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slippy

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Posts posted by slippy

  1. 3 minutes ago, slysniper said:

    Just asking you to re-word things would have been nice, but hey, jerk things happen, and you not being able to handle it is also a sign of your immaturity.

    It is the times we live in, people cannot handle being misunderstood or repremanded when maybe they are not truly at fault. Their world has come to a end.

     

    Well, on the internet where all you are being judged on is the words that you type, well guess what, its very easy to be misunderstood.

    So put on your big boy pants, work through the issue and be vindicated, instead of running to your bedroom and slamming the door and not wanting to play anymore, thats what my grandchildren do. Not a person that has learned that the real world is not always fair.

    I think you may be the one that is misunderstood slysniper. I think Frank has handled it admirably. He was just trying to set the record straight that what he is offering was never going to be payware.

    He is offering to give us all something for free that has cost him many hours of research and dedication, and you have seen fit to have a dig at him?

     

    I really don't see the need or point in your post to be honest

  2. 1 hour ago, slippy said:

    Hi Frank

    Hope this gets sorted mate.

    I must apologize to you also though, as I posted somewhere about your release being payware, I can't find the post at present, but when I do I will link it.

    This was a mistake on my part based on nothing else than 'assumption' as I took  JoMacs post for fact, when it quite clearly was not.

    I should also say publicly that I have pm'ed Frank and registered an interest in this Battlepack some months ago, and not once has any mention of payment been discussed.

    I really hope Elvis reads this and reconsiders Battlefronts position, and once again I apologize if my actions may have in some way been responsible for this.

     

    Interesting to hear of your work Frank, has someone who has spent 30 years in the Fire Service, I can empathise with your need to 'switch off' to take your mind off the job.

     

    Take care mate, look after yourself, and hopefully all will be resolved soon

     

    Kindest regards

     

    Slipper

    Here's the original link where I mentioned it based on JoMacs comments. It includes Frank's and my own reply to it

     

    Cheers

     

  3. Hi Frank

    Hope this gets sorted mate.

    I must apologize to you also though, as I posted somewhere about your release being payware, I can't find the post at present, but when I do I will link it.

    This was a mistake on my part based on nothing else than 'assumption' as I took  JoMacs post for fact, when it quite clearly was not.

    I should also say publicly that I have pm'ed Frank and registered an interest in this Battlepack some months ago, and not once has any mention of payment been discussed.

    I really hope Elvis reads this and reconsiders Battlefronts position, and once again I apologize if my actions may have in some way been responsible for this.

     

    Interesting to hear of your work Frank, has someone who has spent 30 years in the Fire Service, I can empathise with your need to 'switch off' to take your mind off the job.

     

    Take care mate, look after yourself, and hopefully all will be resolved soon

     

    Kindest regards

     

    Slipper

  4. On 1/11/2024 at 2:32 AM, Paper Tiger said:

    I'm not sure what to do about this. I tried having the StuGs advance one action spot to the bocage line at the start of the mission and they don't poke through. Good, but they can't spot diddly either. The one in the east gets spotted pretty much instantly - I drove a buttoned up Sherman into the field and as soon as it entered, it spotted the StuG behind the bocage and started firing. Of course, the StuG couldn't see anything at all and took three hits (ineffective except to close the hatches further reducing their chances to spot).

    We had the opposite on the east flank where nobody could see anybody else so the StuG is completely ineffective and safe.

    So, what to do? I think I'll just leave it as is because at least they can do something even if it looks weird.

    Hi PT

    Could you possibly change the type of hedge at these locations? Would that enable them to be placed behind the hedgerow but still have LOS?

     

    Just a thought

     

    cheers mate

  5. 1 hour ago, Paper Tiger said:

    I actually do slip in some small terrain undulations to break up LoS because the real world is not generally billiard table flat (except perhaps for beaches). I've been doing that as long as I've been making maps for this game :D Check out Beau Guillot for a good example - Google Earth shows flat terrain but as you can see, there are plenty of small dips.

