Philippe

Pick one mod, describe it exactly by file name and describe exactly what you're doing and we can sort you out. Have you gotten any of the other CMMOS mods to work? What is the full path of your CMMOS, and what is the full path of your CMBB (i.e. where do you have them)? I'm not familiar with that (or any other mod) off the top of my head, but are you sure it's a CMMOS mod? If so, are you sure you remembered to install it (clicking on the configure button etc)? Does an icon for the mod appear in the CMMOS control panel, and if so, is it in enabled or disabled mode ? This might be a good time to learn to read the CMMOS log file. What does the log file say in the part that pertains to your mod after you click on the icons for that mod in the CMMOS control panel. And then there's my personal favorite, did you remember to apply the mod after you clicked on it in the CMMOS control panel (I do this one myself all the time when I'm in a hurry).

Maybe we need to take a few deep breaths and step back a bit on this one. Given the general trend of comments that I've seen coming from BFC I would be surprised if this gets fixed anytime soon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we at the end of the road on patches for the CMx1 series ? That being the case, maybe what we need to do is to draw up a list of what to do to *not* trigger the bug. There seem to be two broad categories: Head-to-Head and Solitaire. From Sergio's post I get the impression that the bug can be avoided in Head-to-Head by a simple gentleman's agreement not to resave during a game. I really hate house rules, but it's a simple one and I'm not sure we have a choice. I'm afraid it will have to be left up to each Tournament and Ladder as to how they address or avoid this problem. In all fairness I think it is important to make clear to those who play against the AI how to avoid this bug, if it can be avoided, because I suspect that more games are played solitaire than with animate opponents. I do not include myself in the last category, especially in the early morning. If it makes you feel any better, pay a visit to one of the Tiller game Napoleonic forums and ask about artillery, zones of control, and cavalry charges. A few extra wingmen circling overhead will seem tame by comparison.

Just took a look at one of the related threads in the other forum. If I understand correctly, if I play a PBEM and do not do a save in the middle of a turn the bug will not occur. Is that the case ? Does this then mean that the only way to avoid the bug on these aircraft is to play PBEM ? Is there no way to avoid it when playing against the AI other than never saving ? I think we need to focus on finding all the work-arounds on this one, because I really don't think it is going to get patched.

I wish you hadn't said that. The next question is whether the bug happens in QB's and scenario's, or just QB's. I noticed something in one of the bug lists that made me think the bug might not occur all of the time. Seems odd for a bug to occur less than 100%, unless the variables that trigger it aren't present and this difference hasn't been recorded. Until this gets resolved (if it ever does get resolved) I guess we just have to think of a single plane as several flights from a squadron that may or may not make multiple sequential passes over the battlefield. I hate being told that my toy is broken.

This is perhaps very naive of me, but I'm also wondering whether a plane bugged in a Quick Battle will necessarily be bugged in a scenario, and whether both of those apply to PBEM's. I haven't really played CMBB yet so I can't comment, and though it stands to reason that the answer is probably yes, there's always a chance that this didn't get picked up before because it only shows up in a limited subset of all possible situations (= non-pbem quick battles only). To be scientific about this you have to test all four possible situations -- which is a little tricky with the PBEM. Knowing that the bug is operative in all four cases or only just some of them might help someone who was familiar with the hardcoded programming identify what the cause of the problem was. I'm guessing that the Il-2 Sturmovik is probably bugged (without even looking at what it carries in CMBB) simply because it was probably used as a multi-option plane. That would be sad if it were the case.

What exactly did the Polish Home Army have in the way of armaments ? The reason I'm asking is because I thought I remember reading a weapons list (might have been for the Warsaw Ghetto rising) and it seemed like there were a lot of British small arms (and probably a smattering of German small arms). If that is correct (and I have no idea whether it is or not since I haven't researched it), would it make any sense to use CMAK early war conscript Brits against some kind of late war Germans (assuming that is possible). On a related note, I've toyed with the idea of modding the Warsaw Ghetto scenario in CMBB, but gave it up because I don't like the Russian helmets and uniforms (which could probably be converted into civilan clothes). I've read that they actually flew a blue and white Irgun bicolor next to the red and white polish flag -- modding that flag would be easy and interesting, and the unachieved objective marker wouldn't be hard to come up with, but searching the web for MP3's of Kol Nidre would be a little too depressing. Too much work for one heartbreaking little scenario.

I think you might also want to lighten it a bit. Perhaps add a layer of sand-coloring in Photoshop? Be sure to post it to CMMODS when you're done.

