Philippe

Dieseltaylor has just posted on this topic in the CMAK forum, pointing out that there were 4.5 million tons of Lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union that went through Persia. He also posted a great link to a website on the subject. That isn't Saudi-US, but it may represent a convoy in the right general area (assuming the Lend-lease got to Iran by going around Africa). The direction of the flow should be US to Iran rather than Saudi to US, and the flow doesn't consist of oil.

I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, but I glanced far enough ahead to know that you are asking him to summarize a lot of pages and footnotes. When he answers I hope he remembers that he's dealing in ***spoilers***.

There's a lot of discussion in Tooze about the synthetic oil production program. Do you happen to know why those methods aren't being used now? With oil staring at $100/barrel, the coal-to-synthetic oil process must be economical again. Does it cause too much pollution?

Does anyone know what the range on those things actually was in real life? There may not be anything in need of fixing.

And if you want to make his day complete, before you give it to him download the latest patches and burn them onto a cd. That way he won't have to grapple with the internet.

Does all of this mean that if you start with the 1939 scenario and it plays out pretty much the way WW II actually did, if you make the kind of decisions Stalin made (paranoia and purges?) you should end up with an order of battle that looks pretty much like the 1941 scenario ? Real life was not optimized. If you play WW II over and over again at the strategic level you'll develop some pretty good tricks. But the real WW II was played by people who were playing for the first time, and often fumbling their way through the manual and the index as they went along. The historical outcome in any simulation game should always be possible, but shouldn't necessarily be any more likely than it was in reality at that time. Sometimes what really happened was a bit of a fluke, and making the judgement call on how to portay that fluke is a key part of the game designer's job. Many of us play these games so that we can change history. But to really change history you need to be reassured that you can reproduce history if you want to. If you can't mirror history, you aren't really changing it when something else happens -- you're just a prisoner of the game system.

The short answer is yes. I plan on releasing a full flag mod for all the scenarios that come with each game. That's a lot of copying and pasting after I finish making the flags (which I have pretty much done already). I'll post the final result at CMMODS. My intention is to set up the end product so that after you unzip it to a holding folder you can just copy and paste it into the root directory of each game. I'm still in a bit of recovery mode though as I just finished sorting a couple of thousand scenarios for CM. As soon as I stop seeing double...

Tipperary is really close, but not quite a cigar. Right movie though.

You're wandering off-topic or missing the point. What's at issue here is whether or not the game design reflects historical reality. If it doesn't, and there isn't a pressing design reason for having that convoy, the convoy should be removed (and possibly replaced by something else). I have yet to see anything that suggests there were convoys of ships going from Saudi Arabia to the US that would have been vulnerable to raiding if Saudi Arabia had entered the war. I don't think Saudi oil production was particularly significant during WW II, and I can't think of anything else that would be moving in sufficient quantities to warrant convoys. I also suspect that there may be some kind of game-design short-hand going on here, and that the Saudi-US link is really a proxy for something else entirely. I think what we need at this point is some commentary on design intent.

Not exactly. But let's just say it was a song that many are familiar with because of a movie about submarines.

I believe the Hood was a bit more modern than WW I era. For many years it had been touted as one of the RN's finest, and the psychological effect of the loss was significant. And for two extra points -- does anyone remember what was playing on the Bismark's loudspeakers while they were repairing the damage they took while sinking the Hood?

Does anyone here know if there was significant maritime traffic between Saudi Arabia and the US in WW II, significant enough to warrant the use of convoys? The reason that I ask is that the latest incarnation of SC 2 includes a convoy between Saudi Arabia and the US. This may just be a proxy for everybody else's trade with the US, and it had to start somewhere, so it was given a starting point in Saudi Arabia. As I understand it Saudi Arabia's oil was discovered by Standard Oil in 1936, and though reserves were eventually deemed very significant I doubt that production was anywhere near what was coming out of Iraq and Iran throughout the 1940's. If anyone here has a handle on this, please post in the first SC 2 forum in the thread about convoys from Saudi Arabia.

Don't forget that traffic out of the Persian Gulf includes Iran and Iraq, not just Saudi Arabia.

Nice figures. The situation in 1929 is not totally applicable since it would show Saudi oil production at 0. Note that there are different grades of oil, so you can be a net importer and a significant exporter at the same time (viz. the U.S.). The real question that needs to be addressed is the volume and direction of maritime traffic. I'm sure the people behind the Silent Hunter III Grey Wolves 2.0 mod that is getting ready for December release have an excellent handle on this, largely because they had to know the frequency and tonnage of random encounters in any given area of the world. But I would still like to hear what the design intent behind the Saudi convoys was -- I suspect it has to do with more than just Saudi oil.

