Philippe

I didn't really want to do any modding for the Warsaw Ghetto because I'm not very comfortable with the subject matter. But I've noticed that there is more than one scenario about the uprising so I've made a small mod pack with a victory flag (blue and white Irgun bicolor), a hidden unit marker, an interface small unit flag and an unachieved objective flag. I've included some notes on my attempt to develop an introductory music mod to go with it, an attempt which, unfortunately, I had to abandon. If the Western Wind ever gives me a full MP3 of their rendition of Avinu Malkeinu, I'll finish the sound mod. The new mod has been posted at CMMODS in the CMBB section.

Just remember to turn off your firewall before you start downloading mods from CMHQ.

It does with a bit of jiggling, I think (99% sure, but I don't use XP). But you should ask this question in the technical questions forum, and look for an answer from Schrully. The Technical Forum is three forums below this one on the Forum Menu. And if it isn't, that's only because I can't count.

I was hoping I was posting to Noel Coward.

I'm not interested in making myself feel important. Much the opposite, and I was hoping that you would help me out with my problem. Say something that's actually witty, and I'll say something in Greek.

But what would be possible would be to include a CMMOS/McMMM type program that would enable option switching.

Actually, the sounds do sometimes give information of a sort. If you see a German unit shoot at you for a while, and then start hearing shouts of "keine Muni", you've just learned something. Or if you're shooting at a single indistinct German figure and suddenly hear somebody yell "Sanitaete" you've learned something else. Having said that, the use of languages in the game is one of its more brilliant features (one of my regrets is that there are no Czech or Bulgarian sound files). Many Americans are culturally naive, under-educated, and xenophobic, and can only tolerate foreigners in non-threatening emasculated English-speaking Epcott-center form. I hope that's not true of anyone in this forum, because a bowdlerized view of foreigners (who use fictional German flags) is incompatible with historical accuracy. Transcripts (with translations) of the wav files are a good thing, because they clarify things otherwise misunderstood. I never realized until I read one that that weird sound one of the Americans was making was actually a cry of "Hustle up". And I'm still not sure if that is idiomatic 1940's English. I suppose I should check the dialog in Mailer's "Naked and the Dead". And I don't know if CMAK is any better, but the Canadians in CMBO were never very convincing, eh?

This is why you're no longer in charge of the tea and biscuits cart. </font>

This will take you straight to the cmmos section: http://www.combatmission.com/cmmos/cmmos.asp Normally you would just go to combatmission.com and stare at the menu on the left for a while. I've never understood why, but I've always found that menu hard to read. Somewhere on this site there used to be a fairly up-to-date collection of useful links.

Parturient montes, nascitur ridiculus mus.

Mark Gallear's website has a great assortment of increasingly baroque and quite groggy icon sets for the menu screen for CMBB. He also has the de-bowdlerization patches. Well worth a visit.

Angered? He hasn't angered the community. The community is merely shaking and seething with rage and righteous indignation. Quite an accomplishment, actually. When I first saw this thread I thought of suggesting that we start a new one in which you were only allowed to post if you were seeing double. But quickly dropped the idea lest it draw posters away from the MBT. And then realized that worrying about such things was outside my province as a nuclear attack submarine.

CMBO is quite snowy, especially in the Ardennes and the Vosges in winter. There is also a variety of winter mods available in CMMOS over at CMHQ that depict the snow cover the way it was when if first started snowing during the battle of the Bulge (Tom's Bulge Mod) all the way through to what it looked like after it had snowed for a week and everything was blanketed by the worst winter in fifty years (the Abominable Snow Mod). Look for these (and several others) under a mod group called Winter Wonderland. There are also several nice water mods showing various states of frozen ice. Strontium Dog did a particularly cold and unpleasant looking one. To get the full effects of CMBO at an absolute minimum you have to get the MDMP packs from CMHQ, because not all winter terrain bmp's are included, though the programming is there. One thing that I really like about CMBO in winter is that Gordon did snow-covered vehicle mods as well as white-wash mods. This doesn't seem to have been done for CMBB yet.

The truth is never nice. I can barely figure out which side is up, let alone whether that little squiggle is a tree or a bush. I had an epiphany the other day when I realized that double tracks look like single tracks in aerial photographs because from higher altitude a track starts to merge into a single rail. But at least clods like me would be able to figure out the shapes of the fields that Normandy is subdivided into. That in itself is worth something. I hate playing on wide open spaces that I suspect don't really exist.

