Philippe

Maybe this would be a good time to dust off the Stuart monarchy and bring it out of retirement. Who's the Jacobite pretender these days? Having a catholic monarch whose family has lived on the Continent might give the institution a more pan-European flavor...

I've posted the finished versions of the German minefield markers at CMMODS, including these clean ones, for those that don't like the weatherbeaten look: I'd like to thank Andrew Fox for graciously agreeing to let me re-use his red-white-and-red signs on lumber derived from Ed Kinney's Wooden pillbox. And an extra special thanks to Eichenbaum for his comments, encouragement, and all those wonderful fraktur fonts. There are two different fraktur scripts as well as one roman script. The mod distinguishes between anti-tank and anti-personnel by using different fonts rather than different text. The mod was inspired by the Markus Hofbauer/Gordon Molek CMBO German minefield markers in CMMOS, and by Elisa Decker's series of photographs of wall paint flaking off of women's thighs.

After you take a few screenshots if you decide you want to put them in a thread you'll have to post them somewhere. Image Shack (which you can find with a Google search) has a great free hosting service, as long as your images aren't too large.

Didn't one of the Commonwealth armies in Overlord sometimes reverse the star so that it was point down, to distinguish it from the Americans ?

You don't mean Grafenwohr, do you? I've never actually played it, but from your description I'll have to take a look.

Trenches are very difficult, probably in the Japanese sense. There are a lot of situations in CM where two-dimensional images have to cover for lack of three dimensional modeling in the game, usually for small details. There is, however, only so much illusion you can pack into two dimensions, no matter how good you are. The problem with trenches is that game modeling is trying to make the bitmap do too much. The trench bmp should be stretched across a dent in the map, not a flat surface. It needs to have real depth, and units standing in it need to be visibly lower than the surface of the ground. Apart from that, the trenches work differently depending on whether you're looking straight down on them (Close Combat style) or at a slant. Since they're usually viewed from a 45 degree angle, it is very tricky to make them look convincing from both angles. And some mods, because of their transparency, are designed only to work when viewed in three dimensions: simply borrowing the bitmap and reducing it in size misses the point and spoils the effect. There is a certain type of courtesy that is supposed to go along with modding: courtesy to potential users, and courtesy to other modders. A modder shouldn't publish a mod that isn't tested -- it's unfair, for example, to expect a general user to have the time and patience, or to even know how to find and eliminate pink spots. He should also include a readme file of some kind explaining what his mod does, what version it is, thanking any previous modders who gave him permission and suggestions for how to improve his mod, and any useful notes of historical insight that the modder might have come across in his research. When you look at all the files that were posted after the crash attributed to the anonymous modder, you'll understand what I mean. It's really frustrating to have three different versions of what may or may not be the same mod taking up space in your hard drive, and the only person who knows if they're different or not couldn't take the trouble to to write "Mod X Version 1.0 by Modder Y". Some people also maintain that out of courtesy to CMMODS one shouldn't post the same mod under one of the games, but I suppose that on a small mod it doesn't matter all that much. Borrowing other people's work without contacting them, however, does matter. The onus of research is on the modder, and pleading ignorance to who made what mod or how to get in contact with them is not an excuse, especially when the mod that was borrowed from is well-known and clearly labeled, the modder is a member of the forum, and his e-mail address is listed in his profile. But mistakes do get made, and mindless appropriation is, I suppose, the sincerest form of flattery, even if done without courtesy. And if you ever want a good chuckle, try digging through the archives from a couple years back and look up Scipio discussing Maximus. One other thing about the first trench mod (the one whose picture you didn't post). I think the gun emplacements are a neat idea, but the problem is that trenches are supposed to be in jagged parallel lines with communications trenches running between them. If you have too many firing pits I think it makes the communications trenches look a bit odd. So you might want to rethink how you handle the first trench that you did. If nothing else, be a little less hasty in releasing mods, and make sure that you include a few readme files, especially to that first one.

I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan. Standard motorcylce assault tactics involve several score hogs slowly circling the target, which is then subjected to a desultory barrage of outlandish visuals and strange remarks. The motorcyles pull up alongside the target, but are careful to block any nearby entrances in order to suppress unexpected arrivals. Engines are revved sequentially in a kind of fugue -- the sound alone is usually enough to secure the area. Passengers then dismount and swagger carefully inside -- carefully so as not to damage their costumes. After drinking beer for a few hours, belching repeatedly, and covering the target with smoke, they clamber back onto their hogs and wobble off into the night. Some of them never made it past Canal Street. You won't find any descriptions of this in the war literature, because nobody involved was likely to remember what happened the next day. I guess on the Eastern front they must have had to settle for kvass.

