Blast effects are too strong?

[c3k]

Hmmm, it seems to me that TheVulture has highlighted what may be going awry: what does "produce casualties" mean?

Is the radius of effectiveness a 100% casualty rate against a frontal, standing person with no body armor? Or is it 50% versus a prone target behind a helmet? Etc. I know from throwing grenades that the radius we were given was a 50% figure, possibly against a standing target.

In short, casualties figures are extremely dependent on the aspect and what percentage is being assumed.

Regards,

Ken

[SlapHappy]

The Effects of Target Posture

It's also useful to note how vulnerability changes with target posture because it suggests the relative amounts of fire needed in different circumstances. The following estimates the relative risks of becoming a casualty to ground-burst shells on ‘average’ ground:-

Standing

1

Lying

1/3

Firing from open fire trenches

1/15 – 1/50

Crouching in open fire trenches

1/25 – 1/100

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[SlapHappy]

Originally posted by Adam1:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by SlapHappy:

The Effects of Target Posture

Is this in CMSF or from other sources? </font>

[SlapHappy]

Originally posted by Adam1:

What is incident pressure? What is reflected pressure? What is "Step"?

incident pressure is 90 degree relationship from blast to surface (free field). You would use this value for a normal ground burst vs. human standing on same level surface. Here's a linky from a google book search which talks about the relationship:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8jQ4CvkLFMUC&pg=PT26&lpg=PT26&dq=reflected+pressure+explosion&source=web&ots=z5MsYILyYU&sig=I-XnmHpUvQ6S2AAhw-Dx4wCmj4A&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&r esnum=10&ct=result

Step is simply the interval (in feet) between the minimum and maximum ranges of the distance from explosion values used to calculate the total blast range plot.

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[SlapHappy]

Yeah, it's the reflected pressure from an interior blast if you are near the reflecting wall that's going to turn your insides into jell-o.......

[Jonny(FGM)]

Then there's the Abrams in game being told to shoot at an 8 story building's roof. Note that there's two explosions -- one from the propellant in the barrel (which is in the right place), and a second, on the sixth/seventh story (way above what the gun could shoot at). There were no other units shooting at the building at the moment. See the following image:

Ok I hate to drag up an old thread like this but the max gun elevation on the M1 is still broken, the minimum depression on the bradley seems to have been fixed (I didn't test the minimum depression on the M1) but the M1 can still target the top of an 8 story building from the very base of it.

[Thomm]

Certainly.

Do not expect it to change, though. We discussed this numerous times and the last word by BFC was that fixing it would require extensive changes to the targetting and evasion logic of vehicles, which they are not ready to make at the moment.

It takes a lot of fun out of city fighting, but there is nothing to be done about it for now.

Best regards,

Thomm

PS: I do not think that gun depression is limited in any way, either.

[Jonny(FGM)]

Well i certainly managed to find a gun depression limit on the bradley. That is a shame, i only brought it back up as i saw steve say that the guns were supposed to have a minimum depression and maximum elevation and if they didn't it was a bug.

[c3k]

At very close ranges (sub-10m) ISTR that you can see projectiles coming out of vehicle guns at an angle. E.g., the gun may be depressed 10 degrees below horizontal, but the bullet stream/shell leaves the muzzle and travels in a path 25 degrees below horizontal. The gameplay reason is clear: if a target is too close, in many cases the vehicle would manuever and use micro-terrain features to gain an LOS to the target. This enables the vehicle to fire on an enemy which is very close. (Tank hunting often took advantage of gun blind spots. This is a gameplay trade-off.) In a similar vein, high angle firing is not limited.

I agree: in a perfect world actual gun elevation limits would be nice to have. However, then the terrain mesh would need to be modelled to a much finer level of detail.

Perhaps a compromise would be to allow the current low angle "fudge" to continue, but restrict the high angle? (Note that then Thomm's comment about AI reprogramming would still be a MAJOR task.)

Regards,

Ken

Edit: I just noticed the remote .50's angle of fire. Notice how it is trying to parallel the red target line? Almost there, but not quite.

[Jonny(FGM)]

It seems i've missed a big chunk of discussion over this. The only reason i brought it back up was that i saw steve said there should be maximum and minimum elevations already coded in and if they weren't working it was a bug and as the post was 2 years ago I thought an attempt would have been made to fix this so i just wanted to point out it hadn't been fixed if an attempt had been made to fix it, if that makes sense. Obviously it seems it is a "bug" but one that for whatever reason can't easily be worked out of the system

[Battlefront.com]

Well, I think I remember that post eons ago and I think somewhere I corrected myself by saying that I misspoke. So to recap...

