Philippe

I've sent a sample of the problem to the address in your sig that you should answer at your leisure (a good answer is always better than a rushed one). Please let me know if you didn't get it.

Great that you got the Autobahn ruleset installed. I'm not sure that those three mods that you mentioned would appear in that particular ruleset though. At the risk of beating a dead horse, how do you know that the three mods you tried to install with CMMOS are CMMOS mods ? Please answer the following: 1) Do the mod bmp's have extensions on their file numbers ? [e.g. bmp number 12345 with an Andrew Fox mod would probably appear with an "_atf" extension, and would be 12345_atf in a CMMOS mod. 2) Does the zip of the mod with the bmp extensions include a zip with a CMMOS rule for the ruleset? Many people naively think that if they put some funny letters and an underscore after their mod bmp numbers that they've somehow made the mod "CMMOS compliant". The way that you make a mod work in CMMOS is to write a rule textfile with a name like Rule123-456. If a mod doesn't have a zip file inside it with a name like that ("Rule123-456") it won't work in CMMOS. I really think that what you have to do to understand this, besides rereading Gordon's readme files and Mike's excellent tutorial, is to take one mod and one ruleset that are easy to get right the first time. I suggest we do this with Juju's small arms, and do it in detail. So download the appropriate ruleset, and tell us what your control panel screen looks like, then download the mod, try to install it, and tell us if a new icon appears in the control panel, and whether or not it has the european one-way do not enter sign showing. If you give us a precise answer to those questions it will eliminate a very large array of potential problems, and will save us from having to ask you a lot of questions. It will also be a good learning experience in the use of CMMOS. In case you hadn't guessed, there are probably ten other people out there reading this who are too shy to ask their own questions, so be a mensch and help them find a solution to their problem by solving yours in public.

Rulesets won't do him any good if a) the rules don't exist, and the mod bmp's don't have CMMOS extensions keyed to the rule. Having said that, I've never tried putting unzipped rulesets in the bmp folder. With CMBO CMMOS it is generally a bad idea to put anything other than bmp's in the bmp folder. I must say I was unaware that CMMOS 4.03 would look for rulesets anywhere but in CMMOS, but I'm not as familiar with CMBB CMMOS as with CMBO CMMOS. Have you actually tried doing what you're recommending and can you say with 100% certainty that it works ? I don't recall seeing anything about this when I was part of Gordon's CMMOS cabal distribution list, but then most of us tended to have our noses stuck in our own particular parts of the project.

The three mods that you mention in the error texts may not be CMMOS mods. I would be very surprised if the FatherofNonesoundmod worked in CMMOS. I haven't looked at it yet, but sound mods are very tricky to get into CMMOS. The error message is saying that the mod isn't formatted correctly, which means that it either has a mistake in it, or it isn't formatted for CMMOS (the program doesn't distinguish). I am not aware of a CMMOS version of UD's sky. I was thinking of writing one myself eventually, but the error message is saying the same thing as on the last one. Not formatted correctly or (as is probably the case) not formatted at all. I'm not sure I know what a drtywntrdmikeyd is, so I can't comment. The way you test something is in little steps, starting with something that you know works. See if you can get the juju small arms mod to work. And remember, if a mod hasn't been converted to cmmos format it won't work in cmmos. That means there are rules in zip files inside the mod, and the rules have rule numbers so the program can sort and use them. I notice one of your error messages is unable to load rulesets. Did you download and install any rulesets ? If you didn't the rules won't have anyplace to go. Looks like you have CMMOS in the forbidden games folder. You also seem to have it in a different drive than your mods. What is the path for CMBB? I can't tell if you're getting an "unable to load Rulesets" message because your unusual locations are confusing the program, or if the program can't find the rulesets because they simply aren't installed. I think you really need to sit down, read the readme file, and start over again. Please describe the structure of the contents of CMMOS. How many folders do you see when you look inside, and what is in them ? Specifically, what ruleset folders do you have, and do you have rules in them ?

