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#1
Recent IGN article that combines an interview with behind the scene insights to show what Relic is doing to create CoH 2. Obviously not a whole lot of details on gameplay but it's very cool to see what they're doing.
Included are behind the scenes photos and videos. Even sound recordings of weapons fire. The comparison between CoH 1 and 2's MG42 sounds were sweet.
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2012/07/0...tic-experience
#2
The sound in the first game was one of my favorite things about it. Truly one of the very few games that I feel really takes advantage of surround sound and knows how to properly use bass sounds.
I'm so excited for this.
Agreed roflmao. Sound is so often an overlooked part of game design and Relic is one of the few stand out companies that doesn't forget how important it is. Even saying how good CoH 1's sound was, the MG42 in 2 sounds, well, terrifying. Hitler's buzzsaw indeed.
#4
Good to see the sound comparison made it out. Was truly amazing when I heard it.
You should check out Priority Vox Channel Secundus, a blog!
Compares pretty well to this
Note the Maxim 1910 at the end. Also, check out the accuracy of the MG 34 and MG 42 when mounted on the heavy tripod and how quickly they can chew through ammunition.
On topic: Thanks for the link Yurdle! In a war game, sound can really make or break the experience and it's nice to see Relic making an effort towards giving us a better audio experience for COH2, thus adding to authenticity. Now, about those squad sizes...
For a second there, when the sherman was rolling out of the tent, i thought a bane blade was going to roll out.but damn that was fun to watch.
No qaurter back men, only forward or we will hold this line forever!!!
[IMG][/IMG]
Row Row Row Fight the Powha
#7
Footage of sound recording is usually great, more of it please!
To further illustrate this, here's a video that wasn't part of BF3's multi million advertising campaign, but it's still one of the most memorable ones.
Spoiler
One step closer to the end of the decadent Eldar race.
[...] the reason we don’t like DRM solutions is because they punish the innocent and they have to jump through all these hoops. We don’t want to do that [...]
I remember the CoH1 MG42 was changed at some point in time to its current version, but I don't remember how it sounds like and how it compares to the CoH2 ones (I would expect the CoH2 ones to be the best-sounding though, with all the effort going into sound).
Originally Posted by chelovek_veliki
Well i guess i actually invest in new speakers and a sound card to take full effect of their sound authenticity.
That mg42 was glorious. As for tank sounds, i hope relic realizes they can you tube the Tiger and Tiger 2 running at a museum in France. The article said they will have to guage how they think it sounded, which is retarded when you can easily see and hear how it sounded when running with a 5 second you tube search. I hope those garbage can shermans arent the only tank that has a realistic engine sound.
#11
Well, ARMYguy, hearing a video on youtube is not the same as hearing it live. I imagine for proper sound design they have to be able to record in high fidelity the actual sound produced in a very specific way.
#12
Sound is a very important factor in a game, turn the sound off during any game and you will notice how quickly it gets boring to continue playing. I have every faith in Relic in creating the new sounds for CoH2, after all, CoH1 sounds were rather marvelous too, especially for a game from 2006.
What I truly hope is that Relic does keep CoH2 authentic to CoH1 in terms of gameplay, battle scale and the importance of how to use your units rather than producing more units than your opponent.
#13
as long as it isnt in the levels of dow2.and the importance of how to use your units rather than producing more units than your opponent.
on topic, man the sounds is superb as usual. keep up the good work relic.
Hopefully as part of the authentic experience Relic adds in side armor facing values for CoH2. It is hard to accurately portray a Panther's weak side armor when only rear armor has a separate value.
#15
Not really, the tank is just seperated into 50% front and 50% rear.
http://companyofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Penetration
I do hope CoH2 has real armor penetration and thickness..
I don't see how that's historically authentic, either though.
You mean front, side and rear values? I'd be very much in favour of that! Some vehicles had a substantial difference in armour thickness even between the side and rear plating.I do hope CoH2 has real armor penetration and thickness..
#18
Exactly. Real gun penetration values would be highly appreciated too, instead of simple modifiers to a certain armor type. The reason for this is there's even a small chance that for example a 75mm Sherman gun will penetrate the Tiger frontally.. But as a start, having a difference between frontal, sides, rear and top would be very nice.
#19
"real gun penetration" is affected by a myriad of conditions and coincidence (wind strength, padding on target surface, angle of shell when hitting the armour piece and probably more besides). I'm not sure how possible such a realistic system would be in an RTS game, bearing in mind the toll on CPU performance. FPS games with their limited vehicular spawnings, sure. RTS games . . . I don't know. That's a lot of information to process.
I am an Iron Warrior! Iron Within, Iron Without!
#20
Hrmm.. Not really.
Just throw in a "Chance to Penetrate" parameter to all gun values as a percentage. For example: 75mm Sherman Cannon has 1.7% chance to penetrate target Tiger Tank Frontal Armour.
Done.
#21
Hrmm.. Not really.
