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Steve, just wondering is the RT based systems the reason PBEM is a "wait and see" kind of thing at present? Assuming I have understood the state of PBEM correctly, I'm thinking, and of course have no real idea how one goes about it, but doing PBEM with a RT based game "engine" is probably a bit of a challenge.

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Ugh…

I remember many arguments with Steve Young about Real-Time verse WEGO. My argument was always that WEGO offered a more realistic feel due to its offering the simulation that more then one commander was issuing commands. Company COs, Platoon Leaders and Team Leaders were all taken into account while issuing orders. Eric’s argument was always that “the military doesn’t want to hear about anything that is not Real-Time”. Obviously he was correct in that respect but he never argued the point if it made a game more functional or more fun to play.

I played “Command and Conquer” when it first came out and enjoyed it for a little while. But the RTS genre never caught me up, as I prefer Turn-Based play as I find it more relaxing and enjoyable. The youngsters I know all wanted RTS Combat Mission due to their energy levels as they split their squads and charged my positions.

After reading your thoughts in this thread ( Steve ) and other’s posts I can see where including RTS makes sense in a business environment. I may even give it a try now and then. I am certainly pleased that WEGO will still be part of Combat Mission.

[ November 06, 2005, 11:02 AM: Message edited by: Abbott ]

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Kip,

You seem to have changed your mind
Nah... not really. We made the decision to do CMx2 as a WeGo/RealTime choice before we actually started working on it. So... uhmm... sometime before CMBB was released, or just after. That means I was probably having those arguments when I already knew that CMx2 would have RealTime as an option.

The arguments, as I remember them, were an all or nothing sort of thing. In other words, "real time is so much more realistic than WeGo, so drop WeGo and do real time only". That is something we aren't planning on doing and have no plans to do in the future.

Now, it is true that there were (and still are) some serious things to consider for RealTime environments. AI is one of them. One of the first things Charles and I did was sit down and really see if it was possible to do those things. The answer was, at the time, "probably". We had a plan to abandon RealTime as an option if we found in the first year or so that it wasn't practical. Hence one of the reasons why you guys are only now hearing about it :D As we got further into it we found nothing to scare us away so we kept at it. Hardware has come a long way since then too.

No, PBEM is not "wait and see" because of issues related to RealTime. Why would it be? If you have turns you can in theory have PBEM. There is nothing challenging there. The only possible problem we might run into is that the file size might be too huge. This has been discussed to death and I have already said that it is looking good that it will be included. So let's drop it, OK? The single most annoying thing about showing up on this Forum is having to see this brought up yet again when we cleary don't have anything to add at this time :D

No, there is no plans to have a "running buffer". If you are in RealTime mode you can stop the action, if allowed, and that's it. No replaying. That would open up a huge can of worms for something that is contrary to the concept of RealTime to begin with.

I think people are crazy when they say that 2-3 minute turns would be viable. It is just too long inbetween decision points. For tactical warfare seconds count. Going that long without being able to interact would place a very heavy burdon on the TacAI because (like CMx1) it will only react and not act on its own. The more time that goes by without direction, the less realistic the game is unless the units can create their own direction for themselves. And that just isn't going to happen.

Having said that, there are no 60 second hardcoded assumptions in CMx2 like there were in CMx1. So who knows... we might allow players to set their own turn times (within reason).

Remember folks... RealTime, or WeGo, are just gaming conventions. On their own they don't mean anything. A game can be fun and realistic or dull and cartoonish using either system. It is all in the game design and the execution of it. Design and execution have always been two of our strong points ;)

Steve

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Having said that, there are no 60 second hardcoded assumptions in CMx2 like there were in CMx1. So who knows... we might allow players to set their own turn times (within reason).
My first thought upon seeing this was picturing a 30 minute battle and setting the turns to thirty minutes (which I guess would be way outside the definition of reasonable).

I then thought, with how much has been said about the great waypoint system that this may be a viable option. Who could lay out a better battle plan from the start.

I then remembered this one game of CMBB my friend and I played once where we set everything to random (force selection and map). We were pretty sure it would be horrible, but we thought it just might be wonderful as we were forced to use whatever units we got.

It turned out horrible. The computer gave him a force of tanks against my conscripted infantry on a pretty flat field. Many a German soldier died that day, most fleeing. We concluded never to do that again.

Which my mind now realizes would be how a full game turn would play out. Still, we would probably be foolish enough again to try.

Really though, I hope to see adjustable turn times and think they are a good idea. In a small battle would probably set less time per turn, more time for large battles.

