Steve's post on Infantry

dalem

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The other guy is vowing not to buy a game that hasn't even been released yet because of some imagined evil grog cover-up and I'm the one posting crap?
In my opinion, yep. But then I'm clueless, angry, hateful, and full of vitriol. And other stuff too, but I forget. :)

-dale
 

Elefant

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If you actually read my posts constructively I used the word reason in plural form and did mention initially I will not be buying this game. I do not remember making or taking a solemn oath not to buy this game. I just thought I will not buy it. There is no point attacking me to gain respect from other forum members. I am afraid you lost that without my help. Well, I have better things to do so I will not bother responding again. You can reply if it helps your insecurity.:hissyfit:
 

Mad Russian

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I don't think they are doing it just to divert you from the fact that they are just using a six-sided dice roll for every armour hit.

Steve has stated several times that having this sort of info is something they'd like to do, but it is pretty clear that they are technically unable or unwilling to spend the time on it. Probably a bit of both. There will be a simplified armour defence diagram like in CMSF which is not nothing.
Boy, you said a mouthful there. If BFC is using a six sided die roll to do combat resolution PLEASE DON'T TELL ME!! In todays computer world that would be like considering chess the only real wargame in the history of the world.

The problem with not showing the data makes veteran gamers leery of just how it was done. Which takes them directly to how accurate the game is in it's resolution. Which makes them question every other feature of the game. IMO, as a game company you have to show that data just to take out all the associated question and answer sessions later. A huge drain on your HR resources. If you care about that sort of thing.

Good Hunting.

MR
 

Mad Russian

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You can just read in the press about BFC going out of business and some other wargame publishing company dancing on their grave.
That would be one of the saddest days ever for our community. We are too small a group to have that happen and anyone with any common sense think it was a good thing.

Good Hunting.

MR
 

Michael Dorosh

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That would be one of the saddest days ever for our community. We are too small a group to have that happen and anyone with any common sense think it was a good thing.

Good Hunting.

MR
If it clears the way for another company to come along and invest more time into doing a better game, it may be a good thing. If - IF - some theoretical company was thinking the only reason not to do a squad-based, company level tactical game right now was because "BFC has that ground covered."

Imagine Paramount to do a movie about Space Lobsters (bear with me). TriStar figures there is no reason for them to do a science fiction movie with lobsters in it because they don't want to compete. So they don't make their movie. But if Paramount goes out of business next week and pulls funding for their film, suddenly TriStar has a green light to do their project.

However, that many not be a great example, because film studios routinely put out movies on the same subject all the time, ditto TV shows (I recall Armageddon coming out with another asteroid disaster picture, and there were two OK Corral movies at the same time, ER and Chicago Hope debuted opposite each other, 30 Rock and Studio 60 were similar enough to be considered "competitors" though one was a drama and the other a comedy, etc.)

Still. Production companies seem to have infinite resources.

Do game companies routinely rip each other off to "compete" with similar subject material? It seems to me the opposite would be true.
 

dalem

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I don't think the comparison with Hollywood goes very far. There are tons of scripts and treatments and stories and purchased licenses to IP floating around unused in all the studios. Very little of it ever sees the light of day. Then all it takes is Studio A to be sniffed out making a baseball movie with Star 1 and Studios B, C, and D will all immediately dust off their closest-to-finished baseball scripts and throw them onto the conveyor belt so as not to be left out.

I don't think there's a lot of "just add actor and director and shoot" equivalancies in the gaming software world. I dunno. But maybe I'm just fabricating baffling garbage.

-clueless hateful dale
 

vulture

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The problem with not showing the data makes veteran gamers leery of just how it was done. Which takes them directly to how accurate the game is in it's resolution. Which makes them question every other feature of the game. IMO, as a game company you have to show that data just to take out all the associated question and answer sessions later. A huge drain on your HR resources. If you care about that sort of thing.
As I understand it, the problem is that there isn't any usuable data to show. CMx1 had internal data that was directly useful to the player: firepower as a function of distance, percentage cover, penetration chance. CMx2 data is lower level. For a gun AP round aimed at an AFV the game might (for example) pick an aim point, add in a 2d gaussion random offset to model shot distribution, calculate the trajectory of the shot based on that, determine the first intersection of the shot (which may be the ground for a hull down tank); if it has hit a vehicle, determine which poly was hit, find the composition of the vehicle in that spot, determine angle of incidence, look up penetration data to determine possible outcomes, determine trajectory of shot after exiting / richochet from the armour layer, risnce and repeat with the next thing that is hit and/or work out behind armour effects and flaking. There may or may not be special cases for weak points / shot traps depending on how precise the vehicle models are.

