Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Mad Russian

Is there some reason an unbuttoned tank commander couldn't turn his head and see an ATG behind him? I can understand if the tank is buttoned to an extent but the commanders cupola on a PzIV allows for limited all round vision. Every German tank from the PzIII had them.

Most Russian tanks would be limited visibility to the rear but the KV-1 and JS-2 tanks in particular, actually had machineguns that were mounted in the back of the turret to fire to the rear. They had as much visibility to the rear as they did forward.

So, I'm surprised that a tank would have to turn to "see". Especially a German one.

Good Hunting.

MR

Perhaps a more detailed CONE OF SIGHT is needed?
Below is just something I slapped together for a suggestion. The values are Base and reflects a tank w/5 crew and with a cupola.

Mobius and Erik??
An even more detailed cone would be great if you could model the turret cone seperately from the hull.

Rob

EDIT NOTE : changed button values

You should ad that to my official unofficial wishlist Rob.

ORIGINAL: ravinhood

You should ad that to my official unofficial wishlist Rob.

heya ravinhood,

I was going to but I didn't know whether or not Karkov would have a detailed cone of sight rule for tanks. I would hate to clutter that thread with something that doesn't need it .... well, I still think the ravinhood easter egg is a good idea [:D]

Rob

We could do that, I think what you're suggesting is well thought out, but I'm not sure it's necessary instead of allowing player reactions. We'll discuss.

ORIGINAL: Mraah
Perhaps a more detailed CONE OF SIGHT is needed?
Below is just something I slapped together for a suggestion. The values are Base and reflects a tank w/5 crew and with a cupola.
Mobius and Erik??
An even more detailed cone would be great if you could model the turret cone seperately from the hull.
Rob
EDIT NOTE : changed button values

Rob, that looks really good. Though we would have to define the sighting arcs in terms of Sighting Factors (Look into Data/Tables folder of the game for sighting table xml). When limitied visibity does show its ugly head all we would have to do is apply a constant multiplier to the normal sighting factors.

In CM scenario designers pretty much started the scenario with both sides out of LOS. With PC's smaller maps that doesn't always happen. In PC I've lost tanks that were in LOS from the very first moment the battle started.

Good Hunting.

MR

Hi Rob,

Nice artwork.


Regards,

Grell

Erik hit upon this. Besides just sighting what is the tank or AFV going to do if they do sight something to the rear or side? If an open topped fixed gun AFV sighted something to its rear at a distance is it going to whip around with its rear to the enemy lines and try to shoot the object? It is better if other friendly units handled the interloper.

Kharkov vs. WS. I've played the WS scenarios using the Kharkov engine and they play a bit differently. Besides smoke the retargeting after a kill moves the game along faster. Also it is more deadly. My strategies had to improve as well.

ORIGINAL: Mobius

Erik hit upon this. Besides just sighting what is the tank or AFV going to do if they do sight something to the rear or side? If an open topped fixed gun AFV sighted something to its rear at a distance is it going to whip around with its rear to the enemy lines and try to shoot the object? It is better if other friendly units handled the interloper.

Kharkov vs. WS. I've played the WS scenarios using the Kharkov engine and they play a bit differently. Besides smoke the retargeting after a kill moves the game along faster. Also it is more deadly. My strategies had to improve as well.

Mobius,

I can see Erik's point. I suppose a Target Priority routine would need to be applied to prevent it from turning around, but at least it's spotted.

To expand more on the idea of vehicles seeing behind them and applying Mad Russian's point about spotting from the other thread you could try this ...

You could give the vehicle's a 360 degree/ 800 m sighting cone but apply an Activity modifier towards a particular "cone" of sight instead of an overall distance reduction modifier.

For instance, a stationary unbuttoned vehicle without a target would be able to see 360 degrees, base 800m (I'll call this the Spotting Mode). When it finds a target it enters a routine which will either rotate the turret or vehicle towards the target, once it's within say 45 degrees of the target it enters another mode (I'll call this Targeting Mode). Now, the cone of sight is reduced because they are focused on the target. Once the target is eliminated, or the player changes targets, it reverts back to the spotting mode until it engages the new target, and so on.

So, it's a dynamic change in the cone of sight based on activity. The reduction size (in degrees) and the time in a particular mode could be determined based on vehicle variants, unit experience, button status, etc. I would think a Green unit might get tunnel vision and stay in Targeting mode longer as opposed to an Elite unit which would bounce back and forth between modes, albeit staying on the same target unless a worse threat appears.

Anyway, when I play PCOWS I haven't really seen an issue that vehicles can't see behind them ... I suppose it's just the concept they can't [:)].

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Rob

ORIGINAL: Mobius

Erik hit upon this. Besides just sighting what is the tank or AFV going to do if they do sight something to the rear or side? If an open topped fixed gun AFV sighted something to its rear at a distance is it going to whip around with its rear to the enemy lines and try to shoot the object? It is better if other friendly units handled the interloper.

Sorry, I missed Erik's answer to this somewhere. But in answer to your question Mobius, apparently WS didn't allow spotting back there. While that is not realistic neither is the don't worry about it because it's someone else's job.

There may not be other friendly units to handle the interloper. The other friendly units may not be able to handle the interloper. What if they are enemy tanks and your friendly unit is an infantry platoon.

The real answer is the same one as it is on the field of battle. What happens when those guys get spotted is up the commander to decide. In this case, that means you the gamer. I'll decide who takes care of what threats to my plan of action. I just want the same opportunity to do that as the guys in real life that the game models.

The short answer is that once they've been spotted it's my problem to take care of that threat. Sometimes the answer will be to turn units around to take care of them. Sometimes it won't. Either way I should still know they're back there and have to make a decision what to do about them.

