Further Releases of CMx2 engine

[Sequoia]

In regard to the progression of future CM 2 WW2 releases on the Eastern front. Can anyone else see the merit if they were released in historical order? I think it would give a better sense of history and if nothing else the early war tanks in Barbarossa would make a nice contrast following on from CM 2 Normandy.

It's been discussed. Going with Bagration first gets us East Front twice as fast as the German stuff will already have been finished for the France '44 game. I'm good with that.

But with that in mind all you WWII fans where should Battlefront go after Normandy and Bagration? Bulge? Kursk? How about Fall of the Reich, Germany Spring '45? One game with

U.S. in the base game and Commonwealth and Soviet modules. All the late war stuff plus

some prototype vehicles like the Maus. That would also allow Patton fantasy scenarios of West vs Soviets.

[Battlefront.com]

Cabal23,

I just figured since the game depends on scenario designers and modders to keep it alive, it pretty much is a sand box game.

Not by our definition. It's a set of limited features which just happen to be quite flexible within those limitations. In our mind a "sandbox game", in wargaming terms, is one that allows you to do far more than make scenarios and swap graphics/sounds around. But it's a matter of opinion since there is no official definition The point is, however, that CMx1 nor CMx2 were designed to be MORE than what they were advertised to be. In the case of CMBO it was NW France from Normandy to the fall of Germany. In CMBB it was pretty much the whole damned theater (we were smoking crack for 2 years, I guess!). CMAK was North Africa and Italy, while CM:SF is Syria in 2009ish timeframe. So on and so forth. You could not do France 1940 with CMBO, you could not do Yugoslavia 1941 with CMBB, you couldn't do Crete with CMAK, and you can't do Iran with CM:SF. Not to mention not being able to do Vietnam, the Somme, Gulf War 1, Fulda Gap, Space Lobsters, etc.

I just think you could sell a ton more games if you changed direction and became more flexible with what is offered.

That, right there, is where the theory breaks down. We have a very limited audience to cater to. Opening the game up would bring in some new people, for sure, but it wouldn't likely be more than the sales lost to the core crowd when they say "no thanks BFC, I already have that and am happy with it".

The secret of the big game companies is that they really aren't giving away anything that they weren't already planning on abandoning anyway. Typically a particular game release can only make one appearance before it needs a complete overhaul. So what do they do? They get all the sales they can from Release A during its VERY limited prime selling time (a couple of weeks or months, depending). With a huge wad of cash in hand, and revenue coming in from all sorts of other places, including stockholders, they go about making Release B. Release B is designed to blow the doors off of Release A by taking advantage of new hardware technology, mostly, or some sort of trendy thing which wasn't in the first game. When Release B comes out it doesn't work with the previous stuff "as is", so people have to purchase Release B and the modders have to transfer their stuff to it. At which point they start working on Release C (if things are going well) or completely abandon that particular game and move onto something entirely different (or go out of business, as is often the case).

What would happen to us is rather simple. We'd sell Release A very well and have a nice chunk of change that compensated us for our previous work, if we're lucky. People would mod the Hell out of it and we'd have to put our noses right back to the grindstone to create a new game experience. Chances are it wouldn't look much different than the old one, or put another way not different enough to matter. Yet the costs and risk would go up dramatically for us. And if it didn't pan out we don't have big sugar daddies to step in and write off our debt and then give us money to continue moving forward again.

I suppose if someone could figure out a way for us to open the game engine up to stuff we have no intention of doing, like WW1 for example, then we'd probably be fine with that. But the reality is once the cork is out of the bottle, so is the genii and our ability to remain in business. Getting outsiders to help with the Modules is a good compromise, since it does allow us to get content that the core of Battlefront would not have time to do, but it does it in a way that actually makes us stronger instead of killing us.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Bagration is not coming right on the heels of Normandy, just so you know After Bagration we have no definite plans. Personally I think it's a tossup between Barbarossa to Stalingrad and Kursk to just before Bagration (those winter pocket battles are, of course, legendary). The problem with the Eastern Front is that it is not as good of a seller as the Western Front, much to my Ostfront heart's dismay sometimes. I like the Western Front a lot, but the thought of a crushing Soviet combined arms assault on beat up hand-me-down German tanks and worn out infantry is my idea of a fun time

Steve

[Hawk66]

Steve,

Some clarifications...

The Modules for CM:SF are independent of the game's core code, though of course here and there we've had to make code changes to support weapons/units specific to the Marines. But essentially they aren't changing the core of the game and therefore are riding on top of whatever the game engine is that the products are based around.