    Ah ok! Thanks, PT, I should have known you would consider this also 😉. Thanks again mate

  6. Sounds great Paper Tiger, really looking forward to it, especially the Scottish Corridor remake.

    Would love to see a Goodwood, Bluecoat, Totalize campaign someday, but I digress.

    One thing that I find in a lot of battles is the lack of cover represented, I find this in Scottish Corridor. I suppose if you are taking map heights from contour lines then you end up with a relatively flat area in between. when in the real world there is cover in even what appears a flat field for example.

    It would be great if uneven ground could be included to represent this, but understand if it's out of the scope of your revamp or not possible due to map editor restrictions.

    anyway, thanks for all your work mate, really appreciate the amount of time, effort and research you must put into your work

     

    Quote

     

     

  7. ok Frank, here goes!!

    Western Front

    East Front

    • Operation Doppelkopf
    • Operation Solstice
    • Operation Spring Awakening

    About half the operations are with the Axis attacking as you mentioned you wanted to to do Axis 😉

    Thanks, Frank, take care and good luck, I will look forward to whatever you release though

    kind regards

     

  8. 5 hours ago, Thewood1 said:

    This is good news.  Noted that the M-26 is in.  Are there plans to bring all of the CMBN vehicle pack units into CMFB?  I'm mainly thinking of the Sherman Crab.  It was very useful in mine-infested scenarios.

    Nevermind...saw that the crab is in CMFB already.

    in the TO&E it does mention the Sherman Crab,Churchill AVRE, and Churchill Crocodile

  9. While I can understand peoples frustration and I do think communication could be better. I do not think mud slinging by either side does any good at all.

    Everyone needs to take a step backwards, after all this is just a game we are talking about. If you feel angry, frustrated, bitter, or whatever, then maybe its time to take a break, play a different game, spend more time with family and friends, or something similar.

    Whatever you choose to do, there is absolutely no point in coming on here and complaining. There is no proof that it makes a blind bit of difference to release schedules or projects.

     

    I've been playing CM games since CM1, I have all CM2 titles and packs, I will continue to buy whatever is offered, whenever it is offered.

    I still have not had time to play every campaign, scenario or battle, so there is still plenty to do. Plus there are also people continuing to make great campaigns such as George MC, Dragonwyn, Paper Tiger, and Frank is soon to deliver a paid for campaign for RT.

     

    If I get fed up with some of titles due to bugs, AI or boredom, then I go and play something else, or go to the gym, have a walk.

    Life is to short and precious to get hang up on a computer game, surely

  10. It would be good if there could be more cover bonus added to all map tiles. 

    In reality even what looks like flat terrain is rarely so, and some kind of at least basic cover can mainly be found, whether by slight undulations, dips, rises, bases of hedges, etc

    In game unless the map designer actually includes all of these slight differences then the terrain is considered flat and offers no cover at all.

    I think this impacts on the amount of heavy casualties seen in CM as a lot of time there is no cover and targets can be seen and engaged from long distance.

    It would be too large a task to adjust all maps. A better alternative may be to adjust all cover values up, so that even flat ground has some potential to at least partly protect your troops.

    Next time your out and about, take a look at what appears to be a flat field or the like, and if you can get your view close to the ground. You will find it is generally difficult to see that far due to the reasons mentioned above.

     

  11. 3 hours ago, MikeyD said:

    Any pistol in the game will go 'bang-bang-bang' as fast as you can pull the trigger. That's a luxury bolt action rifles don't have, especially if the rifleman is on his feet and moving. A low chance of hitting the target is not the same as no chance of hitting the target.

    People talk of CM casualty rate being too high but we're talking WWII where as many men can die in a single afternoon's battle as died in all eight years of the Iraq war. In the Battle of the Bulge the US saw 89,500 casualties. That averages out to more than 2,000 men a day, every day for 40 days. and that's just the Americans.

