SurlyBen

My sky mod is more or less done. It consists only of daytime skies, because I haven't decided how or if I plan on doing night ones (there are already quite a few night skies out there...) There are 8 blue skies (including one with no clouds at all) 6 dawns, and six overcast. The reason for the extra skies is that my skies aren't very generalized, so it's easy to notice that you are looking at the same clouds all the time This mod includes my previous sky mods. Here are some previews (I've limited it to six out of consideration for those of you who read this on dial up modems ) Each of these was taken in view one looking towards a corner, and these are of the low res version of my skies on account of I have a lowly 16 MB voodoo 3 video card. The high res ones should look much better (less banding) Now all I need is someplace to host 'em, and y'all can see for yourselves. SurlyBen

PeterPanzer: the sky mods are done by me. They used be available, but it looks like the site that hosted them went down. No worries, though. I'm working on a bunch of new sky textures. I'm going put them and the ones I've already done in one big pack o' sky textures... I'll make an announcement in a few days. (for a tiny preview check out this thread over at the Band of Brothers website. Marco: Nice greyhounds, by the way... SurlyBen Edit: Correction, the first sky mod (the pink and purple one) is mine, the second is not.. [ 06-11-2001: Message edited by: SurlyBen ]

And will it be possible to have a post scenario briefing? (Ok, I know I am probably the only one who wants this, but it would be an excellent place for scenario designers to put spoily historical information, or give a pat on the back for a job well done...) SurlyBen

It could be a fraction of the unit cost, or each infantry casualty could have a standard point value (2 or 3 points probably) (modifed by unit experience or whether or not it is a crew) I also don't know if you get full points for killing things like sharpshooters, or if taking out a mortar (or gun) and its crew gets you the points for the mortar PLUS the value of the crew. If it does, assaulting mortar formations would be a points bonanza. I suppose someone could test for all of this, but it won't be me All I wanted to have was a rough way of calculating the score during a game.

Been meaning to post this here for a while. I've seen several plain english explanations, but for the math inclined, here's a rough guide to CM scoring as I understand it. It doesn't say anything about exited units (whether from an exit scenario or not) and it probably overlooks other stuff too (for example a scenario designer can give one side bonus points), but in QBs I can usually tell what the final score will be to within a few percentage points by the late few turns of the fight. pa = total points of allied casualties (allies captured count double their casualty value) pg = total points of german casualties (germans captured cout double their casualty value) f = total value of flags fa = point value of flags controlled by allies fg = point value of flags controlled by germans a = allied score g = german score Flags are worth 300 points for the big ones, and 100 for the small ones. All units are worth their cost in points(that is, if you only kill a regular sherman, pa will be 115 ), with the exception of arty spotters, which are worth 30 points, and possibly infantry casualties, which I haven't tested for exact values. That is, infantry may have a standard per casualty value (probably around 2 or 3 points) or it may vary by unit type. Captured units are worth double points. SurlyBen

I've never been in the military, but as far as CM goes: Moving your tanks forward is almost always a mistake. If you find yourself wanting to do it, you should stop, think about it, and then not do it. Also you can never have enough infantry Surlyben

All the old patches look like they are still available on the battlefront ftp site... try copying the following into your broweser (or use an ftp program) ftp://ftp.battlefront.com/pub/patches/ cm105.exe is the filename...

Even better, the turret or gun always instantly changes to dead ahead when the gun is damaged. So you can see gun damage immediately even if the FOW doesn't say anything about it. Probably a consequence of the design of CM, and not a bug, though. SurlyBen [ 04-30-2001: Message edited by: SurlyBen ]