Steve

thanks for your explanations. Then the 'module strategy' makes sense, of course.

Just allow me one further question/comment :-):

Wouldn't it make sense to increase your development team, so that you could develop two branches in parallel: the 'modern' set and the 'WWII' set...or are the selling numbers of CM just not that high enough?

[cabal23]

Thanks for the explanation. It helped a lot. I was under the impression since past games were based in the WWII theater, that there would be a similar format for Shock Force. Modern conflicts around the world that are fictional. Russia, Iran, N.Korea, ect. It's all good. This is still my favorite game .

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Cabal23,

...you couldn't do Crete with CMAK, and you can't do Iran with CM:SF.

Errrr, yes you could. You guys included Crete as a separate theatre, remember?

Get some sleep Steve.

[kipanderson]

Steve,

“to just before Bagration (those winter pocket battles are, of course, legendary).”

Steve… you’re sane after all… I am shocked…

Korsun Pocket… operationally a real stunner…

If not Korsun Pocket… then winter ‘42/’43…. Stalingrad… Leningrad… the Kharkov/Manstein SS counter attack… crying out for a module all of its own.

The problem I have with ’41 Eastern Front is the lack of balance in the quality of the forces. If one were to build realistic scenarios, which for me is the point of CM, you are talking militia quality Soviet troops. A huge and very heroic militia but truly hopeless in their quality in all ways.

Winter ‘42/’43 or ‘43/’44… .

Lots of fun to come…

All the best,

Kip.

[Battlefront.com]

Hawk66,

Just allow me one further question/comment :-):

Wouldn't it make sense to increase your development team, so that you could develop two branches in parallel: the 'modern' set and the 'WWII' set...or are the selling numbers of CM just not that high enough?

It comes down to cashflow. There's simply not enough money coming in at any given period of time to dramatically increase our staff, even though theoretically we would get reimbursed later on. So what we've done is got a second, fully independent, development group going making the Modules while we concentrate on the primary game for a particular Family (what we call the Title game). We also have a small legion of tireless volunteers that do a wide variety of necessary tasks. This does speed up the development process by a lot, but it is not a fully parallel venture. Charles and I still have to do work on the Modules, just not nearly as much. Well, except for the Marines one because that was our first and that was largely an internal project.

Last edited by Hawk66 : Today at 04:52 AM.

cabal23,

Thanks for the explanation. It helped a lot. I was under the impression since past games were based in the WWII theater, that there would be a similar format for Shock Force. Modern conflicts around the world that are fictional. Russia, Iran, N.Korea, ect. It's all good. This is still my favorite game .

It's a tough concept for customers to wrap their heads around unless they've done it themselves. Which is why I take the time to explain it. Someday I'll get smart and just link to a thread like this instead of retyping most of the core issues

The primary problem with code is that it is very inflexible. And the more you try to force it to be flexible, the more brittle and difficult it is to work with. CMBB was a nightmare for us to make because we needed to break so many of the things in CMBO to get CMBB to where we wanted it to be. Commonly called "hacks", "bloody hacks", "spaghetti code", and other fun things , over time they become more and more and more a source of problem the further away from the original design one goes. And this is without trying to preserve backwards compatibility! To do that things get even messier.

This is why CMAK had very few game changes compared to CMBB. It is also why we abandoned the CMx1 code base and started fresh. While it is impossible, in any practical sense, to write code that can be modified indefinitely in unforeseen ways without major difficulty, one can write code that is more friendly to it. In order to do that you have to pretty much know what you want from the start and plan for expansion. CMBO was not written with that knowledge, CM:SF was. Hence the difference between the two. Even still, there is only so far things can go.

A great example of this is the original LOS system in CM:SF. It was more refined and powerful than CMx1, but it had some shortcomings which were obviously a problem for many customers. We tweaked it, tweaked it, and tweaked it some more. Eventually we got to a point where there was a conflict between two needs which were mutually exclusive (this is the low wall issue). Charles was faced with making a really bloody hack to sort things out or to spend a wee bit more time and rewrite that entire section of code. Because CMx2 was structured to allow for such possibilities, it was theoretically practical (performance issues prevented earlier adoption) to rip out the old and insert a new system. That might not have been the case with CMx1.

File format, unfortunately, must evolve. When it evolves it becomes difficult to maintain backwards compatibility and still make improvements to the game itself. Sucks, but that's the way it goes. Sometimes the files are internal, like TO&E, other times they are external, like the Campaign file format. The TO&E files for Normandy will be very different, so to make SF stuff work I'd have to spend a long time reformatting everything. Charles would also have to reformat the unit data, since their structures are going to change too.