    On a different subject, I totally agree with the above, but I really think the amount of wounded versus KIA needs looking at

  12. 13 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

    Have been doing some more work on our beloved Bocage this week, trying to remember how far I'd gotten and how to do stuff in Blender. The good news is I have now got a good solid technique going which I can repeat for all the various sections of bocage. I can now make bocage that is very different from the original game stock and will hopefully give us a more naturalistic gaming environment ...

    suBOawp.jpg

    ... this image shows the one section model that I have reworked thus far - bocage-straight-1.mdr - repeated three times on a straight run of bocage. What you can see immediately is that it has a much more ragged profile with a bit of light coming through the underside and NO beanpoles, those you can see are from other unmodified sections. Here is the Blender render of the model ...

    UmiGv4H.jpg

    ... fully clad ...

    dctXONA.jpg

    ... leaves removed from the main body. Blender tends to give a smoother render than the game engine.

    As you can see from the last image we have a large ash sapling to one side which gives immediate height, the supporting branches are now more bush like and there is a good layer of undergrowth at the bottom. The ash sapling and undergrowth are fixed, extra textures whilst the body of the bocage is variable. So depending on the number of boccage textures present in your Z folder, there are an almost infinite number of combinations that can appear in-game. This is just one section remember, by the time I have reworked the other fifteen 😩 section types for tall bocage alone the variations will be legion. With different extras textures for the other sections along with variations on height and depth we can finally have a representation of bocage that gets us closer to what I envisioned when I started this project last year.

    If anyone would like to take this for a spin let me know and I'll make a little bocage bundle to drop in your z folder.

    You amaze us all again Lucky Strike, incredible work mate again. I would definitely like to try it out please.

    Regards

  13. 15 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

    I can see it's been a while since I gave my fellow tree-huggers an update so ...

    I'll start with the bocage, or rather sunken lanes. I've been doing some experiments with other ways of creating sunken lanes. Previously I had just put two rows of tall bocage on adjacent, parallel rows of tiles. This provided a not too bad version of the sunken lanes we see in Normandy, but I felt it could be improved upon, or at least made differently. So starting with the same two rows of tall bocage what I tried was to ditchlock the bocage in ditches of 1-2m depth running their length, any more and the ground becomes very distorted whilst surroundings become harder to manage. The ground texture is, at the moment, just plain old dirt, but other textures might well be useful, forest light can look effective, but does introduce quite a bit of vegetation so the path becomes less distinct. A custom tagged ground texture might be the way to go on these. The result, with lots of heavy bocage, is a tunnel-like experience that I would imagine provides almost total concealment, and which induces a real sense of claustrophobia. They are just about wide enough for smaller vehicles though corners are likely to stop movement. Probably best treated as footpaths. Here's a little sample map with trees off ...

    HoUMvHA.jpg

    At left a zigzag path running uphill south to north, forking at the top, the other down the middle running along a field edge. As you can see they are somewhat narrower than the regular dirt road, at left and right. At ground level ...

    djEAvA2.jpg

    ... the track through the middle, just about wide enough for a 250, probably navigable, but a bumpy ride ...

    IM7L71w.jpg

    ... hunting through the dappled shade further up the path ...

    5Gyny5Y.jpg

    ... it's dark in there, even on a sunny day!

    Now back to trees ... As it stands I have now done enough exercises and experiments in Blender to successfully export tree models, new or modified, with proper wrapped bark texture on the trunks and nicely swaying leaves for windier conditions. I've learnt some more of the limitations of the game engine. I've figured out an approach to making LODs that works in both the same way as the originals but also, I hope, enhances the look of them somewhat. I can pretty much make any tree that I desire to see in the game, and have it appear in pretty much all seasons, though winter is still to be worked on just because how snow looks on trees can vary tremendously depending on the amount of precipitation, so coming up with a single solution for all snowy conditions is unlikely to give the best results. This will also apply to bushes. This all assumes that BF DON'T change the way trees work in all the existing WW2 games since I discovered SF2 has a quite different approach that I think will be more difficult to mod in such a pleasing manner.