Glad that you put CMMOS inside its own directory, but where exactly did you put it ? What is the path ? Could you explain No. 3 ? That may be the problem. The other possibility is that you're trying to run a CMMOS mod that hasn't been converted to CMMOS. I'm not sure I know where to find Juju's stone wall on the CMHQ site. So to be sure we're on the same page, try a different mod. Get the Juju_smallarms_CMMOS file from the Miscellaneous ruleset. Make sure that you've downloaded and installed the ruleset first or the rule won't have anywhere to go and the mod won't install (is that your problem, perhaps?) Please tell us exactly what you're doing. Making me guess is bad, because if I guess about how to do something in CMMOS I'll probably guess correctly: I'm used to how it works and I tend to instinctively do the right thing. Until you rewire your brain for CMMOS think your assumptions will tend to be wrong, so please spell everything out this time. One more thing. What does the cmmos log say ? You haven't mentioned anything about clicking on tabs on the main cmmos control screen, but that kind of activity and its results will show up in the log. And if something is wrong or is missing, the log will tell. At an even more basic level, what is the name of the ruleset that you're looking in, is there a normal icon or a disabled icon ? As I said before, try it again with the small arms. My CMBO CMMOS is encyclopedic, but my CMBB CMMOS is anything but. Having said that, I don't seem to have that mod (the juju stone wall) that you mentioned as a cmmos mod, so I have to wonder. Does it have zips of rules inside, and do the bmp files have cmmos extensions ? What is the rule number for the mod ? [Again, if you know that, go look in the cmbb ruleset folders and see if a) the ruleset is there and the rule is there.

There's a whole host of questions that need to be addressed to solve your problem. 1) Which CMMOS ? I might be able to help you with the official one at CMHQ that's numbered 4.03. 2) Exactly where did you install it ? It needs to go to something that looks like C:\Program Files\GEM Software Productions. If you put it inside the game it won't work. 3) As an addendum to the last point, if your game isn't exactly where the program expects it to be, CMMOS won't work. CMMOS expects CMBB to be at C:\Program Files\CMBB. If you let Bill Gates convince you that it belongs in a folder called "My Games", nothing will work. 4) Exactly what do you mean by "point it to a zipped mod" ? Please spell out your actions in excruciating detail, because barring something alluded to in 2) or 3) above, this is very likely the source of the problem. I hope you aren't trying to describe the process of telling CMMOS where CMBB is located the first time you configure it. 5) In the older versions of CMMOS I would have told you to take a peek inside the GEM Software/CMMOS/CMBB folder to make sure that the rule set and rule is installed. It's not a bad idea when you're trying to figure out what you forgot to do. If you don't see it, it probably means that you forgot to configure the mod. So click on the CMMOS desktop icon, click on CMBB (assuming that you have CMBO in there as well), and make sure you have the add mod tab pressed before you start trying to point. In truth, if I have to guess what you're doing and list all the things you might have done wrong I'll just confuse you more. So please spell out exactly what it is you're doing. Half the time just stepping back to figure out what you've done makes you realize that you forgot something very basic.

This is the current state of the unachieved objective markers. From left to right, top row: Plain Generic, German, Finnish, Romanian. Bottom row: Hungarian, Italian, Soviet, Polish Communist. Not shown are a series of alternates, including pennants in black or green with SS runes or bundles of fasces, and a blue pennant with Luftwaffe eagle. The concept behind this type of objective marker is that you change your markers depending on which side you're about to play. So what you'll see are little reminders that don't look like anything else that these are the locations that your national army is supposed to control (i.e. dark green pennants with national coats of arms), interspersed with a few of national flags from each side. It works because green triangles don't look anything like red rectangles. And for those that don't like changing flags every time they play a scenario I'm including a plain generic pennant, though I find it a bit boring to look at. I'm currently having a problem applying ripples to flags. I had thought I had solved it, but because the pennants need a fairly high resolution to avoid having jagged edges the residual glare from the ripple template is hard to ignore. Personally I like the idea that achieved objectives flutter in the wind and unachieved ones don't, so for that and other reasons I'm not willing to declare this done yet. What to put on the flags was a source of bother. I finally decided that aircraft roundels and things of that ilk look great as hidden unit markers (one almost ended up on the finnish and romanian pennants), but aren't really appropriate here. What I really wanted was to find national army symbols, but failing that I fell back on national or monarchist coats of arms. Comments and suggestions are welcome, especially with my technical problem (which may be no more than a by-product of my lack of skill with Photoshop).