Oddly enough, I actually prefer the balkenkreuz as a German hidden unit marker. I think the swastika would be appropriate if the Germans in a particular scenario are SS troops or maybe Fallschirmjaeger, but I know too many WWII German veterans who were simply patriotic Germans doing what they perceived as their duty, even though they couldn't stand Hitler's politics. Without straying too close to the fortunately defunct political forum, there are a lot of Americans in Iraq who are Democrats -- imagine how they would feel fifty years from now if someone used the Repulbican elephant as their hidden unit marker just because the republicans happened to be running the country. The analogy is weak, of course, because the Nazi party symbol got elevated to a national symbol as well. But I think that either the balkenkreuz or the iron cross (in either its bowdlerized or WWII-era version) make very good inclusive national symbols for all branches of the service. And they're very good designs, too. You might want to take a look at the different options available in the CMMOS vexillography mod over at CMHQ if you're interested in the Reichskriegflagge or the Hakenkreuzfahne. You should also take a look at Juju's German flag pack as well. Note that the iron cross and the balkenkreuz are both included in the design of the most all-inclusive German flag, the Reichskriegfanhne (National War Flag). You might also want to take a look at Mark Gallear's mod site.

Has anyone performed the test described in the parallel thread in the CMAK forum ? Is the CMBB bug identical to the CMAK bug ? For those not familiar with that thread, the bug seems to only get triggered by multi-option load planes (different size bombs or rockets) and not single option loads (one kind of bomb and that's it).

I don't suppose you came across any caches of color photographs of head shots of minor axis re-enactors staring directly into the camera by any chance ? Please say no, because if you did, I might have to start another unit portrait set. There's some nice Italian material at Commando Supremo, along with a pretty good forum on Italy in WWII. There's also an astonishing number of Italian fascist sites out there that glorify Mussolini, disclaimers notwithstanding. A weird combination of creepy and unintentionally funny. I found them when I was looking for WWII Italian music, of which there is quite a lot (some of it very good, some of it incredibly bad). From the sounds of it the same guy who was writing songs for Fred Astaire may also have been writing songs for Mussolini when he invaded Africa.

CMMODS is very good, but much of what you want is lurking in the CMMOS section at CMHQ. Many of the mods at CMMODS seem to be CMHQ cmmos mods without the extensions, though almost all the new work goes there as well. Many series that were started but never completed in cmmos ended up at cmmods. Be sure to get the Undaunted skies at CMMODS, as well as the Andrew Fox uniforms. Unfortunately there was a great crash a while back, and I don't know if all the mods were reloaded (I wasn't paying attention to CMBB back then).

Try sending a cc to Madmatt, be polite, and make sure you get the end of the e-mail address correct. Looks like you're missing a t.com from the address. And mention whether the charge has appeared on your credit card or not.

What address did you use ? They usually answer in a matter of hours.

After some more coaching by mchlstrt I managed to put ripples on three black pennants. They're a bit on the dark side, but the ripples will show in midday light. The reason I wanted the black pennants so badly is that they were actually used. Note the pennant with the fasces under the fine young fascist attacking the Communist polar bear. To distinguish this from yesterday's upload to CMMODS I'm calling this version 1.5 as opposed to 1.0. To reward the patience of those who download this twice I've included a jpeg of the polar bear and my private versions of the German and Soviet national flags made to historically correct proportions. If enough people feel that the black pennants are too dark I will make lighter versions of them.

Thanks to mchlstrt's timely assistance I was able to finish the first version of Little Semiotics, which I have posted in the CMBB section at CMMODS. I don't have any screenshots handy, but it looks like the eight flags that I posted screenshots of earlier, only a little darker and rippled. And there are a few surprises. Because these flags seem to look a little different on different computers, I'd be interested in feedback: if there are any unresolved visual problems I can do another version. I suspect that these flags will appear a bit darker on a Mac.

