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The road ahead... a recap


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Will operations return, or some form of fighting back and forth over the same battlefield?

They area already present in CMSF. The Ghost campaign has one, and I believe one of Paper Tiger's campaigns has one or two. In fact the first two missions of the Marines campaign constitute one as well.

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They area already present in CMSF. The Ghost campaign has one, and I believe one of Paper Tiger's campaigns has one or two. In fact the first two missions of the Marines campaign constitute one as well.

Do they have persistant craters, destruction, vehicle wrecks, immobilised vehicles a shifting front line and such? (comps broken, so I don't know).

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Do they have persistant craters, destruction, vehicle wrecks, immobilised vehicles a shifting front line and such? (comps broken, so I don't know).

Nothing persistent except the map itself. So yes there's a shifting front line, no to everything else.

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Steve,

I'm not really that interested in a Britt only module however, if you guys could include a couple of kick A#@ campaigns (1 US Army, and 1 Marine) as well as maybe a few more Army or Marine Toys; It might just give the US only guys enough incentive to purchase .... hint ... hint ..

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There will definitely not be a return to the CMx1 Operations. The whole problem with "campaigns" is the vast array of possible designs and the fact that people generally only like one or two types. This means that no matter what design we go with there will be people upset with our choice. Operations were generally not well received by the full CMx1 customer base. That is why in 2001 or so we decided that we were going to abandon the concept. It simply was too much work to get it functional for too few people. Now that CMx2's Campaign system is out for people to kick around, we know we made the right decision.

While CMx2's campaign system can use some improvements (nothing we've ever made escapes that statement), generally the new system has been received far better than the old one. This is not surprising to us at all, since that's why we chose the current CMx2 format over the old CMx1 format. So instead of frittering away our valuable time making very minor improvements (we were past the point of diminishing returns on Operations from a programming standpoint) to a system that wasn't very popular, we are instead spending less time and making larger improvements on a system that is far more popular.

One thing we will eventually put into the game is "persistent damage" between battles. It's a non-trivial thing to do and it really has limited applications, but we do understand why some people want to see it. Therefore, it's on the list but not very high up. Plenty of other good stuff is ahead of it.

Steve

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The good thing about this whole system (like CMx1) is that you can still simulate some early war battles with the given mix of equipment to some extent. I would also love to see an early war module (France, Poland, June - February Barbarossa) but I will take what I can get as this is turning into a great game system (now that I can actually play it as my technical issues have been mostly dealt with - thanks to BF and players for the help in fixing it).

My question concerns the feasibility of creating an entire movie from stitched together turns. That was one feature lacking in CMx1 and there was some talk about it earlier in CMx2. Has the gavel come down on one side or the other for its feasibility? I would love to see the entire game played out after it is all said and done with all information being visible. This would be a great learning tool and would be very interesting to watch at the end to see what both sides did.

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We recognize the desirability of watching the whole game as one long movie. For RealTime this is definitely not practical without a second computer hooked up as a recording device. The amount of disk interaction is just too prone to causing stuttering due to the demands of the game plus disk IO.

For WeGo it is more practical since the data is generated and stored to disk before the actual action starts. However, having one uninterrupted, continuous playback of a battle is a big departure from what goes on right now. The way things are the 60 seconds worth of action is loaded in one chunk, not streamed. From a programming standpoint the two are very different, with streaming being much more complicated and prone to error.

What this means is that we would LOVE to do it, but we don't know when it will be practical to tackle. In theory it is possible, it's just not necessarily practical.

Steve

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So it makes sense to us that by the time 12 months post Normandy rolls around you guys will want some new game features to play with. The logical place to do that is with this Title.

May i remind you, that CMSF was released 7/2007? So that makes already 15 months waiting for the next title-release!

btw: in the meanwhile i have a credit-card - where can i place my pre-order?

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May i remind you, that CMSF was released 7/2007? So that makes already 15 months waiting for the next title-release!

I'm going to make the (possibly controversial) claim that CMSF was not truly released until 1.10 - and we even got the first module at the same time! So really, they're 6 months ahead of the game :)

Or hell, we can even say 1.08 was the true release date (April), and 6 months after we got the first module, so we're right on schedule. And this way we get Normandy and Brits at the same time, so everyone has the Sophie's Choice of where their time goes.

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Not to bring doom and gloom to this thread but I do hope when the first WW2 game is released that it is in better shape than CMSF when it first came out.

Actually I hear that they plan on re-introducing all the old bugs in the engine, just so it can be like old times.

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Actually I hear that they plan on re-introducing all the old bugs in the engine, just so it can be like old times.

That made me laugh quite a bit. :D

British Tommy, I wouldn't worry too much about the first WWII title. Since it's basically going to be an improved CMSF engine, it should be better than CMSF is now, let alone when it was originally released!

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No operations? Oh well they will be missed but the new campaign system is better anyway.

I hope persistent battlefields are ready in some form for the WW2 release, there are countless battles where armies fought each other over the same bit of land for days or even weeks.

While craters, wrecks and damage to structures are very important to a lengthy battle, I have very fond memories of other parts of operations in CMx1 games.

Things like shifting fronts and fighting over who controls tacticle pieces of terrain for the next battle. I remember having a Priest mobile artillary being immobilised in the first battle but still being able to support my defenses for 3 more battles before the front line overran it. I remember abandoned tanks being recoverable if you kept them on your side of the front, or damaged tanks being repairable to an extent. I could go on for ages about the good times I had with operations and I hope to have them again some day with CMx2 games.

Oh and if we'll get flame throwers, does that mean we'll get burning terrain? Yay!

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And with the CMSF modules selling nicely and no outsiders *Cough* Paradox *Cough* presuring them for an early release I'm sure well get a finished product this time.

Since when has BF been put under pressure from Paradox? I can't see Steve and the team losing sleep over it if they were.

I can't find any other war games which are in the same class as BF's.

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Actually I hear that they plan on re-introducing all the old bugs in the engine, just so it can be like old times.

All I was trying to point out was that when CMSF was first released, it got hammered by player comments. If you don't believe me, just do a search on the internet.

I just don't want to see it happen again. Like many others here I have my credit card ready to buy the next WW2 game and I look forward to designing scenarios with the new game and even been thinking about converting the ones I've made for CMx1 such as Storm 555.

With so many excited players here, someone has to step forward and mention it.

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All I was trying to point out was that when CMSF was first released, it got hammered by player comments. If you don't believe me, just do a search on the internet.

I just don't want to see it happen again. Like many others here I have my credit card ready to buy the next WW2 game and I look forward to designing scenarios with the new game and even been thinking about converting the ones I've made for CMx1 such as Storm 555.

With so many excited players here, someone has to step forward and mention it.

I don't think we will be seeing the sort of problems in Normandy that we saw in Shock Force, the reason being is that the major bugs have already been worked out through the patches. Battlefront isn't starting the code/engine/whatever from scratch to build Normandy; they are using the same code/engine/whatever that was made for Shock Force. Evolution, not revolution, as Steve has said before.

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Hi all, been a very long time since I have posted or even checked in on this forum. I just got back to VA, from six months of Navy schooling in San Diego and was surfing and said "Hey lets see what Battlefront is up to.".

I felt burnt by CMSF when I bought the CE version, seems like they have finally worked through the most egregious bugs at last! The only problem is I can not find my disc LOL. So, therefore in a vote of support for BF, I will order the Combo Pack with the Marines. Please keep up the good work BF! Now hurry up with the WWII title :)

Downloading now!!!!

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