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Why no US/Brit allied nco's in the BMP files?


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Maybe the history of this goes back to CMSF and has some odd backstory full of BFC inside jokes.

Or it might just be boring and sterile.

You have NCO uniforms slots in the German axis forces and the Soviet allied forces.

Why never for the Anglo-American allies? :D Also no NCO slots for the Italians as axis and I guess soon to be allies?

Also, will pigs fly before we'd ever see the uniform slots created to have helmets for the US officers (vertical stripe), nco helmets (horizontal stripe) and soldier helmets (no stripe).

Did we get a Mackinaw jacket for the officers by any chance? I asked Bil to maybe showcase US winter uniforms but I think he got justifiably busy with his AAR.

Thanks.

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I have mixed feelings about this request.  I thoroughly enjoy the uniforms Mods with unit shoulder patches / flashes and Mord's unit portraits.  I question how can adding NCO slots where they don't exist be retro-fitted to the game in general and existing scenario's in particular.  If this is not a simple task, the cost/benefit of such work is not worth it to me.  I would not want BFC to spend time on this kind of eye candy at the expense of other game improvements.

I admire and enjoy your modding effort, Kohlenklau.  I just don't share your  views on this one.  It never hurts to ask, though.  Good luck and good gaming.

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BFC's kind'a bipolar on suggestions like these. Often their response is they didn't want to tax players' graphics cards and take the framerate penalty. Other times they snap up a suggestion enthusiastically!  As much as you want to fight 'em over suggestions (I make a LOT of suggestions) you can't argue with results. The game keeps getting more sophisticated while at the same time its FPS keeps improving. its like magic.  :)

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To me a leap forward was made with the appearance choice of "mixed camo" and you have that squad or small team being outfitted using 2 different skeleton files and each of those randomly reaching out to numerous bmp uniform options. The officers have several different skeleton file options for headgear. There are many empty or greyed-out slots in the dropdown menu. I think it is untapped capability. Oh well. I personally hope we see some real imaginative use of that dropdown menu in the future. How many skeleton files could be used to outfit a squad including headgear options? What a great looking squad that would be with variety in headgear and uniforms and camo! I saw that Russian-made film "Stalingrad" last night. I know this is CMFB, but now I can envision a Soviet "Straggler group" or whatever term for an adh oc defensive unit holed up in a building and you have regular Soviet army, factory workers, sailors and some variation in headgear among them. Steel helmets, army caps, sailor hat, civilian hats. As soon as you get those civilian clothing and hat skeletons and bmp images in there, you can more easily kill 2 birds with 1 grenade and get into partisans and Volksturm, right?

But my key point of the 1st post was if anyone on the BFC team knew or recalled WHY the US had no NCO slots? Perhaps a lost footnote in the development process history....

(A lot of US Army NCO's might be rolling in their graves! )

Anyway, Merry Christmas. :D

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It's probably something they just didn't get around to doing, for whatever reason. 

On that note, the German NCO uniforms will be a lot more prevalent with CMFB, as now all NCOs will be depicted with an NCO uniform. Before it was just NCOs who were platoon leaders that were tagged with an NCO uniform.

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@LukeFF Thanks for sharing that info. Now I am curious how the random card shuffler subroutine will work for those axis available choices for the NCO BMP images. Perhaps a German platoon leader image will show a feldwebel but in his platoon it shows a squad led by a oberfeldwebel or hauptfeldwebel? Or will it go to a system like with a tiered scheme like with the officers? nco-sr, nco-mid and nco-jr? Oh well, nothing is perfect but I am very, very happy that some small amount of programmer time is allotted to experimenting around in this area. 

Suggestion: For the CMRT Module, please consider to implement an appearance option for the Soviet forces (along with any others you intend to implement! :D ) called shall we say, "mixed-uniforms" where it will, like with axis "mixed-camo", draw upon 2 mdr's and thus 2 options for clothing. Headware mdr's too if you can! Ushanka or caps on some tough frontoviks and helmets on the rest. Fire, night time flares, spotting are all giant mountains of programming and testing with no promise it will be solved. It probably makes you guys not even want to log on and "go to work"...  So perhaps the uniform issues represent an achievable small scale feature improvement to get you warmed up and feeling productive! Thanks guys.

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Another thing I was just thinking of. The half-tracks and much of the armor has some type of subroutine (Please kindly forgive me if I mess up the terms. My last programming course was "basic" in 1982!) which randomly grabs some cargo or gear from an mdr/bmp set and slaps it on the hull of the vehicle. Right? Sometimes the big tarp, sometimes the spare bogey wheels, sometimes the sand bags, sometimes the landmines, etc. That type subroutine maybe could be used to randomize the headgear possibly?  Shucks, maybe the randomizer is already there for choosing gear on soldier's belts, right? 

Disclaimer: I don't think I got an "A" in the course. :D

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@LukeFF Thanks for sharing that info. Now I am curious how the random card shuffler subroutine will work for those axis available choices for the NCO BMP images. Perhaps a German platoon leader image will show a feldwebel but in his platoon it shows a squad led by a oberfeldwebel or hauptfeldwebel? Or will it go to a system like with a tiered scheme like with the officers? nco-sr, nco-mid and nco-jr? Oh well, nothing is perfect but I am very, very happy that some small amount of programmer time is allotted to experimenting around in this area. 

Most formations currently have just one NCO texture per uniform type, so that's what's used for all NCO ranks.

