Philippe

I've just made a north direction pointer using a Cyrillic S. Before I go crazy trying to get the colors to blend correctly, is this how you indicate north on a Russian map? The compass rose tends to be a western nautical-influenced usage. I've looked at a (very) few Soviet maps and couldn't find anything beyond scale indicators and the orientation of the text to suggest which way north might be. I realize that maps were almost like guarded secrets back then. If there is no appropriate period north indicator, what, as a russian-speaker, would you rather stare at: an arrow with a Cyrillic "S" on top of it, or an arrow with an inexplicably western language roman alphabet "N". I suppose I could also come up with a Cyrillic "N", but I'm not sure what it would stand for. I don't have enough space on my hard drive at the moment to load up IL-2 and figure out what is written on the russian compass to indicate north.

I have just posted Version 2.0 of the German Unit Portraits to CMMODS. The difference between Version 2.0 and Version 1.0 consists of corrections to the uniforms of about a score of units. It sticks to the original BFC unit images (unlike the upcoming Version 3.0), and incorporates many of the helpful suggestions and comments that I've gotten along the way. In particular I would like to thank Michael Dorosh, who has done yeoman's service in reviewing my increasingly incoherent e-mails. I felt it was neccessary to get the mistakes in Version 1.0 cleaned up in case outside events prevent me from finishing Version 3.0 in the near future. There is also a major difference in presentation between Version 2.0 and Version 3.0. Version 3.0 heads tend to be smaller and full face. More interesting and a lot harder to construct, but not necessarily consistant with the faces of the other nationalities in the game. At some point I'll have to decide how I really feel about that, and either make the current set that I have larger, or simply not worry about it. My choice was between posting Version 2.0 and the current state of the mod, which is probably the equivalent of 2.6. I decided to post 2.0 because it is just about as far as I can take that approach, and so represents a kind of complete mod. I much prefer the mod in its current form (creepy adolescent Volksturm, Gebirgjaegers in characteristic hats, regular infantry in fatigue caps) but it will need a lot of rebalancing before I can release it. So I've decided to release 2.0 instead, which should replace 1.0 and is a completed mod. Version 3.0, however, will be radically different and a lot more fun.

You might want to set your Google to "image" instead of "web" (or whatever the normal setting is called) and do a search under Victoria Cross. It's bound to turn up a few good images. You can then cut one of them out, and, perhaps, remove the color from it and paste over a gold layer similar to the color of the iron cross. That way the two different crosses should match, and you'll have one symbol from each side. The alternative is to use the RAF roundel, but I don't think that would really look right.

Am I correct in guessing that a computer with heat problems will behave differently if it has been running all day, as opposed to when it first starts up after an overnight rest ?

A Victoria Cross ?

Take a look at the byte battles at Der Kessel.

I've uploaded the Ride of the Valkyries to CMMODS as Eastern Front intro music. I took a look around a while back, and it didn't seem to be available anywhere. It should be. I didn't edit the file, but it converts into exactly the right format, and begins and ends in the right places. Which makes me suspect that someone else must have massaged it work as intro music. A lot more music was available two years ago, but much of that has dried up. Warning: the wav version of the file is rather large. It also poses a mental health hazard: the score is orchestral, and you may catch yourself singing to fill in the missing voices.

Mod away. Just be careful, because the one that looks the most like France has a thatched roof in it that would never occur in France, or even England (thatching is done differently there).

While looking for color photographs to use in my German portraits mod I came across several large photographs from Signal magazine that make good introductory screens. One of them has already been used in lower resolution in the Tarkus mod, but I thought it might be nice to have a set of them that work with the out-of-the-box BFC interface, for those that want to see the Eastern Front through German rather than Russian lenses. So I whipped together two sets, one with the Red Twins and one without. My favorite is the second one, which shows a shell exploding just in front of a squad taking cover behind a moving tank, Caucasus mountains in the background. Unfortunately the link on this photograph wasn't working, so the resolution isn't as good as it should be. All of these Menu screens can be found at CMMODS. While you're there, make sure you take a good look at the two Vincent Splash Screens that were posted a few days ago. The quality of the design work is far superior to what I did in these four screens. I really like his collage technique. Many thanks to eyepilot for directing me to the sites where I found these images. And thanks to Image Shack for providing free hosting for these images.