    So, introducing the Scot's Pine (Pinus sylvestris) or my take on it.

    hAsRWTj.jpg

    It's the tall ones centre left. (These are in BN) I have made these deliberately taller than the stock pine trees.

    kIbKjkS.jpg

    WuYK7jy.jpg

    They stand head and shoulders above other trees and are more like the type that might be seen in a mature plantation rather than the more twisted forms that are also commonly seen. Pines are generally used in game to represent plantations or vast forests so it seemed appropriate. Going forward I will probably increase the height of some of the other trees a bit as they're on the small side IMHO. Any tree can of course be made to represent whatever tree we want by reworking the model and a little tagging or renaming. We can even have a set of say just pines and conifers to represent a heavy coniferous forest seen in more northerly or mountainous regions.

    uq1jmRn.jpg

    A small plantation.

    Scot's Pines are found throughout much of mainland Europe so are a good species to represent. The models are a bit more complex and natural than the game originals but they seem to work without problem in game.

    Running the game at balanced or improved which are the recommended setting means that LODs are used more often. What I discovered is that the LODs are actually used a lot more than I originally suspected. So long as a tree isn't moving then it's probably a LOD, usually LOD level 1 but more often LOD 2 or LOD 3 are used. What this means is that the lower detailed models are used even when quite close to them. LOD 1 will be in view at ranges of less 50m commonly, and in some cases when it's almost right next to the viewpoint, LODs 2 and 3 are commonly seen from about 100m out to 400m, whilst LOD 4 (the star-shaped trees viewed from high above) are seen at anything from 100m to a few km depending on quality settings and how many trees are featured on the map. Incidentally LOD 3 is the model used for bare tree trunks when trees are toggled off. What I've tried to do is make the detail levels of the first three LOD levels a bit closer to the detail level of the normal model, reducing it as the LODs become more distant. I have also tried to make LOD 4 look a bit more like a tree in the distance but also, importantly for very large dense forests, allowed it to work when viewed from a bit closer. I can't control when LODs kick in, but I can make the models a bit more detailed to compensate for this. 

    fxyRF4D.jpg

    Morning on the edge of the Zon Forest near to the town of Best (MG Outstanding Gallantry). The distant trees are LOD 4.

    wYZlUnX.jpg

    At the edge of the forest - a lot of trees! The foreground is Normal and LOD 1 but the scene quickly starts to use LOD 4 models because of the sheer number of trees rendered. Of note, the LOD 4 models don't cast or receive shadows.

    OhFyhVG.jpg

    The other side of the forest in sunlight, the trees in the middle are LOD 4, notice how the light doesn't affect their trunks, can't alter this ...

    D49srGO.jpg

    ... but, IMHO, they do blend quite well, especially considering they are used relatively close up, as on the right here.

    Another benefit of the extra details, hopefully, is that the jerkiness and flickering associated with trees won't be so noticeable when transitions between LODs are a little smoother, but this is yet to be demonstrated with multiple new models.

    Things like the lack of shadows on LOD level 4 are stuff that I can't influence. Increasing ones quality settings in-game pushes the point at which LODs are introduced further form the camera, but at a serious cost in render speed and frame rate. The shadows under the trees move back a bit but they are still missing in the distance. A mistake in my opinion since the shadows at that distance bind the trees to the ground and create a sense of distance and depth, they're what makes it look three dimensional, makes it pop! Look at a landscape with distant woods and you'll notice that the underside of trees and the ground below, even on dull days, is much darker, whereas in game it's light and indistinct. I know that there are compromises with how the game has to work and what is rendered, limited by consideration for hardware, but I do believe this one is an error in judgement ... IMHO. If I could fix one thing it might be this ...

    dQnpitH.jpg

    The Rhone Valley as appears in game on a bright day but not full sun (with my mods)

    REAFKkS.jpg

    Artist's (huhhum) impression with shadows under distant trees. Perhaps a consideration for the next engine ...

