Philippe

This is still a little too half-baked to put in the CM2 wish list, so I'm running it up the flag pole here to see what happens. I'm uncomfortable with several aspects of the movement interface. First, I have trouble accepting the increasing movement delay for extra waypoints. Second, I probably have trouble accepting waypoints themselves, but am not sure what to propose in their place. Even if I suspend disbelief for a bit and try to live with them, I keep encountering things that I have trouble reconciling with reality. [NB: to make sense out of the following you have to realize that I'm still stuck in a CMBO time-warp.] If I want to move someone to the other side of the map I'm going to use a lot of waypoints, if for no other reason than I don't want the unit that I'm moving to go ploughing into bottomless wells and the sides of barns, even though that doesn't hurt in CM. And it gives me the room to maneuver. I don't care for waypoints, but can rationalize some of what follows on the grounds that the interface is a little off, and this probably compensates for it. But I don't like it. If my unit gets halfway across the map and has a waypoint every thirty meters or so, if it encounters an obstacle it can often maneuver around it by resetting the waypoints. To some extent I'm ok with this, but if the maneuvering around involves ducking around a unit and changing speeds, including, perhaps, a bit of crawling, I start to wonder. On the other hand, if I want my platoon to arrive at the other side of the map in some kind of order, I need all those waypoints so that I can vary the speeds of the different units to keep them in the same relative position (which probably means we need a maintain relative position command for line as well as column movement). I shouldn't be penalized with the waypoint penalty for telling my troops to simply march around the bottom of that ridge over there by going through those fields in line abreast. On the other hand, the waypoints give me a little too much flexibility. The other day I had a tank hunt around the obstacle it was using for cover and take up a new firing position a little further ahead. It had just cleared the obstacle but hadn't finished its move when it encountered a new threat. By the time my turn started it was clear that the tank was overmatched, so I simply repositioned the unused hunt waypoints, changed them to reverse, and cancelled target. I think this was simulating the tank commander screaming at the driver to back up. The tank didn't have enough waypoints to get back to where it came from, so I had to issue another order to reverse it back behind the covering obstacle. Net effect, the tank, in a miracle of responsiveness moved backwards without even having to shift gears. Then stopped dead in its tracks while the driver smoked part of a cigarette, then reversed away to safety. I can rationalize some of those events taking place individually, but I simply can't imagine them taking place in combination. The instant short reverse achieved by dragging back the waypoint and converting it into a reverse seems the hardest to swallow, and is probably the easiest to fix (code the game so you can't change directions on the speed menu without pausing to shift gears). But I'm still not satisfied, because it seems to me that that tank commander would have been screaming at the driver to back up because he was staring down the barrel of a rather nasty anti-tank gun and had just watched two shells bounce off its front armor. So once the driver's ears stopped ringing I don't think he would have backed up a bit and then stopped, unless his foot slipped big time. The game engine wasn't simulating some bizarre mishap, it was giving a standard response to a fairly common situation. So any way I look at this I'm unhappy about something, and can't help wondering if the movement process might not benefit from bit of a rethink.

Anyone passing through midtown Manhattan might be interested in taking a look at a small photography show that will be running until the end of the month in one of the 57th Street galleries that deals in original prints of older photographs. I saw this show during one of my weekend excursions, and there are several really interesting photographs in it. In particular, a wonderful shot of American troops marching down the Champs Elysee on parade before being deployed into battle that includes Robert Capa, camera in hand, scampering across the front ranks. Another that I liked was of three American MP's standing guard in front of a night club (very good image, and apropos of the African-American soldiers thread, the MP in the middle is black). There were some striking pictures of germans surrendering, and one particularly good barbed-wire barricade with a sign in French saying that anyone going beyond that point would be shot. There was even an action shot of French resistance fighters under fire that may not have been totally staged (it was, however, such a good image that you really have to wonder), and a great picture of Goumiers on the march with their goats (mascots, not food, though not sure what it had to do with the liberation of Paris). Unfortunately the gallery owner isn't planning on posting these images on the web, nor does there seem to be a catalogue. The show announcement on the gallery website can be found at http://www.patricialaligant.com/pressrelease/pressrealease.htm. The show is coming down at the end of October.