Don't forget that Gordon Molek did a really good set of Commonwealth minefield markers in bright and subdued textures for the British and Canadians. They come in generic as well as engineering-unit specific versions for the UK Guards Armoured Division, 11th Armoured Division, 4th Armoured Brigade, and Canadian South Alberta Regiment and 1st Hussars. These can all be found in the CMBO CMMOS section of CMHQ (turn off your firewall before trying to download, but I know you know that). The Commonwealth style of marker is very distinctive, and completely different in feel from my American and French markers. Let's hope Gordon comes out of retirement at some point to do the other Commonwealth armies in CMAK (don't look at me, I don't have CMAK yet and ETA is next Christmas given the rate I'm going on CMBB).

These are Andrew's, sort of.

A preview of part of the current work in progress. Anti-personnel on the left, anti-tank on the right. More to come next week. I think I have text for Italian and Finnish minefield markers, but I don't know what they're supposed to look like. I don't even have text for Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian Minefield markers, though I suspect that the Romanian text will be similar to the Italian. Any assistance with this on-going project will be appreciated.

My memory is getting a bit hazy around the edges, but I thought that Grenadiers were armed with muskets rather than rifles. And I wonder how many of them really carried grenades into battle by the late 18th century. Musket and rifle aren't synonymous. Chasseur-type infantry (aka Jaegers, Cacciatore) fight in open order and tend to aim their weapons at individual targets. Line-type infantry fight in closed ranks and point their weapons in the general direction of the opposing formation. This latter procedure is not so silly when you realize that a musket ball flying out of the barrel will be spinning every which way, and the chances of hitting a twenty meter wide target at a hundred meters is probably 50-50 at best. That's why they didn't bother to aim, and that's why a firing squad was a particularly inhumane form of execution (in the pictures of the execution of admiral Byng the squad is standing very close). The whole point of musket tactics was to get as high a volume of fire in the general direction of the enemy as possible. You don't win because you kill him, you win because he loses his nerve in the smoke and the noise and runs away. Muskets are smoothbore, and reputedly a little easier to load than rifles, which may or may not have tighter barrels but apparently fire a slightly different sized ball. Napoleon armed his light infantry with the same weapon as his line infantry to reduce the size of his ammunition train (and thus increase his columns' road speed), but apparently intended to eventually switch back -- he never got around to it. Most other armies that had jaeger-type troops tended to arm them with rifles, since a rifle is better than a musket for aimed fire. Note that jaegers got into the various military systems via Hungary, Austria, and Germany, and there were many different styles of German armies (Saxons, Bavarians, and Prussians were the main ones). When working with Napoleonics you always have to be careful to make sure you know what your Fusilierien, Schuetzen, or Jaegers are armed with, because if they're carrying muskets the designation may be honorific, or if they're Napoleonic German allies they may be Gallicizing and shortening the supply train (and simplifying logistics and industrial production) by using muskets instead of rifles. I think the Westfalians may have done a bit of this. Remember that a fusilier is someone who may or may not be carrying a fusil (french for rifle).

One should never forget that this is BFC's site, and that while here we are their guests. Do you really want to hurt your hosts' feelings? I'm sure you would never stand in front of the counter at a family-owned shop and ask customers as they came and went to sell you second-hand goods. Just because computers are involved doesn't mean there aren't real people and feelings involved. I hope the water in Charles' jar isn't turning blue: that might set the completion of CMx2 back for months.

At the risk of being accused of being an atmosphere grog, one of the things that I noticed immediately when I looked at those photographs is the smog layer. A very sad subject. Until the early seventies the light in Greece was spectacular. I first encountered it in the sixties, and couldn't believe my eyes. Not only was the air perfectly clear, but in many parts of the country it almost acted like a magnifying glass: you could litteraly see more, and everything was sparkling and clear. Two things killed it. Athens developed a layer of corrosive smog from a combination of cars and industrialization (particularly around Eleusis). This pollution is so bad that it eats away the surface of ancient marbles. And the wind currents, particularly on the Adriatic side, brought a huge amount of East European industrial pollution and dumped it in the local atmosphere. So the result is what you see in those photographs, particularly the first one: instead of ultra-clear magnifying light, you get layers of schmutz at and just above hilltop level. Bottom line: don't use modern photographs of the modern Greek sky to get a realistic WWII Aegean sky mod.

I've noticed that rar files seem to cause people no end of problems. Might I suggest an old-fashioned, low-tech zip?

This is a very interesting technique, and the space saving is significant. How do you set up a color index? What happens if you try to mod an indexed bmp, and is there any way to convert all the existing bmp's to indexed format? I can't believe this is a free lunch. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

(shudder)

I need to send you an e-mail and I'm embarassed to say that I've lost your address. Please e-mail me at the address in my profile. I have a couple of zip files that I want you to take a look at.

What I think many people would find useful is a comparison of the uniforms available at CMMODS and the uniforms in the CMMOS section at CMHQ and in the stand-alone mods section of the SE disk. My personal conversion project has gotten hopelessly sidetracked, but my understanding is that much (but not all) of the pre-crash material already exists at CMHQ. Nothing is more infuriating than using a dial-up to download a file that you already have.

