Philippe

I've just uploaded a high resolution version of the barbed wire texture (bmp 1211) to the cmmods.com database. The package includes some of the photographs that I used as source material. As soon as I remember how to post a screenshot here I'll do so. In the meantime there's a preview picture at cmmods, not that the package is very big to begin with. This mod is far from perfect. If someone with stronger modding skills than I have sees my work and decides to improve on it, I will be more than happy. But in the meantime here is a coiled wire mod in the spirit of the original texture, rust and dirt included.

I don't really understand the problem, I switched to view 1 in the setup phase, looked across the map, and discovered the wadi after 5 seconds .... o.K. could have been six or seven seconds as well.... Regards, Sven </font>

Whenever I want to find a bmp number for something in CMBO, I usually look in the CMMOS file lists. There's also a very handy list over on the Appui-Feu website.

I've been trying to do a little research on what the US Army used for minefield markers during WWII, but without much success. It was suggested that what I needed to take a look at was the text (and/or illustrations) of FM 20-32, which covers minefield warfare. There have been many editions of this manual, but the one I need to take a look at (assuming that it has what I want) is one from WWII, which I think came out in 1941. So far I've only been able to track down someone who had one from the Korean War. I seem to recall that someone once provided a link to a site that had the text of a lot of the Field Manuals, but can't remember what the subject was. And I realize that what is in the manual may not really be what I want. I've done a little interviewing, and so far I've come across vivid recollections of mines, but no recollection of how they were marked. It may even be possible that there was no standard way of marking them, other than word of mouth. So any help from anyone here on this will be appreciated. And yes, it will eventually, in theory, end up as a minefield marker mod.

I recently took it into my head to figure out what a U.S. minefield marker should look like ca. 1944 (as opposed to a German or a Commonwealth marker). After drawing a blank from my very meager research facilities, I tried contacting the Army Corps of Engineers. Much to my surprise, they weren't too clear on this either. Though there are still people for me to contact there, it was suggested that I try looking at one of the old army field manuals. It turns out that they had the appropriate ones from the Korean War, but not from WWII. I seem to recall that someone once posted a website (if it was the Library of Congress I'll feel very stupid) that seemed to have many of the old army FM's. Unfortunately I can't remember what the subject under discussion was. If someone knows of the website that I'm referring to and could post the address, I would be most appreciative. Since there's no guarantee that the FM that I want will be in that group, or that it will even contain the information that I'm looking for, does anyone happen to know what a period minefield marker actually looked like ? I have a sneaking suspicion that there really wasn't any such thing, or that if it existed on paper, actual practise was completely different. Earlier today I grilled a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge (he didn't call it that), and although he certainly remembered mines, he didn't seem to remember markers. Apparently you just knew. Or stepped on one. [The discussion also touched on a couple of interesting topics -- there was lots of snow, the troops improvised their own snow camouflage, and often had to buy the bedsheets from the local farmers with cartons [!] of cigarettes. It didn't take the troops very long to figure out that wearing olive drab in a white landscape was not a good idea. And they were cold, covered with frozen mud, and had trenchfeet.] Old age and memory are funny things. My source commented that he could recall that winter in vivid detail -- but remebering what he did last Saturday was another story altogether...

I just realized that I've probably posted this reply to the wrong name thread (yes, there's another one this morning). I'm a little too befuddled to figure out how to go about moving it, so please accept my apologies if this post seems a little odder than usual...

Prosopography is an interesting subject. If you're sensitive to it seeing clearly ahistorical names on a unit in the 1940's ( e.g. an Australian Battalion commander with a Vietnamese name) is every bit as annoying as seeing a Waffle Grenadier or a flag that never existed outside of computer gameland. A bit like refusing to watch Baa Baa Black Sheep because of the 1970's haircuts... So in the interest of historical enhancement, may I suggest that we compile and post several lists of surnames for use by designers of future scenarios ? What I have in mind is a guide, by nationality, of a dozen or so of the most common names for each country, along with notes on what names to avoid using. Modern demographics are very different, so we have to avoid the temptation of reaching into the phone book to come up with an ahistorical multicultural army. And I suspect that it wouldn't be too hard to come up with lists of names of veterans and war casualties from official sources to create an authentic pool of names from the 1940's.

