe]

I have an ancient 1Gig AMD and I'm quite happy about it. CMBO runs nicely as does CMBB. No whining here.

Graphics is one thing, realism and playability is other.

I somewhat despise this have-to-have-newest-tech-PC-on-my-desk kinda talk, it's simply not smart to feed hardware manufacturers and software companies with that attitude. I'm affraid that somewhere on the line, the originality and playability will decrease and the players are the ones to suffer.

But hey, if you have the dough to burn, make yourself and the local HW store happy.

[Firefly]

Originally posted by Sergei:

I've heard there's not much of grass in Sahara to speak of.

That's probably why they fought the war in the Western Desert instead, apart from a few mad Frenchmen of course.

[Sergei]

What geographic area does the Western Desert account for (and from what POV is it 'western', Egypt?)? Is it also known as the Libyan Desert? :confused: I would think that is a part of the Sahara area. Maybe I'm wrong... nah, can't be.

[lcm1947]

I strongly agree with Cabron66 as the most important thing is that the game needs to be realistic. I love the eye candy as much if not more then anybody else but wouldn't be playing it still to this day for over the past 3 years if not for it doing that. I think BFC has balanced both of these things extremely well. The realistic part and graphics. They should however concentrate on it staying realistic above all else and let the great group of modders we have take care of the eye candy part. This way guys with only average puters can still play the game without having to slow their game down anymore then what it already is and the guys with the faster ones can grab all the modds they like. My 2 cents anyway.

[Firefly]

Originally posted by Sergei:

What geographic area does the Western Desert account for (and from what POV is it 'western', Egypt?)?

Basically it covers the Egyptian/Lybian border, so yes it was 'western' if you were in Egypt. The Sahara was to the south and pretty much considered an impassable flank, apart from small groups such as the LRDG in light trucks and the French Saharan troops, who used camels as well as light trucks. The Sahara, with its loose sand was definitely a no-go area for armour and often a death trap for light vehicles. Also remember that the Sahara has expanded since WW2.

[Canuck]

If you're frightened of CMAK then you're going to be petrified by CM2

[Sergei]

Okay, then it must be the same as that marked as Desert of Libya in my atlas. These things have a habit of having different names in different languages. Btw. it is Libya, not Lybia (or Libia or Libirya...). I can't remember the name used by Italians for it, though, and now I'm going to spend all day trying to remember.

[Panzertruppe]

Compared to some other games CMBO and CMBB look dated(graphic wise). It's the game play...and the attention to detail that makes these games the best!

I still play board games like "Africa Korps" "ASL",ect...and I don't see "counters"...I see AFV's...soldiers,ect!

I enjoy my CMBO and CMBB on a P3-866...although I have a Alien P-4 2.5 sitting in my "War Room"!( for the FPS games).

Hell with "cutting edge" machines!...as long as the game is playable at a reasonable rate....I'm a happy camper!

[Jack Carr]

Cabron66 posted: Well there's some pretty interesting opinions here and apparently a lot of people with money to burn. Bad Joke posted: But hey, if you have the dough to burn, make yourself and the local HW store happy.

As far as the "money/dough to burn" part goes, couldn't be farther from the truth in my case. I am a realist however and the reality, as can be seen over time, is that software will drive hardware requirements up. As I had stated in my original post,

I posted: Will it cost me money? Yup. Would I like to spend the money on other things besides gaming PC hardware? Yup.

Anyone who made a comment about money to burn is "grasping for straws" to make a point. If you want to play it smoothly you gotta have the horsepower to do it. It's simple.

Bad Joke posted: I somewhat despise this have-to-have-newest-tech-PC-on-my-desk kinda talk, it's simply not smart to feed hardware manufacturers and software companies with that attitude.

Despise away. Have you been out to the latest gaming PC websites or gotten a copy of any of the latest PC gaming magazines. Every other page is an advertisement for another company that sells ****-hot fast PC's that will run even the most processor intensive games smoothly. Just to name a few, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, VooDoo, ABS, IBuyPower, Vicious PC, etc. The list goes on. Hardware and software companies exist and survive because of that attitude. If that attitude was not prevelant and did not exist, who in their right mind would want to get into the business? Business in general has a bigger, better, growth is good attitude. Better software and hardware drive the market. Folks with out-dated, under-powered equipment at best will be an after-thought. It's simply not smart to feed hardware manufacturers and software companies with that attitude? Dude, it's too late. I didn't start the idea, but as I stated before, I'm a realist. The idea will continue to drive the market. I might add, in the past it was big business, corporations, that drove the PC market the hardest. Corporations needed alot of PC's for everyones desktop. Now this is not so much the case. Gamers and PC power-fiends are a big driver in the hardware and software market. I guess in many of the posters eyes in this thread, those gamers with "money to burn".

Cabron66 posted: Second, I don't think the use of the term "dumb down" is appropriate in this case. I want the game to be more intelligent and in depth.

I used this term simply in reference to the graphics aspect of the game. If I misled anyone into thinking otherwise, I apologize.

Cabron66 posted: I like realism. Not sparkly explosions and trees that sway in the breeze, but realism such as the very fine work done by BFC dealing with tanks firing and penetrating the armour of other vehicles. Perhaps this is why I can still play and enjoy a lot of older games like Panzer General 2.