Just throw in a "Chance to Penetrate" parameter to all gun values as a percentage. For example: 75mm Sherman Cannon has 1.7% chance to penetrate target Tiger Tank Frontal Armour.
Done.
#22
Oh, yes, that's definitely doable (I was actually thinking of something like that as an approximation
#23
Well Akra, that's how it already is. You simply have a scale from 0-1, being 0% to 100% chance to penetrate a certain target.
A weapon has a base penetration for the 4 available ranges, and then another penetration value for each specific armor type. So if a tank has 0.7 penetration on medium range and 0.4 penetration against the frontal armor of the target, you get 0.7*0.4 = 0.28 = 28% of penetration on that range against that target.
Having each tank with their realistic armor thickness on all sides would obviously be too much to process as Gorb said, but I would prefer a system which is way better calculated than a simple dice roll with one value. A start to this would be to set many more locations of armor thickness on each model, like frontal, side, turret, rear and so on, each with a difference value.
Problem with including turret armour is you have to figure in the thickness of the gun mantle, and then the turret front, sides, and rear...Then there's the superstructure and turret roof...
I'd just be happy with hull front, sides and rear - that way, you can do DoW 3 properly as well
You could have incredibly realistic armour penetration calculations; most of the work can be pre-calculated, along with hit boxes placed all around the model to determine the exact armour facing that was struck. Getting the exact angle of impact is dead simple, since the engine already knows the orientation of the projectile and vehicle on impact. It's not really difficult to do at all.
However I'm not expecting any of this, because that doesn't seem to be the nitty-gritty details that Relic are concerned with. Since the player has no control over what part of the vehicle their shell impacts, the results could feel too random to the player. A Panzer IV H's 75mm shell impacts the lower hull of an M7 Priest and bounces, or it hits the thin upper armour protecting the gun compartment and slices clean through and out the other side. Drastic differences like this, paired up with random numbers that can give you one outcome over and over again, could really drive a player crazy. Instead they seem to be aiming for the ballpark numbers, giving a likely result that players can plan for and keep in their heads, rather than a myriad of armour thickness and slopes that cover each vehicle.
#26
How does the engine know the orientation of the projectile based on wind speeds and intervening obstacles?
Also, how would you "pre-calculate" such a huge range of values? Somewhere, somebody has to actually calculate these, you realise?
The projectile orientation has to be known for the engine to render the projectile mesh that is animated and moved across the screen. It is hard to see sometimes, but CoH cannons fire a rendered projectile. Wind speed has a negligible effect on a cannon shell at the 30m - 60m ranges of Company of Heroes. If we're talking about another game which has ranges out to 2km, there are formulas for wind resistance and wind speeds that can be applied to determine its actual velocity and impact point at the end of its flight time. This is not quantum mechanics for a physics programmer.
Also, what 'huge range of values' are we speaking of? And pre-calculation doesn't mean it's done by hand by someone, you just need the raw data and a tool to crunch it and store it in a database. Cannon testing data gave 1 to 2 values of penetration (rolled homogenous and sometimes face-hardened) for typically 100m, 500m, 1000m, 1500m, and 2000m ranges. National testing criteria would adjust these values slightly up or down, based upon their own testing probabilities they were aiming for. This creates a curve which can be easily mapped out to determine what the penetration is at 750m or 1136m. The thickness of each armour facing is easily stored and mapped to a model hitbox.
About the only thing you would have to create ballpark figures for is HE's effect versus armour. There's lots of research into the subject, but they never did concrete penetrating tests during the war, so you'd have to estimate based upon accounts of its effectiveness.
Though I still think the most Relic will do in this aspect is give us a separate Side armour value. Everything else I listed above isn't in line with what they see CoH being about.
#28
Thanks for explaining - it's good to find people with expertise or knowledge in such areas of debate. While it may not be quantum mechanics, as a programmer myself I'm intrigued to know about the difficulty of such things.
What do you think Relic "see" CoH as? Nevermind CoH 2 which is shaping up to be a more polished experience than even vCoH, I'm intrigued (as someone who isn't massively familiar with CoH) as to what a long-term CoH forumite thinks Relic thinks of the game.
WWII in an accessible and semi-plausible form. Lots of forum modders have tried to push it into more historical directions, including myself, and our successes have only been possible because the original game was not completely inaccurate to begin with. They did try to make the various mechanics and stats be reasonable echoes of the reality, despite squeezing it into a small and fast-paced RTS using a traditional build-earn-research model. The accessibility comes from not having to juggle a lot of data in your head when making decisions. You don't have too many units on the field at once, the rock-paper-scissors aspects are not difficult to spot and remember, and you don't need to know the history of the war to understand and play the game.
So I imagine any changes to make CoH2 more accurate or historical will only happen if they don't interfere with its accessibility or ease of play.
#30
This is a completely hypothetical situation, but if the scale was reduced, or the scope was changed - would you think there would be more room for complex simulation models?
Something like what they attempted with one the game modes in Tales of Valo(u)r, but more detailed/aimed at the historical (or dedicated) gamer (as supposed to "blow stuff up in a tank"), as a rough outline? I'm just wondering what level of detail you'd like to see in something that approximates RTS (or RTT) gameplay.