I wish RGW had the same map graphics. The only thing I have like it is War in the East, which you can now get as a free download from Matrix or somebody like that. I'll probably try RGW at some point next year. Took a look at Danube Blues last night -- to make it work you would have to use two rulesets, the Hungarian and lateware German. There's an issue we haven't touched on yet, but I'll mention it now just in case. If a vehicle doesn't change but the rule and ruleset are there and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong in the log, that can sometimes mean that the rule changes a large class of vehicles (e.g. all german vehicles). It is important to realize that it only changes a vehicle if a) a winter mod for the vehicle was done that mod got converted to cmmos format and c) somebody remembered to update the file list with the bmp numbers for that mod. This gets discussed at some point in the readme file. We may not need to go into it, but I'm mentioning it now just in case. If a mod exists and everything else works but the mod isn't applying, the fix is usually simple -- you write down the list of bmp numbers, check the relevant file list to see if the numbers are there, and add them in if they aren't. You have to be careful with that, though, because the file lists are what make the CMMOS program think clearly. In the simpler case where the bmp numbers are listed but the mod doesn't exist, the symptom is often that the bar in the lower lefthand corner fills up quickly and doesn't crawl across the screen. That means that the mod is either very small, or simply isn't there. Another thing you have to realize is that the rules and mod conversions aren't infallible. There's a mistake in the Gautrek Dirty Truck mod that was used on the special edition mod cd that makes it impossible to use if you don't know how to fix it. This kind of error takes one of two forms -- a slip of the hand on the extensions (in the Gautrek Dirty Truck the culprit was a double instead of a single i), or a slip of the hand in writing the rule. My favorite almost invisible and incredibly insidious cmmos error is when someone accidently hits the space bar when writing a bmp number extension -- practically invisible, and figuring out why it doesn't work can drive you insane unless you have a very sharp eye. With any luck you won't need to know this.

By the way, the German vehicle rulesets only change German vehicles. To change Hungarian vehicles I think you would need to use the Hungarian ruleset which has rules for summer and winter textures. Same for Italians and Romanians.

Detailed aerial recce photographs of Europe taken during WWII. There are already plenty of maps down to 1:10,000 that give you contour lines for elevation (e.g. the French IGN series and the hikers maps), but the war photographs will tell you if a building existed at the time, and what the plant cover was. So it could mean a quantum leap in battlefield map detail and accuracy.

1) If you click on the icon that installs everything in the winter dunkelgrau mods, and then fire up MikeyD's Warm Place to Sleep, are all of the German vehicles in whitewash? If not, what exactly does the CMMOS log say? Quote the relevant part, and maybe we can figure this out. 2) I'm not as familiar with CMBB as with CMBO, but isn't Danube Blues a late war scenario? In which case, no, the whitewashed dunkelgrau vehicles won't show up no matter what you do. In a late war scenario you'll need to apply the whitewashed dunkelgelbs (I can never remember the year they switched over, but I think it was '43). Once again, if that doesnt do it, please quote the relevant section of the CMMOS log. 3) If anything isn't working on either ruleset, a) confirm that the rulesets are in place, confirm that the rules are in place, c) confirm that you see the icons lit up in enabled form (you still haven't mentioned any of this, so I can't tell what's going on other than the end result), and d) (really important) quote the CMMOS log (yes it's a mantra). I'm hoping that meditating on the chronology of German camouflage will solve the problem, but if it doesn't, we have to get to the bottom of this. It's probably something that you're doing or not doing that you aren't aware of. But if the icons are lighting up in enabled mode and you see the little dark line in the lower left-hand corner of the screen crawling across the page when you apply a mod, then the only thing that will give us a clue is the log. And full disclosure.

Just realized it's probably easier to use MikeyD's Scenario "A Warm Place to Sleep" to test whether or not things are working. I didn't mention it in the configure discussion which we're not getting into if we don't have to, but there are a total of about 17 zip files of mods that have to be downloaded and installed to make those two rulesets work. So that in itself is a bit of an operation. I don't remember how many of them are included in the CMBB Special Edition Mod disk -- I just made a list of what I had, compared it to what was at CMHQ, and if I didn't already have it, I downloaded it. Some of the CMMOS mods at CMHQ are in non-CMMOS form on the mod disk. I mention this last bit for those reading this who might have the special edition and might not have realized that it has a very large selection, but not a complete one.

