Is CM:SF fundamentally flawed ??

[KNac]

I must add that games (or applications) are allways programmed to be run on old generation hardware.

This game engine was started 4 years ago, and don't know to what kind of system Charles was programming it ron run on. But at least a 4 years old one.

Indeed, I think 4 years old systems can move the game, at least not extremelly big & unit intensive maps, rather well.

So what a could the game do if it was programmed and optimized to run in a quad-core with 4gb of RAm and a *sigh* SLIed double 8800?

[Abbott]

I have been thinking along the same lines. The CMX2 game engine was designed with the power of future home computing in mind. As fast as computing power increases we shouldn't have to wait more then a year or so for the ideas and improvements that I am sure Steve and the Gang already have in mind to be implemented. Maybe a more traditional WEGO could be included by then as well. If not we may all be "assimilated" by then. At the present time CM:SF may not be for me but I have high hopes for the future of Combat Mission.

[dan/california]

Probably with good programming (and enough time to do it), top home computers could do the trick.

Yes, but only ten percent of the possible market has such a machine at any given time, at the most. There just wouldn't be enough customers to go around if it took a brand new quad core with dual 512MB video cards to run the game.

Of course if someone wants to donate me a rig like that I will happily volunteer to beta test.

[KNac]

Yes but don't miss that something along these lines will be the standard in two years timeframe.

[Battlefront.com]

KNac,

[quiote]While #1 is usefull, for RT and WeGo, #2 it-s usefull most times only in RT. In WeGo we have to rely on TacAI decissions so if squad AI is not tuned to perform better or soem sorts of programmed SOPs are introduced, we still have issues.

For sure the TacAI continue to be tweaked and improved over time. However, I think you might be misunderstanding the fix and why it is important. That's OK, since v1.04 will show you what I mean better than any words I type

fritzthemoose,

i think bfc knows exactly what those complains are aboutbut is so far down the line that they will never admit it.

Another possibility... that some of the people complaining don't know what they are talking about and they will never admit it. Guess which possibility I subscribe to?

you can see from their answers that they dont know a solution (and in my opinion the game is fundamently flawed. those things cannot be solved with a patch because they are engine related) because it would mean changing the engine which is probably above their financial means or going back to a more cm1 style which they will not do because then they have to admit that cm2 is fundamently flawed.

Well, it is very true that we can't afford to chuck the code we have and start over again. I've said that hundreds of times, so it's not like we're denying that. But thankfully, the dreary pessimism is unfounded. CMx2 is not fundamentally broken.

what do we hear from bfc.

you dont get it

reviewers dont get it

you have to unlearn and forget everything u like in a wargame

it is more realistic so whats the problem

You've also had the opportunity to read well reasoned discussions, such as this thread. I can't help it if you choose to not engage in that discussion.

and we hear that over and over again.

why?

because, in my opinion, some of the major problems of cm2 are engine related and cannot be fixed.

Or... that it isn't fundamentally broken and therefore we can not admit to something that isn't true?

I will stick with this opinion until i hear from bfc that for example the problems linked to 8x8 tiles with a central action spot will be fixed in patch whatever.

There are improvements in v1.04 and they have been discussed already. I'm sure there is more we can do.

too many people here on the board dont like it. the discussion here is not going if the tiger should get 1cm more penetration power or if a bren gun should have a tripod. there are fundamental complains about the gameplay as a whole.

I for one don't miss the pissing fights over that Tiger mantlet thickness and Bren Tripod crap that goes on and on and on and on and on and on

reviews from both reviewers and users are average at best

that mirrors in basically all the wargaming boards i check

even the people who like the game admit that currently there is a mirriad of problems.

Which proves nothing about the inherent game system's viability. It simply indicates that some people aren't happy with it as currently presented. I'll also remind you that a LOT of discontent has to do with the subject matter. I bet we'd see only 1/2 of the abuse if we had Tigers and Panthers running around with SS troops following close behind. At the very least it would put more people in the "like it but want things fixed" category. We had people lined up in deep rows ready to hate CM:SF before we ever released it simply because it wasn't WW2. We knew that in 2003 when we made the final decision to go modern with the first release of CMx2.

it hit the bargain bin fast then u can get your credit card statements and by that rate it will not even be in the bargain bin a couple of months

It isn't in the bargain bin. One shop, Play.com, was selling CM:SF for WELL below what they paid for it. They apparently only had a few copies left and this was their way to quickly get them out of their warehouse. Since they were the ones that sold CM:SF at cost from the start, we're not sorry to see them gone.