Still haven't figured out how to make this missing tabs and buttons reappear on Task Manager in Windows 2000. And I still seem to have mouse flicker in CMAK, though the problem doesn't seem quite as bad as in CMBO. [My problem with mouse flicker started when I let Microsoft bully me into installing DirectX9 -- what's really annoying is that I have no mouse functionality at the start of CMBO if I don't hit Esc and come back in, but then I don't have any music. Very annoying since I'm the creator of the "Hills are Alive" CMMOS music mod]. For the Task Manager missing tabs problem, I keep hoping that if I poke around in Control Panel (but under what ?) I'll eventually find something that has a setting for full or limited display, and that somehow limited display/no tabs got checked. The problem is that I don't think in IT speak, so I have no idea what to call this, and therefore no clue as to how to do a proper search. And I really don't want to re-install Windows 2000, since a) I may lose something; it probably won't solve the problem anyway; and c) it's a big hassle and intimidating to boot. So any suggestions for how to solve this ridiculous problem would be greatly appreciated, even if they're wrong.

Not long after my first attempt to download CMAK my computer made a strange beeping sound on a reboot. When it had finally rebooted I went into Task Manager to start shutting extraneous programs down, when I noticed to my surprise that all of the control tabs along the top of the pop-up box were missing, as well as the button for exiting the program. [i still had the button for ending the program, so I could get out by simply shutting down the Taskmanager command line]. Now I'm not really suggesting that CM has anything to do with this very annoying and very sudden anomaly, but I do need to have the ability to shut things down easily to free up memory to run the game. So any suggestions about this would be appreciated. I seem to recall having seen this once before. I think there is a tab or a switch somewhere, buried in some obscure menu, that causes most of the shell for the Task Manager program to appear. And, of course, I only saw it once, and for some reason I knew what to do at the time. I looked up Taskmanager in Help, but couldn't find anything that seemed to relate to this. I tried the scan and recover bad sectors program: it took a while, and I don't seem to have any. I also used this as an excuse to install Service Pack 4. I don't know what caused this, but I'm pretty sure the solution isn't anything particularly violent (it reminds me a little bit of that old juvenile office trick of reversing the left/right mouse buttons on the computer of someone you don't like). I really don't want to start re-installing my system for something that can be resolved by toggling a tab. And I'm secretly hoping that Service Pack 4 will allow me to listen to the intro music in CMBO and use my mouse at the same time (but I know it won't happen). So any non-drastic and reversible solutions will be enthusiastically considered.

Are the versions of CMBB and CMAK in the Bundle Pack sold in the United States the same as what you would get if you ordered each game individually from BFC ? I would prefer to avoid buying two games only to discover after the fact that they are CDV surplus hard-coded with Waffle Grenadiers. BMP's can (and most will eventually) be changed, but text imbedded in the game is another story. I'm assuming that the Bundle Pack is not bowdlerized, but would like to see that confirmed. I seem to recall that one of the US retail versions of the game was rumored to contain an historical innovation...

For whatever it's worth, I've added a few rules (as opposed to rulesets) and made light modifications to existing rules, and the program has been willing to recognize the changes. But I think the real answer is, it depends. CMMOS was always kind of finnicky, and I would sometime surprise myself (and, on occasion, Gordon) with what would and would not work when you added it. There are two issues here. First, you have to have file lists in place to support whatever rules or rulesets you use. Second, you probably shouldn't make too many changes and expect the program to work as designed. How many is too many ? Haven't a clue, but I think a gradualist approach is always best with something like this. For the record, I've been running several rulesets that are not part of the official release for many, many versions of CMMOS. I just keep a list of my own unofficial changes and always back them up, then add them back to the most recently installed version of CMMOS.

