Philippe

And what's infuriating is that I know how to do that in Word or a textfile, but am clueless when it comes to the Scenario Editor.

This is not really a CMC question, but how do you go about using umlauts and other German letters in the CMBB game editor ? I've seen a few scenarios where this has been done, and can't figure out how to do it short of re-mapping my keyboard before going into the editor. I suspect the scenarios were done by someone who has a German language computer (as opposed to some of us who have no-language computers). This is almost a relevant bit of CMC trivia, because it would be nice to have a Captain Mueller with a u and an umlaut, or a German street name with an s-zed instead of a double ss. Very useful for Fall of Berlin campaigns and for German names in general. I'm assuming that if you can be linguistically authentic in CMC, this will get picked up in CMBB. I also wish that it were possible to have non-standard military rank names appear where appropriate, like Commissar Popov or Unterbahnbautruppenfuehrer Schmidt. And alternate wav files that would use the correct nomenclature for non-Wehrmacht troops...

Uploading a mod to send to someone is a lot more time-consuming than downloading. You really shouldn't ask someone to spend their time doing something that would be much easier for you to do yourself. Just identify what was in the gridded grass mod and do a second reinstall. You're the only one who knows how many files that was. Grass mods are big, so it is neither fair nor considerate to ask someone else to do it for you. If I understand correctly you sound like you have the CDV Special Edition, though you never spelled that out. If that is the case, you don't need to worry about patches because CMBB comes fully patched. Applying lesser versions of the patches to a fully patched version will just degrade what you already have. And that hedge sounds like it was almost as much fun as the anti-aircraft gunshield made out of a breach block that someone was using.

If you have installed CMMOS correctly, take a look inside the GEM Productions/CMMOS folder. There should be several readme files and a tutorial on using it. The tutorial is very helpful for first time users, but has to be read in tandem with the readme files, several times, and very slowly.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying, but I gather you're stuck looking at someone's gridded grass mod. Pretty ghastly, I agree. I don't even like the nice ones. Look at the bmp numbers that were in the mod. Get a copy of the original bmp files that match those numbers. Copy and paste. You've now reversed the grid effect without undoing any of the mods you liked. You really need to make a clean back-up before you get too far into this, because you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

Never toss anything into your bmp folder without backing up the original first. It's best to have a folder with a copy of the mod and a copy of what you're replacing in sub-folders. Most mods have files in them that you don't want in your bmp folder, so you need a sorting area to figure out what is what. Your best bet is to make a parallel reinstall so that you can save a copy of the original bmp folder. That way you will at least be able to get back to the original on any particular mod that you use. In CMBO you can copy the bmp's directly off the CD, but not in CMBB and CMAK. Always look before you leap. Some mods have to be renumbered before you can use them, and some will copy over things you don't want overwritten. Make copies of everything. You'll save yourself a lot of time and trouble in the long run.

When you look at something in-game what you are seeing is one or more bitmaps stretched over a frame. Mods aren't installed as much as copy and pasted into the game's bmp folder. So if you have a bmp file in your bmp folder that's a green square numbered 12345, and copy and paste in a bmp file that's a red square numbered 12345, the visual result will be a red square. When you get bored with red and find a yellow square numbered 12345 and toss that into your bmp folder, what you see will be a yellow square, and so on. You're just replacing what gets stretched over the frame. Sentence structure and punctuation are your friends. They make other people much more willing to read and answer your posts.

