Kwazydog
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Posts posted by Kwazydog
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Hehe, no worries Rex. To be honest, I wasnt happy with it either but not much more could be done with it.
If doing it again I could very well be inclined suggest we went for repeating textures that could be a higher res over the tiling method. The skies really need to be kept lower res with this method so as to not tax peoples video cards, and I think they could really benifit from more pixels. On top of that tiling them was a nightmare, but I remember now that I ended up using a special problem that rendered them out depending on the time of day, etc, as it was just taking too like using standard methods.
Errr, South of Englad Cup...have I missed something
?Dan
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Looks great Tom. If youd like some idea on how to wrap them send me an email and Ill see if I can remember how I did it
Dan
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Rex, that 'godawful pixellated mess of an overcast disaster' you talk about looks that way becuase CM's engine uses 16 bit colour, and that particular texture is being stretched over such a wide area. When making textures over such a large are they need to be dithered or you will get banding across their surface, which looks even worse.
As we now have textures that do not repeat, this allows us to have a proper sunrise and sunset but as a trade off, the textures for skies are actually equal resoluation than those in CMBO, and thus it is really hard to much with them. Id say that this is why you have yet to see any that have been created...they are bloody hard to make and have them look any good at all (unless you make them one single colour which actually looks worse).
Once we get to the rewrite CM will be in 32 bit colour which will eliminate this problem.
Dan
[ February 17, 2003, 08:31 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Great, I take half hour to write a post, and since then we've all decided to drop the subject
Dan
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"But I am expecting regular patches until the game is done. I can see from your comments that you got the impression that I felt CMBB was half finished, I was talking about the new design philosophy in computer wargaming. Release a not finished product and patch it later."
This thing is, by your defination here, Charles could 'finish' the game in about 10 minutes by removing vehicles without a unique model from the game. By delievering more, it seems that in your eyes we have delievered less. If these vehicles, some of which I imagine most people didnt even know existed, were left out of the origional game, then that would have been much better it seems, even though it would reduce the tactical scope of CM as a wargame.
Hortlund, I understand you would have like to see every model in game. I spent months working on them, many nights getting less than 2 hours sleep just to do that. I can assure you that I wanted them in there MUCH more that even you could and worked my ass of to get them in there. But the reality of the matter is that, under the current engine, it couldnt be done. In fact, the eninge couldnt correctly handle some of the models in question.
Currently I have a stack of books on my desk as high as my monitor for the software we will be using with the rewrite. It is going to take me weeks, if not months to learn it properly. The result will be that we will be able to do things differently in the rewrite, and hopefully avoid hard descisions like we had to make with CMBB. Its time to move on. Sometimes these choices arent easy, but they have to be made. Lets look towards the future though
Dan
[ February 09, 2003, 06:01 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Thanks Micahel
I do realise many do appreciate our descision, and thats great. It is also importatnt to note that the new ening should make it a quicker to add in new models, too, so time shouldnt be such a constraint in the future.
Dan
[ February 09, 2003, 01:45 AM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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What confuses me is that if we didnt do the research on armour values, weapon penetrations, ground pressure, horse power, etc for those vehicles that dont have a unique model and thus we *didnt* add them into CMBB, people would consider the game finsihed. :confused:
Instead we decided to make CMBB with as much tactical scope as possible and add in vehicles that yes, dont have a 100% accurate model (shock!), but do operate as reasistically as as CM's engine can model.
I actually recommended this option before we even started modelling vehicles as I thought people would be much more interested in tactical scope than eye candy. Im not sure I could make the same recommendation again though unfortunately, as we are being told by a few that becuase we put in the extra work noted above, the game is now unfinished in some way. To be totally honest that doesnt sit well with me, and it would certainally be easy to avoid.
Dan
[ February 09, 2003, 02:48 AM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Youll have more info when we have more info to give guys. Lets be fair to others and not keep bumping threads to the top unnecessarily.
Dan
[ February 01, 2003, 11:03 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Hi Guys,
Yup, slappy has it right there, this is happening as designed.
The idea is that if you move forward beyond your lines those units can become cut off from the main set up zone, but able to stay in position. This allows you to choose between staying in your forward positions or pulling back to friendly lines.
The down side to staying put is that you cannot maneuver your units. Generally you would want to pull your armour back to safe positions as they have probably been spotted and the enemy will move armour assets into that area to counter them. On the other hand, infantry could very well have move forward to an area of cover where you would want them to stay put in the hope of moving up other units to support.
