Philippe

I just noticed that Steve is thinking about ballerinas in camo tutu's (see the WIA thread). The only logical reason for this that I can think of is that the next title will be: COMBAT MISSION Space Lobsters of Doom: SWAN LAKE Music by Phillip Glass and John Cage.

Could you be a bit more specific about that ? What else will she be wearing ? My sister was a ballerina, and let me tell you, a tutu wouldn't cover a whole hell of a lot, even if you happen to have an anorexic dancer's body. This WIA thing is getting more interesting all the time...

Go into your computer and find the folder into which you downloaded all those zip files with scenarios. Then find the folder in which you keep CMBB (probably has a name that is something like C:\Program Files\CMBB). Go into the CMBB folder and make a new folder called Scenario Depot Salvage. Minimize the folder to make your life easier later on. Go back to the folder with all the zips of the scenarios. For the next step I am assuming that you have Winzip -- if you do not, do a google search and download a free trial copy from the web. Double click on one of the zip files and, depending on which version of Winzip you are using, you'll have a number of action options. The one you probably want is "Extract". Extract (or unzip, to use the colloquial parlance) the zip files one at a time and specify that spiffy new sub-folder (aka Scenario Depot Salvage) that you made in your CMBB folder. Do that with all of the zip files. The Scenario Depot Salvage folder will be thoroughly constipated, and full of litterally hundreds of scenarios. If you look closely, most of the files will have CME or CMF extensions. There should also be an Excel file, and probably a couple of readme files, but I can't remember because I'm getting senile. Copy the CME and CMF files in your Scenario Depot Salvage folder and paste them into the CMBB folder named Scenarios. If you're feeling particularly teutonic or anal, you might want to make a copy of the original Scenarios folder first and put it in a safe place. (Why ? Because it is always a good idea to back parts of the game up before you mess with them, and it saves you having to do a parallel install of the game if you do something stupid. You, by the way, won't do anything stupid -- but I will and do all the time). The game will read the CME and CMF files very nicely on its own, thank you. If you want to modify them, you can rename each individual file in Windows (you'll probably want to do this because many scenario designers seems to have a terrible visual sense, and clutter up the names of their scenarios with useless and narcissistic strings of letters that make the actual scenario names dissapear off the menu screen, which is where most people try to find the scenarios they are going to play. Go figure.) The other way to modify them is through the Scenario Editor (one of the buttons that you first see when you fire up the game), but you have to get them into the Scenario folder first. You do not want to have anything in your CMBB Scenario folder besides CME and CMF files. Any other stuff can stay in the Scenario Depot Salvage folder, or wherever it is you like to keep that kind of thing (e.g. a two-car garage). I'm starting to lose it so I can't remember if it is possible to read an Excel spreadsheet if you don't have Excel. Most people have it (it was one of the four most brilliant inventions of the 20th century) and you probably can't download it for free. If this doesn't make any sense to you (it doesn't make much sense to me) I'm sure someone who is a native English speaker and who isn't punchy from going on too many interviews will be along shortly to rephrase this in coherent and concise English. [ September 14, 2005, 01:09 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

I think you forgot to mention exactly what problem it is that you are having, other than that it is very basic. There is a very good and pornographically explicit description of what has to happen in the manual.

What I would like to see is a very simple sketchmap, inkstains and all, reminiscent of what you would jot down on the back of an envelope during the briefing for the larger battle to remember what your corner of the universe will look like. The simplest solution would just be to allow a bmp of a certain dimensionsion and leave it up to the designer to fill it in or not. A designer could draw a very basic map in Microsoft's Paint, that comes bundled with the Windows operating system: a few roads, a few rivers, the odd triangle for a hilltop, little or no text. Poor drafting skills would add to the verisimilitude. The slab of text that Pvt. Bluebottle mentioned is often hard to follow for two reasons: 1) the reader's lack of imagination and/or familiarity with the genre; 2) the designer's poor writing and/or language skills. What goes in the text varies from designer to designer -- be glad when they include anything at all (some don't out of sloth or embarassment at using babblefish -- they should just do it in their native language and have done with it). [ September 14, 2005, 04:22 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Portraying the wounded is not that hard. Off the top of my head you show a heavily bandanged prone figure with an IV drip. That should get the message across. The medic can have an armband and a stethoscope, or something. And then maybe we should rename this CMx2 Mash: The Sims...

Might not be a bad idea to edit the title of this thread...

Although I much prefer the Chaco War, I am also a big fan of the Guano Wars and applaud it is a suitable choice for the second series of new CMx2 games. There would never have been a need for the Chaco War if Bolivia hadn't lost its corridor to the Pacific. And it's a wonderful comment on the futility of war that grown men could kill each other for control of bird droppings.

Nie !

