Philippe

I've uploaded a 2-D sprites mod to the SC 2 Campaigns section of cmmods.com. Everything you need to know is in the notes. The flags that you see in the screenshot are not included in this mod, but can be found in my Authentic Flag mod (which in its latest version has revisions to most of the original flags from SC 2 WaW, including some that will never be used).

There are two kinds of terrain files in CMAK -- North African and Italian. CMETO doesn't exist as a discrete program: it's simply a set of mods to CMAK Italian terrain.

It shouldn't be possible to sail through the Suez Canal, but sailing into the Indian Ocean should be expensive but possible (it's covered in detail in the Grey Wolves expansion of Silent Hunter III, and I think there are even notes in the manual on which units were assigned to those patrols). But I have no idea what happens if you try to do this in-game.

Really looking forward to seeing this one. But how do you handle victory conditions? There's no way this thing can be balanced, since the White's position is probably hopeless.

What kind of hardware do you have, how much memory, and what operating system are you using? If you were trying to play SC 2 WaW on a 400 Mb hard drive with 250 kb ram running on Vista... You may have some kind of conflict, and you need to describe the background a bit more thoroughly so when one of the more technically-minded show up they won't have to guess what the problem is.

Any hex grid. If you go outside and look at a landscape, except in a few rare and perverse cases you won't see a pattern of grid lines on it. Nature doesn't work that way. And people don't walk around with blue and green squares under their feet either.

You should post this in the tech support forum with a few more specifics about your equipment, operating system, and configuration.

People with taste consider high-contrast gridded terrain to be an aesthetic abomination. It most certainly is not pretty. As to whether it is useful or not, that depends on your style of play. I'm sorry that BTS didn't make a grid overlay toggle switch: I might actually have switched it on and then back off once or twice at the beginning of each game. If you play games with the hex grid switched off for aesthetic reasons, you won't want gridded terrain. If you're too lazy to walk the battlefield at level one, you'll want it.

Gridded terrain mods don't really work anywhere because they're an eyesore. Apart from that, CMETO is the same thing as CMAK as far as bmp's are concerned. Which means you can even deface it with CMBB gridded terrain if you really want to (except in a few places where you'll probably have to do some light renumbering).

If you were going to use a single flag to represent India from 1939 to 1946, what would you use, assuming that Chandra Bose and Ghandi weren't kosher options? Now I know that there are different kinds of flags, each with its specialized purposes. I am not talking about maritime flags. I am not talking about civil flags. I am talking about the state flag of the place that at one point had a seat in the League of Nations, even though it wasn't independant. I am aware of three possible candidates: 1) The Governor General's flag (a Union Jack defaced with the order of the Star of India where the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew intersect); 2) A variant on the Blue Ensign (with the order of the Star of India in the blue field to the right of the miniature Union Jack); and 3) A variant on the Red Ensign (same arrangement of the order of the Star as on the Blue flag, only on a red field). I was under the impression that the Governor General's flag was a bit like the Royal Standard, specific to a person and (sometimes) his immediate subordinates (surrogates?) when posted to the Persian Gulf. As such it would seem odd to use it to represent India under the Raj (with lots of capital letters). However, I recently came across an old map (vintage ca. 1919) showing the league of nations (not sure if that's exactly the same as the UN's ill-starred predecessor, or merely a homonymous leage) where the flag in the middle, representing India with its (for those days) huge population of 300+ million, was the Governor General's flag. I suspect that there is some weird principal of medieval heraldry going on here that I can't quite put my finger on. I also came across a statement at the FOTW website that the Red Ensign version of the Indian flag was the one that was flown at the League of Nations (the organization that fumbled Manchuria and Abyssinia). The other two candidates for a state flag are the Blue Ensign variant which got used as an Indian Army flag in an interesting CMAK mod a while back. If I hadn't seen the WW II era flags for Australia, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia, and Malta I might be inclined to think that the Blue Ensign was somehow nautical in character. And I think, in fact, that it may actually have been used for the merchant marine. There's a Wikipedia entry that fingers this as the Indian state flag, but my sense is that the author of that part of the Wiki glanced at FOTW, started to get a headache, and pronounced the Blue Ensign India. And the last contender is the Red Ensign variant. And a comment in FOTW makes me suspect that India's state flag may have resembled Canada's and Bermuda's. I'm afraid I'm at sea as to why a colony or a dominion might use a red as opposed to a blue ensign for state occasions, and that this might hold a clue. I have a dim awareness of the origin of blue, white, and red ensigns, but I think that allocating portions of the Channel Fleet has nothing to do with the problem I'm losing sleep over. I'm also keenly interested in knowing what would be the most appropriate flag to represent Indian armed forces on land. And finally, if a compromise had to be made and only one flag were to be used for the state flag and the army, what would be the best flag to use? As an aside, I've just stumbled on a great photograph of Japanese and Indian soldiers celebrating a victory, with an INA tricolor waving in the background. The interesting thing is that the spinning wheel in the middle of the white section of the tricolor is oriented in a different direction from what you see on the FOTW site. And no, it's not the Azad Hind leaping tiger.