The first rule of modding is that you have to make folders to back up your originals as well as your mods. Among other things, that is how you go about switching mods manually without a mod editor. But it also saves you a lot of grief if you decide to delete your bmp folder and then announce in public that the dog ate your homework. That's the first time I've ever heard of anything like that happening. I'm not even sure that it's possible for CMMOS to delete your CMBB folder. I think it's a pretty safe bet that you did something on your own, unrelated to CMMOS, shot yourself in the foot, and decided to point the finger somewhere else. It's not even a question of not reading the instructions. I don't suppose you contacted Gordon when that happened. If you did, do you happen to remember what he said ? As it stands, if you install CMMOS and don't have a clean install CMMOS will assume that any bmp in the game's bmp folder is the BFC original. CMMOS is not really complicated, rumors to the contrary. It does require that you pay attention to what you are doing, and have a modicum of very basic computer handling skill. But nothing that a non-techy humanist over the age of 40 can't handle. [ January 06, 2005, 10:18 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Note, however, that many consider gridded terrain to be a visual abomination. I've never seen gridded terrain providing clearer height information than what you could garner from level one or level two. So why ruin your visuals with something that doesn't really help all that much? Maybe CMx2 will have a terrain grid that can be toggled on and off.

CMMOS and McMMM are mod managers. They actually work best used in tandem because they have different strengths and weakness. CMMOS mods won't work in McMMM without a manual overhaul, and non-CMMOS mods usually work in McMMM but never in CMMOS. So eventually you'll want both. Rulesets are the program instructions that allow specific groups of mods to work in CMMOS. Download all the CMMOS mods and all the rulesets. But make sure you read the instructions before you try doing anything with them. Note: CMMOS has a CMBO section and a CMBB section. Download all the CMBB CMMOS mods, not the CMBO ones (unless you have CMBO). McMMM works with CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK.

Unless my mind is wandering (which happens a lot these days) MDMP are mods for CMBO, not CMBB. So don't install them. Most of the CMHQ site is devoted to CMBO. The CMBB material is found in two places: the CMMOS section and the New Mods section. Click on the CMMOS item on the left of the CMHQ intro page, and then download and install CMMOS 4.03. It should be installed to path that looks something like C\Program Files\GEM Software Productions\CMMOS\CMBB. The CMBB in that path is not the game, it's a folder named CMBB that keeps the CMBB material separate from the CMBO material (which has its own folder in there as well). After you've downloaded and installed CMMOS, to make it work you'll need rulesets (which you get from the CMHQ site -- they're usually at the top of each page in the CMMOS section) and mods (listed in sections under their appropriate ruleset). Go ahead and download them, but before you do anything else read as much of the readme files in CMMOS as you can stand. Then read them again. That file will probably clear up most of your questions (all if you read it enough times). Somewhere (I don't remember where) there's a great tutorial by MikeT on using CMBB CMMOS (which is slightly different from CMBO CMMOS). I think it's posted on Zimrodok's website, but I'm not sure. The rulesets, once downloaded, probably have self installers. Just keep sending everything to the default location. Installing the mods themselves is actually easy, but doesn't make sense if you haven't seen the CMMOS control screens or read the relevant parts of the readme files (you can skip the discussion about how to write rules and rulesets -- you're just installing the mods for now). As a general word of advice, when downloading any mod (and especially the non-CMMOS mods) it's a good idea to download them into a separate holding folder and examine the contents. There's a lot of stuff in there that you don't want in your bmp folder. You should also always, always, always make a back-up of the BFC original before you replace it. The nice thing about CMMOS is that it does that for you (and zips the back-up), if it is set up correctly. If you have a big hard drive you might want to make an extra copy of the CMBB bmp folders and Wav folders as a safety just after a clean install. They're kind of big, but it saves quite a few headaches at first because you're bound to make mistakes. After a week or two, when you've got your bearings, you can delete your safety wheels.

Go to CMHQ and download CMMOS 4.03 from the CMMOS section. Remember to turn off your firewall when downloading from combatmission.com or you may have a problem. Download all the CMMOS rulesets and all the CMMOS mods and install them (it doesn't take that long, even on a dial up). You should be particularly interested in the dirty Russian and dirty German mods, especially those done by Gordon Molek and Gautrek when there are several to choose from. And don't forget Juju's modslut special (small arms), which is really easy to use in CMMOS form. The nice thing about CMMOS is that you can grab it all and figure out which textures you prefer later. I set up and save QB's with huge numbers of points so that I can look at the line up for a particular period. After that, supplement with material from CMMODS that never got converted to CMMOS. Much of the older material on CMMODS seems to be conversions of CMMOS mods to non-CMMOS format. Make sure you get the Undaunted Sky mods from CMMODS. There are many really talented mod artists that I haven't mentioned, but if you're going the CMMOS route the material tends to come with explanations embedded in the program, and there are only a few cases where you'll have to avoid choosing a lesser designer.

