Visual Bone

[bodkin]

I hope Scipio is still a beta tester and someone is looking at the potential to include some of his graphic improvements in CM:N. His weapon icons, unit silhouettes and realistic flames were the must have mods of CM:SF for me.

[flammenwerfer]

Will the game be out by July 4th?

[Pvt. Ryan]

It might be, but don't get your hopes up. It is better to be surprised than disappointed.

[dieseltaylor]

Wooden fences? In bocage country!

As I am sure tens will design scenarios perhaps some time spent looking at available bocage and village detail pictures would help get a truer flavour. Of course flat featureless terrian existed in Normandy also .... but get the feel right

[sfhand]

Well, it seems like half the mods are made by the same guys working on the game (including testers), so they are surpassing their own work. And it's not just about getting better quality, it's about changing the look. Great examples are changing desert paint/uniforms to temperate. Or the mods that reduce or get rid of sun glare, or the sun itself, or mods that reduce the size of the background mountain images. There's a lot of room for many, many mods.

I wholeheartedly agree with sfhand. Pinetree's base mods is one of those you can't go back from. It's simply the best (imo) and provides not only color indicators, but shape indicators as well. Much better than stock bases. Beside the fact that Pinetree is a good guy and went to New Zealand Army boot camp with none other than the great Rhys Dharby.

There is a mod-manager utility I've downloaded that I'm too intimidated to try to use because I run Vista 64. As a result I've no doubt missed out on a lot of very good work. Your comment about those who are involved in the mod scene as well as the game's development is something I was unaware of, thanks for pointing it out!

[McAuliffe]

Wooden fences? In bocage country!

As I am sure tens will design scenarios perhaps some time spent looking at available bocage and village detail pictures would help get a truer flavour. Of course flat featureless terrian existed in Normandy also .... but get the feel right

Must admit, that I was thinking same at first impression. That and the projection of a wide avenue in an average Calvados village don't seem right to me. You would maybe see a wooden gate at the entrance of a bocage patch, but IMHO, in open terrain, boundaries of fields and orchards are rather made up of barbed wire instead. I guess you would see stone walls or iron fences around farms. And.. are that apple trees?

[MikeyD]

One thing that CM:Normandy can take advantage of that wasn't around for CMx1 is Google earth/Google map. No more having to approximate a 'typical' French countryside scene. You can go right to the spot and can represent the actual thing. Heck, you can even hit 'street view', drive down the lane to check out what sort of fencing is being used by the farmer!

One caviat to that. 2008-ish Googleearth Normandy is not an exact representation of 1944 Normandy. I understand lengths of hedgerow have since been dug up to increase field sizes in order to to facilitate use of farm machinery. And some villages now sport highway bypasses going around them. But its still darned close.

[theFightingSeabee]

Google Earth now has historical modes for certain areas where you can dial back the clock to get an older image. I have not tried around Normandy, but I do know that Normandy was photgraphed from the air quite a bit more than most parts of the world in the mid 1940's. That's also worth a shot. Google Earth is one of the most amazing tools ever made.

[Kwazydog]

The fence style was copied off of pics from Normandy guys...essentially its up to the scenario designers to decide how common is should be. Id say pretty rare.

[dieseltaylor]

I was mulling over the fence, the width of the road/square in the village shot, and the idea that a railroad would run through a village. It strikes me that as most people are not familiar with Normandy, or indeed Western Europe in 1930's-40's then it might be handy to have a thread where useful linkies to photographs could be posted.

So I will start it!

BTW in 1930 the French had 2.9million horses, the UK 1.2million, and the US 14 million in 1940. So France for its population was highl in horsepower.

[edgars]

Splendid pics.

Any news about Mac version?

[Mace]

I was mulling over the fence, the width of the road/square in the village shot, and the idea that a railroad would run through a village. It strikes me that as most people are not familiar with Normandy, or indeed Western Europe in 1930's-40's then it might be handy to have a thread where useful linkies to photographs could be posted.

I'm now wondering how many scenario designers will take their scenarios 'out of Normandy' as it were?

There were a few CMAK based scenarios based in France for example.

[Michael Emrys]

I'm now wondering how many scenario designers will take their scenarios 'out of Normandy' as it were?

That's a thought. Anvil/Dragoon took place with about the same mix of forces that CM:N is going to have. More Frenchies perhaps. The modders should have a field day with south of France architecture.

Then there is always Italy. Shingle and Diadem anyone?

Michael

[c3k]

I'll wait for the modders to come up with DIFFERENT roof tile patterns.

[LukeFF]

1. Soldiers now have equipment based on the type of guy they are and what primary weapon is carried. If a guy is a radioman, he has a radio. If a guy has BAR then he has BAR ammo pouches.

Does this include variations among German riflemen? E.g., will a K98-armed rifleman have all K98 ammo pouches, while a G43 rifleman have a mix of K98 and G43 pouches? (IIRC 2-3 magazines were issued with the G43, and the rest of the ammo was carried in 5-round stripper clips).

[Battlefront.com]

Soldiers armed with G43 will have a double G43 mag pouch on the left side of the buckle and a three section Kar98k pouch on the right, which was the standard loadout. Piece of cake

Steve

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Now that is admirable attention to detail. I wouldn't have expected it.

