Juju

Thinking outside the box is the new rage. Bravo Umlaut!

Pity. Thanks Pete. I thought of that, but there may be instances where you don't want that. Oh well, It's a non-issue now anyway.

Before I spend an hour checking if it's even possible, I'll ask here first, on the off chance someone has already tried if it's possible to assign negative victory points to a unit or terrain objective? Why would I want to do that? I'm not sure, cos I just came up with it. I bet I could come up with reasons, though. Punishing a commander who blatantly disobeys his orders could be one...

I'm new to this as well and this is probably a really obvious one: I've been using enemy touch triggers for individual squads to relocate to fallback positions as soon as an attacker gets too close for comfort. If you can afford to have each squad assigned to its own group, so each can respond to different threats and hopefully even cover eachother's retreat, then all the better. Seems to work well for urban defense situations. Another thing I found is that HQ's (and other small teams) tend to be a little quicker in executing their movement paths than a full squad does (these leap-frog their teams and therefor take a lot longer to get where they're going). This means your HQ's have this tendency to lead from the front, which is something you usually don't want. Having a platoon HQ in its own group allows you to trail after the rest of the platoon by having them wait for the squad(s) to start a specific order before running ahead and getting their heads blown off.

LOL. One of my favorites.

Well duh! I seem to have put this one in the wrong sub-forum (Late. Wine)! Moderators, please move this to the mods and scenarios section. Sorry 'bout the mess-up.

5 Bridges, one of which acts as a jetty: Pitrovsk town 31 new random posters scattered around town:

Mini mods: More mini mods: New flavor objects: New fences:

Hello and welcome to Juju's 'The railyard at Pitrovsk' project (TRaP, from here on) work-in-progress thread. Here I will take you through a ‘guided tour’ and tell you all about the stuff I'm working on. So, what’s this TRaP project? Sounds intriguing. It's an attempt to combine map, mods and scenario in order to create a specific atmosphere which (dare I say it) hopefully elevates it to a higher level of immersion. Maybe some of these ideas are picked up by others, or even BFC, and developed further. First of all, let's all NOT take this one too seriously and have a little bit of fun with it. This is my first attempt at making a map and scenario and some elements of this projects may seem a bit quirky and 'out there' to some of you. It's a 'casual' project and not intended to be historically correct or aimed at grogs or history buffs. Tall talk, lad. What does TRaP offer that I haven't seen before, then (stifled yawn)? There's the map. My very first one, I might add. It covers the fictional town of Pitrovsk but centers on its prize target: the railyard at Pitrovsk. The map is crammed with oodles of details and flavor objects. I’ve hand-placed approximately 960 (give or take a few) of the things and many have tiny little stories behind them, if you use your imagination a little. I even went as far as researching the common distance between telephone poles in rural and urban areas and along rail lines. Uh-huh. Been there, done that. T-shirt. What else you got? Well, there are plenty of mods, including several what I like to call 'mini-mods:' little dioramas within a diorama, if you will, that are unique to this scenario and are mainly there for flavor. But the main feature is, obviously, the railyard (both the passenger station and freight yard). There are some generous mod contributions from fellow modders as well! (perks up) Mods? What are these new mods of which you speak? Quite a few, actually. Most are scenario/map specific, but some are for standard use and these will also be released separately. Here's a list of what I have: - Railyard warehouses and passenger station: new building textures, complete with clock and name signs. Many windows facing the yard have the 'correct' reflection when you look at them. - Railcar mod; the most ingenious CM mod ever, designed by Umlaut. Give the man a medal! - New grass tiles (by Tanks A Lot). - Novik Farmstead: tweaked building textures. This one also has many correct window reflections. - New fences (picket, stick, wood- and barbed wire). - Mini-mod: burnt down house and trees. - Mini-mod: abandoned building. - Mini-mod: small oil spill. - Mini-mod: 'Pitrovsk' milestone. - Mini-mod: 31 new Soviet posters scattered around town. - Mini mod: railyard gatehouse sign. - ‘Tiny’-mod: The Mad Hermit's sign. - Mini-mod: Mr. Sedov, The Mad Hermit, a 'playable character' (civilian combatant, Allied). - Mini-mod: Mr. Nosov, The Collaborator, a 'playable character' (civilian combatant, Axis). - Several new and tweaked flavor object textures, including coal bin, dog kennel, two more oil drums, large and medium chicken coop, chicken hutch, shelters and two benches. - Several tweaked ground textures for a more harmonious look. - Most of my existing terrain mods (bridges and walls) also make an appearance and will be included as well. Okay, enough already! When do we get to fight!? I guess I'm still scratching the surface of what the editor can do, but I have the forces I want to use in place and a basic plan for the defender that I've been testing. Results so far are pretty good IMO, but I'm probably going to be needing help, advice and testers soon, all of which I'm hoping to get in this thread. It’ll be a while, though, I still need to start making the attack plan. Aww! There, there! How about some screenshots, then? Yay! Okay, Here we go: Pitrovsk passenger station With Umlaut's railcar mod: More Pitrovsk passenger station: Pitrovsk freight yard:

I've been working on similar stuff, and man, that looks great! Which flavor object did you use for that? I'd like to borrow that idea for my own project, if that's okay. EDIT: Did you have to mess with mdr files to get that to work? As to your original post: I didn't even mess with the mdr's for milestones. I simply changed all of them to point to Pitrovsk (in my case).

Found the beta demo at BTS in late 1999. Installed it, had a good laugh, uninstalled it immediately. Tried again a few months later and the rest is history.

Goody, yet more work!

Yes, I understand the concept. The problem is, I have modded Russian/German names.txt files where I altered some names. The changes do work, but un-tagged they'd work for every scenario. We don't want that. But as soon as I tag them to be used in this scenario only, they stop working. Basically it leads me to believe not every file type may be tag-able, and I just wanted to know for sure. Was that more clear? Clear-er? :confused: Thanks, I think I covered most of that. Thanks for the roof reminder, though! Mustn't forget that.

Got a question here: I've been unsuccessfully trying to tag a .txt file. The modifications I made work as intended when it's not tagged, but stop working when I tag it. Is this normal?

Pft. That'll be the day. Awesome work, as always, Ed!

Aaah! Here's another tip that took me quite a while to figure out: You can have your modded files tagged with caps in the tag, but you can not use caps in the actual tag you're importing into the scenario file. Phew, at least I didn't have to re-name all my files, just the tag itself.

Marco, you can upload a preview picture, but only after the mod is released. Very annoying, that.

I know of two people who are at least considering making a small campaign. One of them is me. Lack of things to mod has pushed me towards the editor, I'm afraid.

I'm working on something entirely new (and rather unique, as far as I know) that will combine a new mod, tweaked stock files and a map into -what I'm hoping to be- a fairly cohesive fictional 'diorama' of a set of very specific and recognizable structures. I don't want to give away any details yet, as it's still in an early stage of development. What I will do is make the pretty pictures and the map (my first attempt, and it's as fun and addictive as modding is). But the map and mods are no good all by themselves. They also need an actual scenario with plans, units, objectives, triggers and whatnot. That's something i've never done before, and to put it bluntly, I'd much rather mod the game some more than learn the intricacies of scenario design from scratch, when there are experienced designers out there that already know how to do it and can do a job ten times better than what I would come up with. That is where I'm hoping one -or more- of you scenario designers comes in and makes it into an actual scenario and/or a set of quickbattles. I haven't a clue how much work goes into scenario making/testing (on an already finished map) or if it's influenced much by the size of a map, so I also don't know if this is even a reasonable request. But, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If anyone is 'game,' or has questions, please let me know.

FYI, nothing new if you already downloaded this. I just needed to go through the hassle of fixing the non-existing mod title.

Duh. Exactly that.

Aw, thanks man!

Yeah, PM me and I'll get it to you by tomorrow. @ Kendar: thanks for checking. I didn't know if SF was compatible as I don't own that one.