En bref. Suite des nouveautés annoncées il y a peu par Battlefront, voici une petite série de captures d’écrans pour le futur module Rome to Victory concernant Combat Mission – Fortress Italy.
Ce projet a été retardé entre autre par la complexité du prochain CMSF 2 mais il devrait néanmoins finir par voir le jour cette année, a priori. Au menu en résumé une longue campagne avec donc l’ajout de nombreuses unités le tout sur une période allant jusqu’à la fin de la guerre.
Pour plus d’informations sur Combat Mission – Fortress Italy – Rome to Victory, voyez le site officiel (qui sera prochainement entièrement refait). A lire également notre Test de Combat Mission : Fortress Italy ainsi que celui de Combat Mission – Gustav Line.
Au passage sachez aussi qu’une série de patchs pour l’ensemble des jeux dit CM 2 arrivera en théorie prochainement, peu après la sortie de CMSF 2, fin juillet si tout va bien.
Communiqué
CMFI Rome to Victory Bones
It’s been a while since we’ve updated you on the progress of Rome to Victory, the second Module for CMFI. Time to make things right!
CMSF Rome to Victory (R2V) takes the CMFI game Family up to the end of the war and introduces a ton of forces that fought during the full campaign. The ambitious nature of this Module is one of the reasons it’s taken a lot longer to put together than expected. For those of you who have researched the details of the Italian campaign know, there’s pretty much an exception to every rule and then exceptions to those. Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for our release plans, we care to get the details right and won’t release the game until we’re satisfied we’ve done so. It’s just who we are!
Here’s a short list of what you can expect to see in R2V
– The timeline extended until the end of the war, which means all the late war equipment and formation changes you’d expect for the Italian Front are included
– Gebirgsjäger, Waffen SS, and expanded Luftwaffe forces (yes, including LW Field Divisions) are included as well as the various modifications of Heer formations found a the end of the war
– The Allies now have access to Canadians, Polish, South African, New Zealand, Indian, Brazilian, and French forces along with a host of visual, equipment, and organizational quirksEverybody is busy with CMSF2 and I didn’t give the testers much time to cook up some screenshots, so I only have a few things to show right now. I’ll post some more later on. For now, here you go…
Update on Engine 4 patches
Patches for all five existing CM2 Families are coming right on the heals of the CMSF2 release. This is a lot later than they should be out to you guys, and we are very sorry for it, however we feel realistically that’s the best we can do at this point. That’s the short answer for you.
The longer explanation is the nature of CM2 has thrown us a bit of a curveball that requires us to change the way we patch. In hindsight we should have figured this out months ago, however with our plates as full as they are we didn’t see where this would end up until recently.
Since the very beginning of CM1 we pretty much worked on one game at a time. We’d fix things for the next game, make sure they were working fine, release that game, then patch the previous game. That worked fine up until the five Family Game Engine 4 Upgrade came out and we now had to make sure that fixes worked equally well for five games all at the same time. Given the complexity of CM2 games there’s a lot that goes into making sure we’re not putting out a bad patch and having to go right back into patching again.
The primary problem is with a dozen or two fixes queued up, the chances that a fix might not work correctly, or in fact cause a new problem, for one or more of the five (soon to be six) games is pretty good. Especially when you consider that the Game Engine code is always being worked on, which means we have to make sure brand new code doesn’t mess up things for older releases. That’s a lot of work for our testers.
The solution we came up with is to cut down on the complexity of any one patch. Instead of having dozens of fixes in one patch we’ll keep it down to the bare minimum, release a patch fairly quickly, then let some time go by and patch another modest number of fixes, and repeat as often as needed. It’s too late to adopt this strategy now, so we have to wait until CMSF2 is out the door before going through the patch process.
OK, I can hear some of saying that an alternative solution is to put out « beta patches ». Sorry, no. As soon as gamers are given something that is called « beta » they start thinking they are beta testers and wanting to have their 2 cents of input on everything. Not just stuff we’re trying to fix but stuff that isn’t even broken. This creates entitlement that we can’t possibly live up to, which means we get slammed. In short, we try to do something good and get treated like bad guys. No, that’s not a road we want to go down.
There you have it. The long explanation of how we got to this point and our plans for addressing it in the future.
Steve
