Soldiers forming shallow depressions

[Cpl Steiner]

Hi,

Has anyone else noticed the following? Sometimes an enemy squad's position is revealed by some shallow depressions in the terrain mesh where the squad is. Even though the men aren't spotted, each one seems to depress the ground a bit, like he was lying on a soft mattress. Bizarre!

Any explanations BFC?

[Holman]

They need to lay off the doughnuts?

[Mishga]

It is meant to represent shell scrapes I imagine.

[M1A1TC]

They are most likely Hasty Defensive Positions, which is just a very shallow indentation with some dirt piled to the front of the enemy. Soldiers normally dig one up really quick (5-10 min) if they are going to be there for awhile.

Ive only had to dig a few of these, since most of the time i got a ride

[Hev]

Ok great theories but having seen it id love to hear from BFC on this one. Looks like a bug, and if its not is there a way that makes the depressions visable only if you have eyes on.

And on the posative side if it is a feature that guys hastily dig a fox hole during the battle, thats bloody awesome!!

[Battlefront.com]

Foxholes can not be dug during a game, only prior to the game depending on the type of battle and which side is defensive.

There is no way, currently, to "hide" things like foxholes and trenches. This is an extremely difficult thing to acheive and so we haven't attempted it. I hope we might be able to come up with something for WW2, but we'll just have to see. This is definitely a downside to having real trenches and foxholes instead of CMx1's 2D "stickers" that represented such things.

Steve

[Huntarr]

Yup, they look exactly like a "belly hide"

[Mord]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Foxholes can not be dug during a game, only prior to the game depending on the type of battle and which side is defensive.

So how is this done? A designer places craters? Or those little depressions are created if one side is defending? I don't recall seeing any fox holes so far...just those shallow depressions.

Mord.

[Hev]

So the depressions we are seeing are fox holes dug before the battle (like in CMx1) OMG thats so cool.

Thanks for the statement BFC.

[Battlefront.com]

Mord,

We could be talking about different things, I'm not sure Like CMx1, when one side is on the defensive the soldiers automatically get foxholes. Or at least that's what my slower-than-usual-today brain has come up with

I will say that WW2 demands that we do things a little bit differently than we did for CM:SF. As I've said many times over the years, we have to pick and choose what to implement because the list of desirable things to put in would stretch development out several decades. Therefore, we have to be careful about what we do and when.

We figure that a large percentage of the battles played in CM:SF will be Urban in nature, which means a lot of units stationed inside buildings. In open areas trenches are probably the more common form of defense in this particular setting since we're talking about a fast moving attacking force hitting defenders that are either prepared ahead of time or not. Hasty defenses, set up over a period of a few days, would be less common in CM:SF than in WW2.

So, with that in mind we decided that the foxhole thing could be pushed off until WW2, allowing us to put something else into CM:SF in place of it. So with WW2 coming up we'll definitely have to revisit this in some way. I don't know what we'll actually do, because this is a thorny technical issue, but we will certainly look at making some changes.

Steve

[Huntarr]

We are all talking about these right?

[Hev]

well i am

and as a side thought i havent seen them move as far as i recal.

[ October 02, 2007, 06:52 PM: Message edited by: Hev ]

[M1A1TC]

These definatly look like hasty defensive positions, not foxholes

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[aka_tom_w]

the seam you are referring to was described by Steve as the secret as to why the game gives faster FPS rates now.

(I will search for his post, it was today somewhere)

I think this what you are seeing and referring to:

yes?

Kevin Kinscherff ,

quote:

I wonder what was the technical breakthrough that increased FPS. If it's not secret it would be interesting to know.

End quote.

What we did was identify that one of the biggest reasons for slowdowns was the 8x8 grid being drawn in the distance with one texture for each 8x8 spot. This is the way to get maximum detail, but it is slower. After it became clear to us that people would be willing to take a small hit to the graphics to get a larger boost in speed, Charles recoded the engine to use a technique that FPS and RTS games use. That is...

Instead of drawing a unique tile for each 8x8 spot, large sections of the map are drawn using a portion of a much larger texture. The portion shown matches the terrain type, so you still can see what the different terrain types are, but the detail is reduced because you're not seeing a "custom made" tile for that one spot. The thing is that it's hardly noticable at medium range, not noticable at all at far range. Therefore the graphics quality tradeoff isn't as much as we initially thought it would be, but the speed boost is MUCH better than we hoped for. In other words, we didn't use this technique earlier because we thought the tradeoff would be noticably worse graphics for a small increase in speed. We're very glad we were wrong about both

Steve

[ October 02, 2007, 08:02 PM: Message edited by: aka_tom_w ]

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[aka_tom_w]

no no no, really, its a texture thing you are seeing ( I think)

if you are talking about the line of textures on the terrain that renders on the fly (sort of) as you scroll over it, about 2/3 deep into the map, then that is exactly what Steve is talking about.

If I interpret your comments correctly regarding the seam you see its the render on the fly distant terrain that Steve said is part of the FPS speed increase.

right?

[ October 02, 2007, 08:18 PM: Message edited by: aka_tom_w ]

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