Jim Boggs Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by Sergei: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Dorosh: I don't drink coffee...too.....American somehow.Oh, and what are you, then? Australian? African? Antarctican? Admit it, you bloody Canucks and Brazzies and Argies, you all are just Americans! You live on a continent named after an ITALIAN!!! BWAHAHAA!!!!!!! </font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeyD Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 At the risk of continuing this thread, has anyone mentioned yet that we know ZERO about the new game engine? Absolutely ZERO? ...okay, maybe not quite zero. BFC is said to be planning to use a very fancy new polygon maker/painter program that'll totally change how the product looks. They also said the bulk of our never-ending 'helpful comments' will probably be a moot point with the new engine. So debating the mechanics of the new game engine currently resembles the old eclesiastical debate on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I say seven. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FM Paul Heinrik Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by JasonC: OK, I will jump into this disaster of a thread in progress and attempt a hijacking. Instead of speculating about other companies and eye candy and the state of the art (yawn), I will just bring up something I've never seen a tactical game get right, CM included, and put it on my CMx2 wish list. First I will explain the motivation, the bit of military history that makes it clear to me something is not currently modeled and mattered in some tactical situations. I've been rereading Bernard Fall. In his Dien Bien Phu book, he describes numerous occasions early on where recon in force through the jungle runs into enemy infantry positions, gets pinned down, takes disproportionate casualties. And part of the problem was clearly the size of the units (full battalions, sometimes a couple of them), plus the way that interacts with the terrain, and with movement. The issue is mostly concealment vs. cover. But with a twist. CM already tracks that as a difference in how the two forms of protection work against HE. But treats small arms FP as all aimed. That is, concealment works against bullets but not against shells. This may be a reasonable first approximation when one rifleman is shooting at another. But when a platoon with automatic weapons is firing out into brush etc, and there is a whole battalion out there, it is not a good approximation anymore. The issue is that fire can hit things the shooter can't see. Concealment blocks LOS. But a blocked LOS does not mean bullets hit a lead wall and ricochet into the ground. This was critical in the cases Fall examines. Why? Because the detection range in continuous woods was quite short - short LOS, check. CM has that right. This allowed the units to get quite close to each other before anybody fired. CM gets that right too. Naturally, the up front shooting is pretty nasty when the range is so short, even when both sides barely have LOS. But the leading units quickly shoot one or the other side down. And in CM, the units 40m farther back are completely immune. They don't care a bit that there is a ferocious firefight going on less than 100m away. Because "there is no LOS". But in reality, bullets go flying through the whole area. They penetrate much deeper through the cover than light does. A leaf will stop light. But it won't stop a bullet. So what happened tactically in these cases, is not only did the front guys get hurt, but the whole battalion pinned. They were too dense, so they took incidental casualties, too. Beaten zones from MGs are the same sort of effect. But those are generally modeled in the open. I'm talking about the equivalent of beaten zones, from all fire, passing through concealment rather than cover. One of the reasons this can be nasty is the guys with full concealment tend to move about more confidently. Upright. Big targets for stray bullets - until they pin. In Fall's cases, this was made worse by the height differences, too. The defenders were typically up on a hill, and in foxholes or better. The attackers were approaching, without any improved positions, moving. In pure concealment terms they had fine "exposure". But when lead starting raining, they could not easily put solid ground between them and the shooters higher up. On mostly level ground, a modest rise might give real cover. Same on the part of a slope that is bending back toward level. But not so when one is on an "accelerating" slope. This sets up interesting tactical effects, if modeled at all realistically. Movement is high risk, and especially so in certain areas. Approaching an improved position in concealment terrain is not the cake walk it can often seem in CM. That is all motivation. So, what is the wish? That when small arms FP is dished out, it attenuates with range and *cover* (in the strict sense). But doesn't care about LOS. Apply the concealment portion only to some fixed extent. Have there be a lower bound on the firepower, reflecting random hits on targets of typical size. Even better would be tracking some of the dispersion, so that denser enemies would face more "residual" this way. If done right, beaten zones for MGs would be an automatic byproduct. Also if done right, friendly fire would be more of a problem, especially when trying to use "mob" formations. Surrounding an enemy too closely could result in the famous "circular firing squad". Lots of realistic effects. I'd love to have them. And when one scanned a battlefield for approach routes, the leafy scattered tree