Bimmer

Yeah, I've seen that as well.

FWIW, my "The Hills Have Eyes" (in the Repository) has a sort of gully/wash on a hillside. I was reasonably pleased with the effect of elevation, rocks, and foliage - have a look if you like.

I hope everyone who plays through this will offer up their comments - it's useful to designers to hear from end-users. Maybe someone will even decide to do a full AAR or DAR on the forum (hint hint...).

Just screwing around in GIMP trying to teach myself how to use layer masks.

Thanks! Please let me know how you like this one.

In case anyone missed it, this is now available HERE. And as a little tease, here's something that's currently in development. I couldn't let all that map work go underutilized....

The text above is somewhat mangled; apparently the accents and umlauts didn't translate well into forum code. Here's the (hopefully) corrected version: US paratroopers land off-target on 6 June 1944 near the village of Saint Jores. German fallschirmjäger are tasked with clearing them out of the village and opening the route north to Sainte-Mère-Église. This is an expansion and complete reworking of the original scenario of the same name. The map is based on modern 2D and 3D maps, as well as 1947 aerial surveys, and is as accurate as it was possible for me to make it. While the scenario is fictional, it is based on the historical situation - several sticks of US paratroopers did land near Saint Jores, and German fallschirmjägers were active in the area as well. For now this is H2H only; AI plans may be added at a later time. You will need the Market Garden module to play. And as an early tease, this is currently in the works: Stay tuned....

This has been uploaded to the Repository and should be available soon. I tried to upload to GAJ's site as well, but I cannot get it to work, so you'll have to wait for the Repository.

The simplest reason is that higher contrast and sharper edges tend to make more obvious the graphical limitations and make the photos look further from reality rather than closer to it, to my eye, at least. Slightly blacker blacks worked in places, but applied universally I was not happy with the result. Even modern silver halide films will tend to blow out the sky without color-correction filtering due to reduced blue sensitivity. All that said, it's obviously personal preference. My photos, my preference.

It's intentionally low contrast and imperfect.

A few screenshot teasers to keep you interested.

A few from my soon-to-be-released update of Station Stop: Saint Jores.

And a few more photos. The final map may have a few further slight tweaks based on testing, but it's about 99% done at this point.

Since MG brought German paratroops to Normandy, it was time to overhaul one of my earlier scenarios - Station Stop Saint Jores - since it was designed with this force in mind. At the same time, however, I also extended and heavily revised the map, making it a closer representation of the real place; I used a combination of the 1947 aerial survey maps, modern maps, and Google Street View to achieve a reasonable approximation. I also took advantage of MG's new ditch feature in a few places. While there's a rudimentary AI left over from the first version, it hasn't been revised at all, so this one is really meant only for H2H play. A later revision may include a more functional AI. The scenario is testing now and should be available soon. Here's a few comparison photos to give you a taste.

Even if it's only a map (frankly, building the map - especially an urban one - is so much of the time involved that I'd throw together a scenario just for kicks, but I digress) you'll need to run some playtesting to see where and how your adjacent buildings are permeable. If you don't you'll get endless complaints from users about "I just saw units run/fire through a solid wall at X". Set up some sort of test scenario, or run a QB, or something.

Having done an urban map myself (Palma di Montechiaro for CMFI), your biggest headache will be eliminating movement and fire opportunities between adjacent buildings where you do not intend them to be connected. Align the buildings so that you can place high walls between them wherever possible, though even this doesn't seem to work 100% of the time. Removing all the doors and windows from adjoining walls of modular buildings helps, but it also is not foolproof. No matter what I did, there were still ways to fire and move through solid walls in some places. You'll want to playtest a lot to figure out where this is happening, and then try to eliminate it as much as possible; just don't expect to resolve every instance.

I don't know if they're reviewed anywhere, but all of the scenarios from "The Farm" tournament played out very evenly across multiple games (elimination tournament that started with 32 players in two groups, so 16/8/4/2 games). I'd have to go back and dig up the stats, but it was close to 50-50 in each round IIRC. They're all in the Repository.

