Philippe

I hope not. This is a real question and worth knowing the answer. I had a copy of Manstein at one point -- if I can find it I'll see what he calls things. I keep thinking of the A-10 Thunderbolt/Warthog -- the real name for something may be different from the official name. Having said that simply calling something a Panzer IV sounds familiar, and quite possibly right. I have trouble believing that anyone other than the manufacturer ever actually uttered the words Panzerkampfwagon IV H. The alternative to all this, I suppose, is to post the question at one of the WW II history sites, but I don't belong to any of their forums.

If memory serves the CMAK and CMBO files are under either Birdgunner or Bruce Doiron. There was also a small update to all three collections, but I can't remember if it ever got posted or not.

It's been about a year since my computer died and I had to redo my cmbo cmmos, so I don't remember exactly what I did. And the worst part is I need to remember becuase Dell is in the process of replacing my computer again, so I'm about to experience another total wipe-out. But I think I went to CMHQ and downloaded everything there. Then I went to CMMODS and added the parts that never made the final cut at CMHQ. It takes a bit of fiddling around, but you can end up with a version of CMBO CMMOS that is essentially CMHQ plus Mike T's salvage work on one of my mods and Darknight's Commonwealth uniforms. You can do this kind of mix and match thing because CMBO CMMOS works a bit differently from CMBB CMMOS. CMHQ will give you most of the rulesets that you need, add Mike T's, then figure out which are redundant and remove them. I'll be able to describe it in more detail next month when I reconstruct my computer again (sigh).

Does that mean he is the new number two?

What? But they told us in Sunday school that God dictated the Bible to King James in Shakespearean English...?!?

It was in the bible first... or are you suggesting that Al Murray was right all along when he stated that God is indeed British, which is why we dont have earthquakes in this country... </font>

Many thanks the quick response. At the risk of asking a variation on the same question, was a German more likely to refer to his Mark IV's as a Mark IV (isn't that CW terminology ?), a Panzer IV, or a Panzerkampfwagon IV ?

There was a thread on a related topic a couple of years ago but I haven't a clue what to search for. What word (besides Panzer) did your average German use when he was talking about one of their tanks? The Panzer VI series were Tigers, and I'm assuming they were referred to as Tigers. (?) The Panzer V series were Panthers, and I'm assuming they were referred to as Panthers. (?) What about the Panzer IV ? Did it have an animal name, either for the series or for the individual models? I'm not asking what the Allies called the different German tanks because I understand that we called everything a Tiger.

I think there may be some confusion here between composers and conductors. None of the records in Hitler's collection were on the banned music list as far as I could tell. What is interesting is how much Russian music there was. One singer's name that caught my eye was Chaliapin, who was not exactly Stalinist. Wagner was represented not by the Ride of the Valkyries but by the overture from Flying Dutchman. But Richard Strauss and the Rosenkavalier were nowhere in evidence.

Combatmission.com is also a really good source for the older CMBO mods. Combatmission used to be the principal unofficial site, and was run by Madmatt. It has few CMBB and CMAK mods, but was the home of CMBO CMMOS, which even now is worth a look.

Without being able to calculate things like dollar of expected return per programmer's man-hour (and other, more prosaic return on investment ratios) and to compare them to the ratios of the alternative, the business argument is pretty meaningless. I'm sure BTS knows these numbers, and they'd be crazy to reveal them to anybody but their investment banker. They've got one programmer, and they keep his brain in a glass jar. If Charles works on your combined CMx1 release (which is probably two releases: CMBB modified to be more like CMAK, and CMAK expanded to include Normandy, Belgium, Germany, and a few odd vehicles that don't show up in Italy) he doesn't fix CMx2 and expand it into the WW II modules. That could be potentially risky for the long term future of BTS. They're pretty good at surviving, and have probably rationed their limited resources in ways that will give them their best shot. So although in my fantasies I want them to retrofit MadMinuteGames' road pathfinding routine on CMx1, I don't talk about it because they know more about keeping themselves alive than I do. Bullfight critics ranked in rows Crowd the enormous Plaza full. But only one is there who knows, And he's the one who fights the bull.