My point is... while there are good marketing reasons for us to stop supporting a game system at some point, there are major technical reasons as well. Customers generally only see the one and not the other unless they're in the same sort of business. Backwards computability isn't easy if you're into making improvements.

Elmar,

Errrr, yes you could. You guys included Crete as a separate theatre, remember?

Sure, and we were paid for doing that AND it wasn't released to the general public. So that doesn't count

Steve

[Sequoia]

Elmar,

Sure, and we were paid for doing that AND it wasn't released to the general public. So that doesn't count

Steve

No Steve, you're still not awake. You gave us Crete with the general CMAK release. I'm playing it now. Greece is the extra you got paid for by the Australian Army.

You going to introduce us to the new guys soon?

[stikkypixie]

Less talk...more marines

[Battlefront.com]

No Steve, you're still not awake. You gave us Crete with the general CMAK release. I'm playing it now. Greece is the extra you got paid for by the Australian Army.

Damn, I guess the brain really does require sleep at least occasionally

Steve

[RuhrRiver]

Why couldn't BF sink all of its money into giving everyone what they want, hire a lot more staff on spec, etc., and then, when all the bills become due and cash flow is a problem, say that you need a federal bail-out to avoid making the entire WEGO military gaming industry insolvent? Okay, getting the feds to stop laughing long enough to hear the details of the plan would be a problem, but this little strategy is so crazy it just might...

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Don't be silly RuhrRiver. That'll never work outside of an election year.

BFC would have just a few weeks to hire thousands of people and run up a debt of tens of billions of dollars. Any debt lesser then that and the feds won't cough up. It has to be tens of billions. Sorry. Maybe in four years, eh?

[Battlefront.com]

Funny enough, Charles and I had the same thought! What we said was "damn, if only we had mismanaged our company really badly and had some friends in $5000 suits who are sleeping with various people in the regulatory departments. If oil people can do it, why can't we?"

Grrrrrr.... this especially pisses me off because I pulled what little money I had in stocks (including 401k) out of the investment pools and put the money into money market funds. Hmmm... that was something like 10 years ago I did that. Why? Because it was so FLIPPIN OBVIOUS that we were headed for this disaster even to a layperson like me way back when. Now I have to help pay for other people's greed and lack of morals. Almost enough to make me want to switch my membership from the Greedy Capitalist Pig Club to the Socialist Fantasy Camp. At least the Socialists don't hide the fact that they are all about taking my hard earned money and misusing it.

Steve

[Mord]

Grrrrrr.... this especially pisses me off because I pulled what little money I had in stocks (including 401k) out of the investment pools and put the money into money market funds. Hmmm... that was something like 10 years ago I did that. Why? Because it was so FLIPPIN OBVIOUS that we were headed for this disaster even to a layperson like me way back when. Now I have to help pay for other people's greed and lack of morals. Almost enough to make me want to switch my membership from the Greedy Capitalist Pig Club to the Socialist Fantasy Camp. At least the Socialists don't hide the fact that they are all about taking my hard earned money and misusing it.

Steve

I've been deemed a great investment...my interests rates are rather narrow but the joy and fuzziness you'll feel in seeing me thrive makes up for it.

Mord.

[-Pv-]

While it happens to be a so-called Republican administration in which the melt down happened, it's the people working for the "Socialist Fantasy Camp" who caused it. It's just that the "Greedy Capitalist Pig Club" didn't have the courage to stop them. Just take a look at where the advisers for the SFC used to work and which community activists got the most money from it.

It can be considered a compliment when a large number of people think what you do is easy so long as you don't have to tight rope your way across the Grand Canyon to prove them right. Let's just let BFC code the games they like and the rest of us vote with our wallets.

-Pv-

[purpheart23]

And another thread dies due to politics.

[Battlefront.com]

Greed is apolitical, as is stupidity, ignorance, and just plain old wishful thinking My parents bought a house towards the upper end of the housing market. I told them they were fools for buying it at that price, they said "that's what it's worth and the value will only increase over time". Two years later, after the slide started, things changed and they had to sell the house. And whaddaya know? It was worth about 1/8th less than when they bought it, even though they invested a decent chunk into fixing some stuff up. Thankfully some chumps bought it and now it's worth even less. People believe what they want to believe. People like my parents are partly responsible for their own financial demise. And they are most definitely not in the Socialist Fantasy Camp, not even as a part time affiliate member

which community activists got the most money from it.

