Nomada, you are at least consistent lol! GIC and SA were same game. Also Simtek got code for CC, Simtek stated re-releases.
We are doing great and very happy, so you will be very sad Nom or Ivan .....
I don't know what meds you are on Ivan, but we NEVER said AoC wld be free. Its a game, not a Starwars mod .....
The images are really just for you Ivan, enjoy. Unstick your head from Matrix's arse and clean shit out of eyes, and ears and stop posting shite you know NOTHING about.
Those types of posts interest me (the deleted one). With all the background info you posted about your dealings with Matrix, combined with what other people have posted, it makes that deleted post very interesting to me. I have followed all projects since CC5 very closely and whats usually happening in the background affects the final product. To delete his post without explaining it was wrong makes it even a bit more interesting. Maybe he said "basically working for free." I can't remember, the post was deleted too quickly. What was his username?
I am just trying to get the facts on things I am interested in. I would assume the game hasn't been picked up by anyone as theres nothing listed yet. Can you clarify whether or not its a demo you are developing in order to find a publisher?
As he had never worked for us it makes no difference.
Mooxe, whatever! All the things we post, no interest, 1 negative post, bamm, its listed here as you say within minutes. What goes on in the background is just that, background. Given everything that I have put up with in the past, this time, I am making a game. If you want a soap, watch TV.
The Game I wanted to make sometime ago, the game I have dreamed of making. If people are interested in that fine, if not, fine, go play a CC mod or CM. I am not getting involved in flames, trolls, haters or any of the stuff that some people seem to love. I remember when the CC Community was great, when it was stuffed full of truly awesome people. A lot of old CC players are turning up on the forums, they are interested in the game, in the progress, in how things are going. You came on when CC5 was being developed? Apart from his hysterical hatred of modders, KZ and Atomic, did not have any "background" going on. When the time is right we will post or someone else will post about a publisher. You do realize its not a 1 for 1 deal? That you have various publishers for all the various places? Well unless you are Ubi or SEGA. Developers are often NOT free to post info like that until agreed with "various" publishers.
I am just trying to get the facts on things I am interested in.
NOT the game then, I take it?
I am making a game, I am having a blast, we have an amazing team who are working bloody hard and who I will not jeopardize! Hopefully, all being well people will have a new game sometime next year, followed by a series of games.
It was deleted as it was someone who never in fact worked for us. look at the rest of the thread preceding! This was someone who had wanted to work on the project but was turned down.
Do you honestly think that 6 artists, 4 programmers, etc would work for 6 months for nothing? These are not modders, these are professional artists who have worked on things like CoD, Ghost Recon, Warfighter etc. How anyone could think people like this would work for free is kind of beyond me.
We are making amazing progress. In 6 months we have gone to having a strat layer finished, Battle Maps started. Our programmer has worked out an awesome LOS/Cover/Conceal algorithm. The physics and pathing are in. Apart from working on the art, a large part of the time over the last few months has been spent on making sure the core items work well. This is essentially an infantry Sim, yes the BGs will contain all the usual armour etc, but its infantry centric.
This means that LOS/Cover/Conceal has to work perfectly, a wheat field has to conceal, but not cover, large rocks, both, scrub land, bushes, conceal, and so on. This also has to work for every item on the map, house, tree, barn, vine, trench, bunker, marsh grass, literally thousands of items, then every dynamic item such as men, vehicles, AT guns etc, all have to have correct cover/conceal/ballistics working perfectly. We have been concentrating on the AI and getting these items working, creating toolsets and production pipelines, procedures for doing things.
The quality of graphics [terrain] you see and will see in the Battle Maps are an order of magnitude better than any other game of this type, they have to be, infantry hiding cannot show up because there is only 1 stalk of wheat or grass per meter in a field or tiny tufts of grass that conceal nothing. They have to be far more detailed purely because the game is infantry based.
Vehicles are being built by hand as every vehicle needs working hatches, tracks, wheels, bogeys, etc etc. Most off the shelf models are very poor. Also given the OOB for Anzio, the volume of assets needed is large and varied, including many rarely used. In the way that CC was a major jump forward from V for victory, AoC is a huge jump forward in squad based infantry Sims. With 18 squads [platoons] on each side, this can mean with vehicles animations etc up to 300+ infantry on a map at a time. This is a large volume and many things needed to be built from scratch to do this. Its much more than the art, the heart of the game is realism on everything, from psych model, physics, ballistics, LOS, etc to environments.
Its strange that with all the news I and others post on the AoC forums, you jump to post something negative Mooxe, there is a constant stream of items, news, screens etc going on, but it has to be something negative before posting? Why some people are so keen to see a potential new squad based infantry Sim fail is beyond me. Luckily we have a lot of support and we are making amazing progress! Lots of old CC players have dropped in or emailed me to wish us well and are looking forward to the game.