National symbols and Waffle Grenadiers fall under the rubric of historical authenticity. Useless features added to a program to conform with corporate policy falls under the moral purity rubric, especially if the those features have an effect on functionality. Corporate anonymity is incompatible with moral purity. You can get some nice shades of grey, though.

Moral purity and historical authenticity. The first can't be bought, but you can get most of the rest at Mark Gallear's Mod site. The address is listed in one of the threads at the top of the CMBB forum. Or you can Google it. Note that the US CDV version of CMBB that I am using is similar to the BFC version, except that it has an extra intro screen. Don't know about the the version that comes with the Anthology. The European versions (which have been known to leak across the Atlantic from time to time) have fictional names associated with some of the German units and a host of strange software requirements that, as I understand it, can play havoc with certain systems and may interefere with future patches. In other words, if your CD doesn't work it may not be BFC's fault. I don't usually say this, but in this case buy American. [ January 04, 2005, 04:01 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Again, this is another question that is best asked in the technical forum. I can't say that I ever noticed my computer using the disk apart from the initial security check when I launch the program. Of course, it would help to know if you have the original, pristine, pure and uncorrupted BFC version of the game, or one of the CDV versions (comes in at least two flavors which behave differently). Without knowing where you're located I can't even guess at that. I'm not much good at computer technicalities, but if I had to guess I'd wonder if you were perhaps set up to play off the disk. The solution would probably be a new, clean, and full install onto your hard drive. Having said that, there are any number of people in the technical forum who have forgotten more about computers than I ever intend to learn. Just don't let them talk you into doing something unnecessarily complicated like partitioning your hard drive and setting up ghost CD drives to fool your computer into thinking the CD is still in your hard drive. You don't want to go that route.

Again, this is another question that is best asked in the technical forum. I can't say that I ever noticed my computer using the disk apart from the initial security check when I launch the program. Of course, it would help to know if you have the original, pristine, pure and uncorrupted BFC version of the game, or one of the CDV versions (comes in at least two flavors which behave differently). Without knowing where you're located I can't even guess at that. I'm not much good at computer technicalities, but if I had to guess I'd wonder if you were perhaps set up to play off the disk. The solution would probably be a new, clean, and full install onto your hard drive. Having said that, there are any number of people in the technical forum who have forgotten more about computers than I ever intend to learn. Just don't let them talk you into doing something unnecessarily complicated like partitioning your hard drive and setting up ghost CD drives to fool your computer into thinking the CD is still in your hard drive. You don't want to go that route.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions. I'll certainly keep them in mind as I work through the material. Remember, though, that I'm working in 55 by 57 pixels, and that these are unit portraits, not uniform mods. So that means that the image is pretty much limited to an area from a centimeter or two below the collar-bone to just above the hairline. Maybe a little more. I also seem to have latitude between using half-faces and full faces. When you're working this part of the anatomy sleaves and coat-tails are completely out of the picture (by about a meter). I agree that it would be nice to see winter mods of uniforms with long coats, but that's for uniform mods, not unit portrait mods (the little colored square at the bottom left of the screen that suddenly has a face and a flag in it when you click on a unit in the game). I'm planning on varying the head-gear a bit, especially for the gebirgsjaeger. Right now I'm trying to make up my mind exactly how to use the 120 images to best advantage, given that many of the image slots get re-used for different kinds of units (e.g. Lieutenants and spotters, weapons crews and truck drivers). I'm not planning on doing a scenario-specific set of unit portraits: if I did something like that I would release it as a CMMOS mod, and not enough people seem to use CMMOS these days. And my current thinking is to stick to summer uniforms. In my Faces of Fear mod for CMBO I had a set of summer faces and winter faces, but you had to use my CMMOS Semiotics mod to effect the changes. I'm going to have enough trouble coming up with 120 color faces, let alone 240. While I welcome suggestions on content and approach and will read all of them with great interest, what I really need right now is sources of images that I can remove from the web by download or screenshot. So please keep those cards and letters coming, and think about images, not ideas.

Gordon and Marco usually post at CMHQ. Try scrolling through the new work section. A lot of the mods in that section work in CMBB and CMAK.

Schrully posted something about something like this the other day in the tech forum. You might want to try looking or posting about it there.