I've been experiencing significant graphic corruption problems with an Nvidia 7900 GTX card. It doesn't seem to affect CM, but it affects any graphically intense 3-d environment where there are extensive light and water reflective effects. The corruption usually takes the form of black or light brown triangular forms radiating out from a single point, but can also take the form of black splotches flickering on and off over the surface of a particular figure. I started having this problem about 6 weeks ago with a slightly different card. After much hair-pulling Dell replaced my card with a newer model (that just happens to have twice the memory). My previous card had worked fine for a year, but replacing the card didn't solve the problem. Then, on the offchance that there was a connection problem with the card and the motherboard (?!?) Dell sent a technician out and replaced the motherboard. That didn't help either. I'm in a bit of despair because Dell is now talking about doing a complete system exchange, which means I'll have to figure out what data is irreplacable, make back-ups, and then reinstall it into a new system. I've done lots of driver work -- three or four different video card drivers (and in the process I discovered that you can't really uninstall the base driver from a computer with plug and play features), new old versions of Directx (haven't tried rolling back to v.8 yet), Bios updates, and some really ugly blue screen stop messages. I seem to recall seeing something about a year ago about someone having driver problems, but I can't remember what they were or what the final outcome was. As to why I had the card I have, I didn't want it originally and had tried to buy a simpler (and much cheaper) model that I knew worked. But they didn't make it anymore, and to get me to buy the system the sales desk threw the fancy card in at the price of the old, simple card. I didn't complain, the card worked fine for a year, and then the trouble started. And I'm still not convinced that my problem has anything to do with software. Any comments or insights? [Note: I've seen a random scattering of people complaining about versions of my card on the web -- not very frequent, but persistant enough to indicate that there have been problems -- but the complaints stop, which suggests the owners give up of find a solution. [Long sigh] And I still haven't gotten my CM fully back to the way it was a year ago... So I'm left wondering, is it the card, my system, or something on my system...

How do professional artists make permanent back-ups of their material, and how permanent is permanent? This is a sensitive subject for me since I lost most of my image collection, unpublished mods, and work-in-progress folders to an unanticipated computer death last summer. On reflection, most computer deaths are unanticipated, and the current batch of high-powered computers seems a lot more delicate and finicky than my old Zeos Dos machine, which is still running strong. This is not an academic question. I'm worried about what to do with future mods, and my artist girlfriend has just started converting from film to digital photography. So we're both sweating. There's a rumor in artist circles that CD's eventually warp. Not an issue if you're only worried about the next year or two, but serious stuff if the CD is your only back-up and your time horizon is 25 years plus. In the bad old days I probably would have started muttering something about tape back-up, but it just doesn't seem that archival or permanent to me. (Though when you think about it, film negatives don't seem very eternal either.) Not being familiar with the current crop of external hard drives, does anyone have any thoughts about whether this is a route to explore? My initial concern would be that if you have a hard drive that is external but somehow ancillary to your main system, if your main system's motherboard dies, how can you be sure any emergency replacements will be able to read the hopefully unaffected external drive. Or sumfink. Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If I understand what you're asking, do one of two things. a) Click on the first line of text that appears below COG's message. Go to cmmods.com. If you want operating instructions that's another story.

Nice work. And it has inspired me to see what else can be deconstructed from ToW. What exactly do you use to extract bmp's from the graphic files? Is this something that can be done in Irfanview?

I would suggest returning it and getting another copy from an accountable source.

Before I make any more comments you are going to have to clarify that "pirate-made copy" remark.

