Steel Beasts Professional, above all, is a simulation of combined arms combat tactics - at battalion level and below in larger multiplayer games, at company team level and below for a single player. A secondary role of Steel Beasts is crew procedure and gunnery training, in combination with the right hardware, be it as a desktop trainer station or as a part of larger cabin trainer installations (I hope to be able to make a decent video of some of them in the future). Bouncing roadwheels simply are of no importance in either role. Their main purpose is "good looks". Good looks are nice, we like them like everybody, but they simply are not at the focus of our attention, and never will as long as our main business is in delivering training tools.
Aside from all the flaming here, this is still the main reason I won't buy Steel Beasts. For one, the stubborn rebuff of this crew to bring this sim into the 20th century, and the attitude that graphics are for eye-candy pie-heads. Bought the first one, and the downright comical infantry ruined the whole experience to the point it was taken from my HD.
No shadows, no realistic suspension or animations, still. Beg borrow and/or steal it from Battlefront if you have to. Their tanks in CM Shock Force embarrass SB (or should), and it's not even a tank sim. I would argue that the fidelity of their engine is every bit as complicated and realistic as SB. Sims are about immersion for gamers.
If graphics in sims are so over-rated and unimportant, why the 'eye-candy' in LOMAC and IL-2? Why aren't the developers on the sites flaming people for asking for these things? Or (as I suspect) are we just so lucky that SB is available to us lowly gamers at all? I realize we're just second fiddle to the army and should just be happy with the scraps we're given after the 'real' customer is served. What a load of arrogant BS.
make no mistake, we've wanted to implement shadows, lighting and all sorts of eye-candy for years, but because of the military contracts, and us only having a single programmer, we haven't been able to. then again, it is because of the military contracts that we are still here, if we only worked for the civilian market, Esim would have gone bankrupt 7 years ago. instead, we are doing exceptionally well, and now have the manpower and resources to expand on SB, and make it what it always should have been.
we now have 3 programmers, 3 artists, and 1 sound guy/bughunter, plus some betatesters, compared to 1 year ago, when it was basically only 1 artist, and 1 programmer and 1 sound guy.
FYI, the infantry in SB has received more upgrades than just graphical ones. they're still not where we'd wish they'd be, but they're better now than before (they now duck and start firing when fired upon instead of run around like lemmings getting killed).
i agree that more effective infantry is important to a tanksim, since they will provide a more realistic challenge for tanks, but we're working on a tanksim, so we have a tendency to focus on the tanks, and forget infantry.
