Shortfall in LOF Reciprocity

[c3k]

Gents,

Playing a city fight as Blue vs. Red, WeGo Elite.

A couple of situations have occurred which have me, well, griping here.

A red RPG gunner is positioned on the corner of a building up on the third floor. He is currently suppressed, so is prone and out of LOS. Fine, he has fired at my men, and a Bradley. He will die. But how? My Bradley, despite having a clear LOS to his position CANNOT fire on it. The only option available is to area fire on his floor of the building. Although the Bradley can see the corner of the building, it CANNOT see the center of the building. Hence, no area fire option.

Anyone else see this happen? Do I need to run a screenshot?

Thoughts?

Regards,

Ken

[Huntarr]

If you Area Fire the floor of the building with a BFV's TARGET LIGHT it's TacAI will spread the fire across the face of the building and the penetration of the rounds will kill that RPG since the RPG is not in the center of the building.

I'd be happy to look at an image or save if you wish c3k.

[fireship4]

But as he said, he cannot area fire the floor as he can only see the corner.

[Lanzfeld]

I think this has come up before and it is just a limitation of the game engine at this point. You have to move the Bradley to get a better angle on the buliding. I may be wrong though...

[Huntarr]

The only option available is to area fire on his floor of the building. Although the Bradley can see the corner of the building,...

Based on what c3k wrote he can see the building. Again without seeing the situation I can only base it on his words.

[c3k]

Huntarr,

Um, based on what I wrote, I emphasized that the Bradley cannot see the center of the floor, hence cannot area fire. In fact, if you look up at my original post, I even capitalized "cannot" to add emphasis.

So, the Bradley has been fired on, and hit, by an RPG gunner standing in the corner of a building. The RPG gunner was suppressed and is now out of LOS since he's lying on the floor. The Bradley's only option is to area fire at that floor. However, an intervening building blocks LOS to the all of the target building except the left 1/3, including the corner with the RPG gunner. Since LOF snaps to the center, the Bradley is incapable of firing on the gunner's position.

I hate screenies: I've got to fire up Fraps, dig through my saves (over 1,000 right now!), replay the action until I find the event, do the screen-save, go online, upload the screen, come back here, post the embedded link.

I'm willing to go through the hassle if this is something you don't understand (verbiage describing a visual situation can be confusing - no condescension meant), or if it's something you've never seen. However, based on some of the upstream replies, others have seen this situation.

So, in sum, I can see the left side of the building. I cannot see the center or the right side of the building. They can shoot at me; if they are suppressed, I cannot fire back, even as area fire.

Thanks,

Ken

[Thomm]

1. Anyone else see this happen?

2. Do I need to run a screenshot?

3. Thoughts?

1. Yes.

2. As far as I am concerned, no.

3. We cannot target building corners, we cannot target vehicle corners. It is a limitation of the current engine.

Best regards,

Thomm

[cool breeze]

If LOS or lof with buildings is only done from the center then how come I move around my target to find the extra blue patch when targeting buildings? Im not contradicting anyone, I have seen how you cant shoot the side of a building when another building is mostly in the way but this seems inconsistent.

[Huntarr]

Correct cool breeze. Charles has already stated that if an enemy can hit you then you can hit them.

There is some miscommunication about how the Targeting Line works. If it can see the action spot it can target the Action Spot. It "Snaps To" the center of an Action Spot which may look like you can't hit the area. I have found that if you, like cool breeze was referring, move the Target Line over a building front you can find the "sweet spot" that will "snap" into place.

c3k, I didn't consider your response condescending in any way. We're all here to help each other. The a$$hats for the most part have left the building.

[Chelco]

I've seen this happen, but in my case the Bradley couldn't see the offending RPGer. My Bradley had a clear LOS to the position of the RPGer, but not to the RPGer himself. What I did is to area fire a building very close to the RPGer, that appeared to suppress the guy and allowed me to move the Bradley to a position with better LOS.

Cheers,

[Battlefront.com]

Remember that Spotting and LOS/LOF are two different things. It is very common to have LOS/LOF from two points, but only have one side able to spot the other.

Remember that Area Fire has the word "Area" in it The purpose of Area Fire is to saturate a generally specific spot with fire because you don't know exactly where the enemy unit is at the time you are firing. If you did then you'd have the enemy unit spotted. In the case of a building the guy could have crawled away or there may be guys in multiple locations. Therefore, generally speaking drilling all the shots into one specific spot, no matter what the terrain, is counter-productive.

However, there are instances where logically the shooting unit should concentrate fire in one specific spot. Or at least do that initially and then spread the fire out. Buildings, due to the ease of losing spotting inside, tend to highlight this exception more than other pieces of terrain. It also tends to matter more where the actual fire hits since buildings offer better average protection than other terrain does.

Ideally we would have a different form of Area Fire that was designed for whacking a specific spot. Blind Fire, or something like that. But we have no intention of adding this into the game in the form of a new set of Commands. Instead, we can possibly tweak certain logic so that the exceptional circumstances can be better covered. We've already done a TON of that in the past year and a half (i.e. prior to release through today), so I think that's where we can look for in the future.

Note that there was a similar problem in CMx1, which was noticed and commented on more than a few times. In CMx1 the fire was abstracted so visually it wasn't as apparent, but hardcore CMers did notice the behavior issues that arose from the method we used to spread out fire. And that was to decrease accuracy by something like 75%, which basically amounts to an abstracted system with similar results to CMx2's direct approach.

Steve

[c3k]

Hmm, thanks for the responses.