highway wouldn't look quite so much like a purpose-built traverse trench in a seige (promised delivery of nearly the entire force to the objective intact, unless massive arty intervenes). Also, the trade offs between HE and bullet FP would be more realistic. Right now, HE vastly outperforms against units in good cover. Some of that should remain and will. But e.g. approaching a wooded hill on the top of which 4 heavy machineguns are continually sawing away unsuppressed, would not be the cake walk it can be today. I too would like to see a sim like that but there are some big trade offs I foresee. One major problem would be the time frame of the game. As CM is 1 min. turns a 20 turn game already takes an hr or so to play in real time. If battles are fought too realisticly then there has to be a more realistic time frame. There shouldn't be such a time constraint on "winning" the objective. I could see a situation, much like in real battles, that lines become drawn and stalemates occur. I think a game like CM is much better the smaller the engagements are and hence quicker the outcomes. Already most of the fun of the game comes from seeing if your los checks and predictions are better than your opponents. I think that if you make firing more realistic then squads in CM would get pinned and do nothing (awaiting addtional support or artillery) much like in real combat. I do see the currently unrealilistic feature of machine guns that can't hit a column of infantry marching down a road, that is kinda lame. But, supposedly tank shells can penetrate buildings and hit things behind it, but I've never seen it happen nor have seen a tank shoot through more than 1 tank. BTW, what the heck is up with squads out running hand grenade tosses, or is it just a poorly done animation sequence and the correct damage model is represented? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
junk2drive Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 20 turns in a hour???? dont you look at anything? in two hours i maybe get in 5 turns, company sized battle. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Dorosh Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by junk2drive: 20 turns in a hour???? dont you look at anything? in two hours i maybe get in 5 turns, company sized battle. Maybe that's my trouble - I let my platoon commanders do the looking. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Dorosh Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by MikeyD: At the risk of continuing this thread,LOL, you silver tongued devil! They also said the bulk of our never-ending 'helpful comments' will probably be a moot point with the new engine.Just like our comments intended to assist the "second patch." They stopped listening to "us" months ago. So debating the mechanics of the new game engine currently resembles the old eclesiastical debate on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I say seven. I tend to agree with both your assessment, and your conclusion and heartily concur with the figure seven. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
s3333cr333tz Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 As to having twelve man squads, it's probably not going to happen for sure as no home computer is powerful enough and I understand this, but I'm sure most people only want to see changes that are possible and understand the limits of todays computers. This is simply untrue. Perhaps if you sold that 486dx and got yourself a 2ghz+ cpu, I hear they cost about 150 dollars now. We also don't use whale blubber for lamps, welcome to today. The problem is not with processor power, or graphics cards. The problem is getting those 12 men to behave somewhere realistically in a 3d environment, you know completely opposite of Squad western front or whatever that piece of trash was called. In CM infantry is abstracted, which means you can get a much more realistic model for how they behave and seek cover (well, they don't seek cover properly but you get the point). If you have everyman in a squad represented the game goes into a totally different direction, depending on how you implement the larger squads. If you just have the same sort of puppets, adding 9 men to the squad with a more modern engine will be fine. If you want to see the things the current game abstacts you run into a whole new ball of wax. You need to seriously work on the AI for the infantry, moreover you need to make the maps much more detailed providing more doodads that actually function as cover. You have to actually depict the individual rounds with their own physics. If Battlefront can pull off the latter and not have the game run like a dog, excellent. However, I think the safe move is to improve the AI of infantry in its current abstracted form. It works, it may not be as eye popping, but at least it wont screw the game up like a poorly implemented dynamic infantry model. Most popular RTS games today can have several hundred up to several thousand units running at once in large games. All calculating pathing LOS etc. The graphical strain should be a none factor, and to be honest im rather unhappy with how the current CM runs on a top end machine like mine, this has to do with the engine, not what the engine does make no mistake about it. There are several games out recently that prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SKELLEN Posted June 2, 2004 Author Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by s3333cr333tz: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />As to having twelve man squads, it's probably not going to happen for sure as no home computer is powerful enough and I understand this, but I'm sure most people only want to see changes that are possible and understand the limits of todays computers. This is simply untrue. Perhaps if you sold that 486dx and got yourself a 2ghz+ cpu, I hear they cost about 150 dollars now. We also don't use whale blubber for lamps, welcome to today. </font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrSpkr Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by SKELLEN: And for your information CM was designed on a Mac and by the time of release of CMX2, I'll probably be the proud owner of a Power Mac G5 which will blow your rig away, my futures bright, welcome today. Let's not wave that red flag around here, boy; it's been debated to death before. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