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Here's the official reason in detail.  Cripes, I could almost classify this as a Bone it's so long and detailed :D

It started with the fact that Germans for the most part have 1st Platoon led by a Lieutenant (clearly an officer uniform) and 2nd and 3rd Platoons by a senior NCO (distinctly different type of uniform).  Other nations pretty much have Lieutenants in charge of all Platoons.  Obviously there are lots of special cases, so I'm only talking generally here.

The leader of a Formation is a special type of Soldier within the code of the TO&E.  Which means that without a special uniform for the German NCO platoon leaders there would be an overt and obvious Officer uniform with a NCO rank.  That wouldn't be cool, so I went through the pain (and it is a big pain) to have a parallel set of graphics and leader types for the Germans so the Formations are correctly laid out with an officer for 1st Platoon and NCOs for 2nd and 3rd Platoons.

Unlike the German uniforms the US uniforms are, for the most part, identical for all ranks.  The only significant difference is that NCOs have their ranks prominently displayed on their sleeves.  For US forces this doesn't cause a problem for Platoon leaders because they are all officers and officers don't have the obvious badging on the arms.  Therefore, I did not create a special parallel NCO system for the Americans.

Where things get dodgy is at the Squad and Team level.  All nations use a large mix of different NCO ranks for leadership positions at the Squad level.  Not only structurally (i.e. according to official regulations), but also because of pre-battle and during battle losses.  It would be absolutely nuts for me to try and cater to that diversity, therefore Squads and Teams have no special provisions for NCO ranks.  That's true for all sides.

However, recently I've started using the graphics from the German Platoon NCOs for Squad Leaders because (for the most part) one can't see a big difference between the various ranks of NCOs.  The most distinctive thing is the collar and that's common for a wide range of NCO ranks.  Because of the way the TO&E code works it was actually a very easy change to make for this particular situation.  So it kinda mostly works for me to have them be the Squad Leaders as well, even though that was never the intention.

In the future we plan to extend "decals" (just like the vehicle Hit Decals) to arms/shoulders/collars of the soldier models.  This will allow rank graphics to be dynamically placed on the model depending on what the rank of that specific Soldier is.  And I mean ALL of the Soldiers in the game, from buck privates all the way up to Lt. Colonels.  It will also allow for unit insignia through the use of [TAG] methodology.  This means you can have distinctive badging for the Big Red One in one scenario and 1st Armored for another.  When added that feature will not only fix the rank graphics but do so much more!

Steve

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In the future we plan to extend "decals" (just like the vehicle Hit Decals) to arms/shoulders/collars of the soldier models.  This will allow rank graphics to be dynamically placed on the model depending on what the rank of that specific Soldier is.  

Oh that is a bone. Sounds excellent. The modders will love that!

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Cool. Could a similar 'cosmetic' decal system be applied to vehicles so each vehicle can have unique numbers and 'flavour' graphics?

Possibly.  It's a little more complicated because we have to specifically designated a space, or spaces, on each and every model.  Unlike uniforms, which have very regimented and predictable locations, vehicles have an a lot of different things and places to put them.  For example, on German tanks division symbols weren't always in the same places, nor the same relative size, nor necessarily mirrored, etc. Not at all like the uniform stuff. 

With rank on sleeves for US NCOs it is easy to do because the guys already have ranks assigned to them in the code.  In fact, they already have rank graphics which are shown in the 2D UI at the bottom of the screen.  Therefore, it's a "simple" matter of extending existing behavior.  No such parallel exists with vehicles, which means we have to make something from scratch.

Adding "bling decals" to vehicles is definitely way more complicated for us to set up and for Modders to manage, but we would like to do something more with them than simply hit decals.

Steve

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it would be nice if at sometime in the future, (and I mean the future, not tomorrow) if we could have "SS" number plates for SS vehicles, although I suspect that is far less straight forward than it sounds. In the meantime i look forward to having more of my troops slaughtered in their new uniforms.

They will perish in sartorial splendour! ;)

 

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it would be nice if at sometime in the future, (and I mean the future, not tomorrow) if we could have "SS" number plates for SS vehicles, although I suspect that is far less straight forward than it sounds. In the meantime i look forward to having more of my troops slaughtered in their new uniforms.

No one's made a mod for that yet? If not I could volunteer. Of course it wouldn't distinguish between Wehrmacht and SS vehicles in the same scenario but I bet there are hardly any such scenarios anyway.

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...In the future we plan to extend "decals" (just like the vehicle Hit Decals) to arms/shoulders/collars of the soldier models.  This will allow rank graphics to be dynamically placed on the model depending on what the rank of that specific Soldier is.  And I mean ALL of the Soldiers in the game, from buck privates all the way up to Lt. Colonels.  It will also allow for unit insignia through the use of [TAG] methodology.  This means you can have distinctive badging for the Big Red One in one scenario and 1st Armored for another.  When added that feature will not only fix the rank graphics but do so much more!

Steve

Oh, man. That is awesome!  Truly some gourmet marrow in that bone, Steve.

Thanks!

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No one's made a mod for that yet? If not I could volunteer. Of course it wouldn't distinguish between Wehrmacht and SS vehicles in the same scenario but I bet there are hardly any such scenarios anyway.

As far as I know, no one has yet. Obviously I could have overlooked it in the Repository and during my visits to greenasjade, but I don't think so. 

Edited by Warts 'n' all
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As far as I know, no one has yet. Obviously I could have overlooked it in the Repository and during my visits to greenasjade, but I don't think so. 

No I think you're right. Looking at the graphics one would have to modify each vehicle with a plate. I could give it a go if there's interest. Most vehicles don't have the plates and some like the "U-boats" don't have a SS equivalent. Would Luftwaffe land forces need the same treatment?

Edited by Sequoia
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