There are several different kinds of mods. CMMODS has mods for many different battlefront games, and separate sections for each game. The SC mods are listed in a section called SC2 Campaigns. Many of the mods are actual campaigns or adjustments to campaigns, some for SC2 WaW, some for SC2 Blitzkrieg. You have to pay close attention to which mod goes with which game version or you'll be wondering why a mod doesn't work (or why your game suddenly crashes for apparently no reason). The mods in SC2 section include complete campaigns like the Thrawn European Theatre mod, or the Advanced Third Reich mod (an adaption of an Avalon Hill game to the SC2 engine). There are a couple of very interesting media mods for SC 2 WaW that include material that doesn't seem to have been able to make it into the game for copyright reasons (colorful period BBC broadcasts). There are also several graphics mods, one of which changes the flags to the historically correct flags that were actually in use during the 1940's. German law and EC harmonization make it effectively impossible to use these in the commercial version of the game. You can find all of this by going to cmmods, signing in, clicking on SC2 Campaigns, and then clicking on Newest mods. The rule of thumb when using any mod, though, is to never forget to back up your unmodded original. SC2 is small enough that you can just copy and paste it into a holding folder.

I doubt it. If it was ready to install it may not have been zipped. What I described to you was how to deal with the worst-case scenario. Look on the bright side. Now you're fully equipped to go to cmmods.com and start downloading mods (which are always zipped). You have to register (you won't get spam because of them) and use a password, but if you remember to check the little box under your password when you sign in, you'll never have to remember it afterwards.

There's a scenario called Hedgehog Hell that takes place during the summer of 1943. You can find it in the corresponding zip file of the Sorted Scenarios in the CMBB section of CMMODS.

I think that was your first post in over two years. Welcome back!

Many thanks. That makes perfect sense, and the difference was driving me nuts.

I made a few very minor changes to the activation sprites in one of the scenarios. The new sprites show up, but they don't flash. The sprites for the other side (which weren't modded) continue to flash. I went through the various bitmaps in the bitmap and interface folders to see if perhaps there was some kind of outline file that needed to be altered in synch with the mod, but didn't see anything that looked relevant. I've clearly overlooked some very small something. Either that or the activation file is hard-coded in some way (which may mean that you can mod it, but your mod has to have the same shape as the original). Has anyone come up against this before? I like the change I made to the activation sprite, but I really like the flash on activation feature and don't want to lose it.

Wishbone?

The flags in the background were from an earlier version of a mod that was done several years ago called Little Semiotics. There was a different objective marker for each nationality. It also spawned a language-specific set of minefield markers. The finished version of the objective flag mod and the ethnic minefield markers can be found at cmmods in the cmbb section under padivine.

Pretty is not something that one really wants to try for when modding. War isn't pretty. That said, if you want to see what one modded version of CMAK looks like, take a look at the images in the Postcards for Italy thread. I'm too low tech to be able to provide you with the link, but if you do a search in the CMAK section of the forum you'll find it about two months back. It has a fair number of screenshots of ungridded winter terrain. And if you look closely you may even spot a couple of very rare mods.

2130 posts by December 9. That thread is livelier than this forum!

Doing a mass mod install for CMBB is a pretty scary idea. You'll still be installing mods a year from now and won't ever have gotten around to playing the game. My suggestion would be to install CMBB cmmos as a start, and then go on from there manually. Only mod for things that you're about to play or have just played. And be aware that there is a lot of shared material between CMBB and CMAK, though sometimes you have to do some renumbering. Spend some time reading the lists of what's available at CMMODS, and use the CMMODS search engine. Don't take anyone's gospel list of mods too seriously -- there are some real gems buried away in odd places at cmmods that are only right for special situations. Half the fun of modding is discovering some great looking mod texture that you were completely unaware of. People who play these games tend to have very idiosyncratic taste and like some really strange things -- to see what I mean, try starting a thread asking about gridded terrain.

Nice job. But for some reason I keep wanting your flag to have a square shape. The objective flag was always very unsatisfying to me, and I applaud any attempt for a different solution.

Any cmbo cmmos mod is compatible with any other part of cmbo cmmos as long as 1) the mod files with cmmos extensions are in the cmbo/bmp folder (and aren't zipped or in folders!); and 2) there is a rule-set for that type of mod along with a specific rule that invokes the mod with the cmmos extensions on its bmp numbers mentioned in 1) above. As long as those two conditions are met, something from cmbo cmmos 4.01 will work in cmbo cmmos 4.05, and vice versa. Your only risk, and you will eventually learn how to fix this if it happens, is that you may end up with a few extra tabs on your control screen that duplicate other tabs. You won't lose any functionality, but make absolutely sure you know what you're doing before you run around deleting apparently duplicate rules. The Semiotics and 21rst Army were originally written for 4.02 in three parts. The cabal moved off into the sunset around the time the first tested draft was finished, so Semiotics never made it to the CMHQ website. When Mikey T put 4.05 together he found a vehicle for publishing Semiotics I and II, minus some of their original functionality (e.g. different unit protraits depending on the season of year), and Darknight had significantly expanded Semiotics III (which was largely his anyway) into its present astonishing and masterful form. If you have any interest in the Commonwealth military, it has to be seen to be believed. [ December 09, 2007, 03:07 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

I'm not sure I understand why you say you might need to ante up for the download of a patch. I doubt that it will be like a multi-Gig M2TW patch that requires broadband. [ December 09, 2007, 02:33 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Semiotics and the 21rst Army group are over at CMMODS with most of the 4.05 material. You'll need to register (you won't get spammed) and then start poking around in the CMBO section. A lot of what's in there are cmmos cmbo mods with cmmos cabability removed. But there's recent work that postdates the demise of the cmmos cabal that is worth looking at. But don't try to do too much on your first foray or you'll get tired and start making silly mistakes.