Firefly

Perhaps scenario designers and modders need to take a similar approach to that used by the MS Flightsim/Train Sim mod community and include a legal disclaimer in the readme file. These normally sya something along the lines of whether the work can be redistributed or not. This can be as simple as 'This mod/scenario is for your personal use only, and may not be sold or distributed in any way without the author's permission' plus contact details.

I think Soddball should include this in the FAQ as the perfect example of a thread hijack.

Page 2 again! If it slips down to Page 3, do we have to start including pictures of topless young ladies?

Happy New Bump.

Tracer, I wasn't making accusations about you or any of the other guys, I'm just saying that checking anything you download from whatever source is good practice. I agree that if any mod maker were distributing viruses we'd have heard it about here.

Personally I check everything I download whether it's from a 'reputable' source or not, the person who adds a virus is not necessarily the person who created the file in the first place. It doesn't take long to scan a file for viruses and it's better to be safe than sorry.

I've seen you disparage Beevor a couple of times now, Berli. What are your problems with his book? I'm asking out of genuine interest as I've seen a lot of criticism of his Berlin, but very little of his previous work and Stalingrad received a lot of plaudits at the time of its publication.

Temporal displacement.

Thanks Ian, it's some time since I read Thomas, i obviously mis-remembered the totals. I suppose thinking about the travelling distances the fact that the French were the most numerous is not surprising.

Interestingly enough, the largest contingents of the International Brigades were also German and Italian. At one point the Italian 'brigade' fought a battle against Italian blackshirts. Huw Thomas in The Spanish Civil War remarked that the Spanish Civil War briefly became the Italian Civil War.

As Jeff says the .exe file or the .bat file that comes with some mods could be a source of infection (and should always be checked), but I think we would have heard of such things on this board and I can't recall any mention of it in the two years I've been reading the board. That that your virus checker doesn't show any problems and deleting the files fixes the problem seems to suggest the problem is not a virus (viruses are harder to get rid of). It could be that the mods have been written to a bad spot on your hard drive. Have you tried running Scandisk or something similar to check your hard drive for errors?

As most of you probably already know, the British called the M3 Stuart the 'Honey', after an officer who took one for a test drive described it as 'a honey of a tank'. To the original question, from what I've read allied troops tended to refer the Pz-IIIs and Pz-IVs simply by the generic term Panzers.

Despite my screen name, my favourite is the Cromwell IV. fast speed plus a 75mm gun means it can flank and kill anything the Germans have. Of course it's curtains if anything hits it, but that's the same for most Allied tanks in CMBO. Playing as the Germans I like the good old gamey Hetzer .

Actually you sound like the ideal candidate for PBEM games . In my experience most PBEMers don't mind an inconsistent turn rate as long as you let them know in advance that your job may prevent you returning turns on a regular basis.

That's your preference, it isn't mine or I'd guess BFC's. High speed internet connections don't make any difference to the fact that my opponent in New Zealand is in bed when I'm awake and vice versa. Besides reading this forum, I'd say the preferred multi-player option is PBEM even between people in roughly the same time zones for other reasons, such as convenience. Your idea of encrypting only PBEM files would be a possibility, but I'd hazard a guess that it would not be an easy solution that could be catered for in a patch and would probably have to wait for the engine rewrite. You need someone familar with the source code to answer that one though. [ December 31, 2002, 10:02 AM: Message edited by: Firefly ]

As you guessed in your first paragraph it's to prevent cheating in PBEM. You don't need a third party editor to create scenarios or operations and I can't think of any way of allowing one and maintaining PBEM security. The dubious benefits of allowing save games to be edited are not worth undermining the trust between players engendered by the current system.

I don't visit the BFC forum for a few days and what do I find? A new FAQ thread to bump and eight pages of the Peng Challenge to read. Who'd have thought life could be so good?

14-20 GMT on Xmas Eve and I'm still sober enough to bump this. Merry whatever you celebrate to all our readers.

I totally agree with the rest of the people, this is excellent service. Merry Xmas to all at BFC.

Bambi.

I don't think using sharpshooters to kill TCs falls into the category of 'gamey' or 'didn't happen in real life', the Germans used the tactic with some success in Normandy, I doubt they failed to use it elsewhere.

I'm not sure it counts as gamey if you only use it against the AI. After all the AI is gamier than all of us .

I suppose legally it would depend if he and his friend shared the computer or not, most licences are framed in the terms of how many computers the licence applies to, not the number of people using the computer. Realisitically I don't see what he's doing, if they have separate computers, is much different from someone buying a piece of software and installing it on their own computer and then also on the kids' computer. When Microsoft tooks steps to prevent this with Windows XP, they got a lot of stick from people who normally condemn piracy vigourously.

I think the figures for civilian dead for the British Empire and Commonwealth are only the figures for British dead due to air raids, which amounted to 30,000 in London alone. I suspect Asian civilians in British colonies such as Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong etc. have been missed out, but unfortunately these people are often forgotten. Edit to note tha someone has already made this point. I shouldn't read threads backwards. [ December 23, 2002, 07:50 AM: Message edited by: Firefly ]

We were all young newbie whiners once, it's just some of us were doing it 30 years ago .