The panoramic filter is not quite the same as a tile filter. What the panoramic one does is take the image and curve it so that the corners are harder to see. The areas that are higher up in the image are curved more than the ones lower down: Getting the edges to match up is a different step (at least for me). You are right about being able to see the seam in the dawn shot I posted above. In that case, the original photo had that cloud sloping down like that, and I'm afraid that end result is that the seam is more obvious. In game, it's only noticable if you really look for it... This differs from the summer blue sky from my blueskies mod which had the pano filter applied incorrectly, so if you look at the blue parts of the sky, you will see that the corners are obvious. The corners are visible on the stock skies too. Anyway, It's only something you notice in view one. I don't want to come across as critizing your skies. Heck, I use your overcast skies. SurlyBen

That's just not true. Or it's only true for my summer blue sky (which was the first one I did). Both the screenshots below show the corners of the box that the sky is mapped on to. You can still see it, but it's not that noticable, and in both cases, there are clouds going right across the seam. I used a panoramic filter to correct for the fact that they are mapped onto a square. I'm not saying my skies are perfect (they aren't. please don't look at them too closely ), But I think I got the seams right, for the most part. FYI There is no way to fix it perfectly for all parts of the map, since what causes the corner to become visible is a perspective effect, and if you are looking at the sky from a different part of the map, you will get a different perspective. SurlyBen [ 04-24-2001: Message edited by: SurlyBen ]

I can tell you how to win a majority of your meeting engagements: try to always defend, and never attack. The easiest way to do this is to charge for the flags with your infantry (and then order them to hide). There are nuances, and plenty of exceptions(which are what makes the game interesting), but getting to the flag first gives you a big advantage because the enemy is forced to come to you. As long as you don't go beyond the flag and you charge in the first minute, it is amazingly safe to do. Try running across open ground as much as possible, because your men go faster (works best if said open ground is shielded from the other side by hills). It can also be a good idea to stop just short of the flag (50 meters of so) so that you get a chance to shoot up your opponent if he is rushing the flag. SurlyBen [ 04-13-2001: Message edited by: SurlyBen ]

I'm still thinking about how I want them to look. Overcast skies can be pretty boring... Probably my next set will be nighttime clear. Ben

The red dawn sky (1412.bmp and 1442.bmp) only shows up on clear days with snow on the ground. This means that you will never see it in a quick battle: any time you have snow on the ground in a QB, it is snowing, so you'll get an overcast sky. This is true of my winter blue sky mod as well as tiger's sky mods. Kind of a bummer, but that's just the way the game does things. The upside is that this means that if you get sick of the regular skies, you have a sky that you rarely see that you can swap in by changing the filenames around. Ben

What he said. One other thing: arty spotters are definately not worth as much as they cost. That is, if you kill, say, a 200 point arty spotter, it only counts for around 30 points, about as much as a squad. (I did a test ) It makes sense, since you didn't really take out the artillery, just the spotter. SurlyBen

Stix, my skies shouldn't cause your system any trouble. I run CM on a 350 mhz machine with a voodoo 3 card, and I don't have a problem with my skies. The thing is, at most you will see two sky textures at any one time (well, the same texture twice). Compare that to grass, where every 20 square meters of the map shows a grass texture, and you can have a map several kilometers on a side on your screen at once. A 1km by 1km map is showing 2500 of those 20 meter squares... SurlyBen

This has been mentioned already, but I just finished some replacement skies for dawn/dusk to go with my blue skies. They can be downloaded over at the Dogs of War website in the download section http://members.tripod.com/johnnocmdow/down.htm . The zip has replacement files for both the high and low res versions of the skys, for you people who have voodoo 3 cards . Be aware that both verisons are bigger than the stock skies. Anyway, here're the shots. I've managed to reduce the posterized look of the skies somewhat on these (and on my blue skies). Comments? Flames? Criticisms? SurlyBen [This message has been edited by SurlyBen (edited 03-31-2001).] [This message has been edited by SurlyBen (edited 03-31-2001).] [This message has been edited by SurlyBen (edited 03-31-2001).]