Don't delete anything, we just need to assemble a little information. First, the two rulesets in question should be RuleSet 150 and RuleSet 152. The path should look something like C:\Program Files\GEM Software Productions\CM Mod Option Selector\CMBB For the absolute avoidance of doubt, that is not the same CMBB file as the one your game is in. CMMOS has a CMBO and a CMBB section, and that just means you're in the CMBB section. So you want to install the two German winter vehicle rulesets to what I will call in shorthand the CMMOS CMBB folder. When I look inside of mine, by the way, I see 25 folders. 23 of them are Ruleset folders, one is the FileList folder, and one is the mod folder. Assuming you've installed the two ruleset to the correct place, if you look inside 150 you'll see four enabled icons, three disabled icons, four description text files, an info text file, four rules text files, and a credits word file. You'll see something similar inside 152, only there will be a lot more of everything. The reason you'll see more enabled than disabled files is that one of them restores everything to summer graphics. Having made sure that there is an engine under the hood (because that is what you were really doing), go back to the folder CM Mod Option Selector and take a quick look around. Yours won't be the same as mine, but they have a couple of key details in common. A CMBB folder (where you were just poking around), one or more readme files (which need to be looked at several times until you get the hang of this), and most importantly, a CMMOSlog textfile. This file is your friend. Be nice to it. What it essentially does is perform a series of sequential checks whenever you fire up the CMMOS program. And whenever you try to do something in the CMMOS program, it tells you that you did or didn't do it, and usually gives a very good clue as to why what you tried didn't work. Close (rather than minimze)GEM Software Productions and launch CMMOS. Click on a few ruleset tabs, then close CMMOS, and take a look at the log. You'll get the idea. Now close everything up and start over. You know the two rulesets are in the CMBB CMMOS folder because you installed them to there. And if necessary, you installed them to a temp file and put them where they belong by brute force. So you know they're there. If they're there, the next time you fire up CMMOS you'll see a tab across the top of the control panel for each one. If you have a lot of tabs it's easy to overlook things, but they'll be there. Click on the tab for the dunkelgrau winter textures. You should see four icons, but three of them will probably have the greyed out wrong-way traffic sign showing: the mod is disabled because you haven't configured it yet. I'll skip the instructions on configuring the mod because I think you already know how and we're focusing on diagnostics. If something goes wrong we'll go over that point on a subsequent round. So via the configuration routine you add the three mods that go with this ruleset. Close CMMOS, re-open CMMOS and navigate back to the winterized dunkelgrau (you don't really have to do it that way, but things get stuck in program memory sometimes). This time when you look at the control panel all four icons should be lit up and enabled. That doesn't mean they'll work, that just means that there's enough of what the program looks for in your mod section to recognize the presence of a particular mod. Click on each icon, and install one of them (just not the first one, because that makes everything revert to default graphics). Now close CMMOS, open up GEM Software Productions again, and take a look at the content of the log file. What you're looking for will probably be in the last six or sever lines of text. If there is something wrong you'll get some kind of message about a mod or a file not being recognized, found, not existing, or being out of reach. That's where the fun begins. As an aside, you may want to set up a Quick Battle (and make sure you save it) with just the vehicles and weather conditions you are testing. By the way, I'm pretty sure you won't be able to get whitewash to show up unless there's snow on the ground, so don't forget to set up the right weather: pick something like January 1942 (for the dunkelgrau) with lots of snow. There's a good chance that if you do things in this order and you're properly configured, the rulesets will be working. If not the last few lines of your log will make interesting reading. One last thing. I always forget to hit the apply button after I click on one of the icons. But to mention this now than to find out later... So give it a shot and let us know what happens.