Investment banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies are "community activists"? Learn something new every day

It can be considered a compliment when a large number of people think what you do is easy so long as you don't have to tight rope your way across the Grand Canyon to prove them right. Let's just let BFC code the games they like and the rest of us vote with our wallets.

Well said. I'm a true believer in Capitalism, despite it's obvious warts and puss filled boils. We aren't in this business to make money (we would be fools if that were the case), but we do want to get fair compensation for our labor. Thanks to the Internet we can do that since we're bypassing the cartels that used to control the destiny of little companies like us. But it also means we can't hid behind endcaps, spiffs, channel stuffing, and slick marketing campaigns to compensate for quality products. If we don't deliver you guys won't buy in sufficient numbers to keep us doing what we do. Without the corruption of the distribution system interfering, it's a pretty fair arrangement.

Steve

[cabal23]

Not to be too nosy but about how many people are out there playing this game do you think? What does the pre-order tell you about the games future?

[Battlefront.com]

Preorders, which are for the hard copies only, are VERY nice. We'll probably sell as many in the first couple of days that we thought we'd sell over a couple of months. What that tells us is that despite the bumpy start we've still got a lot of people playing the game and looking forward to playing more of it.

So far the Module concept looks like it is working out great. We're very, very pleased with the Marines Module and all our testers are anxious (understatement!) to get cracking on the British Module. Hopefully we can get them started on that within a few weeks. All the while work on the Normandy release continues, both in terms of tangible production and design work.

This is all very good news for everybody. It's taken us about 4 years to get to this point of all things coming together. It's nice to know that we didn't waste a lot of time for nothing

Steve

[7thGalaxy]

You might not have wasted a lot of time, but boy am I looking forward to wasting a lot of time once the marines module is out ... If playing games can be called such

[Chops]

That is great news Steve, glad to hear things are looking good for you guys. I want to thank you, Charles, Martin, Dan, and the rest of the extremely hardworking Battlefront crew for providing us with such an outstanding product and hours (days,years) of incredibly engaging entertainment. Really looking forward to the Marines!

[The_Red_Rage]

That is great news Steve, glad to hear things are looking good for you guys. I want to thank you, Charles, Martin, Dan, and the rest of the extremely hardworking Battlefront crew for providing us with such an outstanding product and hours (days,years) of incredibly engaging entertainment. Really looking forward to the Marines!

I second that. It's been a ride ever since downloading Beyond Overlord demo while bored on a Sunday night (followed by an immidate order and agonizing 2 weeks of replaying the same two missions over and over again while waiting for CD to arrive). While knowing nothing about wargaming prior to CM experience, it became the gaming franchise i've committed the most time to!

Now hurry up and give us Marines, we are going crazy over here!!! :D

[M1A1TC]

I second that. It's been a ride ever since downloading Beyond Overlord demo while bored on a Sunday night (followed by an immidate order and agonizing 2 weeks of replaying the same two missions over and over again while waiting for CD to arrive). While knowing nothing about wargaming prior to CM experience, it became the gaming franchise i've committed the most time to!

Now hurry up and give us Marines, we are going crazy over here!!! :D

He he, pretty much my experience. I remember when I got the manual with the CD inside, and it was bent by the postal office pretty badly. I had to straighten it out, and pray to gods that it worked, and it did. I still have it, even though none of my 3 PCs will run it anymore

[CogNative]

I'm a true believer in Capitalism, despite it's obvious warts and puss filled boils. We aren't in this business to make money (we would be fools if that were the case) ..."

Or... an investment bank, a brokerage firm, an insurance company or maybe a "community activists?

"We do want to get fair compensation for our labor."

Sounds fair to me.

"If we don't deliver you guys won't buy in sufficient numbers to keep us doing what we do. Without the corruption of the distribution system interfering, it's a pretty fair arrangement."

No Entertainment OPEC. Fair enough.

"Thanks to the Internet we can do that since we're bypassing the cartels that used to control the destiny of little companies like us. But it also means we can't hid behind endcaps, spiffs, channel stuffing, and slick marketing campaigns to compensate for quality products."

Quality products! Substance that is (or is made to do = patched) what you sell it as? That could be an economic and political system that may not need $700 Billion bail out.

M1A1TC, "I remember when I got the manual with the CD inside, and it was bent by the postal office pretty badly.."

Same scenario but my CMBB (Mac) was snapped in half by the USPS.. a floppy CD. Replaced by BFC w/o any hassles

Quality Service & Quality products & Quality Entertainment... in an economic and political system controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Wishful thinking for much of the world so .... "It's nice to know that we didn't waste a lot of time for nothing.":cool:

Cheers!

CogNative