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Rake

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Everything posted by Rake

  1. I can't access it. I keep getting this error message: Fatal error - attempt to access unpublished file by non-admin user. Unfortunate, because this was one of the first mods I installed with CMBN. I really don't care much for the "bear claw" bases. I tried to download v1.0 and got a "file not found" error.
  2. I replayed the final 5 minutes four times. By this point in the game, Patton's team was hiding on the first floor of the building adjacent to the exit area. I exited the team, without casualties, on the final minute, the penultimate minute & the third to last. The first time I played, I forgot to remove him and assumed the Italians were credited with his death although none got close enough to spot. On all four occasions, the Italians got credit for killing Patton... the only points they earned for the scenario. IF, there is a hidden VL that the Italians only have to touch (or hold) to get credit for his "death", then all of this is moot. Oh, BTW, the reason I enjoyed the scenario is because I didn't have to do to much as the defender... just guess where the Italians would be in the next 5- 10 minutes and give 'em a pounding. Some afternoons after work, I'm just done with thinking; this scenario fit the bill nicely.
  3. tFS, I have a question about this scenario. SPOILERS!! I played as the Americans as suggested, primarily because I just wanted to play a game as the defender. This one was a hoot! Great fun at the end when the ammo truck and jeeps were flying around trying to get ammo (most units were down to grenades only) to the truppen holding off the Italian rush into Gela. Other than moving the vehicles around and acquiring more ammo, I just kept hitting "Go". As it was, it took an emergency call for support from the Savanna, landing dead on target, to save my defenders from being overwhelmed. My question is this... I had a save at the five minute mark when the 6" guns destroyed the Italian attack into Gela. I've replayed it several times because, at the end of the first go-round, I'd forgotten to remove Patton from the map. Even during later play-throughs, Patton keeps showing up as "killed" even though the command unit was removed intact. Is there a time limit that this unit should be removed prior to in order to prevent the Italians from gaining points for killing Patton? Thanks again for a fun little scenario!
  4. SPOILERS!!! (not much though ) No doubt! I had maybe 20 paratroopers left when the reinforcements arrived... and my FO bought it while shifting the arty from the right side to the left. They'd have been overrun in a matter of minutes. I had one bazooka round left after the second scenario; the team popped up from behind the wall to nail one of the PzIII's inside the HQ compound. It could have been much worse if the Germans had waited for the final spotting rounds to fall on the base of attack... they raised the white flag just before the barrage began. Pansies! I was rather disappointed that I didn't get to finish them off.
  5. A significant improvement on my machine... shadows look much smoother, fewer jaggies. GTX 570 Well done, Phil and BFC!!!
  6. As i replied in my response to the first helpdesk answer, I'm using McAfee on both the laptop and desktop, same version on each. I try to stay up to date on the hardware/software issues with CM, trying to steer clear of potential problems. I don't recall seeing any issues with McAfee (as opposed to Norton), but I could have missed something and there's always a first time for everything. Thanks for taking care of this, Mike Edit: I just checked the security log for my firewall. It shows incoming events on Saturday night around the times I was attempting to activate the game, but no events were blocked by the firewall.
  7. Thanks for looking into this, Steve. As I said in my OP, I installed on my laptop Thursday... one install and one activation. I didn't even open the game again after I realized it was going to have problems running on my laptop. At home, my computer does run through my AV receiver, but I haven't noticed any issues with CMBN. In any event, I'm not in an extreme hurry now because I couldn't wait and went ahead and purchased another license. I'm annoyed that it cost me another $55, but not nearly as irritated as I was when I couldn't play at all
  8. According to the manual, we're allowed four activations, on two computers. AIUI, there are no more deactivations.
  9. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling & re-d'ling the file and reinstalling. I'm chair-ridden due to a foot injury while on vacation and I've got nothing else to do but play CM... I wanna check out the new toys! I've never received a helpdesk reply on a weekend. I'm so ready to play, I'm considering purchasing another copy, just for the one activation.