We are busy on many aspects of the game, tying strat / battle maps, production, vehicles, animations and a ton more.
We have several WIP GUIs that I would like opinions on. Please bear in mind these are not final, these are WIP to find a slick, intuitive, easy to use GUI. I feel this is critical to AOC and would like some honest opinions on these.
Please feel free to mix and match, cut them up in your fave program etc. Or you may like one as is. If you are of the opinion that we should know and therefore should not ask for opinions, you are in the wrong place! AOC is designed to be moddable, with as many things as options as possible.
While in certain areas, I feel community input is very valuable so we are asking for it ;)
There is a grand campaign, but we also wanted to give the player some freedom to screw up ;)
The terrain on the strat map and battle maps is based off satellite data, the areas will be very accurate. Also there will be several ways of playing the GC depending on options!
But in any tactical/strategic area, you need movement, and to some extent some freedom.
Thought you may be interested to see some early screens of the Strategic Layer.
These are 4 early screenshots of Art of Combats Strategic layer. These are very early shots, we still have buildings, bridges, and alot of other detail to go into the layer. This is based of actual satellite terrain, so its very accurate. This will be where all the strategic action in AOC will happen, in game you won't see large parts of the map due to Fog of War, we are aiming to make a strategic layer that allows you to make choices and use tactics. When finished the strategic layer will be much more detailed, but we thought you may like an early look at how things are coming along.
They are online on the new Corporate website. We will shortly have some info about the modding ability and interface from the artists who will be looking for input from any of you who may be into modding ;)
Also, we now have a very good handle on the AI and I think not a few surprises as well!
This is going to be as good a tactical sim as we can make. We are trying for options in almost every place we can. We want the player to decide how he wants to play on several levels.
We are now working on the GUI, Battle and Campaign Structure, we already have strat map underlay for campaign sorted. Also working on combat system and AI. Things are coming together very well.
Reinforcements, working in conjunction with attacks on strat map. Stacking BGs Pre-deploy mines/booby traps/ sandbag emplacements, digging in etc.
Pretty much everyone is busy, also we are listening to what people want ;)
The resolution of the screen shots are a bit weird (ex. top down 1353x911)? Is that because the UI elements were cut off as they are a work in progress?
You got it.
Ok, OPTIONS. In AOC we are not deciding what you like. We are giving a range of zoom, [height] a range of perspective and orthographic. Soldiers will be scaleable, ie YOU CHOOSE exact size of your soldier to best suit you.
These are v early screens T, just wanted to show how we are progressing ;)
You will have no problems with viewing this on a 24 inch monitor at the scale you want.
We will have to watch out for that, they look so alike Shiny silver tanks, men running around like headless chickens. They could almost be the same game!
I will let the artists know, to make sure it has no other similarities to said game mooxe. Men of War: Condemned Heroes, a real tactical sim masterpiece. All our assets, men vehicles etc are being modelled from scratch. But you see what you "want" to see. Comparing early pre alpha shots to some blitzkreig or Sudden Strike wannabe is not even close to the reality.
Glad the most of you can see where we are going. Top down is v important as its the best way to play and moreover, control your units in a tactical game. The other views are options. As are the size of your men. We want to offer as much choice as possible, while retaining the tactical sim look and feel.
The team are doing great and I am proud of them. Will keep you updated as we progress.
We have been sorting zoom/scale/perspective out the last few days. We needed to have it finalised for art pipeline. Until we had views set we could not really make a big push on the art/animation/modelling front.
Ok, few questions answered. We have set max / min zoom height, so its an option what you use. Top down is one of the views you can use while playing, again an option. Perspective angle will also have 2 points so you can clearly delineate heights etc, ie: really use the 3D.
But Top down is as was always said my MickXe5, Senior_Drill, all the old players a MUST have, I agree, but we also want to make use of new technology to give you options. Soldiers will also be scalable.
Glad you like them, we are working hard and truly have an awesome set of guys.
The screens show how we are progressing, we also have the GUI underway, the Campaign strat map has now been passed to the artists. AI is being developed. Progress to date is good.
Its a 3D model, going into the game. May have some in game shots of it in next 2 weeks. I am hoping we can include some of the tanks that often get left out of games.
Cromwell, Pershing, Carro Armato P40, Churchill, Challenger, Cruiser etc. It will be good to see the allies with something other than Sherman variants.
Its still very early days for us. We have almost got the campaign wrapped up. Looking at unit perspectives and zoom right now. Will post some screens of that. Work on AI is going well.
Strat layer and GUI will shortly be underway. We have not been at this for 18 months.