Here is what is the issue: the enemy unit can see me and fire at me. IF, a big "if", he stays visible, I can fire back. Yeah, Charles would be right. If he can fire at me, I can fire at him.

However, what I've described is different.

The enemy unit fired at me. I'd bet that the target/LOS line was grey. The unit only had a PARTIAL LOS to my Bradley. Hence, only the portion of the enemy unit in the corner of the building had LOS. They fired. Immediately, one of my infantry units fired back. This caused that unit, the RPG gunner, to cower.

With the RPG gunner cowering, there is NO WAY I can fire at him. Yet, if he were to pop up, I could fire. So, some sort of LOS exists. The LOF only exists if the enemy unit stops cowering.

With a 25mm Bushmaster, I'm not looking for pinpoint firing, but rather, in this case, to spray down the window and surrounding walls behind which the RPG gunner fired.

That's why I'm calling it area fire; I want to suppress a zone of a building, not hit a particular (soft) target.

However, if I can see a smoke plume coming out of the third floor, second window from the left, by god, I'm going to DESTROY that window and the surrounding walls, regardless if I can see an enemy behind it: that is not possible in this situation right now.

So, BF.C, if you could tweak the code that would be great. Right now it's a bit, err, asymmetric.

Instead of snapping area fire to a building to the center of the building floor, how about allowing area fire to snap to any of a building's action spots? My understanding is that buildings have several action spots per floor. Toss in the usual BF.C treatment for dispersion, trigger discipline, etc.

It would be nice to be able to lay suppressive fire down on a building which only has 1/3 of its facade visible, instead of requiring 1/2 or more to be in LOS.

Thanks,

Ken

[Thomm]

The problem is that the building cannot be targeted for area fire, even though a corner of it is exposed to the shooter. I know, because I had it happen to me, also, and it is very upsetting, especially when you know that ýou cannot kill the RPG gunner that is very much capable of killing your vehicle!

For me, it is a hole in the spotting/targetting system.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Thomm]

c3k,

To avoid confusion: you posted while I wrote!

This is why my post seems to be out of context.

Best regards,

Regards

[Lee]

Considering how detailed CM2 is, I'm surprised that it doesn't work that way now (that you can't target all action spots in a building for area fire that are currently in LOS). That would solve problems like this very nicely. Even if you can't see the center of the building, no problem, just target the nearest action spot in LOS in the building to where the enemy is hiding with area fire.

[Flanker15]

Hmmm I've been thinking, after you lost LOS did you get a "?" contact where the chap was? Could it be possible to make "?"s targets? So if you have a recently contact or a sound contact you can attempt to fire at the place you think it is instead of area firing at the action spot? However I am guessing that units are limited to only being able to target an area target or a real unit though. Then would it be possible for in the event that you target a "?" an invisible enemy "object" is created at the "?" which you can't hit or kill, then your unit will fire at this new "enemy".

[Battlefront.com]

Ah.... yes, OK... I know what you're talking about now. There are times when you can't Area Target a building because you can't draw LOS/LOF to its center, but can target something in a portion of the building if you can see it. Boy, if you don't like it now you should have seen it 2 years ago So the LOS/LOF isn't a problem per se, it is the fact that Area Fire on buildings requires LOS/LOF to the center while target to target does not.

This is definitely something that is on our list to address. In fact, I'm going to bump this up again on my own priority list. I don't remember the coding reasons why this issue still exists, I only know that it isn't an easy fix.

Steve

[c3k]

Steve,

Thank you for looking at this. Obviously, you'll have to halt v1.10 until this gets resolved. I'm willing to wait. Marines? They can wait as well. Ignore the wails of anguish and gnashing of teeth occurring worldwide. The patch must wait! (That may well become my new motto.)

All kidding aside, I'm very happy to hear you'll be addressing it. I hope you'll be able to come up with a decent solution.

Thanks,

Ken

[Flanker15]

Thanks Steve! It's defiantly much better than before but It good to see that it will get better.

[dan/california]

Steve, if you are going to play with the area fire coding, could you also allow area fire to spread across more than one action spot? It would be nice if one machine gun could spread the love around more widely especially in WEGO. Emptying the entire belt into a single room that is one part of a 3 story high by 3 action spot wide building is not necessarily the best option.

[Battlefront.com]

What you're looking for is a sort of Area Fire Cover Arc. That's something which has been considered and hopefully will happen at some point. It has to be player specified, unfortunately.

Steve

[Lanzfeld]

Wow Steve...

Only took 1 year and 2 months for you to respond! Is this the DMV?

LOL...

J/K.....

can we have a CM:N bone???

[c3k]

Steve,

I guess this means you linked to this from my response to the OTHER thread...

Glad this is being looked at.

Thanks,

Ken

[Chad Harrison]

Ah.... yes, OK... I know what you're talking about now. There are times when you can't Area Target a building because you can't draw LOS/LOF to its center, but can target something in a portion of the building if you can see it. Boy, if you don't like it now you should have seen it 2 years ago So the LOS/LOF isn't a problem per se, it is the fact that Area Fire on buildings requires LOS/LOF to the center while target to target does not.

This is definitely something that is on our list to address. In fact, I'm going to bump this up again on my own priority list. I don't remember the coding reasons why this issue still exists, I only know that it isn't an easy fix.

Steve

Steve

This is one of my only beefs with the current state of CM:SF. In CMx1, as long as I could see even the smallest portion of the building, I could area fire into it. I have had the same problem over and over in CM:SF where they can shoot me, but I can not shoot them, even with area fire into their building despite having a "clear shot" as far as LOS is concerned.

Would be great if this was addressed.

Thanks

Chad