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

No, there is no plans to have a "running buffer". If you are in RealTime mode you can stop the action, if allowed, and that's it. No replaying. That would open up a huge can of worms for something that is contrary to the concept of RealTime to begin with.

Autsch!!! :eek:

Bad news for me! My personal dream-game has moved a little bit further away in the future again ...

In this case I might tend to prefer the original WeGo scheme at least for getting used to the game. For having a close look at stuff ... I hope both modes of playing will be available!

Best regards,

Thomm

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This optional Real-Time mode reminds me of the X-COM series. The first two games were strictly turn-based. And when I heard that the third one would include an optional real-time combat mode, I didn't think that I would ever use it. The truth was that I never went back to the turn-based mode once I had tried real-time combat. And I'm not a fan of RTS games.

Although being able to pause the game every millisecond always felt like having too much control. I'd like to see a system where (at least for multi-player games) a player who has just paused the game may not pause it again for a certain amount of time after he resumes the action. He may still issue orders while the time is running or when his opponent pauses the game. That way there would be at least some guaranteed minimum of flow in the action.

Dschugaschwili

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C'Rogers

I then thought, with how much has been said about the great waypoint system that this may be a viable option. Who could lay out a better battle plan from the start.
As the old military axiom goes... no plan survives contact with the enemy. So, as great as the waypoint system might be, it can only do so much. It seems you realize that, but figured I'd make it clear to those who haven't thought this through as much.

Dschugaschwili,

Although being able to pause the game every millisecond always felt like having too much control.
Yeah, this is why we aren't really encouraging blurring the line between WG and RT modes of play. WeGo is a hybrid of TurnBased and RealTime to begin with. I think a hybrid of a hybrid is going in the wrong direction.

Keep in mind that many of the early transitions to RealTime were simply turn based games that had the turns eliminated. Publishers tried so very hard to get whatever they had on the RT bandwagon because they were afraid that the game wouldn't sell if it wasn't, or at least would sell more if it was. Little thought was put into the mechanics and how the game would actually play in RT. It was, in short, a marketing ploy. Higher ups at Sierra tried to get us to do this with Civil War Generals 2, BTW, and we successfully avoided that.

In fact, more than a few people suggested we make CMx1 have a RealTime option. That was probably also something that Kip remembers me being very strongly against. The simple reason is that CMx1 was setup to be WeGo, not RealTime. We could not, and would not, attempt to RealTime because it would certainly have been a feature not used (like in X-Com).

To do RealTime right the game must embrace it fully and totally right from the start. The system of giving orders must be tailored to speed and unit self reliance, the game mechanics must never assume pauses, and so forth and so on. So that is what CMx2 is all about :D

Steve

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Originally posted by Dschugaschwili:

This optional Real-Time mode reminds me of the X-COM series. The first two games were strictly turn-based. And when I heard that the third one would include an optional real-time combat mode, I didn't think that I would ever use it. The truth was that I never went back to the turn-based mode once I had tried real-time combat. And I'm not a fan of RTS games.

Same here. One key feature of the RT mode in XCOM Apoc was the ability to adjust the speed of the game. A failing of some other pausible RT games such as the Balder's Gate RPGs is that even though you could pause any time, while the game was running everything was happening too fast to keep track of . I always ran the Apoc battle in slow motion. Even then they resolved in far less time than in turn-based mode. I think this is an important consideration if there is no rewind in RT.
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Hi,

When playing a single player game I can imagine that RT, using the pause feature, may well end up as my preferred option. When you are playing God anyway, which you are in single player games, why not stay flexible. Tweak your orders when you feel like it, when required.

For human v human or CoPlay WEGO will no doubt be the way I will “normally play”.

I say "normally", because I can imagine that in very small human v human games, say two-three squads v a couple of platoons or less, RT without pauses may be fun. Also in CoPlay with each player only controlling “very few” units RT may also be fun.

I was never one who was anti-RT, so as long as I can still play WEGO when I want, having RT and all the options it gives is a big plus.

I am very lucky because all I hear about the CMX2 engine is just the sort of thing I wished for. The focus of development has been exactly where I hoped it would be smile.gif .

All the best,

Kip.

PS. CMSF will even ship with what I call an OPFORs trainer, Red on Red or Blue on Blue feature :D .

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Will the continuous time option be tweakable? IOW, can I speed up and, more important, slow down the clock? This would make larger battles doable in continuous time. It would be nice to have a wide range of adjustments as to how fast continuous time passes.

On a more negative note, I can see it all now. No PBEM and few TCP/IP players willing to use WeGo. Hopefully I'm dead wrong about this. Adjustable continuous time would help to prevent/alleviate this situation.

