1.11 is out

[thewood]

Just played Wadi Scouts in 1.11. In 1.10 it took me well over 3 minutes to play each turn. Now with the blue bar back, the turn calculates in less than 5 seconds and I FF through most of the turn. Overall the turn took me 30 seconds to play. Amazing and frustrating BFC didn't do this from the beginning. One more sign that on release CMSF was a RT engine with a WEGO game shoehorned into it.

btw, the game plays very well now. It is much, much smoother than in 1.10 for WEGO.

[Sirocco]

I played through a 1.11 QB in WEGO. Here are my thoughts:

- no keyboard setup option

I find it amazing there's still no option to define keys in game. I know you can edit a text file, but that's hardly the elegant way to do it. It should also be possible to completely map functions as desired. So, for example, you could assign the pop up menu to right mouse click

- no auto loading option

There should be an option to start with units loaded onto their respective vehicles. It's a pain to have to manually load everyone at start

- playback controls are confusing

I tried to rewind a turn, clicked the button to rewind to the start, then clicked the red "go" button, which seemed to do nothing but start the next turn. Playback needs play, pause and quit playback controls

- no audible cue

It really needs the "boop" sound from CMx1 to signify end playback of the turn

I'm sure there are more elements to improve upon, but those are the most obvious.

[KG_Jag]

As usual, those of us who do not have the Battlefront version will have to wait a few days for the patch.

[northman80]

Hello guys. Have anyone here tested 1.11 thoroughly yet? I'm thinking of bugs/issues, more specifically infantry behaviour wrt. QCB, LOS, Strat-AI, campaign bugs...

- Is MOUT still the same, ridiculous massacres as before, with cover playing no role whatsoever and everyone dying within three turns? The dreaded 'Al-Huqf' should be the benchmark scenario here.

- Is LOS still as random and bugged as before? I posted a few examples of some of the worst issues after 1.10 was released, but only got shrugs in return(on the BF forums). Noone seems to care about LOS anymore :S Here they are:

http://www.filedump.net/dumped/losbug1222552118.jpg
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/losbug21222562406.jpg
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/losbug31222562886.jpg
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/losbug41222652203.JPG
http://www.filedump.net/dumped/losbug51222654366.JPG

- Does the enemy strat-AI still suck? Can the AI use anything other that 'quick' to move its troops, or do they run around as meaningless as before?

- Is the 'Marines!'-campaign fixed?

I've pretty much given up on this game, so I won't give 1.11 a shot unless someone not belonging to the Halleluja-crowd at the battlefront forums tells me things have changed significantly .

[Michael Dorosh]

I've not tested 1.11; last run through Al Huqf was I believe 1.10, still noticed guys running through walls, shooting through walls, but really, still don't like the unrealistic modeling of just about everything - the slow motion running, the lack individual battle drills which aren't, etc. It's all too sterile for me. The lack of hand-to-hand combat - there is so much abstraction going on, it's a distraction. I'll wait and see what guys are saying about 1.11 as you are, but really, can't be bothered anymore to download patches for a game I've no interest in playing. Meeting at High Altitude is usually my alternate benchmark because I'm the guy that wrote it, but Al Huqf is still the primary.

Haven't heard about the Marines campaign yet. That's a complete joke if they still haven't unlocked the final battles in that one.

[northman80]

I've not tested 1.11; last run through Al Huqf was I believe 1.10, still noticed guys running through walls, shooting through walls, but really, still don't like the unrealistic modeling of just about everything - the slow motion running, the lack individual battle drills which aren't, etc. It's all too sterile for me. The lack of hand-to-hand combat - there is so much abstraction going on, it's a distraction.

I could live with abstractions (after all, cmx1 had plenty of them) if they were just done right, but in SF neither the abstractions nor the WYSIWYG-stuff makes any sense when it comes to infantry combat at close ranges. Cover does not play any role at all it seems - instead it's pure firepower dominance, and the US always win, especially after 1.10 where they did some strange tweaking to accuracy and firepower that resulted in the US being even better than before and cover being even more meaningless. Try playing Al Huqf as the Syrians... it's absurd.