I think the Pacific has a lot going for it if you look at it from a broader perspective (I still have soft spot in my heart for the Pacific Theater Steel Panthers scenarios). And whenever I think about WWII in Asia, I have trouble convincing myself that the war started as late as September of '39. First, extend the conventional time-frame back a little bit and you have the early tank battles in Mongolia at Khalkin Gol. Lots of tanks. For comparison purposes you can fast forward a bit and watch the rematch in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria at the end of the war. Second, there was an awful lot of fighting in China during the late thirties that continued on into the forties. So even if you want to leave out the Communists (and there's no reason why you should), there should be some interesting actions between the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese, and some of these will involve light tanks. Third, the Japanese "blitzkrieg" with light tanks and infiltrators in the Malay peninsula leading up to the fall of Singapore may not be popular with the Commonwealth crowd, but it makes for very interesting reading. And you can watch them tackle a different military system (U.S. and Philippine colonial) at about the same time by looking at the fighting in the Philippines leading up to the surrender in Bataan and the fall of Coregidor. Finally, what treatment of the war in the Pacific theater could be complete without the fighting in Burma and on the border of India ? Imphal and Kohima are too important to ignore, and the fighting in that theater lets you bring in the oft-forgotten Indian National Army. There's a lot of ground fighting without a beach in sight, one or two big tank battles, and a lot of different national armies besides the Japanese and the Americans. I think you could bring out a game with at least a score of very different types of scenarios, and none of them would have to be island jungle slogs. Having said that, three of my uncles served on Guadacanal and one served in the Aleutians, so I have to think the Pacific was a very interesting place historically (even thought nobody in my family ever seemed to want to talk about it).

Not sure if I follow exactly what you've done, but you should be aware that CMMOS for CMBO works a little differently than CMMOS for CMBB. The drill for CMBO COMMOS is as follows: Download and install CMMOS. It does *not* get installed in the CMBO (or CMBB) directory. To tell if it's working you should be able to call it up, and in the CMBO section you'll get a bunch of screens with crossed out icons if you installed the appropriate rulesets. Download and install all the rulesets if you haven't already. Next, download the CMMOS mod that you want to try to someplace safe. Unzip it. You'll see a bunch of BMP files (or WAV files) with weird extensions. Copy the BMP files (and nothing else) to the CMBO BMP folder. Go back and open up CMMOS again. If you look under the appropriate CMBO ruleset tab, some of the icons will not be crossed out. If you click on one, and then click on the apply button, after a few seconds (or minutes) the mod will be installed. If you're playing around with sky mods, the ruleset tab you should look for is called Sheltering Sky (after the Bowles novel). There's no need to mess with the configure button. Reading the credits (they change on each ruleset) can sometimes be educational. I hope this helps. I'm actually retired from the CMMOS project at the moment, so I'm doing this from a very faulty memory...

And here I thought they were playing Chemin de Fer in Baden... Apart from that your explanation seems pretty plausible, just needs a bit more quellenforschungen. The text that we need is probably buried in the introduction to some Fleming anthology. Since he's not my favorite author I can't help on that.

What is needed here is for someone to dig up an interview with Ian Fleming where he was asked why he used 007 for his character. I'm sure someone, somewhere, must have popped the question in print during his lifetime. I even have a vague inkling of having read something about it once in the 'sixties, but I'm not supposed to be able to remember that far back... Given the lengths people will go to come up with 'original' academic topics, we may be giving some hard-pressed graduate student in comp lit or popular fiction a useful idea. And if that student's program isn't too rigorous, we might even get regaled with a discussion of whether John Dee or Michael Wittman (or Leaves of Grass, for that matter) had a subliminal influence on Fleming's choice of numbers. But failing a post-deconstructionist analysis, we should probably stick to using Fleming as the only appropriate source for something like this.

One interesting site to consult when interested in the lyrics or background of traditional songs is The Contemplator. The site lists two versions of the song, but it is clear that there are many more. One version can be found at www.contemplator.com/folk/harlech.html The site is not about WWII, but is a very good source for nostalgia and Brigadoonery...

