CM2:Shock Force

[KG_Jag]

Here's the latest from Steve at Battlefront:

Posted by: Battlefront .com6/30/2006Martin has been bugging me to write something for this new blog thingy we have going. I guess I gotta do what he says. He is German after all (or Polish, he can't make up his mind!). Plus, the new pattern of June Monsoons that we have here in the Northeast US (you soccer moms out there, keep using those SUVs to buy a quart of milk!) has ruled out lazing in the sun all day like we game designers are prone to doing.
It's why games are always late, doncha know! Speaking of that, I'll move onto the topic at hand; Combat Mission: Shock Force development update.
Many of you out there have been with us long enough to know that we have a hard time getting anything out of the oven until we're 110% happy with the way it looks, smells, and tastes. Or something like that. Well, considering this is the game engine we plan on using for 5 or more games, this is not the time to change our ways. The side effect of this is things taking a lot longer than we imagined or would like. But the good news is we're just about at Beta. Probably 2 weeks more.
What does Beta mean for you all? Not much, other than I'll probably post some screenshots of some sort in the middle of July. I wanted to do it in the middle of June, but thanks to ATI's well known attention to detail when it comes to their drivers, that wasn't possible.
Charles has a video card that works and Dan and I have ATI cards. In order to get CM working well enough with smoke and dynamic lighting on my computer, Charles had to also acquire an ATI card so he could experience the broken graphics for himself. He did that this week (it involved buying a new system) and spent 2 full days working around ATI's brilliant "features" contained in the driver. He's almost done, then he can move on to finishing off the user interface work and bingo... I can take some shots for you guys.
The in-game art is still pretty rough at this point. Since this is a new game engine we've been spending all our time making sure everything works right before going ahead and doing a bunch of art. Back in my previous life of corporate game development they never understood this.
3 artists would crank out a small mountain of artwork only to have it thrown out a couple of weeks later when the development team figured out things weren't going to work that way after all. While it would be nice to have the money to burn on wasted efforts like this, we don't so we have to be smarter about how we do things. That means the game looks like an early Alpha even though it is nearing Beta, as opposed to the corporate games that look like Beta but are in fact early Alpha.
The dirty secret is we both ship based on what we call the game. You can figure out what that means on your own :-)
Well, I guess that about does it for my first Blogfront entry. Hope you found it entertaining. If you also find it enlightening, so much the better. For me, I'm just glad to get that German (or Polish) guy off my back. Hint to all you budding entrepreneurs out there... if you are a slacker by nature, don't hire a German (or apparently Polish) guy to run your company. Instead, go for someone who is happiest to let things be. Like an Australian. Dan (aka KwazyDog) NEVER bugs me for anything. Hmmm... maybe it is time for a management reshuffle at Battlefront? Hmmmm....
Steve

[KG_Jag]

For what it's worth, here's an edited [by BF] version of the internal BF discussion of the subject:

"Posted by: Battlefront .com8/18/2006

Here is a hotly debated topic from a recent internal discussion about Combat Mission Shock Force. It has to do with the use of civilian (looking) suicide cars or trucks.
The following snippets are comments from various people involved in the internal discussion we had over the course of a few days, reposted here in loose chronological order and with only a few edits.
The names of the participants have been edited out to protect the innocent ;-) (some you will no doubt recognize sooner or later, but with some you will most likely be wrong if you try to guess who it is), but each new post is marked with an > for easier readability.
Since the entire post is super-long, I am going to post this in several parts over the next few days.
Here goes... Part 1... Suicidal
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One question I have about CMSF is with regards to suicide cars/trucks. Apparently, in Baghdad, these were used a LOT. Toyota pickups, Chevy Cavaliers and taxis, packed with explosives, were used in huge numbers to try and ram US vehicles and positions and then explode. They proved a constant threat and while they were usually taken out before they got within 100 meters of any US forces, they did cause some casulities when they exploded and wrecked or when secondary explosions cooked off. So, we going to model these? If they used them in Iraq, I am sure they would use them in Syria....
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This opens up a can of worms, as does anything that is camouflaged as civilian.
The reason they work in real life (and often do not, mind you) is that they blend into normal traffic and there is no way to tell that the vehicle is any different than hundreds of others around it. If the suicide driver knows what he is doing, the first hint people will have that the car is a guided bomb is when it detonates. In CM:SF if we have Toyotas loaded with explosives driving around they will never get close to US forces because everybody will target them and blow the crap out of 'em prior to getting into range.
So how can we have suicide car bombers when we don't have civilian cars? I don't see it as being possible to do. I can't even see how we can abstract it.
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The only way the suicide vehicles work in real life is when they masquerade as a civilian vehicle. Without civilian traffic (and just think of the AI that will be needed for that!) the tactic can NOT work in the game. Well, not in a way that anybody will buy.
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There is NO question that having civilians in CM:SF would be massively awesome. The problem is there is no way to shortcut it, therefore it can't go in.
Now, onto my idea of how to get some of the civilian disguise element into the game...
The most important thing to simulate is intel gathering. The location and makeup of US forces is generally known long before they get to wherever they are going. Some guy on the street with a cell phone or looking out the window with a hardline phone or radio is all they need. The proposal to simulate this in CM:SF is to give the Syrians special single man "Spies". These guys are either static or mobile and simply spot like all other units. The trick is they are invisible to the US player under most MOUT circumstances. But the closer the US units get to the Spies, the more open the terrain, the greater the chance that the US forces will figure out that the guy is a Spy. This is determined behind the scenes. If the US does figure it out the Spy becomes visible and is fair game to shoot at.
What this means is that a Spy in the second story, stationary, has a very good chance of going undetected as US forces roll on by the window. However, if the Spy is walking around following the US forces there is a decent chance someone is going to notice and pop him one. Likewise, a Spy hiding out in date tree grove will likely have no less chance of being seen than a single man combat unit.
This is pretty elegant and is, on the whole, easy to simulate because it involves very few special rules and practically no AI (in fact, Static Spies require no AI at all). I want to extend this to IED Teams, and Bombers.
We COULD try to extend this to civilian cars, both as transport and as bomb platforms. The rules would be identical to the Spies, so in theory it shouldn't take much to get them into the game. However, in the past when I've thought about this I felt that the visual abstractions would not sit well with people. Not seeing a single guy can be rationalized even by skeptics, but a Toyota pickup coming right for you? Much harder for people to swallow for sure. But perhaps we can give it a try and see what the testers say.
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Off-topic: Is the US player (and Syrian for that matter) going to receive some sort of penalty if they destroy every building in sight, depending on the scenario? In a way this could help abstractly model the fact that doing so is likely going to cause civilian casualties.
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Yes. It's currently in the plan for the Victory Conditions setting (i.e. what % of buildings can be whacked before hurting the score). We are also allowing for certain buildings to be flagged as "no kills", meaning you aren't allowed to damage them. Ministry buildings, Mosques, or what have you can be specifically flagged if desired.

...to be continued"