If the care of wounded is going to show up in the game at all I really think that it should be largely out of a player's control. My reason for saying that is simply that I see a strong connection between morale and the need to take care of the wounded. If morale is high and the wounded aren't hurt too badly, they're probably given minimal help getting back to the aid station. If morale is low, even if the wounded are walking wounded, everybody and their cousin will help the guy back to the aid station, and stick around until they're sure he's well down the road to recovery. Units will temporarily melt away, unless an officer in charge of the aid station chases them back to their units, or their commander didn't allow them to leave their ranks in the first place. One man gets hit, but two others are temporarily incapacitated while they escort him out of danger. I'm not sure we really want to see this part of the fight moving around the battlefield. I want the aid station (medic kneeling at attention/medic perfoming a simple stylized care of the wounded in the style of Jagged Alliance -- and the presence or absence of an abstracted patient or two), but I'm not sure I even want the little red crosses cluttering up the battlefield. As an aside, in the Hasbro game Starship Troopers from a few years back retrieving bodies was part of the mission. If you took casualties you had a limited number of seconds to put the warm bodies in some kind of medical stasis from which you could essentially re-animate them later on. After about ten seconds or so your only option was to retrieve the dog-tags, and it was considered a serious disgrace to abandon dog-tags on a bug-infested planet. Some of those warrior pseudo-arachnids actually looked a bit like lobsters, come to think of it... To my mind the main reason for having a care of the wounded routine is that it creates a rear area and a line of communications that stretches behind you off map. I would think that it would be sufficient if WIA's simply dissapear, possibly taking a few intact soldiers with them, depending on that unit's morale state. After a certain number of turns (depending, I suppose, on distance to and from the aid station) the missing soldiers would reappear in their unit. This is probably more elegant if you aren't doing 1:1, but I think the reality is that those missing soldiers do temporarily become unavailable. As for the aid station, I suspect that given the scope of a CM battle there should be no immediate need to evacuate them off-map. I suppose you could load them into trucks and drive them away if you're worried about capture, but that shouldn't be the norm. Though I want aid stations, I don't want CMx2 to turn into MASH: WW 2. Space Lobsters of Doom: Clan Quest, on the other hand, is a perfectly acceptable alternative...

It sometimes takes newer members a few posts to figure out that we use standard English as the lingua franca around here.

On a more serious note, if I understand it correctly (and I probably don't), target memory shouldn't have much of an impact on infantry under fire doing weird things like crawling away from the cover of a wall and exposing themselves in the open. I really hate seing minefield markers pop up outside of my line of site for two reasons: 1) I shouldn't be able to see them; and 2) it means that my computer opponent is doing something really stupid. Doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened in real life from time to time, but panicked troops shouldn't continue to take refuge in a minefield once someone realizes that there are things that go boom if you step on them out there. I really hope that AI improvements will cover this kind of thing.

Cross-dressing Space Lobsters of Doom. This is getting a bit too weird. It hadn't occured to me that cross-dressing was even possible for a lobster.

Silly question. Space Lobsters of Doom, of course.

As I mentioned in another thread, I really don't like it, but can see that you may not have much of a choice. One comment though. If you must have those ads, how about not having them display on the pages that show a sample of what the mod looks like. It's bad enough on the other pages, but it really distracts from the mod images.

I don't really like the advertising, but I can see that you don't have much choice. What I would prefer, though, would be for BFC to be your exclusive advertiser. For that to happen, though, they would have to make you an offer. A lot of people are coming onto these forums now. The new games aren't ready, but the existance of your site gives legs to the old ones. I really think it behooves BFC to give you some kind of financial support, since what you are doing is ultimately in their best interest.

NWN = ?

One of my old gripes about CMx1 was that there weren't enough bodies on the ground after a battle. But on reflection, and given the way CMx1 represented troops, maybe there were, they just weren't always in the right place. If a squad of ten men is represented by three figures, when it gets wiped out that probably means two or three dead bodies and a bunch of wounded. The wounded have magicially teleported back to their aid stations without benefit of bearers (really hope CMx2 does something about this -- you lose more than just the casualty for a short period of time), so three dead bodies translates to one figure on the ground. The dead body rate shouldn't probably be more than about 20% of casualties, but some of the bodies on the ground are wounded waiting to be hauled away. In 1:3 representation a squad that gets wiped out probably shouldn't leave more than one body on the ground, it's just a question of where that body gets left. Dropping it at the last spot that it took losses was not a bad choice because that was probably the most exposed position the unit ended up in, and some of the bodies represented by that prone figure are still alive. So even if you include pools of blood and the occasional soup of splattered brains in 1:1 (how about a realism/gore toggle?), you still aren't going to have that many people prone on the ground. We are probably talking three bodies on the ground per wiped out squad. It will never look like a Napoleonic battlefield in that respect. And certainly won't look like an FPS. But I would dearly love to see units experience a temporary manpower hit and loss of effectiveness while the wounded are hauled back to the aid station. The physical presence of the wounded at the aid station wouldn't have to be modeled 1:1, though it would be nice. And one side effect of using aid stations is that if a unit's morale is taking a beating, the guys who hauled the wounded casualty back to the aid station will become very concerned about the victim's health, and spend half an hour hanging around the aid station to make sure their buddy is getting the medical treatment he needs. Which means that when morale is low, three or four wounded can knock a squad completely out of action for a while. The only problem with this kind of modelling is that it might start to slow the pace of combat down to more realistic levels.