Go to a website called CMMODS at cmmods.com. It's the site where most mods get posted these days but that's not why you want to go there. To use the site you'll need to register. It won't cost you anything and it is well worth doing. The registration and log-in are rumored to be a device to deter bandwidth thieves. You'll need to choose a handle (most people use their BFC handle) and a password. Do not use your BFC password -- use something else. When you log in you'll be asked for your handle and password. You'll also notice that there is a tiny box in the lower left-hand corner of the pop-up that asks for your handle and password. This is probably the only site on the internet where you will want to check that box. Checking it means that it will remember all your details every time you log in. You'll still have to log in, but at least you won't have to worry about forgetting the silly password. The next step is to make sure you have a good book handy. The site that you are about to log into is slow. Really slow. But worth every second of it. When the screen eventually clears it will be divided into two sections. The main one in the middle which won't make any sense to you, and a small column on the left. The small column on the left will eventually give you three choices: CMAK, CMBB, or CMBO. Click on CMBB. After you've read a few pages in that book you brought along the screen will have cleared again, and the left-hand column will now be an abbreviated menu of choices. One of these choices is search, one is newest mods, one is search by designer. I'm not going to tell you the most efficient way to go about doing this, because the search engine on that site is really slow. The second most efficient way involves looking under a particular designer's name, but then you would have to navigate through a couple of options and I can't remember what they are. So I'm going to tell you a very inefficient way to do this, but it will be very easy to remember what you are doing and why. Click on Newest Mods. After several pages of reading your book the screen will load. What you're looking for probably isn't on that page, but if you keep moving backwards to older pages of Newest Mods you will eventually find what you're looking for. My guess is that you'll have to go about four pages back. What you're looking for, by the way, is a series of about half a dozen zip files that contain the entire contents of a collection of all the scenarios and operations from the now defunct Scenario Depot. The files that you are looking for are named Scenario Depot Salvage, and they are listed under the mod designer padivine (they aren't mods and I'm not the designer, but the site is set up that way). What you'll end up with when the process is finished is over a thousand scenarios and operations for CMBB. [And yes, there's something similar for CMAK and CMBO, but that's another story]. With your book propped open on your lap, and a bag of munchies and a good drink in easy reach, left click on the first of the Scenario Depot Salvage files. A box will pop up asking if you want to download the file. Say yes, and it will point you somewhere inside your computer. If you've never done anything like this before, my advice is to make sure that whatever you download does not get lost rattling around loose inside your computer. So when the pop-up appears look at the left hand side of it and press on the "My Computer" button (it will probably try to default to "My Documents", and you don't want it to do that. So take the little box into My Computer, and then navigate from there to your C: drive and then to Program files. Inside the Program Files folder you should make another folder called whatever you want, though I would suggest Scenario Depot Salvage. You can do this step before you try to download, or you can do it from the download pop-up (the little picture of a folder with an asterisk in the upper right hand corner of the box is how you do this, but you may not want to try this the first time out). However you managed to get there, you have now told your computer to download a zip file into a folder that you have made called Scenario Depot Salvage. There are about half a dozen folders, and depending on how fast you read you'll get through a chapter or two before you're done. You'll find that you need to have a separate folder for all of this because after a while you'll be staring at the screen trying to figure out if you've remembered to download all the files, because the silly things all look alike... Let us assume that you now have a folder with half a dozen zip files. Now you have to unzip them. The key question is whether or not you have Winzip installed on your computer. If you're new to computers it is quite possible that you don't, in which case you'll have to go out and get it. This is easy to do. You go online and do a Google search under the word "Winzip", go to the site, and follow most of their instructions. Trial copies are free, and that is what you want to download. As far as I know everyone in the world uses an unpaid trial copy, which is bad news for the company. I'm not going to explain how to unzip files because if I did this post would turn into War and Peace. The explanations that come with the program are fairly self-explanatory, given that they were written by computer engineers. After a few false starts you will eventually figure out how to unzip something to a specific location of your choosing (don't ever let your service provider tell you where you ought to store things on your computer). When you're sure you have all the zip files that you need, unzip them all into a single folder (you can name it Salvage). You'll have a folder with an awful lot of files in it. Click on Edit, then click on Select all, then click on Copy. The thousand-odd files will now have been selected and copied. Minimize the folder you were in, and get yourself to C:\Program Files\CMBB, which I am assuming is the address you are using for CMBB. Inside the CMBB folder you'll see a bunch of other ones, including one called Scenarios. If you paste the 1000 plus scenarios and operations that you just copied into that folder, you'll have a lot more to play with than when you started. A word of advice. You might want to make a copy of your original scenario folder to keep in a safe place before you start adding things to it. You'll quickly discover that many scenario designers have terrible graphic sense when it comes to naming things, and that your scenario menu will look downright ugly after you dump all those scenarios into it. You'll eventually find yourself hankering for a nice, light-weight scenario folder with even few scenarios than you started with orginally. When you've tried wrestling with a 1000 + scenario folder you'll understand what I mean. By the way, as far as I can tell the Scenario folder can handle an unlimited number of scenarios, so if you don't see something after you've copied and pasted, you're doing something wrong.

Last time I looked Road to Moscow was one of the 1000 + CMBB scenarios that I posted at CMMODS, so if you want it you should just download it from there. Look for something called Scenario Depot Salvage listed under my name (as opposed to my Battlefront handle). Best to just download the whole thing, otherwise it would be in the zip file that starts with the letter R.