  10. I don't know what happened either, But I am HOT! I've already posted a message to the helpdesk and if I don't get an answer before Monday, I'm really gonna be P!$$'d Thanks for the reply, jeff
  11. Just got home from Vacation, d'ld CMFI and installed the game on my home computer. When I tried to activate, I was told I had no remaining activations. While on vacation, I installed the game on my laptop; that's one! I thought I was purchasing three activations. With one more day before I go back to work, I'd like to play the game on a computer capable of running it. My laptop's getting old and the game stutters and sometimes locks up locks up, requiring a forced shutdown. Anyhow, what happened with the remaining activations?
  12. I need some help, ASAP. I'm stuck at the beach (GF's idea of a good vacation... me, I'd give a testicle to be on a river in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming ) with just my laptop & no mouse to move around with. So, I'm forced to use hotkeys (or this damnable touchpad :mad: ) as my interface. Unfortunately, I'm so used to the alternate hotkeys that I can't find my way around with the default keys. I've been into the game files, but I can't find the hotkey file. In my CMBN file, there's a text file in the DATA folder, but I don't see a similar file in CMFI. How do I load the alternative file??? MANY, many, thanks in advance.
  13. I'm guessing that's the real reason nothing been posted to the AAR's... this thing about Bil's trip to BC is just a ruse. They're holding off so the finish will coincide with the release. I'm expecting to see it on August 7, the Tuesday after I get back from vacation
  14. I just opened a saved game (Honor and Loyalty... so it's relatively large) and replayed a turn. Frame rates were mid 30's with or without VL's on. Only time the rate drops lower is when panning through foliage. i7-2600K CPU @ 3.4GHz Win 7 8G Ram GeForce GTX 570 All settings maxed out on game and video card
  15. Been to Volcano Man's site every time I get a new game. I also enjoy the _Alt scenarios included for most games as they've been adapted for most of the optional rules that I prefer using. Thanks for the tip! I'm sure others who might be looking into this series would enjoy it... highly recommended, as is this one: http://mapmod.hist-sdc.com/ These mods significantly improve the artwork of the 2D maps.
  16. Sabot... obviously I find enjoyment in the series, otherwise I wouldn't have invested as much in time and money as I have. The game concept was a little difficult to understand when I first started (Bulge was my first). Glenn Saunders and the Blitz was a huge help initially. PzC Normandy is a slog... but so is CMBN in the bocage. Where I feel the game excels is in the blitz style campaigns. Smolensk '41 is my personal favorite The series is not without foibles. I think the games are a bit overpriced, especially now that they're basically an assembly line production. But, I make the choice as to what I spend my money on and I've kept on buying... Tiller does do a good job with continually updating the game to incorporate new changes into old titles. This is why I'm really happy to see BFC updating CMBN and will do the same as time goes on. Too, I'm not sure the OOB's are the most carefully researched. I'm not an OOB grog, so you'd have to rely on others input for more detail in this area. Anyhow, I don't want to highjack Noob's thread any more than I have for unrelated stuff; if you'd like to know more, send me a PM.
  17. Fair enough. I don't have PzC Normandy loaded currently on my desktop, just on my laptop for travel play. I posted last night just before bedtime so I wasn't going to start up the laptop to check... I was just asking a question. I know that motorized units in travel mode can cover a lot of ground. Not having access to the data file to ascertain the movement rates, it just looked like a long go to pass around to the north of the three-unit stack while remaining out of it's ZOC's. The main impediments to travel mode are rugged terrain and hexside obstacles. The latter are often hard to see in 3D mode... one reason that I always play PzC in top-down mode, particularly now that there's a 2D Zoom-in mode. It was not my intent to impugn what is obviously a labor of love. It is clearly obvious that your oppo made a mistake in overextending with the Stuarts and/or not advancing units to cover his flanks and prevent the Stuarts from being cut off. Please continue, I look forward to the rest of the DAR.
  18. Noob... I've been playing the PzC series for some time, in fact, it's probably the game I play most next to CMBN. This series (I own about half of these games) and Tiller's Campaign Series filled the long void during the CMSF years while I awaited a return to WWII. I understand from your OP that you've removed the hard/soft attack factors from each unit. I'm guessing that by doing so, this has negated ZOC's. Otherwise, I don't see how you could have made the moves to surround the Stuarts. Obviously, I can't be certain of this because I don't know the composition of the 4 units in the hex north of the IP. But, if any of these exert a ZOC into the adjacent hexes, it would not be possible to move the motorized unit into the hex north of the western Stuarts. I never play with locking ZOC's, but even this requires a friendly unit currently in the hex being moved to in order to move directly from one ZOC to another. Does your approach just ignore ZOC's? If so, this removes a basic premise from the base game and, barring ample units to form a continuous line, makes forming a reasonable defensive line impossible. I'm just curious. I love the idea of an operational layer and you've obviously gone to great lengths with the PzC system. It's just that, IMO (I know, we've all got one ) misses the fact that units in adjacent hexes would be putting up some kind of fight and slowing down movement through the adjacent areas, if not completely preventing it.