I'm not familiar with Panzer General 2 so I really can't compare Combat Mission with it however I am familiar with Combat Mission. I'm familiar enough to realize that there is a visual element to the game. Whether or not you think the graphics are good or bad is irrelevant. There are graphics and the graphics make their demands on the processor. What are you gonna do? As you suggested/requested, perhaps Battlefront or a modder can provide low-res trees, grass, tanks, men, et al. Again, this is where you and I part ways. I think this is a bad direction for a software company to go in. Perhaps you should give Tac-Ops a try. I do not have the game myself, but it appears to be a less graphics-oriented game that does not sacrifice any of the realism that you enjoy.

Cabron66 posted: Firstly, a realistic game does not require realistic graphics. It makes the game more dramatic and visually stimulating to play, but here there is a question of what you want from a game.

I agree with this statement. I think that this statement raises the next obvious question, "What kind of game is Combat Mission?" From what I can tell, Combat Mission exists in both the graphics realm as well as game engine accuracy. Cabron66 has already stated that the graphics in Combat Mission leave something to be desired compared to some other first-person shooter, Half-Life 2. Does your machine play first person shooters well? If not, have you e-mailed the makers of the first-person shooter in question to come out with a lo-res version?

It's intelligent to come to the realization that graphics will continue to get better (more visually appealing/realistic looking).

There may come a day when the next generation of games is released that requires a ridiculous dollar hardware expenditure to be able to play them well. When this day comes, we're all gonna have a decision to make: "Do I want to stay in this rat-race or not?" If the majority decide against upgrading the hardware/software vendors have a decision to make: "Do we reduce the processor demand or make the upgrade more affordable?"

[Firefly]

Originally posted by Sergei:

Btw. it is Libya, not Lybia (or Libia or Libirya...). I can't remember the name used by Italians for it, though, and now I'm going to spend all day trying to remember.

I know, I can spell, I just can't typ .

[ScouseJedi]

The only upgrading I think I am going to have to do for CM2 is to buy a DVD drive.

I just can't see how they can fit more detailed models and eyecandy on to a single CD. DVDs are pretty much standard for anyone buying a system and will probably be cheaper to supply a single DVD than 3 CDs.

CMAK: The only upgrade I am going to have to perform is to get a credit card so I can buy it direct. (Unless BFC accept switch?)

edit: This is actually my first language, sheesh. Grammer, spelling and meaning altered.

[ August 29, 2003, 02:16 PM: Message edited by: ScouseJedi ]

[Ligur]

My comment is that I'm 99% sure BTS will make the various details so adjustable you don't have to worry. Both their games this far have supported low end computers somewhat.

Just get rid of the trees and doodads if your screen hops around like a spastic freeze victim on meth.

[Herr Kruger]

I'd just like to say that having the option of low-res mods is one I like to have. Especially for terrain and trees.

[Sidewinder]

Hmm....If my iMac 400mhz with 8mb ATI rage pro can run cmbb, then i expect i can run CMAK, as long as i can toggle things like dust and smoke off (something madmatt has already comfirmed). Even if it proves too graphics intensive, making the grass into a low res BMP is quite simple. Tree bases, on the other hand....

[Cabron66]

Jack

I agree with you almost entirely. I'm forced to because arguing would be pointless. The industry is following a pretty predictable road and I think we all know where it is going. I've been playing video games my whole life, like millions of us in this generation, and what I think I can say to simplify this argument is this. I like playability. There is a store where I live that buys and sells used games. I recently bought Fallout for $2.99 Canadian and later bought it's sequel for $3.99. Not long ago, I went back and replayed Ultima IV, V, VI and VII. I have Panzer General 2, CM and two of the old Rainbow Six games on my hard drive. PG2 was lent to me by a friend and I bought the Gold Edition of Rainbow and Rogue Spear for maybe $10 each. CMBO is by far the most expensive game I have purchased in the last year at $30. The guy who runs the store just promised me the Operational Art of War for $20 and my plans are made for the next three months. In short, there's room for all kinds. In fact, I bought CMBB for $15 dollars. The guy I bought it from told me it sat on his shelves for a month after some kid bought it new and returned it in 24 hours claiming it "blew".

[IntelWeenie]

I just upgraded the major guts of my PC (Mobo - Abit NF7 w/onboard GeForce4 video, AthlonXP 2600+, 512MB PC2700 CAS2 RAM), so I don't have much room to quibble, but I would like to see CMAK and beyond stay within reach of the older, less capable systems.

I think BFC has done a good job of this so far just by providing simple options like being able to turn weather effects on/off, adjustable quality smoke, etc. The mod community has taken care of the rest, making both hi- and lo-res mods of terrain and vehicles. I disagree that BFC providing two levels of graphics would be the wrong move. I think it's the right decision for them based on their consumer base.

As we've hear time and again in the forums, there's been many wargamers that enjoy the game because the action is realistic. As long as the graphics are adequate, they'll play the game and enjoy it. Also, there've been many stories of people that are so used the hyper-relaisic graphics that drive so many mainstream games taking one look at CMBO or CMBB and saying "It blows" simply because BFC doens't have a 30-person graphics art section. These people will probably never be happy with CM no matter how hi-res the BMPs are.