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Kip,

Thanks smile.gif I agree that some types of battles will be better suited to RT vs. WG.

I too would like the game speed to be variable. That might not be possible simply because if the game engine is doing all it can to make things happen in 1:1 then it won't be possible to speed them up without losing fidelity of resolution. For example, instead of doing a LOS check every second perhaps a 2x speed option would mean doing a check every other second. So this will likely be hardware dependent and we'll not be able to comment on this until we're further long.

Treeburst, I am quite hopeful that PBEM will be included. I do, however, agree that RT will likely be the primary choice for TCP/IP. This will allow two people to play out a full battle, from start to finish, in a half hour or so. A TCP/IP battle with a 2 minute limit on Planning would mean a 20 turn game would take an hour to resolve. I dunno about you, but I would rather play 3 games instead of 1 :D

Steve

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For me, the fun of CM has been making plans and seeing them unravel, or even occasionally work. The fact that you are committed to 60s of action is what keeps me playing. And of course, being able to rewind a specific piece of action to see exactly WHAT happened.

Saying that, one of the things that put me off playing CM until so relatively late was the fact that it was turn based.

So having both available really is the best of both worlds.

Hurrrm...In the non-RT option, we still get to rewind the movie, yes?

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Originally posted by Other Means:

Hurrrm...In the non-RT option, we still get to rewind the movie, yes?

An important question! After reading Steves posts earlier in this thread I'm not sure either - and omitting them would be a show stopper for me at least! After receiving that hot PBEM file with action on multiple places it is impossible to see all that happens at the same time. As we play both squad leader and battalion commander it's impossible to live without it - and that's also why the "orders while paused" option in RT is unrealistic to NOT have according to me...

Regarding WeGo or RT... 95% of all games on the market are built to make you sweat. I guess the reason why most of us still play CMx1 is that we prefer to think instead...

OK, I hope the RT option will be paced more like Close Combat and that was actually quite cool so I'll hold my horses until the demo before my final verdict ;)

/Mazex

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I recall when this forum first started there was an obscure line about having the option of playing as a single character (or whatever phrase they used). Nobody on the board seemed to notice that line or ask about it, and nobody at BFC volunhteered an explanation... until now.

In my fevered imagination, I can well imagine a couple MGS's facing-off against a couple aging T54s in realtime (dang, that sounds like fun!). If you're concurrently running a company of infantry all over the map, though, things could be a bit more iffy.

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As long as realtime is only an option and WeGo is fully available I am happy.

Let me explain why realtime (RT) is not a great thing. If we weren't simulating multiple command levels and/or having to handle details unrelated to command levels outside of a paticular selected level then RT would be ok. But the reality is we are acting as company commander (if not battalion), platoon leader, squad leader, and maybe even fireteam leader/tank commander. Doing this in realtime is not only UNrealistic it is impossible. As one thing happens at the 'top' of the map something else is happening at the 'bottom'. It is simply impossible to be in two places at the same time to command OR observe. Think of two tank fires happening at the same time at the top and bottom of the map. You simply can't be in both places at once to see a tank pop into view, kill your tank, and pop out. Pausing can make it a bit more workable but you may still miss out on critical actions and not even know it (again if you're watching action at spot A you can't be doing ANYthing at spot B). This situation can be helped (but not remedied) with a 'rewind' feature but BF has stated this will not be there. Pausing realtime is simply not good enough; a player will miss out on a lot of action especially as things get exciting in one particular spot.

With the current CM games I find myself rewinding four or five times a turn on certain critical turns to absorb all the action that happened in one minute. What killed my tank? Where did that unit go? Where did that come from? How did he end up there?! I have 'Highway to the Reich' and like it a lot but my biggest quibble is that while I am messing with a battle up in Arnhem my attack down in Grave gets clobbered and I have no idea what happened; and that game at least gives a small 'log' of what happens to each unit.

If you could 'rewind' realtime and react somehow that would be great but how? At the top of the map X happens and at the bottom Y happens. You rewind to see what and decide to change an order at Y to respond. You've now just 'changed time' and what is the impact on X? Furthermore now you possibly already know something you would not have known if you didn't rewind. Thus your Sherman moves up and gets killed by a Tiger so you rewind and stop the Sherman before it crests the hill. Well that's not right.

So, for me, realtime without a rewind is a no-go except for maybe the smallest scenarios. WeGo is the only answer unless you want to lock yourself to a particular portion of the battle or simply don't mind missing out on half of the fun. Some folks might not mind missing out on half of the action but I hope the game never makes that mandatory.

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