I've just remembered that if you delete the preferences file, you get prompted to set the speed and resolution the next time you start the game. [And yes, it was quite a surprise to see that video again...] So I've now gone a full loop. I've got the music at the opening, but no mouse, if I hit escape and go back in I have a mouse but no music, and then a flickering mouse in the game. If I'm right that the problem has to do with acceleration, how do I fool the game (or DirectX) into letting me run at high resolution without acceleration ? Or is that a contradiction in terms ?

Sad to say I still haven't resolved this one. But today, in a flash of inspiration, I went into my DirectX control panel and shut down every kind of acceleration I could find. And what I hadn't done before was to disable the 3D graphics acceleration. The result did not solve my problem, but was encouraging. My mouse and the sound now work, but I'm now running in some hideously low resolution. So my sense is that what I need to do now is to fool DirectX 9 into letting me run Combat Mission at a high resolution. The interim result, hideous in the game itself, is almost charming on the display screen. Normally I use Tank Girl, so it was a funny surprise to see the old standard start-up screen. So my question now is...how do I reset the game to a normal herz speed and resolution without going through a re-install ? I used to know this two years ago, but I was smarter then, too... What I don't know, and I guess I'm about to find out, is whether the game will work without acceleration at the higher resolutions. To keep the mouse from going crazy I have to turn acceleration off. I wonder if there isn't some other way to go about this.

Still haven't tried re-installing CMBO, but my forays into Windows 2000 Service Pack land were less than fulfilling. I think I now have Service Pack 3 installed. I say think because I haven't been able to figure out if I was actually successful or not. I did an express install from the Microsoft website, it took about two hours or so (I was asleep at the time). When I got up to finish it, the install Wizard mentioned something about shutting down my computer. Fine, I'm used to that. I hit the finish button, and the Wizard shut off my internet link, but didn't shut down the computer. I did that manually, and am still wondering what the smoking gun is for having Service Pack 3. Meanwhile, the mad flickering of my mouse in CMBO isn't getting any better. Essentially I can't listen to any music at the intro screen (I find that heartbreaking because of my Hills are Alive mod), and the mouse activity in the game is not fatal, but disconcerting. So here is my current list of questions: 1) Did I successfully install the Service Pack, and how can I tell ? [i had other reasons besides the mouse flicker for wanting to try the Service Pack...no joy on that front, can't tell if it's because of lack of successful instal, or simply no joy. I suspect the latter]. 2) What is the most recent GeForce NVidia driver that is safe (in the sense of "won't cause any additional tsouras") to install ? 3) How do I figure out what sound drivers I need ? 4) Should I re-install my CMBO, and if so, when ? 5) Is there anything that I'm not thinking of or doing ? Has this mad mouse flicker been reported before ?

My hard drive is clearly much happier now that it has been defragged, but, as expected, my mouse still flickers like crazy. My sense is that something in my system doesn't get along with DirectX 9. I noticed on another piece of software that sound changes seem to cause a hang or slight freeze that was never there before. Could this be what is causing my mouse flicker ? Should my strategy be to figure out what sound drivers I can use and upgrade them ? (I'm going to try re-installing CMBO, but not quite yet. Copying my bmp folder will apparently take just under half an hour on a 1 ghz machine...) I really want to solve this. What this flicker is essentially doing is destroying all my hard work on my Hills are Alive mod.

Since I'm using a Microsoft mouse, I thought it might be a safe bet to replace my mouse software. It didn't hurt, seems to have improved response time a bit when I click on things, but has had no effect on the flickering mouse phenomenon that I mentioned earlier. I'm currently toying with two thoughts. My hard-drive really needs defragmenting. I keep putting it off because it takes so long. However, I'm wondering if un-installing Combat Mission (after saving my bmp folder, of course !), de-fragging my hard drive, and then re-installing would make any sense. The other thing that that I'm considering is taking another shot at the Microsoft service packs. Sometime last year I installed the second one, didn't like how it worked, and then uninstalled it. I may have uninstalled pack one and two when I did that, if that is possible. I recently noticed that I seem to be missing a video compressor, and I'm guessing that that probably got yanked out when I removed the second service pack in a fit of rage. I know it's silly to come back in here asking for advice when you already gave me the right answer and I made the wrong choice. Folly, however, is part of the human condition. So my question is, do these two approaches make sense as next steps, or should I spend more time worrying about compiling lists of drivers to update (or avoid updating, as the case may be)?