Kharkov vs. WS. I've played the WS scenarios using the Kharkov engine and they play a bit differently. Besides smoke the retargeting after a kill moves the game along faster. Also it is more deadly. My strategies had to improve as well.

I look forward to PCK. Then we can do this right.

Good Hunting.

MR

ORIGINAL: Mraah
You could give the vehicle's a 360 degree/ 800 m sighting cone but apply an Activity modifier towards a particular "cone" of sight instead of an overall distance reduction modifier.

For instance, a stationary unbuttoned vehicle without a target would be able to see 360 degrees, base 800m (I'll call this the Spotting Mode). When it finds a target it enters a

Or break it down even finer. Break the 360° into 4° arcs. Then break the cones down to 0-100m, 101m-300m, 301m-600m, 601m-horizon range sections. Thus there are 90x4 or 360 areas the observer will concentrate on. That gives 360 possible places to view.

Now checking on average maybe 0.5 seconds on each section in 40 seconds so only 80 of those 360 sections can be checked on. So randomly choose those sections to view. If a target is firing or moving in those sections when they are selected to view then sighting occurs.

ORIGINAL: Mobius

ORIGINAL: Mraah
You could give the vehicle's a 360 degree/ 800 m sighting cone but apply an Activity modifier towards a particular "cone" of sight instead of an overall distance reduction modifier.

For instance, a stationary unbuttoned vehicle without a target would be able to see 360 degrees, base 800m (I'll call this the Spotting Mode). When it finds a target it enters a

Or break it down even finer. Break the 360° into 4° arcs. Then break the cones down to 0-100m, 101m-300m, 301m-600m, 601m-horizon range sections. Thus there are 90x4 or 360 areas the observer will concentrate on. That gives 360 possible places to view.

Now checking on average maybe 0.5 seconds on each section in 40 seconds so only 80 of those 360 sections can be checked on. So randomly choose those sections to view. If a target is firing or moving in those sections when they are selected to view then sighting occurs.

But if you think about this we've gone, in the example, from having to turn the tanks to see where the fire is coming from, to discussing the possibility of spotting them BEFORE they are fired on.

Think of it this way. When you drive your vehicle hopefully you look around. All around. Behind you too. You can check the entire perimeter of your vehicle in much less than 40 seconds. The same holds true in combat vehicles. You are constantly looking around. If you don't you are likely to get killed. Your survival to a great extent depends on you seeing and engaging the enemy before they engage you.

As a single driver you don't stare, well hopefully you don't, in the rear view mirror as you go forward. You check it every so often to make sure all is okay from where you've already come from. However if you get hit in the rear I would expect you to look in the rear view mirror to see what's going on.

The more passengers in your vehicle the more help you get in driving it...[:D]

Same with an armored vehicle. As we talked about before the bigger the crew the larger the advantage in spotting the enemy.

Good Hunting.

MR

I'm highly anticipating this.
My CMx1 don't work anymore since there is no Vista patch.
I'm believe this is Vista compatible as with all Matrix Games.

ORIGINAL: jomni

I'm highly anticipating this.
My CMx1 don't work anymore since there is no Vista patch.
I'm believe this is Vista compatible as with all Matrix Games.

Yes

CMx1 works fine with Vista (32 bit), depending on what video driver you have.

I hope it comes out today.

Regards,

Grell

It's kinda funny how one group wants realistic spotting, but, don't care for the realism of 1:1 encounters and statistics. Yall sorta pick n choose your realism settings instead of going for the whole pie. I say we should just go back to BORG spotting...everything sees what any unit sees. I mean we don't care about infantry realism why should we care about spotting realism or hull penetration realism or any realism at all?

Ravinhood,

More realism and more detail are not always the same thing. I don't think anyone argues that it wouldn't add more detail, but as for realism that depends on what you the player are supposed to be in terms of command level.

You can really take this to the nth degree in any area, to pursue your point - would it be more realistic if we had every tank crewman detailed? Wouldn't it be even more realistic if they each had stats, a combat history, a biography including previous tanks served on so that we could adjust their experience based on what they're most familiar with? Let's consider maintenance as well - should that be abstracted? Perhaps we should track wear on each road wheel or torsion bar independently and keep track of the mileage for each tank's engine and transmission?

Now, in a vacuum, each of these might seem like cool ideas that must add realism. In practice, if you added all them in you wouldn't necessarily have any increase in realism in terms of end effect and you may well create a lot of new realism problems when trying to aggregate the results of all these super-detailed systems into a net result. On top of that, half your players would be suffering from information overload and feeling like they should micro-manage everything, which for this command level would be less realistic rather than more.

This is not to say that I fail to see the attraction. We've made a few concessions in that regard as well, but those were in the name of "fun detail" more than realism.

I'm not philosophically opposed to more infantry detail, but it's in the category of "fun details" for me and I'd want to make sure that if we ever did it, it didn't get in the way of the gameplay.

Regards,

- Erik

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
It's kinda funny how one group wants realistic spotting, but, don't care for the realism of 1:1 encounters and statistics. Yall sorta pick n choose your realism settings instead of going for the whole pie.

I think its funny that some people want health bars on the tank armor and gun penetration values but want to digitize infantry squad health.

ORIGINAL: Mobius

ORIGINAL: ravinhood
It's kinda funny how one group wants realistic spotting, but, don't care for the realism of 1:1 encounters and statistics. Yall sorta pick n choose your realism settings instead of going for the whole pie.

I think its funny that some people want health bars on the tank armor and gun penetration values but want to digitize infantry squad health.

I didn't see anyone propose "health bars" - let's just agree to disagree on this, ok Rav and Mobius?