L.Tankersley

Mapping Mission is a program that lets you build maps for CM without having to use the clumsy CM map editor interface. It supports things like cut-and-paste, laying down roads by clicking and dragging instead of one tile at a time, and various other features to make the mapmaker's job easier. The maps can then be "exported" to CMBB (or, soon, CMBO) -- you run CM and open the map editor, and select the Export command. Mapping Mission then generates all the key presses and mouse events necessary to build your map in Combat Mission. You just sit back and watch, or go have a drink or something. Mapping Mission also includes a number of features that are intended mainly for campaigns that use CM as a combat engine, such as CMMC. Mapping Mission maps can be arbitrarily large (100km on a side, say). The user can select any area of the map to export to CM. Mapping Mission also includes a feature to let you load a bitmap as an "underlay" that will appear in the map window. Terrain tiles are drawn semi-transparent on top of this underlay. If your bitmap is an image of a topographic map, say, this lets you build the CM map on top of the actual map. If you're still not sure what the program does, download it and give it a spin or read the formal documentation. It's only a couple of hundred kbytes. You won't be able to export to CMBO, but you can play with the map editor and get the general idea.

Mapping Mission 1.09 is now available for download at: http://www.cmmc2.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1350&WHICHPAGE=1 Version 1.09 adds support for Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord, and also modifies the display and exporting of elevation when in "CM level" mode to better emulate the behavior of the CM map editor. [ July 23, 2003, 09:58 PM: Message edited by: L.Tankersley ]

Bump to mention that the next Mapping Mission release should include support for creating and exporting CMBO maps as well as CMBB.

Some other people had noted some performance issues with 1.07. I have improved this significantly, and also changed the underlay appearance back to what it was before. A version 1.08 should be released soon (maybe today) with these fixes. Edit: Version 1.08 is now available (same location as before). No new features, but a couple of bugs are fixed and performance should be significantly improved. [ July 21, 2003, 03:18 PM: Message edited by: L.Tankersley ]

Ah, that may help me figure out what's going on, actually. I may have changed the StretchBlt mode used to scale the underlay; that would explain the visual difference as well as the performance change. I know I was playing with that when I was tweaking the performance of the overview mode. I'll look into it.

Really? Hmmm. I didn't notice this myself but I didn't test exhaustively. I'll look into it; the underlay stuff didn't change (intentionally, anyway) so it shouldn't be much worse than before. One question -- are you "distorting" the underlay by showing it in an area that doesn't match the aspect ratio of the bitmap? For example, showing a square underlay bitmap in an area that is not square? Also, are you running the updated 1.07 that was posted on the CMMC2.org forums? I sent a pre-release 1.07 out to a few people that had fairly significant graphics performance issues -- you didnt't get ahold of one of those, did you?

Bumped due to the bug fix/update referenced in the first post.

FYI, MM 1.07 has been released (see first post of this thread for details).

I still intend to do a Mac version, but (a) I haven't had much free time lately, and ( I'm a slacker. Sorry about that... I use a Mac at home, too, and I definitely want to get a Mac version done. I just need a block of time to surge and get a decent start and then inertia will carry me the rest of the way; unfortunately I have a lot of competing demands on my free time and there's always something that seems more pressing. Mac users are definitely not forgotten!

Any single CMBB or CMBO map supports 20 different elevation levels (0-19 in the editor). The "contour interval" can be set to 5 meters, 2.5 meters or (in CMBB) 1.25 meters. So the maximum elevation change over a single CMBB map is 100 meters. You can build some quite dramatic elevation changes in CM, but if you do you lose some ability to have gentle slopes (and vice versa). Mapping Mission, btw, supports 256 different elevation levels at a 1.25m contour interval. You don't want to use this entire range in the area of a single CMBB map because of the restriction above. But if you are exporting the map in "chunks," at export time, the program figures out the elevations used in the export area and does the best job it can to represent the elevation change in the area within the 20 allowed CM levels.

They can't afford me Although if they are interested in bundling MM with CMAK I wouldn't have a problem with that. There may be legal/other reasons why that might not be a good idea, though. Support, for example.

EDIT: Mapping Mission 1.08 has been released. It can be downloaded from the same location as 1.06 & 1.07 (that is, http://www.cmmc2.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1304 ). No new features in 1.08; it incorporates a few bug fixes and performance improvements. Changes in 1.07: * Added an "overview" display mode in which the map is displayed at 1/4 normal size. This lets you see more of the map at once. Note that you should probably turn elevation display off when using the overview, since the tiles are now too small to display the elevation text. * Added a "CM" elevation mode option. The new CM mode restricts elevations to between 0 and 19, and displays the actual elevation level rather than the level multiplied by the 1.25m contour interval. * Added an "Export Operation Map" option to allow exporting the larger map sizes supported by operations in CMBB. It is up to the user to make sure the CMBB map editor is set up for an operation before exporting a map when using this option. * Fixed the "Ctrl + O" key shortcut so it will bring up the Open Map dialog as intended * Fixed (finally!) the scrolling/resizing problem. Also, for you Mac users: I've made some progress in updating my out-of-date Mac programming knowledge. No ETA yet but I am optimistic that it will in fact get done. [ July 21, 2003, 03:20 PM: Message edited by: L.Tankersley ]

Well, if it solely represents training given pre-battle, then it shouldn't matter if a unit is within range of the HQ (or if the HQ even still exists). That said, I don't think bonuses should be erased if the HQ is hiding. It might make sense to reduce their effective radii, though, or require a valid LOS between HQ and subordinate.