Just a quick update on the progress of my little experiment. The Hills Have Eyes has been reviewed by three helpful players since I posted this (there are now five total reviews of it), and one more review has been added to Palma di Montechiaro. That means we're only two reviews for the latter scenario away from triggering the release of Misty Mountain Hop. Thanks to those who have taken the time to review my previous scenarios; I hope you (and others) will continue to contribute reviews to all the designers.

You mean like this?

^This. For modular buildings, there's no excuse, but oh, is it tedious. I cannot tell you (probably because I've blocked it out of my subconscious) how many hours I spent fixing every interior wall in my Palma di Montechiaro map. For the independent buildings, well, it's a problem, since things like the row houses are perfect for urban maps, but they would be butting against each other. I even tried putting high walls between them, but the door coding seems to override the wall coding, so troops still move between the buildings through the abutting walls. I tried to minimize the instances of this, but it's not easy. There are a lot of things a careful designer can do to minimize the issue, and personally I prefer having the option to set up interior walls in as many configurations as possible, not having the code get in the way of some oddball but useful wall/door/window arrangement.

Don't misunderstand my intentions here. I know, and have stated previously, that self-motivation is the only way that anyone who adds free content is going to keep going; doing it for the adulation of others is never going to work. I do design scenarios because I enjoy it; making some of them available to others is done by choice. This was from the beginning a social experiment, and I said so in the first post. I wanted to see if incentivizing the process had any real effect on willingness of consumers to provide feedback. I didn't expect it would, and I was right (within an admittedly very small sample size). As to people "not wanting to work for it," well, people don't want to work for a lot of things. I don't like going to work some days, but I do it because there is a clear cost-benefit relationship wherein I provide a service in exchange for mutually-agreed-upon compensation. It's a free market exchange. I have little sympathy or concern for those who aren't willing to do more than expect something for nothing, and complain when they don't get what they want.

Well, my experiment is going along pretty much as I expected. It's been a month since I posted this offer, and so far I've gotten two new reviews for The Hills Have Eyes (there are now four total, but two were there before I posted this) and none for Palma di Montechiaro, and no one has opted to do the public AAR. It's been said before by me and other designers on this forum: you'll get more content if you give something back to the designers occasionally. This experiment is just showing how hard it is to get decent amounts of feedback even when you incentivize it.

Not too late at all from my point of view. Any designer has to be primarily self-motivated in the first place, or nothing would ever get created. But feedback, even occasionally, helps to keep things moving. (And FWIW, the map on Palma di Montechiaro alone took somewhere around 50-60 hours. The whole scenario probably took twice that. Plus playtesting.)

Consider it from the designer's point of view. I've done three scenarios for CMFI, two of which have been released. Of those two, there have been a combined almost 300 downloads (roughly 200 of one and 100 of the other). And how much feedback has there been? Five reviews. Five. And of those, four have been for the smaller scenario that's only been downloaded 100 times. The larger one took a ridiculous amount of time to build, and it has one review. Both of these have AI plans, so they are playable solo; in other words it's not just a matter of waiting for PBEM games to end. There's just not much motivation to build scenarios for a community that doesn't seem to appreciate the effort. That's why I decided to do a little social experiment for my next scenario. I posted here that I would only release it after I got three new reviews for each of my scenarios already in the Repository, or if two players started a PBEM and documented it here on the forum. Almost a month later and I've gotten two reviews for one scenario and none for the other, and no one has started a documented PBEM. I can't say I'm surprised, but that was the point. If you want more scenarios, consider helping your own cause by offering the designers some useful feedback.

I like the direction you've taken with the smoke and dust mod, though the effect seems to my eye to be closer to the level of contrast one often sees in black and white photos (in film photography, some emulsions are considered more "contrasty" than others) than in color, especially when zoomed out. I suppose this is in part an optical illusion, but for color use I wonder if dialing the contrast back a bit so that the darker sections were not quite so dark (or utilizing some other method - I'm no graphics expert) might not produce a more realistic looking effect. Nonetheless, I like it, even without any adjustment.