So just to be sure we're on the same page, the Felddivisionen collars should be blue but the tabs green, no ? I think I'm going blind. I thought I had made the Luftwaffe collars blue, but I now realize I just made green collars bluer. So I'll cut some material from somewhere else and make the collars closer in color to the rest of the tunic. Speaking of which, is my blue too dark ? And should I lighten the grey in the first uniform in the example that I showed ?

What makes you think this is incorrect? :confused: </font>

First, understand that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. Second, my impression is that every time someone has had trouble downloading from that site it is usually because their security settings are set too high, or because they have a Windows XP firewall running, or something like that. Armed with that misinformation you may be able to figure out how to work around the problem. For what it is worth I have downloaded from there fairly recently and had no difficulties, so I suspect it may have something to do with how you are configured.

I'm not familiar with the CMAK German unit portrait files, but I've heard a rumor that they're similar to the CMBB ones. If that is the case, what you are describing is not a bug. CMBB uses 21 images to cover 131 image slots. So that means that potentially something like five sixths of the units could have the wrong portraits until someone gets around to modding them. You might want to wander over to the CMBB forum and take a look at my German unit portrait mod. It still has quite a few bugs that need to be ironed out in the next Version (green collars on the Luftwaffe Felddivisionen, and the shade of blue needs to be re-examined), but it does attempt to put Luftwaffe collar tabs on Luftwaffe units.

I hate the sight of the fictinal red flag that gets used as the background of the German unit portraits, so I replaced it with one of my own. The background flag is a rippled version of my Reichskriegflagge from my CMMOS CMBO Vexillography mod (based on historical specifications from the FOTW site). Several of the uniforms and helmets have been adjusted to make them closer to the units they are supposed to represent. This has, unfortunately, opened a can of worms in the research department, so there will probably be several more versions of this mod. For the moment I am sticking to the format used by BFC so that I don't have to worry about the other nationalities. [ But if someone provides me with some research material and images I'll take a crack at the russian marines ]. There are several units I'm not happy with, and any helpful suggestions, useful images, or research would be heartilly appreciated. In particular I'm looking for shoulder-and-ear shots of re-enactors in Gebirgsjaeger and Paratrooper uniforms. There seem to be a lot more bmp slots than there are images. As soon as I figure out what these extra slots are really for, and as soon as I have decent and appropriate images to fill them, I'll come up with another version of the mod. I would like to thank Schoerner for taking the time to answer my questions: any mistakes that you find in the mod are the result of the limitations of my skills, my models and my knowledge, and should in no way reflect on him. This mod can be found in the CMBB section of CMMODS. It might be compatible with CMAK, but I have no way of testing that.

I thought the Avalon Hill boardgame was 1914. I still love the dark shade of green they used for the German Corps. The map was gorgeous, but the hexes were a little cramped given all that went on in them. And it served as my introduction to Eisenbahnbautruppen. I remember the old S&T had a minimalist but interesting looking tactical wargame called Soldiers, that even had a Japanese assault on a German position in the Far East. Before its demise Command Magazine published several good treatments of WWI material, many by Ted Raicer. And then there's always Paths of Glory. Clash of Arms Games has a tactical game that deals with early tanks. I never digested the rules, but it did have a scenario that featured an infantry assault lead by a very junior officer named Erwin Rommel. I for one would kind of enjoy a computerized tactical treatment of WWI. Now I won't go into the fact that I'm sick enough to actually enjoy the Battle of the Somme (and yes, I want to watch a three week artillery barrage), but the static trench warfare that we associate with WWI only applied to the Western Front from 1915 to early 1918. The Eastern Front was too large for the stalemate to develop, and some of the fighting that went on there was really interesting. And the guy who probably had an affair with the author of "Out of Africa" waged what may have been one of the most brilliant guerilla campaigns in history. His African troops loved him, and fifty years later when the German government decided to give some kind of monetary compensation to ex-Askaris they found that many of them still remembered German military drill (I suspect that goose-stepping is not the kind of thing you would ever forget once you learned to do it). And when the Nazis tried to recruit him because he was one of Germany's few great WWI war heroes, he told them where to shove it. (And there's a Richard Berg game about this campaign).