Work on in game soldier models is complete, we will be sorting vehicles as well. Lots going on.
Fog of war is something that will be a large part of what is happening. In WW2 we often forget that intelligence on the enemy was by modern standards appalling and almost exclusively HUIMT.
Even with Enigma, the Allies often got things wrong or purposely ignored the warning for fear of exposing Enigma. Look at the Bulge, 600,000 men built up and the allies missed it. FOW is important to any wargame that wants to be in any way realistic.
Intel, won't be totally random, but FOW will be a real factor, although it is something that I think has to be made an option as some people simply want to know the enemy locations etc, which to me has always kind of defeated the purpose of playing ;)
TBH this is what I am looking for, this kind of direct, from the guts, this is what I like and why.
Ok, Matrix NEVER had any interest in the CC titles apart from making money. I worked for Matrix Games for too many years. There was one riving force making money. To me a games company is about making games, not hug amounts of money.
If I told you what all the CC Rebuilds grossed, you would in all honesty be stunned. No I am not posting figures, its not my place and not my business any more. The whole point of the CC Rebuilds for Simtek, for Chris and myself was to make enough to develop CC further. Sadly I both got ill and trusted the wrong people. I did some stupid things [retrospect is not kind] by trusting too many too much. I paid for it, I lost everything. THAT was my fault. We live, we hopefully learn. My point is, the plan had been with Simtek/Matrix 50% Destineer 50% Split = Matrix 25% Simtek = 25% [Gross] we Simtek, were going to fund the development of a new engine and continuing the rebuilds for that reason. The funds all went to Matrix, you know that story. This is the past, I cannot change that. I can change now, what the future brings.
Now, I have a dev team, better than I could ever have imagined, I have financiers. I can and will make the next Generation game. It is called The Tactical Art of Combat, it will inevitably get shortened to Art of Combat [not NO name change]
I have waited a long time to do this, to build this game. The biggest thing I am concentrating on is the AI. The Strat layer is there as it was always such an after-thought in previous titles. I wanted it done right, with operational realities. Its there to make the game below work better.
Mooxe, my fave has always been CC3, no strat layer straight campaign, but that does not mean everyone wants the same.
2 things are guiding principles here: To make a game that has as many options as possible, if you don't like one view, switch to another or lock the view/zoom. Want to dive right in, quick battles, campaigns. Want supply/logistic, pre bombardment, air strikes, morale reality levels, pre deployment, river crossings, want to award medals, auto award them, promote units, make your own unit? OPTIONS. Eventually we will be trying modular AI, so it can be aggressive, defensive or even build in various traits. AI has moved forward enormously, we will be using as a base AI, an AI that learns. AI is central to the game, small unit combat is central to the game. CQB is central.
The other thing is modding. Yes Unity makes modding hard, but not as hard as has been made out and we can always build game specific editors. This is a game for the community, to finally give a new title worth the name after 15 years, something new and fresh, while keeping what makes it unique.
The more input, the better we can do. Already ideas have come in and long may it continue and god save me from thinking I know what everyone wants or that I know best! I and the team are listening to what people want.
The battles you fight, need to mean something and having to battle on both Op and Tac layers, with both interacting is real. Being able to stack armour, infantry and break through, this is really an Op layer worthy of the name.
The Tactical level will be unchanged apart from predeploy, more accurate ballistics, physics, better pathing/AI. 3 sides allowing for modern asymmetric warfare. [Partisans / insurgents]
I know what has made the game great, close up fighting, mostly infantry, this is the key and its not gonna change. Map size is a question of scale, do you want us to think about it? To get it right? or just follow what? Which previous CC version? 1, 2,3,5,LSA,Panthers? Which one? Each are a CC game, but very different in map size.
We are keeping the Ethos, we are keeping what has always made the game great, while improving and building what it did badly. If that is wrong mooxe, what exactly would you do? 15 years after CC last came out, just after Win95. We should change nothing as its perfect? Or just what you think should change? Are you the arbiter of what's right?
This is why we are asking both ourselves and the players what they think, so we CAN get it as close to right as possible. Not just what I want or Luer or GW Tim, Southern_Land, but what as much as we can the community wants.
Mooxe, if you don't want to like it, think I have already got it wrong, fine. You never need play it. I would say however that give the 15 years of no real DEV in CC, you would welcome new things happening, not instantly knock them.
In August of 2004, Zappi, Homba, Bambam887, RedScorpion and MOOXE all pitched
in to create this Close Combat site. I would to thank all the people who have visited
and found this site to thier liking. I hope you had time to check out some
of the great Close Combat mods and our forums. I'd also like to thank
all the members of our volunteer staff that have helped over
the years, and all our users that contributed to this site!
Topic: 
Oh new website is up as well. 
