Philippe

Just tried loading one of the offending files in the CMBB Editor and got a very interesting message. If I were to believe what I'm being told, it would appear that the file I tried to open was saved on an earlier version of CMBB. I'm not entirely sure I really believe that, but it's a start. What's distressing, though, is that it means that there are unreadable files scattered throughout the Salvage collection (and the CMBO and CMAK ones as well). I also compared a copy of one of the offending files that works to a copy that doesn't work. I wonder if that extra first line which seems to be causing the problem is an artifact of some kind of organizing program Birdgunner might have been using. For anyone who may be wondering, if you relable your normal Scenario folder Scenarios_old and make a new one and only put three scenarios in it, it opens really quickly...

Very curious. I have those two files, but not, apparently, from the Birdgunner collection. And several other files from that collection seem to be not showing up in the menu as well. In the case of your two missing files I have other versions of them that do show up, so they're not lost. But we need to figure out a way to determine what isn't showing up in the menu screens and why. More on this later.

I am currently considering four versions of the marker: The sign is written in chalk. The sign with the longer text is for anti-personnel mines. The text for the sign is painted on freehand (not really!). The text is painted on with a stencil. The text is painted on with a different stencil. Too many choices...

Figure out what the maximum possible command distance is for the HQ that you are planning on using as a spotter. Position your mortar that much farther back and behind something visually impenetrable like a hill, a building, or a thick clump of trees. Remember to bring the spotting HQ out of hiding before you try to target the mortars. Make sure there isn't another HQ closer to the mortar unit than the spotter (i.e. keep checking to see who the mortar unit will be getting its orders from).

Hmm...I wonder if it is more authentic to make signs with intentional spelling errors...<ducks>

Looking very closely at that WWII Hungarian sign, there appears to be an accent over the "i" of VIGYÁZZ. Is this because of the grammatical environment on that particular sign, or did that word get two accents back then. And I note a certain fondness for triple exclamation marks...

Thanks so much for that sign. It tells me something very important: they used stencils on unpainted wood. This will require a minor rethink, but that was really good research.

The voice problem, by the way, is a classic example of something that is in the province of modders. All that it is needed is for someone to make a convincing set of German SS .wav files -- not much of a stretch considering that some of us change the license plates to begin with WH, WL, or SS depending on who will be driving them. What we're talking about here would be really easy to do if you had the right equipment. Over at Punta de Lanza they made a complete set of Spanish .wav files to overwrite the German ones, and that's a lot more work -- here we're just talking about two or three files.

Posting a name of a title can be a bit on the vague side, especially if you don't post the name of the designer and the source location. The collected scenarios from the Scenario Depot were all posted to CMMODS, of course. For CMBB you need to look for something called Scenario Depot Salvage. Trouble is, Little Ponyri Station isn't included in those postings. There are two scenarios called Ponyri Express, but I doubt that's the same thing.

Unless a better idea comes along fairly soon this is what I am thinking of going with:

My present inclination is to go with AKNAMEZŐ and VIGYÁZZ AKNA. I really don't want to use a word that implies anti-tank or anti-personnel. What, by the way, is the difference between vigyazz and vigyazat? And is vigyazat! akna unmilitary hungarian ? (In other words I would really like the sign that uses the term minefield to have more text in it, because I prefer to have wordier anti-personnel signs). Out of curiosity, how many numbers are there in Magyar, and which one tends to get used for the collective? The reason I ask is that I notice that both you and my non-military friend seem reluctant to use a plural for a collective. This is interesting, because Indo-European languages originally had more than two numbers (e.g. singular, plural, dual, collective). Ancient Greek retained the dual in about half a dozen words (the dual is what you would use if you were to translate a phrase like "a brace of pistols" into a highly inflected language), and in Latin neuter plurals are commonly treated as collective singulars (i.e. contrary to the normal rules of syntax, a subject in the plural governing a verb in the singular). I suspect that even odder things happen in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, since they retained a lot of the quirky details of the original grammar. So I'm guessing that Magyar uses something that looks like the singular for collectives, and that's why you want to say "Mine!" instead of "Mines!". And since Magyar isn't related to the Indo-European language family, you could tell me just about anything and I would believe it.

He's probably just a closet maneuverist.