Big question
There would be room, up to a certain threshold. That threshold is where the reality interferes with the player's enjoyment, since real war is not about fair set-ups and friendly competition. Reducing the scope means the player has less mental gymnastics to perform, so managing more data with fewer units seems like an appropriate trade-off.
Part of it depends on what the smallest "element" the player can directly select and command. If I wanted the smallest controllable element to be a squad or individual vehicle - like it is in CoH - and I wanted a very authentic game that was still playable, I'd probably aim at the Platoon level. Company level might also be possible, but only if I can leave an entire platoon under the AI's control while I focus on controlling another one; juggling an entire company at once would be too much. Otherwise Company level would be better suited to a game where you ordered entire platoons around, and couldn't select individual squads and vehicles. Military hierarchy is based upon relegating command, so that no man has to directly command more than what's feasible. A Captain commands a company, but only directly commands platoons. The platoons are commanded by Lieutenants, who then decide how to deploy the squads and vehicles to carry out the Captain's orders.
However only controlling a single platoon is not a lot of fun. You can't have combined arms if you only control an infantry platoon or tank platoon. Also some units would not have a place on the battlefield, like an artillery battery, and some platoons are meant more for support than offensive combat, like an anti-tank gun platoon. So in order for this to work you'd need to have 4 vs 4 to 8 vs 8 games, so that each side could have a combined arms experience. Support units would either be present under AI control, or have them split up into sections and attached to player forces. For example the game could have a pool of support assets, and the players spend points at the beginning of the game to grab individual squads/sections from the pool to add to their platoon, like an infantry platoon player grabbing a machine-gun team and two anti-tank gun squads with his/her starting points.
On paper I think this could work, but it's probably not the only approach that could be taken. Depending upon how "gamey" you want it, and where the threshold between simulation and game is placed, you can come up with a lot of variations.
#32
There are different ways of increasing scope. The easiest would be to simply make maps bigger and increase weapon ranges. It would give the impression of larger battles without actually increasing the amount of units for players to control and CPUs to render. Giving tanks a longer range than 20 meters would also make battles look less dumb. <.<
Other WW2 / Post-WW2 RTS games have this: Nice big maps where artillery and troop transports (trucks and APC's / halftracks) are essential and function in their proper roles.Giving tanks a longer range than 20 meters would also make battles look less dumb.
In WW2 on the Eastern Front, it was typical for tanks to start engaging each other at distances of 2km or more - mostly because the terrain largely permitted that. The Russian Steppe, where most of the fighting took place, is relatively open and mostly flat with low rolling hills in some area...definitely tank country. Infantry combat took place at ranges out to 500m, with the average being about 300m (depending on the environment).
That being said, I do understand the need to scale down ranges to something that players can handle. However, Relic's current range system in COH leaves much to be desired.
#34
The main issue with range is knowing when something is killing you. Take CoH for example and the Flak 88 which had the largest range for an anti-tank gun, that thing could snipe your vehicles from 4-5 screens away before you knew what was happening. I'd rather know what is going on and be able to react than have realistic ranges.
The 88mm FlaK 36/37 isn't even close to having realistic range in-game: Try 10+ km in real life! The cannon was phenomenally good at sniping tanks at extreme range, and the FlaK 36/37 racked up large numbers of vehicle kills in North Africa and the Eastern Front, due to largely open terrain that favors weaponry with long ranges and high muzzle velocities. I recall reading of an instance where a Panther spotted and destroyed a T-34 at 3km out, using standard AP ammunition.
Seeing as distance in COH is measured in meters, you can kind of see where I'm going with this...To properly do weapon ranges and still give room to maneuver, you'd need truly massive maps on the order of 15km x 15km at the smallest and proper, true to life LOS from weapons - which I honestly wouldn't mind seeing
Now obviously to keep maps small and in-game ranges reasonable for most players, you'd need to do some converting and scaling down for weapon ranges, for instance 50m = 15m in-game or possibly less so that players have time to figure out who got hit and where the shot came from and react while still keeping an authentic feel to how weapons and vehicles actually performed. Not an easy task, and this is me speaking as a modder that had to do exactly that for my old DOW mod: Strike a balance between what a majority of DOW players wanted and how things were in TT.
#36
nope, wouldnt want infantry units taking 5mins just to retreat back to base, another 15mins doing tactical movement back to combat zone after reinforced, if that was the case, infantry fights should at least take 30mins per engagement = drastically reducing the lethality of weapons, and a game would take 5hours to complete. current range is fine, flaks are already realistically protrayed, they have extreme range and firepower relative to tanks, sniping them a couple of screens away, similar to back in ww2. the current scale, scope is fine.
also, tanks already have slightly greater range than infantry and on top of that, infantry AT is only useful at med ranges, means getting close to tanks and exposing themselves to enemy support fire. maybe more usage of attack move to allow units to stay at max range would solve most problems, but thats in the realms of l2p.
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