Burning corn etc

[eniced73]

How about the KISS approach to flamers? There is no need to have buildings, bushes, trees, or my birthday candles set aflame if a piece of area is targeted. Just put the animations in and give the weapon it's due suppression and damage modeling. Yeah, you will still have Joe combat mission say " well, that is not truely modeled correctly because that patch of dry Normandy grass did not catch fire". Let them bitch and tell them they are lucky to have it in the first place. Then put an animation in for a charred corpse and a little moral modifier for your men in the same fox hole.

[YankeeDog]

How about the KISS approach to flamers? There is no need to have buildings, bushes, trees, or my birthday candles set aflame if a piece of area is targeted. Just put the animations in and give the weapon it's due suppression and damage modeling. Yeah, you will still have Joe combat mission say " well, that is not truely modeled correctly because that patch of dry Normandy grass did not catch fire". Let them bitch and tell them they are lucky to have it in the first place. Then put an animation in for a charred corpse and a little moral modifier for your men in the same fox hole.

Oh, it's nowhere near that simple. The effects flame weapons are complex, and they behave nothing like bullets or explosives; even a basic representation of them in the game is going to require substantial coding and testing.

For example, most flame weapons project a liquid. This makes them much more effective against dug-in positions, since the liquid tends to flow downhill into foxholes, trenches, bunkers, etc. In this way, flame weapons can "penetrate" positions that bullets and shrapnel can't.

And what happens when a flame weapon targets a building? Any given side of a building in CMBN might or might not have windows. If the burning liquid hits on or near a window or door, it's reasonable to assume that the burning liquid will get inside and the building will probably become uninhabitable pretty quickly (due to smoke and fumes long before the building becomes fully engulfed in flame, actually). But what if a flame weapon hits a windowless side of a brick building? Probably not much of an effect, at least initially... in this situation the flame is actually less effective than a bullet, which can potentially go through the wall.

And what about bocage? Bocage vegetation is pretty thick... is it thick enough to stop the burning liquid from penetrating to the other side of the bocage, at least for the first burst before the vegetation and leaves are burned away a bit? I must admit I have no idea here.

The other fundamental characteristic of flame weapons is that they tend to make the target area unusable to BOTH sides, at least for a while. Nothing in CMx2 does this right now. It would definitely look pretty silly if you could dump several gallons of burning gasoline into a building with a flame tank, and then run in with your infantry immediately thereafter, to use the building as a fighting position.

For obvious reasons, I really don't think BFC is particularly interested in half-assing flame weapons, or anything else, for that matter. Tends to create more problems than it solves.

[LongLeftFlank]

Framerate impacts likely wouldn't be much worse than "fog" weather conditions. And there is a toggle option for smoke already.

I'd personally love to see more ambient battlefield smoke in general -- belching fumes, weapons smoke, longer dispersal of explosions, etc. A huge immersion adder, and seems readily doable by tweaking existing effects.

I wanted this in CMSF too, to the point where I considered putting some random RED indirect fire in my Ramadi map just for the atmosphere.

[skimbo]

Wow!

Seems this thread has grown arms and legs - but a thoroughly interesting read by all contributors!

On the graphics front Theatre of War Kursk/Caen is the pinnacle for me of beautifully rendered vehicles - they really are a joy to behold. However for me the gameplay of CMBN absolutely trumps TOW in every way.

Thats not to say graphics in CMBN are bad, they are great and perform an admirable job - what I didnt realise is that coding fire and its graphics/effects/ would be such a headache.

Skimbo