I was testing the Romanian unachieved victory objective flag that I'd finally managed to get decent ripples on when I found myself staring at a huge map of the Caucausus. And a long column of vehicles. Even though I had more important things to do, I couldn't help myself. I haven't really played CMBB yet, but I figureed it wouldn't hurt to move some of those vehicles down the road to that bridge on the river. A couple of kilometers away. Now in CMBO I've gotten fairly good at column movement. The trick is to make gradual turns by using several waypoints where the road bends, and to have many more waypoints on the straight stretches than you need. I eventually run out of waypoints, but the reason that I do this is so that I can vary the speed of different vehicles in the column between Move, Hunt, and Walk. When used in combination with pauses I can usually keep a column of vehicles of different speeds moving along smoothly without anyone rear-ending anyone else. Too often, that is. So I'm looking at my first CMBB column movement situation and I figure that I'll apply all that CMBO technique. Wrong. I don't understand how you're supposed to do it, especially if there are lots of twists and turns in the road. I tried increasing the spacing between units, to the point that when I did get a column sorted out it would have about forty meters between each vehicle. That's a bit more than one meter of road space for each kilometer per hour. But I still got into trouble when I got my trucks moving. I had a huge hairball when I tried to cross the bridge, because the column was halted there (staggered stopping points), but vehicles still kept crashing into the tail end of the column, setting off a chain reaction of stalls and more collisions. With problems like that, who needs the enemy ? I got it to the point that if everything in the column was moving at the same speed I could make it around one turn smoothly. I needed three waypoints to do it, and the turn wasn't a very sharp one. At this point, unless there is something that I'm missing, road movement in CMBO seems to be better than in CMBB, if for no other reason than the fact that if you use enough waypoints you can finesse a column of trucks and tanks down a road without it turning into a bumper-car derby. Is there something that I'm missing ? It's almost as if what is needed is a road movement toggle that severely limits the waypoint penalty as long as the mover is a vehicle moving along a road. What I really wish this game had was a command for maintaining a constant speed and spacing in relation to one other vehicle, so that you could create a string of vehicles and then only have to give movement orders to the leader. It's really dissapointing to suspect that attacks on moving columns and attacks by moving columns aren't going to happen because there's a modeling problem with column movement. It's sad, because movement in, to, and from columns is a characteristic part of mobile warfare. BTS, fix or do somefink! [ December 09, 2004, 04:25 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Does this mean that any time you save other than at the end of a PBEM turn any aircraft will rearm in flight ? It seems like it would be pretty hard to avoid triggering this if you play against the AI and never play games straight through. Also, if I understand correctly, it means that in a large PBEM game you can't save in the middle of your turn without messing up the aircraft (and losing the file name in the game save screen, which is why I don't like to save in the middle of a turn anyway). If I understand what is going on the fix is a simple little house rule not to save in the middle of a PBEM turn to avoid messing up aircraft reloading. But are we really sure that the second and third bombing and strafing runs aren't just the rest of the flight circling around ? I thought that airplanes only went on solo missions in flight simulators.

In all fairness I think I should say that I'm no longer so sure that CM doesn't handle rich colors well. What I am sure of is that I don't always know which buttons to push to make it handle them. After yet more experimenting I'm back to dark green flags which I like because they stand out nicely against the background (even when the background is green). I'm now using a modified version of the template mchlstrt used to make the second of the two flags that he posted. I need to do a little more testing, but the rippled pennants are finally approaching completion.

There are two kinds of mods on the mod disk: CMMOS mods and non-CMMOS mods. I wouldn't call any of them self loading, but some of them are easier to use and remove once you make an initial time investment. Make a big folder in your hard drive somewhere convenient. I call mine "CMBB mods and downloads" so that it shows up right next to the game in my C drive, and I made the folder name intentionally long so that it would be hard to mistake it for anything else. Inside that folder, make a couple more. One of them should be called CMMOS mods, and one of them should be called Standalone mods. You can name these folders anything you like, though I would avoid calling anything simply CMMOS if you think there's a chance you might use it. Get the standalone mods from the mod disk and put them in the Standalone mod folder. If you're feeling really compulsive you might consider making a separate sub-folder for each author -- that way when you're reading about his mod in the documentation it will be easier to find what you're supposed to be looking at. There may be an installer for part of this step, if so it is discussed in the readme files which are very helpful. The only problem is that there are three or four of them. Put the CMMOS mods in the CMMOS mod folder, along with the various files that discuss CMMOS. What the mod disk comes with that does have a self installer is a program called CMMOS 4.03. It gets used for switching in and out of different mods. Don't try using it without reading the documentation. Unless you happen to be a clone of Gordon Molek, you'll almost certainly get it wrong if you don't do a little reading first. MikeT wrote an excellent tutorial on how to use it, and Gordon wrote and continuously updated a very good illustrated readme file. I'm told that there is more latitude in CMBB CMMOS than I usually let on. What follows is based on getting myself and others out of trouble with an earlier incarnation of the program. When the CMMOS self-installer asks you where you want to put the program, do not put it in a folder called games, and whatever you do do not put it in CMBB. Unless something has changed it will set up its own folder along a path that looks something like C/Program Files/GEM Software Productions/CMMOS/etc. Try to keep it in the same directory as CMBB (it may be possible to relax that, but I've never tested it). After CMMOS installs itself you will need to add some rule sets to it. CMMOS is an exchange program, rule sets tells the program what to exchange. There are several rulesets that come with the mod disk -- I can't remember whether they self install or not, but it's a good idea to try doing it manually (once again, read the readme files). They have been superceded by many rulesets (and many new CMMOS mods) that can be found at Madmatt's semi-unofficial site CMHQ at combatmission.com. Three quarters of what is on that site is on your mod disk, a little bit of it is older and didn't make the cut, but there's quite a lot that is top-flight and that can be downloaded. And if you look closely you'll even notice that some of the mods that are in the Standalone section of the mod disk are in CMMOS form on the site, so you'll eventually want to download these even though you already have them. Depending on how much space you have, it might also be a good idea to make an extra installation of CMBB, throw out everything except the wav and bmp folders, and store these for reference in your mod folder. That was easier to do CMBO, but the reason for doing it here is that the cd stores the bmp folder in a very compressed form. I don't think it's such a pain to do the extra download, but having the safety back-up for the first few weeks that you're messing with mods (especially if you aren't quite sure what you're doing) can be quite useful. When you're comfortable that you know what is going on you can always delete your extra bmp and wav folders. By the way, it's a bad idea to store your back-up folders in the game folder itself (you might erase the wrong one). One of the reasons for the back-up folder is that CMMOS will eventually make zipped back-ups of whatever is in the bmp file the first time you use a CMMOS mod. The problem is, if you were messing around with stand-alones before you used CMMOS for the first time, the program will think the mod is a BFC original. Easy to fix, but a little disorienting the first time you encounter it. Hope this helps, and read the readme files -- I think what self-installs and what doesn't is pretty clearly marked. You don't really want mods to self-install anyway, unless they come with an easy way to back out of it.