No, the best source to learn to do it is from cmhq. The version at cmhq was put together by the cmmos cabal, a group of about twenty people who were fairly obsessive about quality control. cmmos 4.03 lives in its finest form at cmhq. If you have any problems with it I can support you because I was one of the editors. I don't know the intimate details of what went into the the forms of cmmos that live at cmmods, and I don't intend to learn. The cmhq product works. Once you've learned on it you can branch out from there. What I'm not willing to do is to try to answer incoherent and confused questions based on mixups between 4.05 (what is at cmmods) and 4.03 (what is at cmhq and what is also native to at least one of the CDV special edition disks).

The best way to use CMMOS 4.03 is to go to CMHQ, Madmatt's semi-unofficial Combat Mission site. The address is combatmission.com. In the upper left you'll see a menu, and one of the items on the menu is the CMMOS section. Go there. If you've downloaded CMMOS 4.03, where did you get it from if you didn't go there? I thought CMMODS had the later version. Ninety-five percent of all the moddable textures are modded in CMMOS 4.03. You get the mods by going into the CMBO CMMOS section at CMHQ. There's a fair number of them, so it will take a while to download. There are extensive readme files in the CMMOS program that explain how everything is done. But here is what you need to get to your first hurdle: CMMOS consists of a basic program (that works with CMBO and CMBB, by the way), rules and rulesets, and mods that have had their file-numbers changed so the CMMOS program can use them. There are complex variations on this that might work sometimes, but what I'm about to describe is relatively foolproof if you do it correctly. Make sure that CMBO is installed someplace normal. By that I mean that it is on the same hard drive that CMMOS is going on and that it is not in a folder called games. CMMOS looks around your computer for the instructions and the mods, and if anything is in an unexpected place, bad things happen. Install the CMMOS program. It has an installer, but make sure that you have as many background applications turned off as possible before you try installing it. To Make CMMOS work, you need to have downloaded the rulesets and rules. They're in the CMMOS section that I mentioned above. They also have an installer. Go with the default setting. In CMBO CMMOS the rules should be packed in with the rulesets, so when you've installed one you've probably installed the other. To make sure that you've got them, go into the the GEM/CMMOS/CMBO folder and look for the rulesets. If you look inside one you'll see a bunch of textfiles (and a few other things). To make CMMOS work you also have to install the mods. This works a bit differently than the other mod manager program. Set up a holding folder somewhere safe. Download the mods into that folder. Unzip the mod into that folder. There is usually a readme file that you should look at inside of it. Take the bmp's (and only the bmp's) and copy them into your CMBO/bmp folder. It won't overwrite anything because CMMOS mods have different file numbers than the game. To tell if a mod has been installed, go to the CMMOS control panel and look and see if the icon for that particular mod is visible or not. If it's x'ed out, you either didn't install it, or you did something wrong. Finally, always remember to hit the apply button when you're trying to apply a mod, and learn to read the CMMOS log file -- it really is one of the most useful parts of the program. And read the readme files a couple of times. They're a bit dense, but it's all there.

I've been thinking about some of the quirks of the CMBB tactical AI in relation to flags, and have been wondering how (or how well) this is going to work. In a two-player tactical engagement there won't be a problem. But I can imagine that there might be problems playing solitaire. Won't the AI-controlled forces tend to cluster around the flags on both offense and defense? And if there aren't any flags at all in tactical CMBB terms (assuming that the flags might only exist for purposes of CMC), won't the AI-controlled forces tend to mill aimlessly about the map? It might not be a bad idea if the scenario designer designated a few strategic locations on each map (in addition to the central control points) for the AI to cluster around. I've toyed around with various player-designated flag schemes, but most of them would lead to weird results. So I think it might not be a bad idea if the designer checked out each potential battle area and simple designated certain spots as what the AI would be likely to want to fight for, if it were intelligent. I'm assuming that control of these spots wouldn't have much (if any) impact on victory, just on AI tactical behavior.

How will these be handled? If a wheatfield catches fire early in a battle so that half of it is blazing by the end of the hour, will it magically go out before the start of the next hour, or will it keep burning? And if it keeps burning, will it spread? And when and how will it eventually go out? As anyone who lives in the Western US can tell you, if you don't douse these things they go on and on and on...

Would you still call it unfortunate if it included a serious patch? Dust ? The end of the bomber bug ? Multi-turreted Russian tanks ? Bicycles ? Wagons ? Equine quadrupeds (since there will never be any horses) ?

I wasn't aware that chemical weapons were WMD's.

Not really. Any backstory, the current one included, tends to become a very thinly veiled CM:UISFNDR (or worse) unless it is emminently credible and convincing. The thing that you are suggesting is worse than the backstory is already perceived to be the backstory (BFC protestations to the contrary notwithstanding), and that is the problem.