While trying to convince myself that I didn't need to make minefield markers in the old-fashioned Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, I came across these photographs: Romanian sword-toting cavalry in Bessarabia. Romanians in the Caucasus. A very clear shot of the Mark I two-humped Bactrian Camel (as opposed to the one-humped dromedary common to North Africa). The military section of the UN Mission adjusted the punctuation on the minefield marker. The new version 2.0 that I have posted to cmmods looks like this: I'm using "Pericol de mine" for anti-personnel mines. Just because I can read any Romance language without having studied it doesn't mean I can write it idiomatically. Keep those cards and letters coming.

The scenarios from Scenario Depot have been salvaged and stored temporarily at cmmods.com. CMBB scenarios are stored in the CMBB section as half a dozen zip files under mod designer name padivine. The files are named Scenario Depot Salvage. Download all of them, but if you try to play them we won't hear from you again for about two years because there are a lot of them. CMBO and CMAK scenarios are stored, respectively, in the CMBO and CMAK sections under mod designer name Birdgunner. I can't remember what they're called, but it should be immediately obvious which ones they are. Do pay George's site a visit, his work is very, very good. In the old days I would have suggested a visit to Der Kessel, but that's gone now too. I beleive the Der Kessel scenarios were included in Birdgunner's collection at CMMODS -- if any are missing from the CMBB group I can go back and add them because I had made my own set the first time Der Kessel threatened to go out of existance. The best place to go for recent work besides George's is The Proving Grounds, a testing site for new scenarios. A successor site to the Depot is in the works, but these projects are much larger than they look and usually take far longer than anyone expects (which is why we posted everything at CMMODS as a temporary measure).

Did the offending file come from a Scenario Depot Salvage zip file? Could you pick one of these offending files, and mention exactly which zip file it came from, and what is its name? I will look at my own set of these files and see if there is anything odd about them. If it turns out that there is something wrong, I will ask you for the list of files and try to update the zips at CMMODS. How recent is your version of Winzip? Is it possible that your download was somehow corrupted? [i.e. after you establish that the problem children all come from the same zip file, and after you download it again, is there still a problem?] And no, if a virus on your system has somehow gotten attached to one of those files I most certainly don't want you sending it to me (and my aol e-mail address is down until next month at the very least anyway). When was the last time you did a full system virus scan with up-to-date definitions? [Don't answer that in public -- just be sure you know the answer and act accordingly] This is a very serious issue since at the moment the cmmods posting is the only place people can get most of the Scenario Depot files. For the record, I have never had the experience you are describing, and would really like you to point me at one of the files to see what you are talking about. There were a lot of files in that zip, and when I edited my scenario menu I was looking at files that showed up, not looking for files that didn't show up. I suspect there is something going on that is native to your system, but I'm reserving judgement until I've had a chance to investigate. And just be sure that were on the same page, I'm not sure from reading your post if you're having trouble with scenarios that you downloaded from my uploading of the Scenario Depot Salvage files to CMMODS, or if you're talking about something else. I'll indulge in self-flagellation if you're having trouble with something that I did and its my fault. But if you're having trouble with someone else's upload to another site, I'll be happy to lend them my sack-cloth and lashes. [ December 15, 2005, 05:57 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

I've just consulted the military section of the Romanian mission to the UN, who have basically confirmed what your friend said. I'll be producing another version later tonight as an update.

A few of them will transfer, but you almost always have to check first. Vehicles tend to be modelled with more bitmaps in cmbb -- you can get an initial sense by simply counting. Even when they will transfer they will usually need to be renumbered. You will also find that in a few cases the same number of bitmaps is used, but the dimensions (as opposed to the size) of some of th bitmaps is different. There are a few things which do transfer without problem, though again, always check that the numbering is compatible. Examples that come to mind are my coiled barbed wire (found at cmhq and at cmbo/cmmods) and Magua's craters. CMBB tends to be much higher resolution than CMBO. My advice is to visit CMHQ/CMMOS 4.03 and CMMODS. CMMODS also has the Scenario Depot scenarios that were rescued after the Depot's demise.