junk2drive Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 some people like checkers, some like chess. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonC Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 It shouldn't be too hard, actually. CM already has 25m suppression zones around the aim point of infantry FP. And it tracks individual shell impacts with a random model. Between the two, they have the systems they need to have a random dispersion of suppression field away from infantry FP shooters. Maybe it mostly just makes people duck - fine. If enough firing is going on, an occasional man gets hit. It can be tuned after it exists. But the basic idea is to have a dynamic "fp field" over the whole space, as units try to move around through it. Then they take suppression like fire (like being within 25m of an aim point is today) periodically while inside such a "fp field". 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sirocco Posted June 2, 2004 Share Posted June 2, 2004 The new engine will look better, but I'm sure it will vastly improve what's "under the hood", too. However good the game is, there's a lot of room for improvement, especially in infantry modelling. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harv Posted June 3, 2004 Share Posted June 3, 2004 Originally posted by Michael Dorosh: They stopped listening to "us" months ago. Actually, I'm thinking it's mostly just "you" they've stopped listening to. But then I've been known to be wrong before. Oh yes, insert obligatory smiley here. Harv 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
willbell Posted June 3, 2004 Share Posted June 3, 2004 Here is what I would like to see in CMXX2, or what ever you are calling it. Command fog of war. You see only through the eyes of a leader, and the info you get from your units is incomplete. Command line of sight. A game where the leader sees the battlefield only through his line of site in 3D. He can also move to an overall battle map that gives him a sort of diagram of where his own units are, and markers where enemy units have been seen, but the diagram has a lot of FOW in it, missing patches etc. The more the leader cruises around the map, the more actual knowledge he will gain. Why these two similar characteristics? Because there is really nothing out there that gives you that kind of blind, FOW, play by instinct, sift through the conflicting intel kind of experience which is more common in the real world. But more to CM's current conformation, I would like to see a play at LOS of units only option for battles. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Dorosh Posted June 3, 2004 Share Posted June 3, 2004 Originally posted by Harv: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Dorosh: They stopped listening to "us" months ago. Actually, I'm thinking it's mostly just "you" they've stopped listening to. But then I've been known to be wrong before. Oh yes, insert obligatory smiley here. Harv </font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seanachai Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by SKELLEN: Come on guys, I was hoping for sensible answers here unless it's beyond your intelligence, in which case perhaps I'm wasting my time. I like humour as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place and I expected better or maybe you don't understand the Topic? Meanwhile back at sensible HQ... Deary, deary me! There's nothing like trying to patronize an answer out of people, I've always said! Did you see where he called me a halfwit? I like that. Like I'd use that much intellect on someone who pops in to post 'questions for discussion' like someone with a clipboard preparing to grade the answers. I'm not after using more than a quarter of my full wit to jump through the flaming poodle hoops of your mighty 'I will set you all a discussion task' thread. Oh, how rebellious I feel! Wait till Headmaster SKELLEN (were all the lower case letters busy abusing serfs somewhere, and couldn't shuffle into line in time to make a screenname?), finds out that I've not only forgotten how to bob my head in an appropriately obsequious manner, but that I'm not even wearing clean undewear on my head while I'm bobbing! The shame! I imagine a letter home will follow. But I will persevere in my error and pride, be it ever so egregious, and not jump about like a frog before a concert master's baton (improbable image that it is) simply because some bugger sets a topic and then, er, 'invites' us to debate it. Also, I was primarily after abusing Grog Dorosh, which is simply a good thing in and of itself, and needs justifying to no man. Certainly not any man that's had to read a significant portion of his freaking thousands of posts, and I have. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Dorosh Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by Seanachai: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by SKELLEN: Come on guys, I was hoping for sensible answers here unless it's beyond your intelligence, in which case perhaps I'm wasting my time. I like humour as much as the next guy, but there's a time and a place and I expected better or maybe you don't understand the Topic? Meanwhile back at sensible HQ... Deary, deary me! There's nothing like trying to patronize an answer out of people, I've always said! Did you see where he called me a halfwit? I like that. Like I'd use that much intellect on someone who pops in to post 'questions for discussion' like someone with a clipboard preparing to grade the answers. I'm not after using more than a quarter of my full wit to jump through the flaming poodle hoops of your mighty 'I will set you all a discussion task' thread. Oh, how rebellious I feel! Wait till Headmaster SKELLEN (were all the lower case letters busy abusing serfs somewhere, and couldn't shuffle into line in time to make a screenname?), finds out that I've not only forgotten how to bob my head in an appropriately obsequious manner, but that I'm not even wearing clean undewear on my head while I'm bobbing! The shame! I imagine a letter home will follow. But I will persevere in my error and pride, be it ever so egregious, and not jump about like a frog before a concert master's baton (improbable image that it is) simply because some bugger sets a topic and then, er, 'invites' us to debate it. Also, I was primarily after abusing Grog Dorosh, which is simply a good thing in and of itself, and needs justifying to no man. Certainly not any man that's had to read a significant portion of his freaking thousands of posts, and I have. </font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sand digger Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Basically CMAK is over modelled, the right modifiers are there but they are over emphasised or exaggerated. For example I was reading a first person account of an infantry battle in Vietnam. They were on their bellies all the time, that is how they fought, crawling around the place for hours. If you did that in CMAK for a few minutes you'd be exhausted and imobile. LOL to that in Vietnam. I suppose there are technical faults or defects but the over modelling aspect is most noticeable to me. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Salkin Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 To get back on Topic (sorry all hijackers). No other company has the courage to jump on the CM band wagon. As far as they know deep strategy is an RTS like Command and Conquer. Anything else will scare off all console/twitch-game people. Until CM starts selling lots and lots of copies the mainstream companys will focus on the next dazzling episode of Command and Conquer. That's the horrible truth . //Salkin Grammaticly challenged swede with spelling problems (I always write this so the grogs don't have to...) 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SKELLEN Posted June 4, 2004 Author Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by Seanachai: Deary, deary me! There's nothing like trying to patronize an answer out of people, I've always said! Did you see where he called me a halfwit? I like that. Like I'd use that much intellect on someone who pops in to post 'questions for discussion' like someone with a clipboard preparing to grade the answers. I'm not after using more than a quarter of my full wit to jump through the flaming poodle hoops of your mighty 'I will set you all a discussion task' thread. Oh, how rebellious I feel! Wait till Headmaster SKELLEN (were all the lower case letters busy abusing serfs somewhere, and couldn't shuffle into line in time to make a screenname?), finds out that I've not only forgotten how to bob my head in an appropriately obsequious manner, but that I'm not even wearing clean undewear on my head while I'm bobbing! The shame! I imagine a letter home will follow. But I will persevere in my error and pride, be it ever so egregious, and not jump about like a frog before a concert master's baton (improbable image that it is) simply because some bugger sets a topic and then, er, 'invites' us to debate it. Also, I was primarily after abusing Grog Dorosh, which is simply a good thing in and of itself, and needs justifying to no man. Certainly not any man that's had to read a significant portion of his freaking thousands of posts, and I have. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kobal2 Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 *** looks around sneakily *** *** walks in like he owns the place *** Feh. Why are we still bothering with SSNs these days ? *** looks around with a flash of guilt passing across his features, then resume his contemptfull posturing *** What ? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seanachai Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by SKELLEN: You grogs make me laugh...Who's he talking to? Why is he quoting me and then abusing the Grogs? Someone check his meds... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Maybe he meant groggy? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seanachai Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by Sergei: Maybe he meant groggy? Well, maybe. Seems a little mild, though. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Boggs Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by Seanachai: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Sergei: Maybe he meant groggy? Well, maybe. Seems a little mild, though. </font> 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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