I for one would not want to read most of the reviews that would get written if people had to write them. The quality of what gets written is tenuous enough as it is -- flooding the database with involuntary hack jobs can only make it worse. It would be nice if every scenario had twenty or thirty reviews -- that would even out the numerical distortions that come from not having a statistically valid sample. But it's not going to happen, and I think it's better if those who care enough to take the trouble to write a review continue to be the ones who do so. Reviewing is serious business, and shouldn't be foisted on the inexperienced. My own reviews are far too clumsy to be of any use to anyone, and will probably remain that way until I've written thirty or forty of them. Writing clumsy reviews is not my idea of a very efficient or satisfying way to give something back to the community, so I prefer to focus my efforts in other directions. I think part of the charm of modding is that it is understood to be a voluntary effort -- a freely given gift. Most of the opinions that are given about a particular mod are not of much use to the maker in and of themselves, and even some of the positive feedback is not really very helpful. A modder should only be interested in the feedback of people who know what they're talking about, and should ignore everybody else. Forcing people to write who don't know and who would otherwise have remained silent is probably the opposite of helpful. I can't imagine that the critique and feedback process in the making of scenarios is much different. What is really needed is not many reviewers, but a few good reviews. [ November 19, 2004, 02:06 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

A really dumb question but I have to ask. Can any of the CMBO mods be ported to CMBB with a little re-numbering? Gordon made a lot of really nice snow-covered German vehicles (which, being late-war, are all dunkelgelb-based). I'm assuming the answer is no, otherwise it would have already been done. If a vehicle is whitewashed that suggests that it will operate in a snowy environment. Vehicles in snowy environments eventually end up with snow on them, especially during snowstorms. I've noticed that modders who live in cold snowy climates tend to be sensitive to this, probably because they see it every winter. Note that during the first snow of the winter vehicles will tend to have snow on them, but no whitewash. And during the last couple of snows in the spring as well when the whitewash has worn off and the crews have either run out or don't think it makes sense to apply a new coat. I haven't played any CMBB scenarios yet, but I was thinking of trying Mikey D's "A Warm Place to Sleep". What's holding me back is that the Sturmgeschutz IIIb, Panzer 38(t)A, and SPW 251/1 wouldn't look right in whitewash, and don't look right without snow on them. And I haven't even guessed what the Russians have in that scenario. I don't do vehicles. And the only mask I've ever applied to anything was to my face on Halloween. So it may be a very long time untill I play my first CMBB scenario. I probably should have gotten CMAK. I hate snow, and I like deserts. Then again, if I lived in a warmer climate it would probably be the other way around.

After taking another stab at the trench shown in one of the earlier posts I decided that it was already as complete as I can make it. A slit trench should probably be reinforced with wood to keep the sides from collapsing, but won't have these engineering features when hastily dug. Don't think WWI western front, think deep drainage ditch prone to collapse. [The famous archeologist V.Gordon Childe supposedly met his end late at night in one of these things (though rumor has it he had been drinking). A sad end for a champion of Soviet archeology in the West]. I experimented with putting various pieces of lumber in my trench, but quickly discovered that there is an insurmountable perspective problem. The trench is viewed in three dimensions, and not just from directly overhead looking down. I can play perspective tricks with side planking that work fairly well from a few angles, but once I try to get realistic and add the vertical posts needed to hold them in place the whole thing starts to look silly, especially if you look at the trench from many different angles. So instead I've opted to go for the sloping dirt wall effect on the understanding that this thing will have to get structurally reinforced or it will wash away or collapse in the next rainstorm. So for those interested in a hasty supplement to Juju's excellent slit trench, mine can be found in the CMBB section of CMMODS.

[Vergil tugs frantically at Yskonyn's toga and whispers in his ear]: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. [Vergil assumes his warning is ignored because Yskonyn doesn't wear a toga].