I've mentioned this in other threads, but I just want to clarify that I believe the textual distinction between anti-tank and anti-personnel mines is largely modern and a bit anachronistic. We're sensitive to the distinction because of the game and because of the International Convention to Ban Landmines, but in most languages in the forties the signs would mark the presence or absence of mines, and possibly the location referred to (e.g. "Verges Mined"). Since any signs in CM need to be one-size-fits-all, what is needed is textual variations on mines, and the user will have to keep track of the distinction. One more comment about the colors. I've made two versions of the sign using red-white-red danger bands according to a convention that I am under the impression was in use in the German army. I have no idea if this is what the Hungarians used, but am speculating that it might have been appropriate (because the Hungarians used to run the Austrian army, which was similar in some ways to the Germans, and also because they would be in the line near German troops -- and yes, I know that's quite a stretch). If there is some evidence (any evidence) that they used something else, I'll be happy to go with it. What I don't want to use, however, is anything that looks like the modern symbology. The current iconographic vocabulary for marking minefields seems to date from the sixties and seventies, and I'm not going to saddle any national army in the forties with a skull and crossbones inside an inverted red triangle. I suspect that the minefield marker, as used in-game, didn't really exist as a standard, formal object back then, and that conventions for marking minefields probably varied from place to place. I've spent a certain amount of time trying to interview WW II veterans about this subject, and am always surprised by what turns up (or doesn't). Lots of stories about fear of mines, memories from the forties astonishingly clear and vivid after sixty years, but better recollections of how safe paths through minefields were marked than how the minefields themselves were identified [\end rant].

Everything looks better in Italian...

I think you're right, and that was why I had decided to go with those fonts. If they look different to me after I've lived with them a while I'll change them. The only real way to test one of these things is to stumble on one of them when you aren't thinking about it and discovering that your first reaction was yecchh! the lettering on that sign is much too elegant. By the way, the sign on the right is viewed from ten meters away or less. The sign on the left is in the same lettering, looks much less elegant, and is viewed from thirty or forty meters away.

I was hoping you would notice this sooner or later. Now that I have your attention, what's the most idiomatic way of going about this? I've used "Danger ! Mines !" and "Mines !" to show the distinction between anti-personnel and tank mines in several of the other languages. Should it be "landmine" in the singular, or would it be "landmines" or "mines" in military hungarian? Is "mines" better than "landmines"? And is the phrase on the first side appropriate? (Does it work, for example, if the mines are buried in a forest as opposed to a field -- and would you see something like that written on a sign, and if not, what would you see and what would it mean)? I really want to get this right, and your help would be appreciated.

I want press agents who can put enough spin on body counts to alter victory results. Or make half your troops simply dissapear by denying that they're there. [Wasn't there a strategy game once where you only got points if the event was recorded on camera ?]

There are several ancillary tools that allow some boardgames to be played on-line or by e-mail. And since the success of card-driven stategy games (e.g. Hannibal, Successors, Paths of Glory) there are even programs that can handle the cards. I wonder if there is something like this for Junta. I'm not interested in a CM-to-Junta conversion, but having spent a certain amount of time in a real-life Republica de los Bananas, I really appreciate that old gem and would love to play it again someday. It's a bit dated since it doesn't include the debt crisis, the Paris Club, Brady bonds, la bicicleta, and drug smuggling, but the game is meant to be played in the 1960's, when golpas were still in fashion and civilized forms of capital flight had yet to become commonplace. Of course, the best way to play it is around a big table with a lot of unruly people, cerveza, and perhaps something a little stronger. iViva la Revolucion! [ December 14, 2005, 06:40 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

When you get tired of the graphics, swing by CMHQ and take a look around. CMHQ is Madmatt's semi-unofficial support site at combatmission.com. Be sure to read his introductory articles on modding the game. And you will eventually want to take a look at CMMOS 4.03, which can be found on that site. When you get tired of playing the scenarios that came with your CD, swing by CMMODS at cmmods.com. CMMODS is really a modding site, but it was used as an emergency storage spot for the 3000+ Combat Mission scenarios that were posted at the Scenario Depot when the Depot winked out. I don't remember what the scenario files are called for CMBO, but they're listed under Birdgunner. There are about half a dozen of them at least, and there are over a thousand scenarios. CMMODS also has the more recent CMBO mods, though many of them are simply renumberings of CMMOS files. The very latest ones tend to be adaptions of mods for CMAK and CMBB, which have continued to evolve. Hope your wife/girlfriend realizes she won't be seeing much of you anymore...

Go to cmmods.com and look for something called Scenario Depot Salvage under designer name padivine. There are about 7 or 8 zip files there that contain the contents of the Scenario Depot site. There are quite a few ASL and Panzerblitz conversions in that collection.