Haven't heard about the Marines campaign yet. That's a complete joke if they still haven't unlocked the final battles in that one.

The final battles weren't the only ones that were bugged. The second battle consisted of an hour of clicking 'Go!' without anything happening. There were also problems with the campaign not branching as it should. They posted a fix on the forums, but it didn't work. People complained, but were ignored as usual.

[Michael Dorosh]

I could live with abstractions (after all, cmx1 had plenty of them) if they were just done right,but in SF neither the abstractions nor the WYSIWYG-stuff makes any sense when it comes to infantry combat at close ranges. Cover does not play any role at all it seems - instead it's pure firepower dominance, and the US always win, especially after 1.10 where they did some strange tweaking to accuracy and firepower that resulted in the US being even better than before and cover being even more meaningless. Try playing Al Huqf as the Syrians... it's absurd.

The final battles weren't the only ones that were bugged. The second battle consisted of an hour of clicking 'Go!' without anything happening. There were also problems with the campaign not branching as it should. They posted a fix on the forums, but it didn't work. People complained, but were ignored as usual.

You said a mouthful with the highlighted portion, and that's the entire philosophical design debate in a nutshell. CMX1 was based on abstractions that were appropriate to the game's scale. Why on earth do you need to track every bullet coming out of an M60 machine gun for a company-level game? You don't, of course, it's a serious scale-mismatch. In addition to the stuff you mention, there are all kinds of flawed concepts, some of which are slowly being peeled back.

"If done right" is the key phrase - 1:1 representation was supposed to be some kind of Holy Grail, but rather than being the be-all, end-all, it simply masks the fact that these "individuals" running around the battlefield are still part of a squad-based company-level game and don't perform a host of functions which in CMX1 were simply invisible and you could presume they were doing because of the abstractions - hand-to-hand combat, close-assault on armour, guarding prisoners, etc. Much of that has simply been stripped out and no word on when - or if - it will ever be returned. And yet they throw in silly stuff like "buddy aid" so that the current representation is a weird netherworld where the 1:1 "individuals" all look like clones, move like clones, and act like clones, but can't do routine things like run back to an APC for ammo without requiring special orders, or having to do so in a gaggle, and other simple things like sending one man ahead to scout or look around a corner, you can't do at all.

[thewood]

The only way I can play infantry battles in CMSF is to ignore the individuals in the squad and just focus on the squad. The downside for BFC is if you do that, what happens to all the man years spent coding up the individual graphics and behavior. They could probably have had CMSF out a year or two before they did, and in good shape. Look at how many fudges they have to put in to make 1:1 work, eg, the whole 8x8 grid and area fire thing. They are slowly fudging CMSF mechanics back to CM1 levels.

[Geordie]

Look at how many fudges they have to put in to make 1:1 work, eg, the whole 8x8 grid and area fire thing. They are slowly fudging CMSF mechanics back to CM1 levels.

Can you expand on that bit for me please. These are the kind of details I feel I should know.

[thewood]

Area fire goes to the center of the 8x8 grid, no matter where you fire at in the square. This causes many issues beyond inaccurate area fire. The most glaring is if part of the square is visible, but the center is not. You can't area fire at that hex (oops, I mean square). There are also many issues with how squads are spotted and how they spot. I have many times had squads being fired at with no way for them to get LOS to the enemy because of mismatches between grid centers.

I know there are more. Also, I don't mean to sound too down on the 1:1 graphics. Its great if they had everything else working, but lets take a step back; look at all the things left out and being slowly put back in. You can guess pretty easily that a LOT of resources went into programming the 1:1 thing. If they hadn't done that, would they have been able to do other things. How much CPU resource would be freed up. Would they have lost sales? Questions we can't answer, but still makes me wonder why.

So answer me this; what has 1:1 given us in CMSF that couldn't have been done with just a dumb blob of 10 men in a group?