Ssnake

Not quite. The actual coordinate is close to point Nemo, but still a literary reference - R'lyeh.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the thought. It's just that in order to make it work, a LOT of work needs to be invested, and I'm skeptical if the results will justify the effort. Step 1, invent/adopt a render engine that can reliably deliver a steady 90 frames per second, per eye, in high resolution. We'll do that with 5.0, but it'll take a while. Step 2, VR is obviously wonderful if you're inside the tank, looking around. Until you notice all the surfaces that we removed to optimize the polycount from a number of fixed locations. With 6DOF movement you will start spotting them. Should we fix all that? This would amount to redoing all the interiors, without getting paid (IOW, we could do this only at a slow pace, so initially only very few vehicles would be VR enabled). Step 3, if you're the vehicle commander or the driver, while you're not looking into sights, VR is glorious. But the driver's position is not the focus of this simulation, and if you're just admiring the beautiful tank interiors you're doing it wrong, and the virtual enemy will deliver virtual death to you quickly. IOW, the moments where VR works best are arguably least important to your actual gameplay. Should we then change the gameplay to accommodate the few with VR goggle better? Step 4, there's the challenge to operate the instruments inside your virtual tank. VR without data gloves or some other pointing device will be useless. Sure, there's products like Manus VR which not only allows you to point at things but also to get tactile feedback if you click a button. But these are still expensive. Step 5: With VR goggles on, you can't properly use your keyboard anymore. Boom, about 120 hotkeys that you're accustomed to are now GONE and need to be substituted somehow. 3D Gesture Tracking? Voice Recognition? Maybe all these can contribute towards a solution but don't believe for a second that they will work faster and as precise as pressing a single hotkey. People tend to see the "glorious" aspect, and I agree that it is tempting. But there's a looong tail of tasks and challenges that need to be solved which, while we're concentrating on these, will prevent us from working on other stuff. So these opportunity costs need to be taken into account as well. And when I do all that, my conclusion is that under the prevailing conditions it's just not worth it.

You can open these scenarios in the Mission Editor. There you get prompted to replace the map, and then you can pick a map package that covers the same region. There's no guarantee of course that the map package will be 100% identical with the terrain data that the original scenarion contained. The only way to check that is to open the scenario in version 4.0 or older and then to compare if the new map package is altered in a significant way. But usually the map replacement is an expedient solution that yields adequate results. The option of last resport is to extract the map data from the legacy scenario and to make a one-off conversion into a map package. For that you may need to install the Legacy Maps.

"In principle" yes, but we still need a suitable opportunity.

Yeah, you can do that with the classroom version. For SB Pro PE you're stuck with our best guess.

I did apply it, although not consciously. The thought processes laid out above were as they were. Thanks to Kahnemann, which I only discovered years later, I can now formulate the process in a more concise manner. Before that, I would have called system 1 "guts" or "instinct" although we all know that it can be trained with experience (which is what Steel Beasts attempts to do, if you play scenarios conducive to building relevant experiences). And we all KNOW that "thinking hard" (=system 2) is, well, hard, and takes longer and tends to absorb all your brain power/attention. I mean, many of us have been instructors in the army at one point or another. And if you took that role seriously (as you bloody should, since lives depend on adequate training) then you probably also learned a bit about what types of training work best for what kind of skill/activity. Where it's the perfection of body activities armies figured out more than two thousand years ago that drill based training works best, wether your service weapon is a pointy stick or an M16. As army guys we call it "muscle memory" which is of course absurd since muscles have no nerve cells that could store information, but it gets the point across that it's all about memorizing motions until you no longer have to think about them. Because thinking is slow. So, Steel Beasts is heavily leaning towards the cognitive skills spectrum. But even here there's the distinction between analytical thought processes (what you might do a lot in a staff officer's role) and "experience", the ability to sense a tactical opportunity, to develop a simple plan for a tactical move on the fly and to quickly give the necessary orders. I'd bet you a lot of money that successful military leaders, even if they conduct a maneuver in text-book manner, do most of it based on "instinct" and "experience". Analytical thinking has its place when there's considerably less steel fragments in the air, and that's where a lot of tactical training at military academies (sic) is focused on. But at the platoon level, decision-making needs to be snappy. And Steel Beasts was tailored for the platoon level.

It's still a long ways off, TBH. The lure is always there, but so is the understanding that a lot of factors need to come together to make it more than just useful for the player's eye and nothing else.

Yes, widen the road shoulder.

Select the road leading to the bridge. Hold Alt or Ctrl or Shift (one of the three, don't remember which) to turn the mouse into a cutting tool (scissor icon), then cut the last 20m or so leading to the bridge edge. And, of course, cut that road right at the beginning of the bridge. Select the segment again, now go to Edit... Raise Road. This will pop up a window where you should switch to absolute heights, and then you adjust the elevation for the point under the bridge. That could be the end point (no green tip) or the start point of the road (green tip), so depending on the orientation you need to lower the one under the bridge. Reduce the height by 10 or 20cm, click OK, then have a look at the result. If in doubt, undo, then try again. Eventually you'll get the hang of it.

Bug 8708. Meh. Was already in the database, as 5421. (and 5420, related).

Adjust the length of the bridge a little, or edit the road and create a ramp where the end point is slightly lower than right now.

It's, well, a design decision that's ultimately subject to opinion. I figured that trying to come up with structured statements that would follow Boolean Logic would occupy too much of a user's attention when there's usually a lot of things going on, and would subject to an effect very similar to target fixation. These embark conditions etc. are heavily "system 2" driven (following D. Kahnemann's terminology), which is the equivalent to "heavy work" for the brain. But tactical decisions, I believe, are mostly System 1 driven - gut feelings, a sense of the situation that factors in more elements than you can easily name. And you need to develop the System 1 for tactical situations because a. you're working from an incomplete situational picture, b. you're working under information overload and under time pressure. The precious few bits of reserve capacity for analytical thought processes should not be consumed by the simulation's user interface, ideally. You may disagree with that design decision, that's cool. But I hope that the answer above at least illustrates that we didn't make these decisions on a whim.

The way I see it, commercial considerations aside, the only justification for releasing an Alpha version of a software is to invite feedback from the targeted customer demographic. If a developer can't handle constructive criticism, they shouldn't release early. As long as the criticism is respectful and focuses on what the products attempts to be, it is almost always helpful for a developer. Of course, "feedback" from the the proverbial internet basement nerd with the impulse control of a 14 year-old is best ignored, possibly even silenced because really nothing good will ever come from that.

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A $9.50 one-month license will answer that question. I don't know the answer. I'm skeptical. But who knows, you may find the result acceptable.