Is this final 1.03 version different from the 1.03 beta?

Not at present. The issue is the different terrain tiles available in CMBO. I'll need to build a new terrain palette, and change some of the export logic. Once I'm satisfied that MM is feature-complete I may see if I can do that without too much trouble. Actually, you might be able to use it now with a bit of care. The problem areas are going to be tiles that exist in CMBB that don't exist in CMBO, like shacks and shallow fords. Also steppe, soft ground. Probably a few others, too -- I don't recall offhand. Wait -- I take that back. Right now MM checks to see if CMBB is running before export; CMBO won't pass the test. That should be relatively easy to add support for, though. So the answer is "not now, but perhaps soon."

As Bogdan says, you need to know the approximate area of the underlay map. The map also needs to be in .bmp format (any color depth should work, but if you have problems you might want to try 8-bit or 24-bit). Create a MM map and specify a map size large enough to accomodate the underlay (it can be larger). Note that you can use the Set Map Size command to change the size of an existing map if you don't want to create a new one for some reason. Then use the selection marquee tool to select an area of the MM map the same size as the area represented by the underlay. For example, if your bitmap represents an area 1km x 1km, you would want to select a square 50 tiles on a side. (If you select an area of a different size, the process should still work, but the underlay will be distorted, probably not what you want.) Finally, use the Load underlay bitmap command and load your underlay. It should appear in the area you had selected.

It can be downloaded from the CMMC2 website, here: http://www.cmmc2.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=814&WHICHPAGE=1 This version fixes a small bug in elevation export, adds a couple of minor new features, and (most importantly) changes the method used to export data so that (1) it now works for non-US users that had reported problems and (2) events are now sent directly to the CMBB window so there is no chance of the export process mouse clicks being sent to the wrong application and (3) terrain export (but not elevations or landmarks) can now proceed IN THE BACKGROUND (i.e. you can switch out of CMBB and do something else while the terrain data is exported.

1.05 should be released to the public this week. The big reason for 1.05 is it corrects the odd export problem related to scrolling or panning the CMBB map that some European users were seeing. Thanks to Fuerte (creator of PBEM Helper) for giving me an idea that helped me fix this problem, and to Ted and Sergei for testing several intermediate versions. There are also 1 or 2 minor bug fixes (to the elevation export routine mainly). One side-effect of the fix is that now the export process can take place in the background (i.e. CMBB doesn't need to be the active application). The only problem is that exporting landmarks only works if CMBB is the front application, so I'm going to add an "Export Landmarks" command so you can let most of the export run in the background. DD, do you mean you did a screenshot of the CMBB editor and used that as an underlay? That ought to work, but I was thinking about automating the process.

I am working on version 1.05. This version has a few minor bug fixes in it, mostly related to map export to CM. I am still chasing a few elusive export problems experienced by some non-US users; hopefully that will be resolved soon (transatlantic debugging is a slow process). Once that's done I hope to be able to devote more time to the Mac port. Also, I had a neat idea this morning about a way to import CMBB maps into Mapping Mission. The gist of the idea is to take a screenshot of the map in the CMBB editor, and then have MM import the screenshot and pattern-match the tiles to figure out what tile goes where. Elevations might be a bit trickier, but then again they might be very doable. Need to think on this some more. This isn't something to expect soon, but I'm going to put it on the back burner and see if I can do it without much effort. If any other aspiring programmer wants to take a crack at this in the meantime, however, the MM file format is published in the documentation, so feel free!

I did this, actually, and did still see the slowdown. (I was installing everything on a new drive, had the inviso-text problem, remembered I needed newer drivers, downloaded them, removed the existing drives, installed the new, and had the slowdown.)

That's the one.

That's the one.

It can be downloaded from the CMMC2 website. The link is in the forums, the link to the thread is: http://www.cmmc2.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=612&WHICHPAGE=1 (Note: this is a new thread, not the one that had versions 1.0 through 1.02). Version 1.03 was only released to a few testers and in various incarnations; I am labelling this public release 1.04 to hopefully reduce future confusion. Key new features of this update are the graphic underlay (load any bitmap and display it as an underlay while you build terrain on top of it), LOS tool, raise/lower elevation tools, and (hopefully) working elevation export for users with non-US keyboard layouts. --- For those unfamiliar with Mapping Mission, it is a map editor that allows you to build maps that can then be exported for use with CMBB. It has a lot of conveniences that are not present in the built-in CMBB editor. This version is PC-only but a Mac version is in the works. If you want more information, download the file and read the documentation (the whole thing is only about 100k zipped).

It can be downloaded from the CMMC2 website. The link is in the forums, the link to the thread is: http://www.cmmc2.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=612&WHICHPAGE=1 (Note: this is a new thread, not the one that had versions 1.0 through 1.02). Version 1.03 was only released to a few testers and in various incarnations; I am labelling this public release 1.04 to hopefully reduce future confusion. Key new features of this update are the graphic underlay (load any bitmap and display it as an underlay while you build terrain on top of it), LOS tool, raise/lower elevation tools, and (hopefully) working elevation export for users with non-US keyboard layouts. --- For those unfamiliar with Mapping Mission, it is a map editor that allows you to build maps that can then be exported for use with CMBB. It has a lot of conveniences that are not present in the built-in CMBB editor. This version is PC-only but a Mac version is in the works. If you want more information, download the file and read the documentation (the whole thing is only about 100k zipped).

See http://www.battlefront.com/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=005355#000000