On a related note, are there any scenarios in CMAK or CMBO that deal with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (= Nisei-American Regiment) ? Reading about these troops is pretty heartbreaking when you realize that back home many of their families had been packed off to concentration camps (in Arizona or New Mexico, or some place like that).

What you might want to consider doing is to post a message in the Technical Forum (three forums below this one) mentioning what kind of computer you have and explaining in clear and explicit detail exactly what problems you are having running the European version. Eventually either Madmatt or Schrullenhaft will come along and sort you out. Not addressed to Tiger Guner: [i'm only going to say this once, and I'm only saying it because I had to correct someone's grammar recently. The plural of forum is forums if you're speaking English and fora if you're writing in Latin. Talking about that kind of thing gets me feeling old, so please don't make me do this again. I generally try not to use latinate words because it's really pretentious, but in this case I simply couldn't avoid it].

Note that there are over 1200 battles and 100 operations available for free download at the Scenario Depot that work with CMBO.

I don't think this is WWII-related, but I once heard a story that due to unexpected mortalities the lairdship of one of the branches of the Clan Campbell devolved on the line of a younger son who had moved to Nigeria and married a local. Consequently the Laird of that particular branch was a black Nigerian easily recognizable at formal clan gatherings. In all fairness, the story was related to me by a malicious Sassenach who was in his cups. A bit more on topic, weren't there Gurkha units in Italy and North Africa ? They were a bit like the Moroccan Goumiers, but with a special (and terrifying) predeliction for hand-to-hand combat with their traditional weapon, for which they had an elaborate (and unauthorized) weapons drill.

Just a wild guess, but some ISP's (especially AOL) have been doing strange things to small incoming text files. Having the textfile merged with the incoming message (the AOL trick) is a bit of a pain. Simplest way to prevent it seems to be to zip your textfiles before you send them. Then, when your friend receives your text file, he should download it directly into his PBEM folder and tell his system to open when downloading. That way when he goes into multiplayer and the PBEM folder through the game, all he'll have to do is look for a sub-folder with the name of the turn you just sent. And like swallowing, it's much easier to do than to describe.

One concept that I always found intriguing from some of the old Napoleonic boardgames was that of limiting the number of orders you could give. In an earlier period the order limit would have a lot to do with how many ADC's were milling about with fresh horses. One way of applying that to CM might be to allow an unlimited number of orders to a single unit, and with no penalty for waypoints, but a limit per hq or per hq in command (however that would get redefined). The idea would be to make it difficult to intervene on the ground once the shooting starts. I can see some merit in the command delay system that we use now, but I don't think it is a fully adequate simulation of command and control issues. Limiting the number of units that you can give commands to (and the circumstances under which you can give them commands) would put more reliance on the AI and leave the player with a bit less god-like control. As it stands now every squad seems to be wired in to their hq's with headphones. The kind of rules that you would need to make something like this work would be a nightmare in a board game, but could be fairly invisible and unobtrusive in a computer game. As a practical matter, just how many detailed orders can a platoon hq actually issue in the space of sixty seconds? And how powerful do someone's lungs have to be to shout that far (assuming they aren't using the headphones ported from Jagged Alliance). [i still love the fact that in Jagged Alliance you could set the game to only allow you to see what the selected unit sees. It didn't make an enormous difference, but every now and again you would forget that there was someone crouching on the other side of that wall...]

All of that aside, oren's material is interesting from a current military events perspective. But it is not clear to me what exactly it has to do with World War II campaigns in North Africa and Italy, or with the CMAK game in general. No one would object, and, in fact, many would encourage him to continue posting, because it is a perspective we don't see often enough. And who knows, maybe it will start a fashion for people from the region to post, and it might even start a dialogue. If he were to decide to post aerial photographs and 1:10,000 scale maps with contour lines at ten meter intervals of the road from Golan to Damascus, that would belong in this forum even if the images were modern, and we would applaud him. The invasion of Vichy French Syria is fair game.

