Did piracy kill the commercial viability of CMx1?

[sandy]

Spot on in a nutshell dalem!

If it were really 1:1 then spotting would be from each little pixel soldier to each other little pixel soldier.

Not from the centre of an 8m x 8m grid to another similar grid square.

That is the issue (design decision) I THINK Michael Dorosh is going on about (at least in part).

I must admit I was very disappointed to learn about the 8m x 8m "action spots" and to see how my units move to the centre of the nearest action spot even when I try to halt them in place immediately.

But that design error is history and cannot be changed until CM3, so I can see BF's exasperation at people complaining about it.

But why are they refusing to fix QBs, or to bring back unit selection??

No way do I believe that CM3 is needed to bring those key positive features (QBs with unit selection) back - it is a case of BF refusing to admit an error (and therefore it cannot be corrected until it is perceived as an error).

"Perception is all" is the message - BF perceives CMSF as improved. However with the many changes made from CM1 many people posting here perceive CMSF to be broken. BF says we know and we don't care. Not the right way to treat core customers, I (and others) say. Get lost, we want new customers! says BF.

Unless we can get BF to change their minds on at least the changeable things (ie NOT 1:1), it will stay broken.

Message to BF - please change your minds on the value of QBs and unit selection.

[hoolaman]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

None of this addresses the real issue; which in my opinion is that 1:1 representation, at present, simply doesn't do any more than heighten expectation of increased modelling of unit abilities/capabilities without actually explicitly modelling them.

So in order to get this 1:1 graphical capability in, the game has been stripped of other capabilities - WEGO TCP, random maps, etc. - but for what is apparently little gain.

This may simply be faulty perception, but I've mentioned this before - without any kind of detailed manual or Designer's Notes, for the "detail obsessed grog" CMX2 simply looks like "CM Lite".

Hence the frustration of the Old Guard. And as I've said before, all the good intentions in the world and reassurances by the developer won't change that. So at this point we are all talking in circles from our own well-meaning perspectives.

In short - if I'm going to see every soldier on the battlefield, I'll look forward to the day where they behave in realistic ways and I can get them to do realistic things with a minimum of fuss. Watching them fight to the death, but not engage in close combat, seems odd, as does watching them stack up to clear a house, but not have any stairwells or interior walls; watching them give buddy aid, but never seeing them surrender; watching them climb individually into vehicles and reload their weapons, but never throw grenades over top of a wall.

Do the RT players really care if this stuff ever gets in? Do they have a reason to?

Right now, the gains have been "under the hood" stuff, and physical appearance. The modelling (including TacAI but also the 1:1 rep points I mentioned, among others) seems to be an area that still needs to be developed. That's all fair enough, but once that does catch up - as we hope the intention is - then perhaps the CMX1 fans will be more satisfied that we have a worthy successor.

I fail to see how this is the "real issue" to date, since I don't see anyone else mention it except you. But maybe they are preoccupied with the other technical and design issues. Maybe when the game is fully patched and working as it should this is what we will all be complaining about. Something to look forward to?

[TheVulture]

Originally posted by sandy:

Spot on in a nutshell dalem!

If it were really 1:1 then spotting would be from each little pixel soldier to each other little pixel soldier.

Not from the centre of an 8m x 8m grid to another similar grid square.

That is the issue (design decision) I THINK Michael Dorosh is going on about (at least in part).

I must admit I was very disappointed to learn about the 8m x 8m "action spots" and to see how my units move to the centre of the nearest action spot even when I try to halt them in place immediately.

But that design error is history and cannot be changed until CM3, so I can see BF's exasperation at people complaining about it.

It's hardly a design error - more of a design necessity. Performing LoS checks between every individual soldier and vehicle is too computationally intensive (and the time required increases as the square of the number of units involved, so it would very quickly become the bottleneck in the system, which pretty much always determines the maximum size of engagements. (And going from squads in CMx1 to individuals in CMx2 means 5-10 times as many units roughly, and 25-100 times longer calculations - possibly more given the finer terrain mesh and more detailed terrain, which means each single point to point LoS check takes longer).

The trick to get around that is to use pre-computed LoS maps, which get generated at the start of the battle (and modified as terrain changes). And that, incidentally, varies with the fourth power of the linear map size (unless there is some clever workaround I can't spot). There is a maximum size grid of points you can cope with before you run out of memory (which doesn't vary much from machine to machine - going from 1 gig of memory dedicated to this to 4 gig would only increase the linear size by 40%).