  19. This was my question, too, when I read the earlier post. I tend to think not, but I could be wrong. Guess we'd need to hear from BF to know if there's any type of spotting benefit given to a forward scouting crew once it returns to its vehicle. I also want to applaud BilH and ND for the AAR. I've never been a huge fan of the southern front (mainly because I haven't read as much about it and haven't gamed it very often), but this AAR is getting me primed for CMFI. Looking forward to seeing how the PzIII's play out... my favorite little tank!
  20. Jon, thanks for the reply. I'm sure I'll figure it out once CMFI arrives. I haven't been able to figure out how to get topo in Google Earth. The photo in my post is dl'd from IGN as was the topo. I traced the topo and other features (including the scale bar... very important!!!) in one file, with the contours and other info on separate layers. Once the tracing was complete, I flattened the file and discarded the background layer, leaving a white background. This part is time consuming, probably taking three - four hours for the map I posted. This file was dragged into the aerial photo. It's then simple to select and delete the white background, leaving just the topo. Then, it's just a matter of scaling and rotating the topo layer to match the photo. The problem here is that, due to distortion of the photo, or minor inaccuracies in the mapping, there's no perfect fit. Many of the spot elevations in the map are located at road junctions, but no matter how I rotated or scaled, they just wouldn't fit. In any case, it's plenty close for CM work. Final elevations will have to be torqued in CM to match however the road net lays out. The scale bar was copied and rotated 90 degree (the red cross near the top of the photo) so I could lay out the grid. From the IGN topo, the bar was 200 meters, so that's what the grid was set to. I'll go back into Google Earth and poke around a bit more. Your method of topo acquisition seems to be quite a bit faster. I still like having the 1947 photos for the background work. In any event, having overlay capability with the update will speed things up tremendously. Thanks again, Mike
  21. I was all set to start a new thread when I figured I'd better search first... I've got the map below that I started working on when CMBN first came out. Then, someone started a La Fiere map that was pretty far along, so I put this aside once I realized how much work was involved. I started to pick it back up a month or so ago, just after I picked up "No Better Place to Die when M1 started posting screens of his fine, new causeway map. My questions: 1) I'm not sure I understand why I would place this map in my Mods folder; will there be a new section that's part of the Mod Tools? 2) As this is currently a jpeg, I'd need to convert to a bitmap, if I've read the overview correctly. 3) When I open the editor and start a new map, I assume there will be a way to select the "base map". This would then be loaded with the lower left corner of the map at the 0,0 coordinate? I ask this because I want to set up my grid lines to match the editor placement... Photoshop likes the 0,0 "coordinate" at the top left. I'm asking in advance, because this is the part of the update that I'm looking forward to the most. Once I got into the original editor and realized that I'd need a drafting table and tools, a scanner and a full-size digital plotter in addition to my computer :eek: (just kidding) to build a decent map, I just gave up on the idea of making maps. It didn't help that others were already making maps for the areas that I had under consideration, either. A better understanding of the new editor will let start building some base maps. I can see right now that I need to rotate the base photo so that the roads will run more closely with cardinal compass points (I should have rotated the picture above approximately 15 degrees CCW before cropping so that the road from the Manoir to Cauquigny runs east-west... a point learned). Thanks in advance... Oh,and a HUGE shoutout to everyone that makes maps, mods, does testing (beta or otherwise), etc. for this game. The time expenditure is enormous and greatly appreciated by me.
  22. 25 - 30 years ago, I had a half-dozen of these when I took my Land Surveyor's exam... one program in each. From coffee baths to flying off the hood of my work truck, they slowly disappeared. Best calculator I've ever had and wayyy easier to use than my 48-GX
  23. Depends. How's your arthritis?
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