Note that the shared bmp's also prevent the use of Senegalese and Indians. (Though there was a small force of Indians in the German army stationed in Southwest France. These should have been sent off to join the Indian National Army, but by that point in the war the Germans were desparate for troops.)

Also, make sure you unzipped them before you copied them to your bmp folder. About six months after I started messing with mods I discovered that I had a layer of what was in effect file sediment because I hadn't unzipped to a separate folder and then copied and pasted and dragged the parts that I wanted installed.

What do you mean by "original" ? The BFC bmp's or the mod ? If you mean that you didn't get prompted that something was being copied over, that is the tell-tale symptom that the bmp file number of the mod does not match the bmp file number of the original. If there is no match in the file number, nothing will change. There are two reasons why a file number won't match. The first is that there is some kind of extension on the mod's file number. The second, insidious but fairly common, is that a space somehow crept into the file number of the mod when it was getting renamed. The system will read that space as a legitimate character, so bmp file 1234 will not get replaced by bmp file 1234space. To figure out if this is what is going on, simply look in you bmp folder to see if there is, by any chance, a cluster of bmp's with apparently identical numbers. Or maybe a few with weird extensions. I wouldn't start messing with mod managers until you've got the basics sorted out and are comfortable with the manual process.

Tactical Sketch Maps. Hoolredux's idea is fascinating, and it would be great to have all or some of it implemented. But on a lesser note, I've often found myself wishing for a very simplified commander's tactical sketch map. I don't like to zoom out anymore than necessary (though I don't play with Franko's ingenious rules only because the current interface and method of unit handling is a bit too clumsy to accomodate them) but I often find I need to know basic information to get myself oriented, like how that river runs acrcoss the battlefield, does it get crossed by the main road, and where exactly is that town that I'm supposed to capture again ? The map should be linked to a sides briefing, because the tactical map shouldn't necessarily be the same for each side.

After-battle historical reports that can't be read until after the battle. It's been mentioned before but may slip through the cracks. When a game ends it would be nice if there were three buttons to click on instead of two: Map, Score, and Historical AAR. That way people who don't care about such things won't have to read it, and the rest of us won't be subjected to a potential spoiler. Part of the learning experience of playing an historical scenario is comparing what happened in the game to what happened in real life. Putting the historical AAR in one of the two initial briefings is a bit frustrating: you want to know what really happened when the scenario ends, not before. The historical AAR is a spoiler, and is very annoying to have to skip over during play when you go back to consult the briefing (to remind yourself of little details like where you are, what units you're commanding, etc.).

Just the random mumblings of a compulsive paranoid, but before we starting bugging people who have this fascinating version to start posting parts of it, we'd better make sure that we aren't encouraging them to run afoul of the Australian equivalent of the official secrets act. I know that may sound weird, but something they've contracted for may be viewed as government property. I'm sure they're a lot more enlightened than certain other nations' official institutions that shall remain nameless, but never underestimate the potential for damage that can be done by a bored bureaucrat. They may not understand the concept of posting mods and scenarios. Also, if anything ever happens to get posted from it, it might be better to do it on a non-BFC-affiliated sight so that there are no contractual problems (aiding and abetting non-exclusivity). Cmmods and Scenario Depot should do just fine.

Berli told me you were way weird about trees... </font>

The effects of long term fatigue. There are several scenarios that start after one of the units involved has made an all-night march or the equivalent. With the current engine the unit recovers all of that fatigue a bit too quickly, forcing the designer to set astronomically high levels of fatigue to get things to balance out. What is needed is some kind of mechanism for setting a fatigue base line. Perhaps a setting that lists what the minimum level of fatigue for certain (but not necessarily all) units on a side. The effect would be that the units that slogged through the mud all night will never be more rested that winded or tired, while fresh troops might be able to show up to reinforce them who had ridden to the battlefield on trucks. I've seen this happen in a few scenarios in CMBO, and the situation itself is not all that unusual. The solutions for representing it with the current engine aren't really satisfactory, largely, I suspect, because no one has focused on it. Long-term fatigue is a phenomenon that anyone who has ever stayed up all night can attest to.