This bothers me. I don't know the figures off the top of my head, but I didn't think that Arabia was supplying all that much oil to the US in the 1940's. Oil was only discovered in the Kingdom in something like 1936, and the concept of the US guzzling Saudi oil in the 1940's strikes me as a bit anachronistic. I would have thought the maritime traffic flow was between the Gulf and India at that point in time. Does anyone know what lies behind this? Is it perhaps a proxy for something else?

Well done ! Love your snow.

Just started poking around in WaW and this was the first thing my eye landed on. I haven't tried playing it yet, but you're to be congratulated for even attempting it. And I love the flags. Now all we need are mods of the Sino-Japanese war and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia...

My copy of the bundle pack finally appeared at my door yesterday, so I've started work on this again. An awful lot of files that need changes to their flags. No pictures yet, but I've done a WWII-era Mexican flag, a pre-Chavez Venezuelan flag (seven stars, the horse running in the other direction looking over his shoulder), a Brazilian flag, an Argentine flag, and new flags for Hungary, Romania, and Iran. I'm currently following the CMBB model that puts the royal coat of arms on the Romanian state war flag. It's not clear to me that there is a state war flag, but there may be a war flag. I've seen several references to errors in the flaggenbuch, so if anyone has a handle on the pre-communist state or military flag of Romania, I'd like to hear about it. I think I'm using the right flag (it's not a simple tricolor), but I'm not completely sure. At this point the only simple tricolors that I'm using are the French, the Dutch (or is that Luxembourg?), and the Belgians. I've sort of convinced myself that the flag for Manchukuo is right, but I haven't played a game of the world scenario (or even the basic game for that matter), so I can't tell if the Indochina protectorate flag is appropriate or not (my guess is that it is). Any comments on Asian flags would also be appreciated. At the end of the day I don't think you really need a program to make these flags. I just wish it were a little easier to manipulate their palettes.

Mirth has nothing to do with it. It's just a matter of keeping one's priorities straight.

Part of it. But it would be much easier to understand in French. With the exception of Silent Hunter 4, most of the problems that he's alluding to have to do with either imperfect delivery systems or the evils of not buying direct from the manufacturer in the original form. From what I could tell the Russian version of Age of Pirates was a much better game than its bowdlerized and simplified export model. No amount of English-language patching would ever really fix that -- to get the proper experience you would need to brush up on Slavic languages and contemporary Russian culture. I suspect that many small companies simply don't have the resources to produce truly international versions of their products. It's not just a question of feeding the program into Babelfish. Back in the sixties Italian silk was often taxed by weight when it crossed a border, so the necktie that you bought over there was of much higher quality than the one you could buy here.

His question hasn't been answered. There is a flag template out there with about a dozen waving monochrome flags. It is not difficult, if you have a little patience, to put a design on those flags, even a design that takes into account the rippling effect. This can be done with either photoshop or Paint. In Paint all you do is make a bitmap with one flag on it, make a blank template of that bitmap, draw (or paste) the design of the flag onto it, adjust the design for the ripple effect, then copy and paste that design from the template onto the flag bitmap keeping white transparent. Another way to do this is using layers in Photoshop. If you want to use a different color than one of the ones on the blank flag template you'll need to play around in Photoshop with contrast, saturation, and layers. Take the white flag, increase the contrast a lot, then take the flag whose color base you want to modify, modify it, then layer the modified color base over the blank flag with increased contrast, then layer your design over that. There's no magic to putting a design on a flag. But what I have yet to see is a specific cogent explanation of where to go to get the software to make the original flag template, or how to go about it with existing software that you might have. Nor have I seen anyone mention the names of this software. Putting ripples on a flag is easy, we've been doing it in CM for years, and I've noticed that Juju even ported his rippled flag technique over to Silent Hunter (I recognized the template that he uses to put ripples on flags because it's the same one that I use). But I have yet to see anyone explain how to make the flag template in the first place. It would improve the quality of my flag-making a lot to know this, because flags with intricate designs on them would take to rippling much better if you could just feed them directly into the program. So what, exactly, is this free imaging processing software you're talking about?

Those are really nice, and I can't wait to install them so you can blow them up.

You may have just taken the first step on a long and slippery slope...

November 21.... 2103 posts

Sergio, the trigger is method. If you were trying to download the three Mikey D Normandy zips that I mentioned, each one of them unzips to a folder, which has another folder inside of it. The second folder has the bmp's you want, and a jpeg, and a readme file. So if you look in your cmak/bmp folder you will find that you now have three folders that you didn't have before. The CM program does not look inside folders, and that's why the sky textures aren't changing. That is also why it is always best to unzip to a mod holding folder so you can see what you're doing to yourself. And while you're doing that, you really, really, really should go into the cmak/bmp folder and make back-up copies of the files you're replacing.