As an aside, if you want to cover a bigger battlefield with a fixed number of grid points, you need a wider grid spacing. People are already complaining that a) the grid spacing it too wide and at the same time that the map size limits are too small. But you can't improve one without making the other worse (for a given size of memory available for the maps).

So we have too many individuals for individual one to one spotting (and besides, that would terminally screw up the ability of the game engine to scale up to larger battles), and memory constraints mean you have to trade off between grid spacing and overall map size.

And don't get me started on the memory and CPU tme requirements for pathfinding algorithms...

[thewood]

Vulture, but aren't you basically arguing that we aren't ready for 1:1 soldier scaling. That the abstraction in CM1 was appropriate.

That seems to me what Doroash is saying also.

[sandy]

Well explained Vulture. I agree and understand all that you say.

You have pointed out that we do not have the computational power to handle a full 1:1 version of CM (yet). That is why it was an design error, albeit a very brave and understandable one.

From what I have seen the match between computer capability and wargame realism (=suspension of disbelief that I am recreating history and not watching an interactive TV show) was better with CM1 than what I have seen so far with CMSF.

I shall await better machines and CM3

[TheVulture]

Well yes, True 1:1 representation for anything much above platoon level would seem (to my mind) to be somewhat beyond the abilities of current processors.

I'd agree that the level of abstraction of terrain and units in CMx1 meshed well together (20m tiles work fine when you are abstracting a squad of 10 people covering something more than a 10m x 10m area in reality, as a single point).

BUT (and this is an important one), BFC are insisting that there simply wasn't a market for further games (of the type they were interested in doing) based around that level of abstraction. And as Steve may have mentioned in passing, they are the ones with the sales and marketing data to back that up. So if they were going to do something that was a) commercially viable (hopefully) and still resembled the CMx1 concept to some extent (rather than writing say a FPS based on squirrels raiding a badgers den with a variety of squirrel-sized weapons ... CM:Squirrel Force...) then moving towards 1:1 representation was one of the few innovations they could do (at least, no others spring to mind right now for me).

I don't think we need to wait for CM3. But it might take a few patches and ongoing feedback from the players to get to the right mix of abstraction and general tweaking before the game 'feels' right to most people (caveat: it probably feels good enough to some people now... I expect that number to grow with every patch as the tacAI improves, bugs are resolved, game 'balance' issues are sorted (infantry vulnerability for example), and the UI is tweaked in response to what most people find they need).

[sandy]

Very positive approach Vulture, I should try to adopt your attitude.

My problem is that I remain unconvinced about "ongoing feedback from the players to get to the right mix of abstraction and general tweaking" actually getting through to BF.

I have seen no responses from them on the issues with QBs and unit selection that I would consider positive.

[Thomm]

Originally posted by sandy:

I have seen no responses from them on the issues with QBs ...

Heck, I was trying to find out what is up with QBs yesterday, but when I pressed OK the game just jumped back to the main screen (I selected 'Hill' terrain).

Best regards,

Thomm

[undead reindeer cavalry]

there exist no technical limitation what comes to map sizes, unit counts, terrain fidelity and such. it's most of all a design question, and secondarily a question of how much coding time you are willing to invest in it.

even what comes CMSF, with its fancy calculations of bullet trajectories and all that stuff, it is all computed in REAL TIME.

[thewood]

Looking at the issues with 1:1 and finding the level of abstraction that the market would bear, CMSF should have had a public beta. I know contractual and timing issues prevailed, but of all the games that release early demos, this probably needed it.

[hoolaman]

Originally posted by sandy:

Well explained Vulture. I agree and understand all that you say.

You have pointed out that we do not have the computational power to handle a full 1:1 version of CM (yet). That is why it was an design error, albeit a very brave and understandable one.

From what I have seen the match between computer capability and wargame realism (=suspension of disbelief that I am recreating history and not watching an interactive TV show) was better with CM1 than what I have seen so far with CMSF.

I shall await better machines and CM3

I would completely disagree that it is about the power of the computers. The real issue is that giving the TacAI subtle nuances is a matter of programming rather than raw processing power.

If games companies would commit hundreds of man hours to developing amazing AI for a game, games would be an intellectual and entertaining experience. The problem is, people would appreciate it if it was there, but would not miss it if it wasn't

[thewood]

I think the issue is that we are used to the AI in CM1. While, after 7 years we have figured out the AI in CM1, it is still one of the best AI's in a commercial game. We are used to that and didn't expect a step backwards in CMSF.