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SB Pro PE 4.0 - Discussion thread


Rotareneg

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dunno if this has been asked?

 

will the upgrade to 4.0 be free to current SB pro PE owners? or will there be an additional fee to upgrade from current  v3.028 build  to 4.0 when it releases?

Edited by Kev2go
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1 hour ago, Kev2go said:

dunno if this has been asked?

 

will the upgrade to 4.0 be free to current SB pro PE owners? or will there be an additional fee to upgrade from current  v3.028 build  to 4.0 when it releases?

 

No it wont be free.

 

It's USD$40 for everyone who has 2.5xx or later.

 

Pre 2.5xx and the $40 upgrade path is not available (unsure if that means you need to upgrade to 2.5x and then upgrade again (ie. 2 upgrades), or if its a straight purchase from that far back).

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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2 hours ago, Gibsonm said:

 

No it wont be free.

 

It's USD$40 for everyone who has 2.5xx or later.

 

Pre 2.5xx and the $40 upgrade path is not available (unsure if that means you need to upgrade to 2.5x and then upgrade again (ie. 2 upgrades), or if its a straight purchase from that far back).

 

 

 

dang i just bought this a month ago :/

 

 

guess that was pretty pointless. Had i known there was going to be such a major update so soon, i would have held off on the purchase and waited for this new release.

Edited by Kev2go
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45 minutes ago, Kev2go said:

 

 

dang i just bought this a month ago :/

 

 

guess that was pretty pointless. Had i known there was going to be such a major update so soon, i would have held off on the purchase and waited for this new release.

 

The price of the current version is usually discounted before a major upgrade. So, chances are you will have paid the same amount for the current version + upgrade as you would have for just buying the new version to start with.

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2 hours ago, Kev2go said:

dang i just bought this a month ago :/

 

guess that was pretty pointless. Had i known there was going to be such a major update so soon, i would have held off on the purchase and waited for this new release.

 

Well I guess it depends how much you paid.

 

The standard purchase price is around US$125.

 

If you paid that then your thoughts maybe warranted.

 

If however, as flagged by Lt DeFault above, you paid the reduced US$85 or so then the cost of the upgrade is factored in to that "discount".

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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6 hours ago, Gibsonm said:

 

Well I guess it depends how much you paid.

 

The standard purchase price is around US$125.

 

If you paid that then your thoughts maybe warranted.

 

If however, as flagged by Lt DeFault above, you paid the reduced US$85 or so then the cost of the upgrade is factored in to that "discount".

 

This is exactly what I did. I consider it to be buying 4.0 in two instalments. Much more affordable for me now!

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10 hours ago, Gibsonm said:

 

Well I guess it depends how much you paid.

 

The standard purchase price is around US$125.

 

If you paid that then your thoughts maybe warranted.

 

If however, as flagged by Lt DeFault above, you paid the reduced US$85 or so then the cost of the upgrade is factored in to that "discount".

 

 

yes i have a single license dongle

 

I did pay $85, didnt know that was the discounted price. adding $40 for the upgrade adds up to the full price of $125, without discount . That makes sense, thanks for clearing that up.

Edited by Kev2go
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A pet peeve of mine is when you set your route and at the end you have the formation set as a wide defense formation..But the units go to normal spacing and you are stuck trying to make them assume a wide defense formation...It makes the inbound arty less effective..At least that's the way its supposed to work..Has this been addressed??

Edited by delta6
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I usually set the way point tactic to 'none' if it is not already there, change the spacing (and if needed formation in case of times where I may need to reset the tactic to none), then set the tactic to what I want. However, it would be nice if the way points use what the route pathing info is, as well as perhaps a 'continue' routing that uses the way point info, instead of using one or the other as far as spacing and formation (and speed).

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5 hours ago, Azure Lion said:

I usually set the way point tactic to 'none' if it is not already there, change the spacing (and if needed formation in case of times where I may need to reset the tactic to none), then set the tactic to what I want. However, it would be nice if the way points use what the route pathing info is, as well as perhaps a 'continue' routing that uses the way point info, instead of using one or the other as far as spacing and formation (and speed).

Ah, for those paying attention, 4.0 appears to allow you to set the default stactics for both routes and waypoints, and that should go a long way to fixing the problem.

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2 minutes ago, Haferja said:

Sorry for my dumb question: But did i miss the announcement of the release date? Wasn't it June? O.oO.oO.o

 

No you didn't.

 

It was planned for June (which isn't over yet BTW) but its likely to slide to the right.

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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We're working on "Plan B" (which actually is more like "Plan C" because B suggested that we stop working on 4.0 until about October and then mount another effort for a Christmas release). We managed to wrestle a few more weeks of bug fixing and testing time from the work schedule, and I intend to use the full amount to deliver the best possible result under the prevailing circumstances.

 

What that means is that we probably must cut back some ambition in order to bring at least most of the advertised features in reasonably good condition out in July, and then provide a major update half a year later, approximately. What exactly that means is currently being evaluated and tested by the Beta team. The final decision has not yet been cast, but I'm cautiously optimistic that we can wing it.

 

The likely outcome is that the high resolution terrain will have to wait until about Christmas. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just that we decided together with our army customers that we need to find a better balance between good performance and retaining user flexibility; previously we had fucused very much on the performance side of things (both as far as frame rate and loading times for maps and scenario files were concerned) at the expense of some loss in flexibility.

For example, with the current terrain engine we modify the height profile at runtime depending on whether a given point in the terrain is covered by water. If that is the case, the surface point is depressed in height by a certain depth. This works well because the number of terrain grid points is reasonably small so it can be done at virtually no waiting time while loading a scenario. It does however NOT work well at all when you do this with a terrain resolution that is more than 500 times as high.

 

What's more, you also need to offload some computational load to data "preprocessing" to speed up scene rendering and, in particular, line of sight calculations. Preprocessing costs even more time, at least about 20 minutes per map, and up to several hours in extreme cases. Nobody wants to wait that long when you fire up a mission, and you wouldn't want the current 3.0 frame rates cut down by a factor 500 either. But just as well "brute force" is not a viable strategy either.

At the same time however retaining the ability to modify a terrain for a scenario in some places here and there is a legitimate demand, and the original concept would essentially have required to spend all the preprocessing time whenever you wanted to modify a map. In practice this would have meant that maps were to be treated largely as a static thing, and that users would have to give up the ability in Steel Beasts to do quick & dirty map touch-ups.

 

So we decided that we need to go back to the drawing board as far as the balance between performance and user flexibility is concerned. But it was nothing that we could do on short notice without creating a very grave risk of ruining everything for everybody. Also, we didn't want to publish a new terrain engine where we'd know well in advance that we'd change the file handling half a year laters. So our idea of a workaround is to keep pretty much all the features that we advertised in the 4.0 videos, except that we would provide the the high resolution terrain as a free update later on.

 

 

That's where we are and what's happening behind the scenes right now. We don't know for sure yet whether this will work. Right now it looks as if things might work out, so there's reason for cautious optimism. But I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet.

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Why?

 

You get the particle effects, all the new vehicles, plus road leveling. And in about half a year, also the new terrain engine as a free update. In addition, we'll come up with better methods to manage minor map modifications than what we had originally in mind, where we admittedly chose the wrong path. All right, we have to back-track a little. It happens. But the proposed solution, if it works out, still allows for a July release rather than waiting for Christmas (or possibly even longer).

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