Strongly suspecting that changing to DirectX 9 would not solve the problem, but realizing that I would have to confront this issue eventually anyway, I decided to take the plunge sooner rather than later. I haven't done extensive tests on anything, but here is what I have to report on Combat Mission. The graphics don't look any different, except for the odd distortion of parallel lines in the smoke clouds. I can't say that that is any better or worse, it's just a little different. The lines seem to dissappear a little sooner when you move close to a column of smoke, but also seem less pronounced but more prevalent when at a distance. So on balance, it's probably no better, no worse, though not quite the same. My sense is that the video information is being read a little differently. What is different, and a potential problem, is the mouse. The mouse tends to freeze on the menu screen. I can clear the freeze by hitting escape and then re-entering the program. The mouse seems to work fairly normally on the menu after that. But I do sometimes get effects like a ghost mouse frozen in a particular spot while the real mouse moves around, or simply no movement at all. Inside the game the effect is more pronounced, but very interesting. If the mouse is in the playing area but not moving, it becomes completely invisible. That's rather nice, actually. If you move it, it flickers, and seems to have a small square of the background image moving around with it in tandem. But if you put the mouse on the information area, it flickers furiously, even if it isn't moving. The mouse behaves normally outside the game. I'm not panicking because I expected that something like this would probably happen. So here's my question. Is there some setting (mouse flicker feature?) that needs to be turned on or off on the mouse that may be causing this ? That would be simpler (though harder to find) than changing the mouse drivers. Apart from that, should I update my mouse drivers ? That's an easy guess and shouldn't cause any problems, since I'm using a Microsoft mouse.

In a fit of nostalgia for Privateer, I recently downloaded the Freelancer demo. It was pretty hard not to notice that I was having my arm twisted into downloading DirectX 9. Besides a nice little warning screen when you launch the program, there are references scattered throughout the thing to the fact that the "trial version" (their word for demo, sort of like issue being their word for bug) would probably not work without it. I decided to tough it out anyway and not download DirectX 9. I have hazy recollections of it causing problems for other people with CMBO and CMBB, and there is no question in my mind where my priorities lie. Apart from a few sound scratches that I can probably fix by playing around with the audio deceleration slider, I finally hit a repeatable crash-to-desktop situation that may or may not be related to DirectX 9. Now obviously if I ask Microsoft about it they'll tell me to download the latest version of DirectX, along with the latest audio/visual drivers. Given some of the threads that I've glanced at in here, these are two things that I don't think I really want to do. So my question is basically this: will DirectX 9 cause problems with older games ? I gather that installing it is a pretty irreversible step. CMBO works quite nicely on my computer right now, and I really don't want to mess with something that works.

In current American dialect, the word "hick" usually means "country bumkin", or something equivalent. Not sure if it had a different meaning fifty years ago. Should we add this word to the list of differences between English and American, along with boot, torch, and lorry ?

I think you made two very useful suggestions in your original post. The self-extracting ruleset files may have become corrupted, or the program may not like where you're downloading things to. So you might want to try downloading again since the rulesets aren't all that big. I seem to recall that at some point you get prompted to check some boxes to indicate which rulesets you want. If you forget to check any, I don't think you'll get any rulesets. I know it sounds silly, but you might want to make sure this isn't what's happening. The other thing that I remember Gordon mentioning is that those self-extractor programs are extremely sensitive to other things (anything) running in the background. So you might want to make sure everything else is shut down before you run it. If none of this solves your problem we can start thinking about a manual install. This is not really a big deal, since it is the way the rulesets were installed up until not all that long ago. And yes, it all goes in the CMMOS CMBO folder: when you look inside you'll see a file list folder and a whole bunch of ruleset folders.