I guess PC's and Mac's really do handle color differently. At this point, as far as I can tell the CM visual engine doesn't handle the modulation of rich colors very well when run on a PC. That means the CM engine is not optimal for 18th and 19th century combat sims which use lots of interesting colors, but then we knew that anyway. So I've taken a long hard look at the unachieved victory objective flags and convinced myself that lodencoat green is probably a better color for flags in a sim involving the opening months of WWI. To eliminate the glare effect I've created an undercoat of offwhite grey and layered that onto my ripple template (which is a restretched section of the one that Juju uses for his flags). Even after using an undercoat and the feldgrau base color that I used on my German flags in the Semiotics mod, I still had to do some repainting, but the end result is a darker feldgrau, less rich than the flat flags shown so far in this thread, but probably more appropriate to WWII, which was a drabber, less colorful age. Given the amount of repairs involved I think I may limit the set to the eight flags shown in an earlier post. The difference now is that they're a dark grey-green and rippled. I'll post some pictures when I get a chance.

Gahh... I found an e-mail with a zip attachment in my mailbox this morning, but I don't want to open it because I don't know who it's from. I may not look paranoid, but I'm careful about what I open. The worst part is that the address looks vaguely familiar (all the more reason not to open it). A one-liner from the address that I sent my last message to would clear up a lot of confusion. We're having a bad day here in cloud cookoo land.

Maybe not easily printable, but the file lists inside CMMOS are pretty complete when it comes to vehicles. Not infallible, though.

I don't know exactly how big my inbox is, but AOL seems to be able to handle some pretty large files. If not, I have a back-up g-mail account that's pretty big. I just upgraded to Photoshop 7, so I'm assuming I should be able to read files written in 5. I like the shape of those ripples very much -- they're an improvement over the ones I was using. The acid test will come when you try to display them in game, though. I'll be curious to see if the glare effect is still there. If you built the triangular ripples up from the smaller of the two ripple templates I sent you it may not be a problem. Unless there's some technical approach that you have that I don't understand. As an aside, I don't actually know how a pennant ripples. It's not something that I'd given much thought to in the past, and it's not something that you see every day. Maybe I should hang a triangular piece of cloth out my window and watch it for a few weeks to see what happens...

I'm using a PC, and doing the work in a combination of Photoshop and Paint. Normally I'm about 10% Photoshop and 90% Paint, but the ripple effect can't be done in Paint. The problem is not the general darkness, I think, but rather the perceived glare that results from stretching the ripple template to fit onto a much larger flag. At least I think that's what is going on. If I'm right the solution would be to find a ripple template that works on pennants that is about four times the resolution of the one that I'm using.

Isn't there a line in Aristophanes that war is "the hard one, the wet one, the one upon the legs" ? Though apparently that passage is more a reference to being incontinent in line of battle from fear rather than from disease. I remember a former girlfriend telling me about a passage in a soldier's memoirs from the Pacific theatre in which things got so bad that he cut off the back of his pants to save time during the constant firefights.