I'd be curious to see you do an interface variant for CMBB. And I really like that mask!

Forgetting about the game for a moment, if this were real life I would expect a division to have a reserve, an MLR, and a patrol zone in front of it. The patrol zone would have platoons, squads, and sections moving around in it to see what was out there. Whenever an action would start, you would often be uncertain at first if you were dealing with a patrol skirmish, a probe, or a full blown assault. I would hope that whatever mechanism for handling this kind of thing gets used, the realistic gathering of physical behavior doesn't get branded as gamey. I think I saw a comment from Hunter that seemed to imply that the presence of small enemy units wouldn't prevent larger units from moving forward. If that is the case, your reinforced company spends an hour moving into a sector patrolled by a platoon. During the next hour it assaults an adjacent sector held by another company. The patrolling platoon, if it survived, can either find its way back to the main line, or mill around in the enemy backfield until it runs out of food and ammunition. Its presence would impose a slight delay, but not much. Isn't this how it works in real life?

This cuts to the heart of why the subject of this game leaves a lot of people cold. The backstory, best omitted, is very disturbing, and many will be reluctant to feel that they are condoning it by playing a game about it. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the game, by virtue of its subject, is in itself political, and I don't particularly care to buy into that agenda. And it's not about WW II worship. WW II is not my favorite subject of military history and I only accepted it reluctantly because of the excellence of the simulation. Modern warfare is very interesting. Political cant is not. And the problem is compounded by the name of the product. "Shock Force" suggests a semi-political catch phrase and confirms the suspicion that, yes, you probably should be offended by this game before you even open the box. And sooner or later some politician looking for a sound bite will jump on this (though that may actually help sales). I'm not that fond of marketing, but I think Mikey D could fill you in on some of the ramifications of attaching strong, negative subliminal undercurrents to a product. Sort of like trying to sell a Nova in Latin America. There's nothing wrong with the latest BTS product per se, the problem is that it comes with a political context, and possibly with political trappings. I think the product would be more palatable if it were simply cast as a modern warfare simulator, the first release of which just happens to involve the Middle East. But then again, no one ever got rich catering to good taste. As for alternate titles, I think calling the game Combat Mission: Strike Force is a better idea. It doesn't have any of the negative political undercurrents (and potential derision) of Shock Force, and a lot of people (myself included) thought that that is what it was called anyway. Editors of ancient texts refer to this particular mental switch as a lectio facilior, the substitution of an easily remembered word for a difficult one. The subject matter of this game is a bit like sex. While it certainly sells, depending on how you present it the end result can be romantic, erotic, pornographic, or simply boring. It all comes down to the presentation.

You left out the important part. Louis Jadot what. And don't say Burgundy. We all know he's a Burgundy shipper.

smaller units fumbling around a square km of wooded terraing for an hour without engaging each other = reconnaisance

I many be in a minority on this one, but I really think the game is easier to accept if there simply is no backstory whatsoever. One collection of forces just happens to be in Syria fighting another collection of forces. The reason why is better left unsaid.

I many be in a minority on this one, but I really think the game is easier to accept if there simply is no backstory whatsoever. One collection of forces just happens to be in Syria fighting another collection of forces. The reason why is better left unsaid.

I many be in a minority on this one, but I really think the game is easier to accept if there simply is no backstory whatsoever. One collection of forces just happens to be in Syria fighting another collection of forces. The reason why is better left unsaid.

Bending the image around a corner is the big stumbling block. A high resolution rail is about five pixels wide. So a curve of single track is going to require ten perfectly concentric circle segments. If you don't draw them from scratch (which I think is the best way to go about it), you have to figure out how to bend small segments of the image. This can be done in Photoshop with about ten segments, but the result will not be a mechanically smooth curve. There's also the problem of the railroad ties, but that is trivial by comparison. Best solution, I think, is to draw or bend the track, then manually superimpose each tie one tie at a time. It's easy enough to calculate where the rails have to enter and leave each bmp. The problem is execution. Many aeons ago someone did a low resolution double track mod for CMBO. I don't remember who it was but I did try to contact him, because he had obviously solved the problem of how to draw the concentric circles. Or rather, the concentric arcs. If you can draw five adjacent concentric arcs, you've drawn a stretch of rail. All you have to do is recolor it to turn it into track. I suppose the next thing to do would be to search under mechanical drawing in Google. There's got to be a trick to this.