In much of that part of the world small towns and villages tend to be somewhat circular for protection, even if unwalled. I think the reason that the town doesn't look organic is that the designer started by focusing on elements that would have been added to an existing whole and planned the town around them, rather than the other way around. In the begining there was no road and no railway station, just a few small buildings clumped in an irregular circle near the water. The circle expanded irregularly with another irregular circle of buildings or two, and may have included a masjid. The local trade routes were probably diverted to the town to take advantage of the open source of nearly undrinkable brackish water. This track was eventually converted into a paved road: it either runs near the town with a dirt track leading to it, or snakes in and then out of the town along an irregular course. Then some colonialist oppressor decided to build a railroad that skirted the edge of the town. The reason it got a railway station was that the town was already a watering hole and a junction: you don't build a railway station in the middle of the desert unless you're Cinecitta. The town plan in the first picture is the kind of thing I would expect to see in a western industrial suburb. Real places have small crooked lanes to confuse attacking foreigners. Towns and cities that are built all at once have boringly regular grid plans: places that evolve over time are a comfortable mess. Just ask yourself this. If you were a destitute foreigner without electricity or running water, would you want to live there?

The AI might play better, and then again, it might not. But either way it would be a terrible game. Solitaire Fog of War is one of the few tangible advances of computer games over board games. Why would you want to turn it off, except on a lark? Just remember that the AI doesn't usually attack very well. But it can sometimes mount a very credible defense. If you want to be on the receiving end, find some live opponents. Note that revealing yourself a bit here and a bit there is how you lure a live opponent into making a lunge that they otherwise shouldn't have. Women have been practising this for years. I've also heard them comment that shoot and scoot is an age-old male tactic. Wouldn't know about that myself. [ January 11, 2005, 10:44 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

I think he means the lower resolution 'Saving Private Ivan' terrain mods. Acronyms should usually be avoided, because they tend to make the user unintelligible rather than cool. Not sure how they look. I prefer to use higher resolution graphics, and if that means avoiding larger scenarios because my computer can't handle it, so be it. I (as player) probably can't handle the monsters either, and in any case it bothers me to get involved in an orgy of micro-management if all the little details aren't covered (supply dumps, aid stations, replacement pools, rear area logistics). The game does a better job of modelling smaller battles, and they run better on my computer and in my mind (the voices, the voices...). Anyone who has ever made a mod remembers what it feels like to look at the fruit of your labors in jpeg. Low resolution jpeg image quality can make a beautiful mod look terrible. You use it because it's small and gives an approximate sense of what your work looks like. Image Shack doesn't host large images, and in any case I wouldn't want to upload them: it's bad enough uploading the mod itself. Uploading, by the way, is slower than downloading.

Not sure I understand your question, but you might want to visit The Scenario Depot http://ns9.super-hosts.com/~dragonlair.net/combatmission/ which has hundreds of scenarios for each of the three games. It's pretty much where all scenarios end up getting posted. There's also a link in the resources section. The Scenario Depot has a very useful search engine, so if you want to play a given size battle between particular forces at a given moment in time you can enter that in and a list of choices pops up (e.g. Wehrmacht Mechanized vs Soviet Guards, historical, small battle, June-October 1944). Other sites to visit are Der Kessel, Boots and Tracks, and The Proving Grounds. [ January 11, 2005, 06:01 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

I didn't have CMBB before the crash so I didn't pay very close attention to which CMBB mods were available at CMMODS, but I just took a quick glance through the CMBB CMMOS section and found several of Mr. Noobie's mods there. One of the reasons that so much effort was put into CMMOS was the realization that CMMOS mods at CMHQ were much less perishable than mods posted in other places. Watching some of our favorite mods and mod sites wink out of existance encouraged a lot of people to put time and effort into doing conversions and writing rules and rulesets. It's a pity that we didn't get as far with CMBB as we did with CMBO. My own short list would include Juju's small arms.

I've posted a German and a Russian north indicator together at CMMODS. Here's what they look like: Thanks to Image Shack for providing free hosting. I made them with a darker border, so if you feel these get lost in a large landscape just recolor in Paint using the paint can. I got good results with several shades of dark green and burnt umber.

Thanks. That's the confirmation that I was looking for. (For the alphabetically challenged, Cyrillic uses what palaeographers refer to as a lunate sigma -- aka "c" -- for the letter "S".) Maybe if I make enough bells and whistles for the not yet existant slavic edition I can convince BTS to sell a special edition to the armed forces of Byelorussia, the Russian Federation, and/or the Ukraine. Assuming they actually get paid in hard currency they could use the proceeds to defray the costs of updating the CMBB model to accomodate multi-turreted Soviet tanks. I would be really surprised if there were any plans for including them in CMx2.