If you have gone to such great lengths for the G43, what's been done with MG ammo?

[Michael Emrys]

And will the GIs have the folding entrenching tool or the straight kind with the wooden cross piece on the end of the handle?

Michael

[Dietrich]

Will the game be out by July 4th?

It might be, but don't get your hopes up. It is better to be surprised than disappointed.

I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that BFC were putting most of their effort into CM:N, if only so as to get the WW2-fixated folks off their backs so they could finish the NATO module in relative peace.

In other words, I'd be surprised if the NATO module were to come out before CM:N.

[Battlefront.com]

Elmar,

Now that is admirable attention to detail. I wouldn't have expected it.

It's almost no work to do it now that the code supports the concepts we need. The Mauser ammo pouch already exists, even, so it was simply making a simple double pouch for the other side. The code, without any extra work from Charles, just puts the bits where they need to be based on the weapon being carried. So Charles basically doesn't care about how nitty gritty we get with the details because they don't impact his coding at all. There's so few things like that, unfortunately.

If you have gone to such great lengths for the G43, what's been done with MG ammo?

Showing it, you mean? Not easily done because it flexes. That requires animations and animations are not the same as fixing a ridged object to a part of the body model.

What we will eventually have is ammo cans being carried. We already show secondary weapons, such as Panzerfausts, and probably hand grenades. So we're making progress on showing things situationally depending on what is being carried. But for now it is only ridged items so far.

Steve

[Ryujin]

@Steve: Maybe you could try a few tricks for flexible ammo belts... I don't know the details of how they were carried, but I'm assuming your referring to ammo wrapped or slung over the body "Pancho Villa style". Perhaps you could minimize or remove the need for animation, either by having the belt make a "complete loop" of the body so that there are no loose ends or if you have it around the neck and hanging down the front of the body, maybe tuck the ends into the belt? That's all I can think of at the moment. All that detail sounds great by the way.

Just how hard is animating with your engine? (not that there ever is any such thing as easy animation in my experince ). I mean does it utilize some user friendly middleware of some kind like maya or is it a little more inhouse? Not to mention, how big is battlefront?

Oh and I'd really like to know how to open and edit those models in CMSF and eventually CM:N (while we're on the topic).

Now I'll just hunker down and wait for the grog onslaught that'll probably follow my ammo belt comments.

[MikeyD]

I suspect the main problem is simply getting the ammo the short distance from the ammo box to the gun, expecially for belt-fed .30 cal Brownings and their ilk. There's perhaps a dozen ways to do an ugly job of it. It may boil down to a choice between getting convincing looking ammo belt animations or releasing the game before 2040. Either one or the other

[LukeFF]

Soldiers armed with G43 will have a double G43 mag pouch on the left side of the buckle and a three section Kar98k pouch on the right, which was the standard loadout. Piece of cake

Sweet! How will the ammo loadout for this weapon work? Will the solider use his two spare magazines first and then "top-load" the weapon with stripper clips?

[Gromit]

Showing it, you mean? Not easily done because it flexes. That requires animations and animations are not the same as fixing a ridged object to a part of the body model.

What we will eventually have is ammo cans being carried. We already show secondary weapons, such as Panzerfausts, and probably hand grenades. So we're making progress on showing things situationally depending on what is being carried. But for now it is only ridged items so far.

Steve

That's cool Steve. I mean, I don't expect a movie-like experience when it comes to small details such as minor equipment. I don't think devoting animation cycles to a mg ammo belt to be an efficient or good use of developer time personally. Now, if Charles happens to stumble upon a way to do it eventually without killing fps in CM2WW2's lifetime, then great!

Frankly, although the old saying that "big things are made up of lots of little things" is true, at this point I am more concerned with the overall game... how it feels in play, accurate depictions of standard units and equipment, etc. I am confident the detail stuff will come along nicely, whether from Battlefront or the modders. :cool:

[Battlefront.com]

I suspect the main problem is simply getting the ammo the short distance from the ammo box to the gun, expecially for belt-fed .30 cal Brownings and their ilk. There's perhaps a dozen ways to do an ugly job of it. It may boil down to a choice between getting convincing looking ammo belt animations or releasing the game before 2040. Either one or the other

Yup, very well put! There are many "quick and dirty" ways to show MG ammo belts in action, but all would look like utter crap. Things that aren't so quick or dirty will involve significant work. Worse, the easiest of those won't look that much better than the "quick and dirty" methods because, although better looking, will still be quite unrealistic and unconvincing. Which leaves us with doing it right and that is simply not worth the time at the moment. Things like this will be added over time since we have years worth of graphical improvements that would be cool to have.

Sweet! How will the ammo loadout for this weapon work? Will the solider use his two spare magazines first and then "top-load" the weapon with stripper clips?

No. A soldier has 3 magazines on him. In real life how this works is he'd expend one or two magazines and reload them using the stripper clips. It takes only a few seconds to do this, even for a moderately trained rifleman. Therefore, it's not worth us investing in a new animation to reload magazines considering that it would be seen very rarely and likely only if the player was specifically looking for it.

From a simulation standpoint we assume that when soldiers aren't moving, cowering, or shooting that they are getting ready for their next action. There's always plenty of time for soldiers to do things like reload magazines, especially when stripper clips are available.

Steve