Ok, now I think I know what you're talking about. The CMMOS 4.03 from the CMHQ site is what you want. Ignore the text about 4.02. I think it was just something they never got around to updating. Don't download to your desktop. Download to either the root directory or C:\, or to some temporary holding file that you make yourself first -- but be sure it has a weird name like aaaaadownload file so that it will be easy to fine in the C:\ directory. Download into that, then go there and extract. If you have CMBO someplace other than C:\Program Files you should re-install. If you have any mods, copy your bmp and wav folders to a safe place, do the new install, and then copy paste the copies of your old bmp and wav folders to the new install. That will preserve any stand-alone mods you had in place. If you don't have any you don't have to copy them. [ November 17, 2004, 11:45 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

The auto-extract program asks you at the begining where you want to install to, so maybe you should just try it again very slowly and watch where it wants to go, then go there afterwards.

Didn't notice the bit about the desktop. The thing to remember about CMMOS is that it is extremely allergic to anything customized or unexpected happening. It ends up in C\Program Files\Gem Software Productions. It expects to find CMBO and CMBB at the default locations (i.e. do not put them in a folder called Games or CMMOS won't work). I'm not sure I remember exactly how the download process works, but I would avoid the desktop. I also can't remember if the program makes a shortcut or if you have to do it manually. Are you quite sure you don't have a folder somewhere called GEM Software Productions ? Did you do a search of your hard drive ? I'm also afraid I didn't understand your post. You went to CMHQ and downloaded CMMOS 4.03, no ? From the wording of your post it almost sounds like you somehow managed to download a portion of it from somewhere. I would download CMMOS into your C: drive -- that will make it easy to find because you will probably see an executable/self-installing program with a red and white icon, probably as the last file in your C: drive. Click on it, and let it go to default (C:\Program Files\GEM Software etc. If it doesn't put an icon on your desktop, go into the CMMOS folder, make a shortcut from the .exe file (the one with the red and white icon), and drag the shortcut to your desktop. Gordon made the program fairly automatic, so I think if you're having problems its because you should probably avoid desktop. Another thing that might have happened is that the download got put in a temp folder when you weren't looking. There are several of them stashed away on people's computers. The most insidious is the one set up by your ISP -- it's impossible to find and often turns out to be something of a black hole for downloads.

It probably went to something like C:\Programs\GEM Software Productions.

I thought the American slang was "Zippo" and the British slang was "Ronson".

If someone has Windows XP, is the solution for this to simply turn off the firewall when trying to download from CMHQ ?

I've uploaded three different versions of the sign to CMMODS: Narrow chalk text, wide text, and wide text with skull and crossbones. I hope to start working on the other nationalities when I have the text nailed down and am reasonably sure that they did or did not use special colors or symbols. And I'm trying very hard to restrain myself from making the Finnish sign out of birch bark...

Get ready for a good laugh. I'm essentially a computer graphics primitive. I do as much as I can in Paint, but supplement it with Photoshop when I have to. Took me forever to figure out how to make a rippling flag. (And the real joke of it is that I think I may have been the first person to make successful mods of marching soldiers in EUII simply by repainting the animation strips one pixel at a time). So with that in mind, I've heard of Corel 11 but am not sure I know what it is, and am ignorant of cpt's and psd's. Please expound on that last post a bit, because there are several other games out there that don't use the open bmp system that would be great sources of images. I'm never embarassed to declare my ignorance in public. That's how you learn. Essentially I'm going to need to be on the receiving end of something that's pretty close to a bitmap, or on the receiving end of something that I can be taught to convert into a bitmap (or that I can extract a bitmap out of). I'm not sure if this is of any use in this situation, but would it be possible to make a mod of GPL where the sky was white and everything else except the horizon was white or transparent ? You could then take screenshots of the horizon by rotating the camera (assuming that you can do that). You would end up with five or six large bmp's showing horizon and nothing else. I could take those bmp's and manipulate them. When I do that in Combat Mission the individual bmp's are only about 2000 pixels wide, so though the files are large they aren't enormous. As you may have guessed, this is part of the method that I use to make horizon templates such as the one a few posts up. 32 megabytes is unreasonably large. The size issue will need to be addressed. I think I have a file splitter somewhere in my hard drive -- I've only used it a couple of times, but it might come in handy here. As you have probably guessed, I have a dial-up.