More roadblocks. Unlink them from the rubble tile (or whatever replaces it) so that modders can unleash their creativity on the things. It was very limiting to only be able to have road blocks composed of collapsed building matterial. There should be several different kinds available, from impromptu felled logs to little concrete blocks. And some functional earth-moving equipment would be nice, especially in the Normandy hedge-rows.

The graphics are what I would refer to as a CMMOS 4.03 Editor's Edition. You can reduplicate it by downloading the CMMOS mods, and then adding on the parts of CMAK that are compatible and look good. You can also get 4.05 at cmmods, but I didn't work on it. Note that I change my terrain and uniforms for every scenario I play. The hardest part of the setup is deciding (and remembering) which set of mods to use. But to mention a few points, those are modified Andrew Fox uniforms, and a lot of Strontium Dog greenery. There are several dirt roads that give the median strip effect; I don't remember which one I'm using, but it was the one that looked best with Strontium Dog paved roads. The tank is a Marco Bergman subdued (star blacked out to eliminate the bulls-eye effect), the anti-tank gun is by Mike Duplessis, the stone wall is Juju's, and the buildings are Panzertruppen's. The interface is a slightly modded Tank Girl, the flags are mine, as is the photograph and the pine-tree horizon. The sky was constructed out of one of Magua's. The trees are pretty much a random selection and differ from picture to picture, but include DD, Ed Kinney, and CMAK. Graphics in CMBO is an endless task -- it's a bit like a garden, you have to keep digging in it. One set might look good in one scenario, but less than optimal in another. What works in Normandy doesn't work in the Ardennes and vice versa.

More engineering functionality. I want bangalore torpedoes to blow gaps in barbed wire entanglements. I want to move from building to building by blowing holes in the walls and not exposing myself in the street. I want to stub my toe on dragon's teeth. And I want to at least see if not build several different kinds of pontoon bridges, ranging from the very simple kind that is infantry only, to the larger vehicular type.

I think we are straying from the point. We aren't concerned with the philological or etymological history of the words bound and overwatch. What is needed is a concordance of military english, which (I hope) doesn't exist. More to the point would be parallel usages from 1944 to 1975 with quotes showing the context in which they were used (which is how a dictionary writer determines meaning). What we want to know is when did these words come into general usage. Does the December 1944 overwatch quote really exist, and if it does, was it an isolated occurence or was it followed by a stream of overwatches that built themselves up to a dam bursting onto the linguistic consciousness during the Army reforms of the 1970's. If you stop and think about, this niggly little point has some interesting implications for the historiography of military science. You could probably get a master's thesis out of this one, if not more. Simple definitions of words lifted from a dictionary without indications of the frequency of occurrence in the period under consideration don't address the question. You need to see something that indicates that it was rarely if ever used in this sense pre-war, was first used in [???], shows up in 1944, and gets used sporadically after that. Perhaps the use of overwatch in the '70's was a linguistic resurrection of something obscure someone noticed when doing research. Or perhaps it was getting used all the time and filtered into some military bureaucrats consciousness. The answer will be found in someone's familiarity with military literature from 1944 on. And I'm sure, by the way, that any word with Anglo-Saxon roots is probably a bit older than Shakespeare.

The image is a bit blurry because I'm running out of bandwidth, but that's actually the Semiotics mod from the FTP site. The unmodified version does not include the Keystone Division's shoulder patch. And the trees come from all sorts of places. The only real way to compare CMBO and CMAK graphics is to load exactly the same mods into both, and then see what the engine does to them.

Here are some poor quality jpeg's of the CMBO Wiltz scenario. A bit cartoonish, but you get used to it. I'd be curious to see someone post something similar with the CMAK Wiltz scenario for comparison. [ September 27, 2004, 05:48 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Why not be explicit about prompting you for day, month and year, so Americans don't get confused? </font>

So that we have a basis for comparison, it might be interesting if someone posted a few screenshots from the CMAK version. There are so many variables going on here I'm not sure I understand what the criteria for better really are. I'd be glad to post a few CMBO Wiltz screenshots of approximately the same views.