Ideally it would probably be preferable if we could have allowed units to move within their forward box, but that isnt possible under the current system. The problem is that it wouldnt allow players to pull back but it would allow them to move to other forward positions unrealistically. This is something that will be recieving a total overhaul in the rewrite though
Dan
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Hortlund, to be fair I believe what we are discussing here is far different from the above examples
Im sure I can find many examples of shots missing at such ranges in WW2, and I think the chances of it happening are probably much more likely than the stories above
. In fact looking quickly I have here a story about an SS 50mm pak crew whom missed 3 tanks passing by with a total of 6 shots under such conditions (night, but not snowing I believe, even though it was on the ground). I beleive the main factor your not consider here is point that is was indeed night, snowing, and just about at maximum visual range under such conditions, which does descrease the chance to hot quite considerably.As for the guys we witnessed...Id suggest they would probably be green to regulars, as I believe he had owned the weapon for quite some time. More importantly the fact that they had 5-6 minutes to line up each shot and didnt have people out there trying to kill them probably ran in their favour considerably, too
.Dan
[ January 16, 2003, 06:26 AM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Of interest might be the fact that Martin and myself have witnessed a 57mm AT crew (including a physics professor IIRC) miss a target in broad daylight and no wind at 100m, 3 times in a row. This was with taking about 5 minutes to aim each shot, too, and was only a couple of hours after they had hit it with the second round they had fired. These things do happen.
Leutnant Hortlund, note that there is varying levels at which you can see a target. A target that is at a distance at night in a snow storm is certainly harder to hit than one that is at the same distance in daylight and the weather conditions have a degrading effect on targetting. (Hehe, Martin beat me to it
)Dan
[ January 15, 2003, 05:20 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Legend, I cant give out any figures here but yes, sales are going very well indeed, even when compared with those of CMBO over a similar time period
Im pretty sure Steve has mentioned this in another thread, but I cant find it now.Dan
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Heya guys,
Juju, yes, it does tend to be at the expense of the texture detail. If you take a texture that is a problem and half its res, you probably wont see the effect any more
The trick to making higher res textures work fine is to reduce the sharp detail and contrast between colours within the texture itself. I origionally made tree bases that looked great up close, just like long grass around the trees, but they were so bad from a distance due to this problem that I decided to start from scratch. This problem will unfortuatnely be pretty much unaviodable with detailed textures at resolutions above those in CMBB, particually on systems in lower resolutions.
Rob, I would suggest trying to run CMBB in a higher resolution if you are seeing this problem with standard textures, as this should help.
Pud, yup, that is the effect you will see when textures have sharp detail at high resolutions.
Dan
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Guys, if you do a search you will find the reason we decided to add in more vehicles than we were able to add in model for.
Basically CM is a wargame, and we thought it more important to increase the tactical scope of CM than to limit this in exchange for having every tank represented with its correct 3D. It is important to note that that every vehicle has been extensively researched even if it doesnt have its exact model and will behave just how it should. It would have been much easier for us to just not include vehicles which we didnt have time to complete 3D models for, but this wasnt what we wanted to do.
If we had cut out the smaller nations from the game such as the Finns, Romanians and Hungarians then yes, we could have done every vehicle for the Russians and Germans with its 100% correct 3D model. Im sure there are many whom wouldnt have wanted us to do this though
Dan
(edited to make more sense
)[ January 13, 2003, 08:00 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Pud, Id suggest you are seeing two problems here.
CM will do this is you use a high resolution mod (thus with lots of pixels) and/or one that has reasonable high contrast in the textures. I spent hours making sure that CM out of the box didnt do this, as it can really be hard on the eyes, particaully when finding troops.
Dan
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Hi Guys,
Im going to lock this one up as its rather off topic and usually gets heated very quickly. Feel free to take such comments to the General Forum though Panzertruppe, but be ready for a bumpy ride.
Dan
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Guys, Im not sure if it will ease any minds, but the changes made to infantry in 1.01 are very small tweaks. You shouldnt be noticing any huge differences and if you are you may just be using more successful tactics or having a little more luck than previously.
Dan
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Lol, so thats what Ive been missing
Funny indeed!Dan
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No worries tracer! No defanite plans at this point to do so, but I certainally would enjoy write up such a tutorial. Time will tell
Dan
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Hi tracer!
Hehe, glad you like the Panthers
I currently have my hands full preparing for the next patch plus more, but I wrote the below some time back and it may give you some ideas to work with. Down the track I would certianally like to add more, providing time allows me to do so (finger crossed!). _____________________________
So, how do we convert a basic plastic model to a CM texture with camo, weathering, etc?