Manx,

As the starter of this thread, i have to say that i am somewhat encouraged by what Charles and Steve have had to say. Whether the contraints of the 8x8 system and it's "action spots" and the way in which it seems to restrict the maneuverability of squads (especially when under fire) can be improved or not i don't know. I would say that only Charles would know that.

Exactly! Charles and I are the only ones who know what the f we're talking about

Steve

[junk2drive]

Thanks for the sig.

[Battlefront.com]

Steiner14 ,

From what i understand, the 8mx8m squares have been introduced due to save computation power (= the price for RT).

*almost* correct. The part you have a bit wrong is that the Action Spot concept is needed for WeGo too. Well, unless you want to wait 10-20 minutes (maybe hours??) to crunch a turn on the fastest computer out there and have probably 4GB of RAM at the ready. Pathfinding and LOS calculations would explode exponentially if we removed Action Spots completely. So to keep WeGo people from finishing War and Peace while waiting for the Blue Bar to move across the screen the Action Spot thing is completely necessary.

Could it be possible maybe, to reduce the size of the action spots for WEGO only? Or to make their sizes optional (down to 1mx1m would be fantastic!)?

In theory Charles can shrink the size of Action Spots to anything he wants, but it would take months of programming to get everything to work right with whatever the new scale was. And as stated above...

As a wargamer I would have absolutely no problem if a turn calculation would take 5 minutes and the screen would go blank during that phase and the sound being muted.

For 1x1m Action Spots I think the average system with the average scenario would take an hour to crunch a turn, assuming it had the RAM to handle it. I'll get into the reasons why below...

Darkmath

As I said, it would need 4 times more CPU power to calculate 2*2 metres action spot (BFC correct me if I am wrong!). In its current state, the engine manage hardly even with the best rigs in RT.

It would take a LOT more than 4 times the computing resources (do not forget about RAM... it's a huge limiting factor) because the hardware intensive features of a wargame (LOS/LOF and Pathfinding) have exponential needs to increase fidelity. I'm a math moron, but here's a way to think about it:

Picture a grid of 20x20m squares. You want to travel 100m as the crow flies to another spot on the grid. The Pathing system, no matter how efficient it is, has to check all sorts of possible combinations of how to get from A to B. It could be, for example, that the ONLY way to get to where you want to go is to go backwards, then around something else. Your unit may have to go through 20 squares, to travel the equivalent distance of 5 (as the crow flies). Now reduce the size of the grid to 10x10m squares. Are there twice as many different ways to get from A to B, or now (because of the more refined grid) far more than that? The answer is far more than twice as many possibilities. A math guy will have to tell you what the actual number is, because I am a math moron

Oh, but it gets worse

Currently each Team can only occupy one square. It can stretch out when moving between two, but as far as pathfinding goes there was only one calculation done for all those individual guys within the Team. Meaning, 5 guys may occupy two or more Action Spots at a given time while moving, but they will eventually get to the same spot from the same spot. If the grid is reduced this means the "units" have to be reduced to match the grid size. Otherwise you'll have 5-9 guys all in one square of whatever the new grid size is (let's say 1x1m). Well, since you can't have 9 guys all standing in one square meter you MUST break the unit up into, I dunno, 9 individual units. So you reduced the terrain resolution by a factor of 8, but potentially increased the number of units by a factor of 9. And guess what? Each one will now have to calculate its own LOS and paths.

Now, take the two concepts above and combine them. You get an explosion of LOS/LOF and Pathing calculations for each individual unit, then you increase the number of units by a huge number. Er... hopefully the results of that are obvious for you all to see. Major increases in computing resources are needed for even a modest increase in fidelity.

KNac ,

1x1m squares are not going to do it, what is going to do it is 1:1 LOS. 1:1 LOS is technically impossible for RT yes, well, FALSE, it's possible but majority of computers wouldn't be able to run it to an acceptable level, at company sized battles at least. And for WeGo... I don't know how long it would take to process it. There are otehr problems, like inner squad behaviour, that's purelly a matter of AI programming, repositioning, individual response against enemy threads, moving or itnereacting with the enviorenment (seeking cover, MOUT operations etc). It's a matter of inputting a lot of info and how the squads must behave in each situation: so it's a mat6ter of developing time and tuning. The other option is a total 1:1 control, ie. you move EACH soldier. Micro hell and not inresting unless you want to play small unit action (squad level).