The game has been out for several years, and the composing of new scenarios began almost immediately. After a few years several of the scenario composers got really, really good at making new scenarios that had maps based on the actual terrain, excruciatingly realistic orders of battle, and more than a modicum of play balance. The upshot is that there are well over a thousand scenarios for CMBO posted on the web. The original repository was at a site called the Scenario Depot, which not only maintained a great database of everything that had been done but had a neat set of filters so that you could describe the kind of scenario you wanted to play, it would give you a short list, and then you could decide what to download from there. It was very useful if you wanted to find a scenario for pbem that neither player had played. Unfortunately that site died a sudden and unexpected death a couple of years ago. There's a new site that has taken over the name but it is run on different principles, though it does have most of the quality new scenario work that is being done these days. An effort was made to preserve the contents of the original Scenario Depot, and what was in effect a data dump was posted on the site that is the repository of all CM graphic mods, CMMODS.com. To find the CMBO material you should register for CMMODS (you'll never be contacted and your address won't be sold to anyone else). Then look in the CMBO section for designer names and take a look at the material posted by Birdgunner. You'll see a bunch of zip files called something like scenario depot salvage. That's about 95% of the CMBO corpus from the original Scenario Depot. There's also an excel file to help make sense out of what you've got. Not all scenarios are the same quality, and in general the ones that were written when the game first came out were usually (but not always) less well done than the later ones. Note that many of the designers who posted scenarios were authors from the original release. [And some weren't -- I'm still rolling my eyes over an atrocious monstrosity from CMBB that has a description that starts "Fanatical SS Hitlerjuden defend..." -- you know that one was so sloppily edited that it's not even worth opening]. If you have the other games and are interested in the same issue, CMMODS lists the CMAK material under Birdgunner and the CMBB material under padivine. After you've sifted through the data dump, you should visit the new Scenario Depot and the Proving Grounds. Good work going on there, though it is not as user-friendly as the original Scenario Depot. The bottom line: advertisements are usually written by people who don't know anything about the games they are advertising -- that's why they're so weird. The reality is actually much, much better than the propaganda (by a factor of at least ten). [ April 24, 2007, 09:05 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Ahem. You may be king of the little people, but there's no way you're king of the five provinces. When I was in Cork and kissed a certain stone, it was covered in green moss and orange chewing gum. What color has it turned to these days? [Oh god, I wandered into that thread again by accident -- I'm outta here before anyone notices].

I have a gread deal of difficulty imagining the Soviets countenancing co-operation with foreign-controlled forces. This may have something to do with the fact that English-speaking troops had tried to supress the Bolshevik revolution within the immediate memory of too many of Moscow's leaders (Stalin tended not to forget things like that). American airman who landed in the Soviet Union tended to dissapear into POW camps despite being allies. I believe this happened to a few of Doolittle's raiders after the Tokyo raid, and it certainly happened to one of my uncles after bombing Ploesti (the POW camp was behind the same wire as the Allied Internment camp, and anyone, usually children, who approached the wire to throw food to the starving inmates, was machine-gunned -- my uncle, who was reported as KIA, ended the war hating the Russians at least as much as the Germans). The French fighter squadron was probably under Soviet operational control -- I suspect the French were not viewed as as much of a threat as their anglo-saxon allies at that point.

Wonderful, I'm really excited. In the meantime, could you send me an e-mail at my juno address? I need your help in straightening out a problem with my account, and I think my e-mails are getting caught in your spam filter. Many thanks.

The game system tends to reward realistic play, so it's never a bad idea to keep asking yourself what you would do if the game were real (besides run like hell).

They can probably answer this in the tech forum.

Is Carentan the operation where there are two roads converging on St. Come du Mont that continue on as one to Carentan? Been a while since I played that one. I think the idea is that your left column is a kind of flank guard to your right column, and if it doesn't keep up your right column has to get pulled back between battles for resupply and to avoid isolation. To prevent that kind of thing from happening don't let your front line on one part of the map get too far ahead of the other. You have to do something about that hill fortified with pillboxes overlooking the stream or they'll be sending patrols into your rear and your supplies will never get through. Or sumfink.

I often forget about set-up times when I wonder why my machine guns aren't firing.