Out of curiosity, could you list a few historical or semi-historical scenarios in which the missing vehicles appear? Some modders wouldn't want to go to the trouble of making a mod that only appears, hypothetically, in Quick Battles. A glaring bit of green on a snow-white landscape in a favorite historical scenario is a different story. I'm surprised that the AA guns are missing. I thought that Gordon had given everything like that the snow treatment. Did you ever talk to him about it, and do you remember what he said?

I'm trying to do a mod that will eventually improve the graphics on the German Unit Portraits. I've started by replacing the fictional background flag with an historically correct Reichskriegflagge. The results have already been posted at CMMODS as version 1.0. I'm currently in the later phases of producing version 2.0, which currently has an ETA of mid-January. Version 2.0 adjusts the uniform images in version 1.0 so that details like the color of the collars and waffenfarbe are correct for the unit depicted. While waiting for the next round of comments on the accuracy or lack thereof of the uniforms in version 2.0, I've started to work on version 3.0. Version 3.0 is a much longer term project, and involves trying to make fuller use of the 120 image slots available for the Germans. To do this I'm using a combination of photographs and color line drawings, and trying to meld the two to create new images that look like photographs. You can mask quite a bit when you're working in less than 60 by 60 pixels. One of the problems that I'm coming up against is the shortage of color photographs. Which is the reason for this post. I've done quite a few searches, but there are almost certainly sites out there with color images of German soldiers that I can rework that I'm not aware of. So any suggestions of sites that I should look at with color images would be more than appreciated. I'm more than happy to wade through a hundred images just to find a nose or an ear that I can use (though what I want right now are color headshots of officers in field dress). I'm finding useful material from three sources: 1) Color photographs from WWII; 2) Color photographs of re-enactors (potentially good material, especially if you change the faces); 3) Color illustrations of uniforms (also needs face changing). I don't have the Osprey books or a similar source, so if someone knows where I can find more of those illustrations on the web, that would be great. I've looked at a lot of sites on the web, but I'm sure that I've missed a few. I haven't looked at images from movies because I want to avoid using familiar faces, but there are probably some sites with color photographs of obscure war movies that no one has seen that I should take a look at. So any suggestions will be welcome, no matter how obvious they seem. They might not be obvious to me. It takes me about three days to build an image from scratch, and I'm looking at 120 images, so anything I can find that is almost ready-made will be a great time saver. I'd like to get version 3.0 finished before the end of the decade.

But you can place foxholes. And you can get a few extra ones by splitting your squads during set-up.

At the end of the day I think the individual sounds (bangs, booms, and engine noises) are probably better handled the old-fashioned way. The last time I reviewed my sounds I put all the different sound mods into folders and sorted them by category. The file lists in CMBO were very helpful for that. I made a copy of the wav folder, broke it up into categories, and started listening to the sounds, one by one, until I had worked up the right mix. Not every part of every mod will be the best, but you usually can't mix within categories too much. For example, if you have three or four explosion sounds, they're supposed to form a progression of softer to louder bangs. If you stick someone else's explosion into the series it will sound out of place. This isn't just an ear-candy issue, because you are often forced to judge what you are getting bombarded with based on the relative loudness of the incoming (and how big the craters are). Sticking a really neat explosion into the middle of somebody else's series will throw the who thing out of whack. On the other hand, sometimes a sound in a series is too pronounced (like the jeep engine noise) or not pronounced enough. So enhancing the sound forces you to create your own mix and to become a bit of an editor just to use other people's mods. I had originally planned to do exactly the conversion mod you were talking about. But after I went through this process again about a year ago I decided that it was too much trouble. CMMOS is meant for switching in and out of mods -- with sound, once you've got things correctly balanced, you won't want to mess with it. So you're better off just creating a back-up folder of the original wav's, folders for the pristine version of the sound mods you're looking at (don't forget to go to Tom's site -- it's back up and has really great sounds), a folder or two with the edited versions, one with the final edit, and that final edit is also what you use in your game folder. Another way of looking at it is that writing rules and rulesets is a full-time job, and if you just want to get your-self up and running, it is not an efficient way to go. Only use CMMOS for what you really need it for -- do the other changes manually, or look into McMMM. I haven't used that particular mod manager, but from what I hear you might find it useful. You can find it at CMMODS, and it works with zipped files. It doesn't handle options well (that's CMMOS' specialty), and can only install non-CMMOS mods (amazing how many people don't understand that), but it should be quite effective used in tandem with CMMOS. Don't know if it handles wav files, though. By the way, if you followed the process of writing a ruleset and a rule, you'll be able to debug just about anything that ever goes wrong with CMMOS.