Not sure I'm going to address the question correctly, but there are several unit picture mods in the CMBB section of CMMODS. There are a couple of good ones with black and white photographs, I think one was by Tarkus and one was by Patboy. There's also an extremely accurate one by Michael Dorosh (part of his ASL Conversion mod), as well as an interesting one by Schoerner. I also happen to have done a unit picture mod that replaces the fictional flag in the background of the German units with a real one. There are a few kinks in this mod that need to be fixed (e.g. wrong color collars on a couple of Luftwaffe units) so it will go through at least one more version, maybe before the end of the year. To find mine go into CMBB Newest and go about twenty items down the list. The photgraph mods (there are two that I can think of) are worth looking at and replace all the units -- to find them go into the non-national category of units and start scrolling. You have to hunt a bit, but they're in there, and well worth the effort to find them. Michael's unit pictures can be found in the postings of his conversion (you'll see them all grouped together), and Shoerner's mod is probably of about the same vintage as the photographs, so you'll have to do some scrolling. I hope that's what you were asking.

If I'm reading your post correctly you've got it working now? I don't actually know CMBB all that well, by the way. I was planning on loading everything into CMMOS and eventually figuring out what I prefer. One thing I've noticed is that if there is a BFC recovery rule in a ruleset, the program will recognize whatever is sitting in those bmp's as the BFC originals (even if they aren't). It then stores them into a zip file in the mods section the first time you run a rule. There are a couple of rulesets that don't seem to have the recovery rule. I suspect that these were from an earlier model of CMBB CMMOS, though some of the earlier mods are quite good. At some point I'll experiment with it and, if necessary write a recovery rule and maybe post it. [i'm a little leary of falling into the CMMOS rule-writing trap -- I spent 18 months writing rules and not ever playing the game -- I refuse to go there again !] The whole point about CMMOS was that eventually everything would be in CMMOS. We pretty much got there with CMBO, but then Real Life started catching up with the key players, so though the treatment of CMBB was thorough, I don't think it went as deep. At the time we realized that the CMHQ website would outlive any other private website, so we wanted everything in CMMOS to make sure it got preserved. And sure enough, there are now many mods that only exist in CMMOS form. So get all the rulesets and all the mods from the CMHQ site. CMMOS was designed so that the user could figure out which he preferred, and was also designed so that you could change mods easily each time your fire up CM. I literally change my mods for each different PBEM scenario that I play. One the subject of winter mods, I really like the snow-covered (as opposed to whitewashed) mods that Gordon did for CMBO. I don't do vehicles, but I will admit to having looked at it in a few select cases. It seems like it's a lot more work than whitewashing, and that's probably why there are so few of them in CMBB. Too bad, because there's lots of snow in Russia in winter, and every time it snows some of it will end up on the vehicles for a while, whitewashed or not. I seem to recall that when he did the whitewashed series he was running out of time, otherwise the vehicles (and there are a lot of them) would have gotten the full treatment.

I just hope that when mods like this get posted they are clearly labeled as being CMMOS mods without extensions. Many people have gone to the trouble of downloading them from the original site (CMHQ) or already have them on the CD mod disk, and it doesn't seem fair to waste their time causing them to accidently download something they already have. Having said that, I recognize that some people are so computer challenged that removing a CMMOS extension from a bmp file number is too complicated for them to think about, so it's not a bad idea to repost previously published and readily available work, with proper attribution, of course. If I were redesigning CMMODS I would come up with two new categories: one for situations like this, and one for grouping thematic mods in one place. That way, for example, the Vietnam and the Sea Lion mods wouldn't be mixed in with Africa Corps. I seem to spend a lot of time scrolling through CMMODS trying to figure out if I need to download particular mods, and/or in what order when I eventually get around to it. If I'm only interested in CMBB or Vietnam or out of the box CMAK sifting through everything else is time consuming.

The comments I was referring to were the comments about patches. Even if they were considering thinking about doing something about the reload bug it would be inappropriate for them to comment until they had run a lot of tests, not just to scope out the parameters of the bug, but to get a sense of what would be involved if they were to make any more changes to the code. If you take a look at that recent thread where everyone lost their temper you'll realize that the subtext is a certain reluctance to do anything else to the code lest the whole edifice come tumbling down.

Last time I looked the Dark Steel Interface wasn't a CMMOS mod. So you just copy and paste to the bmp folder, but make sure you make a copy of all the different bmp's changed by that mod and put them in a separate folder first. This raises an important point -- CMMOS only works for mods that have been converted to CMMOS format, and mods that have been converted to CMMOS format don't work unless you use them in CMMOS. So it's really important to make sure that you've got your CMMOS configured to work on something simple before you start trying to add more mods.