Now the actual data you have in the engine might be the shot distribution 2-d gaussion and the penetration tables for each poly of the vehicle armour which aren't actually a great deal of use to the player as they stand. Compositing them in to some kind of accurate number is a no-trivial feat and comptuationally not cheap to do, and CMx2 is already quite a processor hog. And doing it fast and cheap is likely to simply be wrong in at least some cases (which will then be found on the forums and discussed endlessly as evidence of BC malfeasance :D) .

No doubt there is some sensible compromise that would give players some rough idea of weapon capabilities, but the point is that the player isn't getting to see the raw data regardless. You are at best going to see numbers that are derived from the raw data, and derived in a different way to how the data are actually used in the game. So in that sense, you still don't get a handle on what the game is actually doing. You get a different version that hopefully correlates to the game fairly well, and will probably fail spectacularly once or twice until the glitches are smoothed out.
 

Redwolf

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As I understand it, the problem is that there isn't any usuable data to show. CMx1 had internal data that was directly useful to the player: firepower as a function of distance, percentage cover, penetration chance. CMx2 data is lower level. For a gun AP round aimed at an AFV the game might (for example) pick an aim point, add in a 2d gaussion random offset to model shot distribution, calculate the trajectory of the shot based on that, determine the first intersection of the shot (which may be the ground for a hull down tank); if it has hit a vehicle, determine which poly was hit, find the composition of the vehicle in that spot, determine angle of incidence, look up penetration data to determine possible outcomes, determine trajectory of shot after exiting / richochet from the armour layer, risnce and repeat with the next thing that is hit and/or work out behind armour effects and flaking. There may or may not be special cases for weak points / shot traps depending on how precise the vehicle models are.

Now the actual data you have in the engine might be the shot distribution 2-d gaussion and the penetration tables for each poly of the vehicle armour which aren't actually a great deal of use to the player as they stand. Compositing them in to some kind of accurate number is a no-trivial feat and comptuationally not cheap to do, and CMx2 is already quite a processor hog. And doing it fast and cheap is likely to simply be wrong in at least some cases (which will then be found on the forums and discussed endlessly as evidence of BC malfeasance :D) .

No doubt there is some sensible compromise that would give players some rough idea of weapon capabilities, but the point is that the player isn't getting to see the raw data regardless. You are at best going to see numbers that are derived from the raw data, and derived in a different way to how the data are actually used in the game. So in that sense, you still don't get a handle on what the game is actually doing. You get a different version that hopefully correlates to the game fairly well, and will probably fail spectacularly once or twice until the glitches are smoothed out.
That's all fine but they put it down to a level where useful data that is needed to make tactical decisions is missing.

Let's say exposure rating. We will need to know how much protection a foxhole in CMBN gives. We need to know whether foxholes in open ground are different than foxholes in wood. Some data needs to be displayed. Not all, just something.

To spin that particular example further: CMx1 foxholes had better protection in wood than in open ground. But trenches, which could also be placed by the user, offered the same protection in open ground as they did in woods. And the protection level of foxholes in open ground was IMHO inappropriately low, whereas no such problem existed for trenches.

So you made tactical decisions like "if I need a fortification here in this spot that is open ground I must use a trench, not a foxhole, or I'm dead".

The same complications might exist in CMBN and we'd never learn about them.
 

vulture

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That's all fine but they put it down to a level where useful data that is needed to make tactical decisions is missing.
Oh I agree entirely with you here. In CM:SF it was less imporant since you almost always faced a "1 hit kill" or "invulnerable" (with a few exceptions), so the crappy level of information given about capabilities was okay. In WWII, the CM:SF display is not good enough.

All I'm saying is that it's not just a matter of giving access to the underlying numbers because they are essentially unusuable. But I really think they do need to give some kind of information on the effectiveness of various weapons and defenses (and matchups thereof), even if it is fairly rough.
 

Redwolf

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We are in total agreement that publishing base numbers and mechanisms would be useless.

There need to be some composite investigative tools. The CMx1 ratings for exposure were good. The tank kill "good, fair" etc were good, although often odd. The firepower ratings were good, the ones displayed with the LOS tool, not the base in the unit data.
 

Quellist

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Now the actual data you have in the engine might be the shot distribution 2-d gaussion and the penetration tables for each poly of the vehicle armour which aren't actually a great deal of use to the player as they stand. Compositing them in to some kind of accurate number is a no-trivial feat and comptuationally not cheap to do, and CMx2 is already quite a processor hog. And doing it fast and cheap is likely to simply be wrong in at least some cases (which will then be found on the forums and discussed endlessly as evidence of BC malfeasance :D) .
What would be so computational expensive? The normal distribution is well known and you could tabulate it and the density function. And if your tank model has too many polygons you could always use a simpler one for the estimates. The estimate only needs to be just that. And while one or two might complain, it is not like everyone is jumping with joy because BFC left a lot of this stuff out so they get FLAK either way, but one way makes for a better game.
 
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