Yup, you are correct that I've only scratched the surface of the problems of further refinement. For example, now we need extremely complex (and therefore brittle) AI to coordinate 9 dudes within a Squad over a wide range of terrain so that they act with some degree of reasonable coordination. Forget about the CPU and RAM that would require... the programming itself would be MASSIVE and the results would still be marginal. There are other issues too, but I think it should be obvious that the refinement is not nearly as technically possible as it is conceptually easy to picture. I know because I went through all of this with Charles in 2003

Steve

[Steiner14]

Thanks for the explanations. Makes totally sense.

[Steiner14]

double post

[Battlefront.com]

Junk2Drive,

Thanks for the sig.

Heh... I thought you would have used this one:

"I for one don't miss the pissing fights over that Tiger mantlet thickness and Bren Tripod crap that goes on and on and on and on and on and on"

Steiner14,

Thanks for the explanations. Makes totally sense.

I'm glad, because if you needed me to explain the math we'd have a bit of a problem since that's the only course I ever got a D in! In my defense, it was at 8 in the morning, Freshman year, and with one of the most boring individuals I ever had in front of me in a classroom. Ben Stein's famous character had more life and excitement in his teaching style than that guy!

Steve

[Rosen Billblatt]

I tried hard to like this game, but it's next to impossible, dear Steve (and Charlie).

I wish you all the best, but now I believe you should have tried an improved CMx1 instead.

And I don't understand why nobody is discussing the most awful aspect, which is those "theatre of war"-style blue and red icons floating in the air.

Good games -as we all know- last MANY years. Crap games last the time of the commercial/graphic hype, a couple of months at most.

I still play steel panther (in its modern variations: SPWW2, SPMBT etc) and it is great fun, because you can poke danemark against iran. And I still play the 'obsolete' CMBO, besides the greatest CMBB and the good CMAK. You know why? Because those games have all "a soul". They are balanced, they are immersive, they keep you playing again and again.

CMSF does not have such "soul", imho. And I doubt anyone will play this game in three years time, though I wish they will for you, Steve and Charlie.

This CMSF game is just -in my eyes- a T72/Theatre of war americanocentric "amelioration" by BFC, amelioration indeed, thanks Charles' genius, but it is still not, imho, a "real" combat mission game, and with this I mean a game so finetuned and balanced and clever that I can play it for 10 years.

I'll still continue to buy your games, even if not really good, out of respect for what you did with CMBB, which deserves a lot, but I will hardly play them if this CMSF is really the way you'r going now.

So, I'll go back lurking now. Excuse my rant.

[dalem]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

This is the issue here. What measurement are you using to say that CMx2 is fundamentally flawed? Realism? Well, if so then in your mind CMx1 must be an f'n piece of feces This is because CMx2 is far more realistic than CMx1, and that is something I can back up in a non-subjective way. If you are using game enjoyment as the measuring stick, then that is subjective and therefore isn't something I can argue against. So take your pick... if you want to say CMx2 is fundamentally flawed because it isn't as enjoyable, the discussion stops there because I won't dispute this since it is inherently your opinion. If you wish to instead say that CMx2 is fundamentally flawed because it isn't realistic, then you are going to have to tell me what your acceptable realism threshold is (since 100% realistic is a pointless standard) and how CMx2 doesn't meet it. Then we can have a meaningful discussion. But I'll warn you... I will compare the equivalent feature in CMx1 to the same standard you have outlined when I talk about the CMx2 comparison. The reason for that? Because it is relevant

Actually it's neither realism not enjoyability. Enjoyability takes a hit for me with all the QB stuff we've already discussed, but that's neither here nor there in this topic. And it's not realism. O, the dreaded Air Quotes of realism in wargames!

I venture to say that that we probably agree on how awful those discussions can get.

I answered the thread's question "yes" simply due to what I would loosely label as a scaling issue, although I think that's probably not the best way I could say it. I hate hate HATE games that mix scales poorly, either in mechanics or output. In CMx2 you now have individual soldiers. In CMx2, as I understand it, these individual soldiers are really where they look like they are on the terrain. And yet, in CMx2 they can't quite really behave as if they would if they were really where they are on the map. To me that is a fundamental flaw that indicates the game engine can't quite yet do what it set out to do: the scale output does not match the scale mechanisms.

Maybe it is such to no one else but me, but there it is. I mentioned seven years ago that that sort of result would be a killer for me and it is, so at least I'm consistant.

-dale

[dalem]

Originally posted by Rosen Billblatt:

and with this I mean a game so finetuned and balanced and clever that I can play it for 10 years.

I don't know that all games have to have that kind of longevity built into them. I find it nice when it happens, of course, but I think expecting a game to provide gratification for ten years (for instance) is kinda like expecting action movies to be made to survive multiple viewings and rewinds.