Well, what Im going to do is to quickly run you guys through the process Ill be using to take a basic model and turn it into a final product. Now its getting on for midnight here so forgive me if the colour is off or if it all looks a more than a little rushed
First, below is a shot of the original image that I will be working with. It is a side turret off of a model that Michael sent in to us (thanks again Michael) and it will be a good help for the entire Pz-III series.
Now, for a start lets pretend that we want to make a post '42 model, which generally should be yellow with a basic camo scheme over it (though this wasnt as common on the Pz-III's as the Pz-IV's). The first thing we need to do is to colour the side turret to the basic yellow colour we are after. This is a reasonably simple process and required me to increase the yellow and red in the model whilst reducing its saturation some. Below is the coloured turret (which alone would be fine for a Pz-III model in 42, as it wasn't uncommon for the colour not to be applied)
Now, lets add a little camo. What I did next was to add a new layer in Photoshop but I changed its type to multiply, which multiplies the colour with the original image (and thus I dont loose the original detail). After painting my model using suitable colours (green and brown for the Germans) I then applied a few filters to give us a faded and weathered effect to the paint. Often the camo paint used was not of good quality, and if you look at photos you will often find that it is applied rather thinly. Generally petrol was supposed to be used to thin the origional thick paste supplied before it was applied to the tank, but often water was used as fuel became rarer, and the quality of the paint suffered.
After applying the camo I then added what is commonly known as a grunge map on top of the texture. What this did was to give the overall impressed of dust and grime, as well as adding some of the water streaks you can see down the side of the model.
Next, I have used the clone tool to remove the shiny spot near the front of the turret. Also Ive added a few chips to the paint around the hatches. Here is the final result!
Now bear in mind guys that this was very rushed, but it should give you a good idea of the process we will use when working with models we receive.
Also note that the above took me about 15 minutes as opposed to 2 or 3 hours if we had no original texture to work from. So guys, if you have any friends out there that are modellers, make sure you remind them about our competition!
Hope this was of interest guys!
Dan
[ November 26, 2002, 06:19 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Thanks ColdSober, I will pass that along
Dan
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ColdSober, the CDV patch is for all languages, so it is actually available
. Martin is going to ask CDV to update their page with regards to this.Dan
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Steiner, here is a site where it can be ordered in the states and a description of the video.Originally posted by Sgt. Steiner:A just found WW2 German training film? Where can I get a copy! I already have "Men Against Tanks", "Engineers to the Front", and "Sharpshooter: The Unseen Weapon". Another addition to the collection would be outstanding. Throw us a link, please!
"VHS-128. PANZERS-MARSCH! In this, the first of an occasional series of supplementary films following the very successful and highly regarded Die Deutschen Panzer series the opportunity is being taken to offer the collector, modeler and general AFV enthusiast new footage that has been acquired since the release of the original eight videos. The format is that of a compendium which is fascinating by virtue of the range of the material covered. It begins with more footage of Tiger Is during Operation Citadel, although the major elements comprise the edited highlights of two German Army training films from late 1943 and mid-1944. The first of these was made for new crewmen converting to the Panther medium tank. The film features Panther Model Ds and early Model As. The second film from 1944 was made for the benefit of personnel serving in Sdkfz 251 Ds and the first Panzerjaeger 1Vs. Indeed, the film of this latter type may well be the only footage to survive the war and is the first seen on video. Once again the film deals with operations against the Red Army. Last are short sequences showing such machines as a late Model Brummbaer. Running time approx. 60 min, English narration, b/w. $ 30"
http://www.sonic.net/~bstone/blitzbooks/video.html
Dan
[ November 24, 2002, 06:17 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]
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Attention South Of England Players - you are cordially summoned to this thread...
in Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin
Posted
Hi Guys,
Rex hs asked me to start of the rounds for you all, so here we go. Hopefully this is what you were after Rex, and hopefully you guys will have a LOT of fun
Game 1 : Mr Grey vs Mr Gold
Game 2 : Mr Black vs Mr Crimson
Game 3 : Mr Brown vs Mr Blue
Game 4 : Mr Pink vs Mr Green
Game 5 : Mr Indigo vs Mr Khaki
Game 6 : Mr Red vs Mr Orange
Game 7 : Mr White vs Mr Silver
Game 8 : Mr Cyan vs Mr Magenta
Enjoy guys!
Dan