    As always your feedback is greatly appreciated. And remember to plant a tree 🌲

    Blimey Lucky Strike, there is no stopping you mate! Superb work again, I can't believe the difference just one more type of tree makes to those screen shots, amazing. And the Bocage screenshots also look superb also.

    Couple of questions, as it is a new tree does it take up a slot from another tree or is it a completely new addition? Did you plan to look at the bush objects at all? As I remember they are pretty puny and uninspiring.

    Great work again, looking forward to the release.

    regards

    slippy

  14. 22 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

    I'm sorry for all these questions but I do think that the balance of road surface is a little off in the game. We have a lot of hard surfaces - cobbles and paving, but perhaps too few of the less durable surfaces. I would personally like at least one more rough surface and could happily have one less paved stone/cobble surface - which gives us a chance to change the balance in game a little.

    Yes i defintley agree with yu on this point Lucky Strike, less paved and cobbles and more 'dirt' road/track

  15. 2 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

    Well, we can have both. It's easy enough with these textures as there is only one to make for ground dirt road. I can put them into options folders and everyone can choose their own personal favourite. Heck we can even have original game resolution and high resolution just for the hell of it. They are found textures so credit to the original maker.

    Later on I may do a complete pack of revised roads which will include these as well as other textures that take in all the sage advice that Falaise has given us.

    Then we can move on to discussing what colour they turn in the rain, how many puddles there should be and whether there should be differences between the surfaces when just damp and very wet ... 😉

    😂 This conversation may never end!

  16. 6 hours ago, Falaise said:

    https://remonterletemps.ign.fr/comparer/basic?x=-0.517592&y=49.132866&z=13&layer1=ORTHOIMAGERY.ORTHOPHOTOS.1950-1965&layer2=ORTHOIMAGERY.ORTHOPHOTOS2006-2010&mode=doubleMap

    must look at the site "Go back in time"
    it also allows you to see the density of hedges and apple orchards.
    you can see the 1950 map to identify important roads

    file:///C:/Users/pc/Desktop/DC_SCAN50_Historique_1-0.pdf

     

    Wow! Great resource Falaise, thanks very much. Very sad to see how much land is lost as time moves on though 😟

  17. 10 minutes ago, Falaise said:

    No, the  thank you, it's for you guys! @JM Stuff @Lucky_Strike

    The management of roads depends on their interest. The one useful to towns or villages are managed by it (route communale , RC on the maps) That allowing the economic life of the departments depend on the department (route départemental, RD on the map) and finally that of national interest, by the French state (route  nationale, RN on the map like the famous RN13)
    In 1944 only the RN, national road were tarred
    Falaise Caen; Cherbourg Caen.
    It was 2 lanes road.
    George MC in his "Wittman Demise" is perfectly right to represent it as the RN 158 near Cintheaux

    226630240_CMNormandy2021-10-0121-14-11-29.thumb.jpg.55a9b5f65425ca0f7616e1ec78e484e3.jpg

    the color is correct because the tar was covered with gravel as Lucky says: Is this like a kind of aggregate stuck onto a tarred surface rolled flat with a large steamroller? I'd imagine it was simply applied every couple of years or so straight on top of the old surface.

    The other roads, which are called departmental roads (RD), were not much narrower but were covered with white macadam.
    In this aerial photo from the 1950s, in vertical, the RN 158 (Caen Falaise) is dark because it is tarred. We see departmental who join it in white, covered with macadam
    In the communes according to their importance and their wealth, the roads and streets were either paved, or tarred or covered with macadam.

    2076041440_routedecaen.jpg.15fd3d43ce6f16a9916f2bc59a507eb8.jpg

    When I got interested in this subject I interviewed elders and many did not remember what the roads were like and I had some difficulty finding the truth. The only thing that people remembered is that punctures were common because roads were littered with nails, the nails of horseshoes which were still heavily used by civilians and German armies !!!

    hOnapYX.thumb.jpg.29547916e90596ce41b061df8e3fb128.jpg

    here the appearance is good but it must be white (mixture of limestone and lime)

    Great facts Falaise, thanks very much

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