Hmm. That's what I thought. The reason you see the v shape at the corners has to do with the fact that the skies are mapped onto a big square. There are several ways to get rid of it: running it through a panorama filter in, say, photoshop (although IIRC photoshop doesn't actually *come* with a panorama filter...); carefully drawing everything by hand; using the shear filter in photoshop (this looks like how the original skies may have been done). It wouldn't surprise me if there was an easy push button way to fix it in bryce... FYI, my blue skies shouldn't have much of a problem with the 'v' effect, and they come in versions for people with voodoo 3 cards and people without. You can get them over at the dogs of war website http://members.tripod.com/johnnocmdow/ in the downloads section. The downside being that they only replace the blue skies, and they may be too bright for some peoples taste. SurlyBen

I'm not seeing seams caused by the textures not meshing, I'm seeing them because of perspective effects caused by the fact that the textures are mapped onto a big square. Where the textures meet, the clouds make "v" shapes. I was wondering if this is an artifact of resizing them or if it happens on the big versions too. SurlyBen

Sounds like something to do with the voodoo cards. I have a voodoo 3 3000 and I've never been able to get the 1400-1414 bmps to show up. This is the reason my blue skies come with both versions... It means I've never seen what my skies look like high res. One thing I noticed was that when I resized Tigers skies (so I could see them at all), I noticed a seam at the edges... that is, the skies are mapped onto the walls of a big box, and I could see where the corners are. I'm wondering if people who can see the big skies notice this. If so it probably means my 1400, 1405 and 1410 bmp have weird looking effects at the corners as well. Oh well. SurlyBen

At the moment I don't have plans for doing overcast, morning, or night skies, mainly because I don't have any suitable photos to work with, but also because there are already plenty of perfectly acceptable skies out there... I don't know. I guess I'm not ruling it out. I would like to replace all the horizons... SurlyBen

There are two things you need to do if you can't see the skies. The first is to rename them to 1430-1444, and the second is to resize them so they are square. Right now they are 1024 X 256 pixels. If you want to see them without loss of detail, you'll have to open them up and resize to to 1024 X 1024. If you want them to be smaller and faster then 256 X 256 is a good size. In windows you can resize by opening the image in paint, hitting CTRL+W (stretch/skew under the image menu) and selecting either 400% vertical or 25% horizontal, clicking ok, and then saving the image. If you have photoshop you would select "image size" under the edit menu... Incidentally bmps 1400-1414 are in the same order as 1430-1444. Meaning that 1400 and 1430 are both daytime summer skies, 1401.bmp and 1431 are summer overcast (I think) etc... SurlyBen [This message has been edited by SurlyBen (edited 03-26-2001).]

If you change the size to 1024 by 1024, you shouldn't lose any detail, because you are actually creating a bigger file. For some reason it will still show the 1430-1444 series, even if the filesize happens to be bigger than the 1400-1414 series. No idea why. And as far as slowdown goes, you shouldn't experience a bigger slowdown than you would from running panzertruppen's buildings, or, say, one high resolution tank. SurlyBen

Tanks a lot: The short answer is lots of dithering, and some experimentation. These were created in photoshop. They are bigger than the skies that come with the game to make the dithering less obvious. The blue part of the sky is just a gradated fill, to which I added some noise to reduce the banding effect. (without the noise, there was still a pronounced banding effct when I reduced the color depth to 8 bit, even with dithering turned on...) SurlyBen

It never rains but it pours. I've been working on some new blue sky textures. You can find 'em over on the dogs of war website in the downloads section ( http://members.tripod.com/johnnocmdow/down.htm ) SurlyBen [This message has been edited by SurlyBen (edited 03-25-2001).]

A solution for those of you having problems seeing the skies is to rename the images to 1430-1444, and resize them to be square. The 1430-1444 images that came with the game are 256 by 256, but if you want to, you could probably get away with using 1024 by 1024 (for no loss of detail). The skies are not a big processor hit... IIRC, if you don't make them square, they end up looking all blocky, or they just don't work at all (you get a white sky) SurlyBen