I mean, Indy never could have made it through the door in the time it took him to claw his way out of the hole.

-dale

[thewood]

Look at all the work that went into making SP last as long as it did. It was not the developer who did it. The developer made thier money and moved on. SP is almost almost an open souce product at this point. It has and continues to fragment.

I actually like BFC's model. It actually relates more to ASL with modules. That is a good way to make it last 10 years.

[Marco Bergman]

Originally posted by Rosen Billblatt:

And I don't understand why nobody is discussing the most awful aspect, which is those "theatre of war"-style blue and red icons floating in the air.

ALT-I turns off the icons.

[Mord]

Originally posted by Marco Bergman:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Rosen Billblatt:

And I don't understand why nobody is discussing the most awful aspect, which is those "theatre of war"-style blue and red icons floating in the air.

ALT-I turns off the icons. </font>

[dima]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Since they were the ones that sold CM:SF at cost from the start, we're not sorry to see them gone.

Steve

Steve, how is that possible? What is the commercial sense in doing that for them? :confused:

[Other Means]

Originally posted by dima:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Since they were the ones that sold CM:SF at cost from the start, we're not sorry to see them gone.

Steve

Steve, how is that possible? What is the commercial sense in doing that for them? :confused: </font>

[Cpl Steiner]

Having some experience of warehousing I know exactly what Other Means is referring to. Storage space costs money, just in terms of things like heating, lighting, security etc. Sometimes it makes commercial sense to sell something at a loss to make room for other product.

[dalem]

Originally posted by Cpl Steiner:

Having some experience of warehousing I know exactly what Other Means is referring to. Storage space costs money, just in terms of things like heating, lighting, security etc. Sometimes it makes commercial sense to sell something at a loss to make room for other product.

I got a whole box of MicroArmor for that very same reason - it was worth the store owner's money to clear the floor space for something that WOULD sell well.

Al rocked.

-dale

[Manx]

As much as i respect BFC in the way that have tried to push things forwards with wargames (which you have to say they have), this time, have they gone a step too far too soon with CM:SF?

[Manx]

Steve, if you don't mind, i'm nicking part of the reply you sent back to me as my sig. Nice one. It's a classic!

[RMC]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

I for one don't miss the pissing fights over that Tiger mantlet thickness and Bren Tripod crap that goes on and on and on and on and on and on

Those threads will come again. Just you wait.

[Battlefront.com]

Dale,

In CMx2 you now have individual soldiers. In CMx2, as I understand it, these individual soldiers are really where they look like they are on the terrain. And yet, in CMx2 they can't quite really behave as if they would if they were really where they are on the map.

As I said, the same argument can be made of CMx1. We have human figures in the game that, although primative, do appear to look like soldiers and not chits of cardboard. Yet they do not act like real soldiers, they aren't even showing an actual soldier nor where that actual soldier is. On top of that the soldier can be a 4m tall monster if the player so chooses.

To me that is a fundamental flaw that indicates the game engine can't quite yet do what it set out to do: the scale output does not match the scale mechanisms.

No, the scale output matches the scale mechanisms. The scale output does not match the real world. And with that sort of comparison, CMx1 does even worse.

Maybe it is such to no one else but me, but there it is.

Obviously you are not the only person bothered by this. You are also not the only person to confuse that with some inherent problem with the game system itself. Meaning, your opinion that the balance isn't to your liking is fine, but it doesn't mean that the system is inherntly flawed. In your view, which is subjective, it is flawed. Just remember that with that logic CMx1 was fundamentally flawed too in the minds of probably more people than found it to be a work of brilliance.

I mentioned seven years ago that that sort of result would be a killer for me and it is, so at least I'm consistant.

If you ignore CMx1's failure to match scale output with scale mechanisms, sure

thewood,

The developer made thier money and moved on.

Actually, the developer made its money, moved on, then went out of business. Shame, because SSI was probably the greatest wargame company of all time (IMHO even greater than Avalon Hill).

Steve

[dalem]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Dale,

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />In CMx2 you now have individual soldiers. In CMx2, as I understand it, these individual soldiers are really where they look like they are on the terrain. And yet, in CMx2 they can't quite really behave as if they would if they were really where they are on the map.

As I said, the same argument can be made of CMx1. We have human figures in the game that, although primative, do appear to look like soldiers and not chits of cardboard. Yet they do not act like real soldiers, they aren't even showing an actual soldier nor where that actual soldier is. On top of that the soldier can be a 4m tall monster if the player so chooses.</font>