Tero, any chance you could comment on the limbering/unlimbering process? Are you satisfied with the CMx1 model ? Can you make any specific recommendations? If a carrier is going to unload its ammunition completely, how quickly should it happen and what is the range of the time-frames? Should large caliber shells unload at the same rate as small? And if ammunition doesn't have to unload completely, what model do you propose for portraying it?

Picking up abandoned weapons probably smacks a bit too much of the FPS. In a company level game stray weapons and ammunition probably aren't worth tracking. Besides, as everyone who has ever played Jagged Alliance knows, you may be picking up weapons and ammunition on the battlefield, but they aren't really going to do you much good until someone with high mechanical skills and a tool kit spends a few hours working on them. And that would throw it into the next scenario. On a more serious note, I've always been disturbed by crews abandoning machine guns, mortars, and anti-tank guns. It's just too easy for someone to reman them, particularly the machine gun. One American Medal of Honor winner got his award by abandoning his machine gun and playing dead while the germans walked through his position, then gunning them down from behind after they had passed. He did this several times in the course of one night. This is clearly a case of re-crewing an abandoned machine gun. As for mortars and anti-tank guns, when you see the crew drop the weapon as a result of small arms fire you just know that they're doing it for morale reasons and not because of damage to the gun. I really don't see why they couldn't recrew their AT gun/mortar/machine gun if they recover morale and the weapon hasn't been overrun.

Oddly enough, I was just reading a few of Steve's posts and I suddenly realized that I'm unlikely to buy a title under certain circumstances. WW I, great. WW II, great. Weird wars in between, even better. Korea, fine. Vietnam, fine, but I'll probably end up re-reading Heart of Darkness. Weird little wars from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, right on. Russians in Afghanistan, Cubans in Angola, Che in Bolivia, the Toyota Wars in Chad. But I would feel really uncomfortable playing anything that is a little too current. As long as I can squint at a subject and convince myself it's history (even if I was alive and cognizant when it happened). Or that it is hypothetical and hasn't happened yet. But I won't play anything where people are still getting killed. So the Iran-Iraq war and the First Gulf War is fine. But I'm too superstitious to play anything more recent than that. It just seems too ghoulish (even if I used to have a close friend name Pickering).

Would you agree, then, that the way ammunition gets moved in the limbering/unlimbering process might need a bit of looking at ? If so, how would you propose to adjust it? The carrier is starting to sound a bit like a small, mobile ammunition dump as well as a set of wheels...

JonS, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the question of how many seconds it takes to unload or reload an artillery unit's full supply of shells from a halftrack. And even more interested in hearing whether you think Germans/Russians/CW/Americans unloaded all the ammunition every time they unlimbered. This cuts to the heart of whether the CMx1 limber times are too abstracted.

I've given this some more thought, and suspect that as long as you don't need to reveal terrain a millimeter at a time, terrain FOW might not be as computer-resource intensive as I had at first thought. Which is very interesting, I think, because it would add a lot to the immersion and realism of the situations, especially on a large map. And just for the record, I don't pretend that this is the way to actually do it. I'm sure if the good folks at BFC turn their minds to it, they'll come up with a simpler and more elegant solution. Terrain as I understand it is going to be represented by tiles 8 meters x 8 meters. This suggests that the entire game map could be defined as a grid with squares of these dimensions. At the very start of the game the computer takes an extra minute to compile a master list of which tiles can see which tiles. It only has to do this once, and will never have to repeat the process again. The list will essentially be a series of grid co-ordinates, with a list of all the co-ordinates visible from that tile. [Hey, I never said this would be elegant]. During the course of play, whenever a unit moves, if it enters a square other than the one it already occupies, this information is sent to a data dump. The terrain crunch (as opposed to the terrain LOS check) only has to happen once per turn, either at the end of the turn or just before the next orders phase. The crunch does not require any fancy programming: I think it can be done on an Excell spreadsheet, using a few simple logic functions. The program would look at the list of terrain entered by all units on a side during a turn, and if there were any new grid squares, these would simply be added to the list of what the player was allowed to see. What the player was not allowed to see, by the way, would probably just look like grass -- the hills would be visible, but nothing else (no rivers, trees, buildings, soft ground). The spread sheet would run down the list of grid co-ordinates and add the new ones to the visible grid list. This list, which would keep getting bigger each turn, would determine what the player could see. I don't think running a spreadsheet type program to track terrain would slow the game down much -- games like Europa Universalis II are lousy with spreadsheets (and bugs). I have no idea whether or not this would be compatible with the game engine or the mental quirks of the designers. And it's certainly more of a band-aid than a design. But if I can come up with something like that, imagine what Steve and Charles could come up with if they turned their attention to it for a moment. So what if it means they won't have time to program in an extra tank or two? Nobody will notice if Shermans are missing from the Normandy scenarios ...

I think the question that needs to be answered first is whether the ammunition was completely unloaded or not. And this is probably going to vary from national army to national army. And we're still waiting for Real Artillerymen to weigh in on what that was. I have no idea what was actually done, but I keep thinking of halftracks as mechanized caissons, which is probably wrong.