There is no "bug" to "fix". There is a design limitation which we have no intention of fixing. Probably ever. The amount of effort that is needed to successfully restrict gun deflection limitations is far in excess of its value to the game as a whole. In other words, the amount of times in a REAL battle that this matters is extremely small, but the effort required to prevent it is massive.

In addition to sacrificing all the other things we could have done with the same amount of development time, there is a risk that playability will be seriously compromised. Not because players will not be able to do unrealistic things, but because doing realistic things would be much harder to do.

So I'll say this as clearly as I can... if you purchase a brand new CM product released 10 years from now I don't expect gun elevation to be significantly different than it is now.

Steve

P.S. Note that we would like to address this issue, just like we would be in favor of world peace or the end of "reality" TV programs. But sometimes things are just not meant to be.

[Battlefront.com]

I looked back at some internal discussion notes and found that 2 years ago, when I made the post about elevation/depression stuff, I was in fact correct. CM does simulate the correct elevation/depressions GRAPHICALLY. But the game effects, which was what people were asking about, are not simulated (as already discussed). I realized this pretty quickly and posted a clarification of that, but I guess that part got missed.

If memory serves me correctly, quite a while ago Charles managed to hack in some sort of generic minimum engagement restriction. That could be what Jonny(FGM) found with the Bradley. But if I'm remembering this correctly, it's not specific to the Bradley.

Steve

[Jonny(FGM)]

Hmmm it can't be minimum engagement range because the brad was firing off the top of a cliff and as such was still aiming a good 100m+ away from itself. It seems that you may have accidentally put correct minimum elevation in without realising it

Being a bit of a n00b on these boards I apologise for going over old ground, especially seeing as steve has come in to clarify the issue, i fear I may have put back the release of CM:N by a few more hours.......

[Battlefront.com]

100m+ would be well beyond minimum engagement range My tired old brain wants to say there is a 1 Action Spot dead zone around any vehicle that prohibits the use of large weapons (i.e. I think MGs still work). And trust me, there is no vehicle specific limitations on deflection/elevation restrictions in game terms. Charles would certainly have remembered doing that

Steve

[Alan8325]

I seem to remember something about it being fairly easy to put hard elevation/depression limits on vehicle weapons, but it's a nightmare to program the Tac AI to be able to cope with those limits.

In real life, if a tank commander takes his M1A1 to a hull-down spot looking over the crest of a hill, he can make the necessary adjustments to keep his weapon limits in the area he wants to be able to shoot in. In CMSF, unless major adjustments are made to the Tac AI, I can imagine you would have many situations where you move your tank to some spot in an area of uneven terrain, the tank spots an enemy vehicle, but oops, it can't shoot because the terrain placed it at and angle that precludes the gun from being able to point at the target! :mad:

I just consider the unlimited gun angles currently allowed in the engine to be an "abstraction" of the adjustments that vehicle commanders can make on the fly.

[Jonny(FGM)]

I just realised. In my bradley tests the gun seems to elevate a lot further than in the screenshots posted before, is this level of gun elevation correct? I have no idea what the maximum elevation is on the bradleys cannon

[Thomm]

I am still in favor of enforcing maximum elevation limits (at least for the special case) when the target is in a tall building, Tac AI be damned.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Battlefront.com]

Alan8325,

I seem to remember something about it being fairly easy to put hard elevation/depression limits on vehicle weapons, but it's a nightmare to program the Tac AI to be able to cope with those limits.

That's the crux of it. Because the graphical elevation/depression behavior is already in the game it would be fairly easy to stop a unit from firing. It's everything else that isn't easy

Thomm,

I am still in favor of enforcing maximum elevation limits (at least for the special case) when the target is in a tall building, Tac AI be damned.

If there were regular problems with crazy gun elevations within real games I'd second the motion. But in now nearly 4 years of gameplay (including Alpha and Beta testing) this issue has come up so infrequently within actual gameplay that it definitely is something with far more perceived problems than actual. And there are a number of reasons for this.

Probably the biggest is that people tend not to get their vehicles into such situations in the first place. And if they do, the TacAI usually kicks in self preservation mode because such a close threat is serious enough to override whatever else it was doing.

Our time is extremely limited and we always take longer to make a game than anybody would like to see happen. Therefore, we try very hard to avoid spending time on perceived problems and focus on real ones. This does appear to be a perceived problem rather than one worthy of diverting our attention from other tasks.

Steve

[Canada Guy]

Will this be re-examined for the Eastern Front games? From my understanding, the restricted elevation limits of the Soviet guns did play a role in the tactical use of German tanks.