Philippe

Horrors, what a thought! Downloading all those mods once is bad enough. You never (or almost never) have to re-download old mods for CMMOS. The only thing that really changes is the program, and that has to be kept up to date. Once in a blue moon there's an complete overhaul of the coding of a very old mod. That's what those two little patches are about.

Almost all CMMOS material is housed in the CMHQ site. There are a very few files that were kidnapped by gremlins, but we've boken a few tiny arms and tails and what little missing material there was should be back in place for the next CMMOS release. I was under the impression that Gordon's Tiger was up on the site. If not, please let us know about it.

For whatever it is worth, the only thing that you should have inside your CMBO/BMP folder are bmp files. You certainly don't want to have any folders in there because neither CM nor CMMOS will know how to look inside them. And dumping the uninspected contents of your downloads into your BMP folder isn't a great idea because many of them contain important readme files (a few of them contain critically important readme files), and you will find, after a while, that you have an accumulation of unidentifiable crud in the bottom of that folder that CM can't do anything with. So do yourself a favor and always download and unzip to a safe holding area unconnected to any functioning program, inspect the contents, and then copy the relevant parts to your BMP folder. One of the other reasons for doing that is that it is really easy to forget to unzip to the right destination. If you're using the airlock method that I've described, you'll know if you messed up because there won't be anything in the folder. Presumably you have installed the latest version of CMMOS 3.02 to C:\Program Files\GEM Software Productions\CMMOS. The self-installer in CMMOS takes care of most of that procedure for you. Don't put anything in a Games folder (a lot of people do that and wonder why nothing works) as it confuses CMMOS. Finally, CMMOS only works if you remember to click on the relevant icon (assuming that it doesn't have a red disabled sign drawn through it), and then click on the "Apply" button at the bottom of the page. I forget to do this all the time. I keep meaning to tell Gordon that he's simply got to reprogram CMMOS so that it can read my mind. One very useful trick to know about is the log file in CMMOS, which is in the CMMOS folder right next to the CMMOS readme file. If you click on it and read through it, it will tell you what you really did, as opposed to what you think you did. It can be quite illuminating (and for me, frequently very embarassing). Give a shout if you're still having problems.

I'm not an expert on vehicles, but I think you're describing Kwazydog's Tiger, which I could have sworn was revived in the CMMOS 3.02 release. If I'm right, got to CMHQ and check out the CMMOS section.

I'm not sure what September 20 has to do with whether or not you'll ever see the new uniforms. The US shoulder patches are done and exist in CMMOS format. I finished them about a month ago and they're currently undergoing preliminary testing. The Commonwealth patches, collar tabs, and lanyards are being worked on as you read this. Some of them already exist in CMMOS format, and the rest will get that way soon fairly soon. And some of them have yet to be completed, but we're working as fast as we can. Darknight is working his fingers to the bone, and has done a really spectacular job. I'm especially fond of his collar tabs, and we're currently arguing about mittens and funnies (don't ask). I don't have an immediate handle on when the global uniform sets will be finished. However, there is shoulder patch switching capability in one of the two flag mods (i.e you apply the unit's flag and shoulder patch with the same button-press). When all the work has been done, it gets tested. Several times. When everything is finished (along with several other things that are being worked on), Gordon will declare a release for the parts that he's satisfied with. Since Manx's departure from CMHQ, publication dates for CMMOS releases are getting harder and harder to pin down with any accuracy. I haven't guessed correctly on one yet, and the only thing that's certain is that they will always be late. After Gordon declares a release, it gets sent to Matt. As we approach September 20, I suspect it will become increasingly difficult for him to post anything because he will get busier and busier. Given the rate things are moving, the work on all of this should be done around the end of the month. But that's not the same as thing as the release date.

You only need to know the exact unit identity of your own unit so that unachieved objective markers will be transformed into your own unit's flag or symbol (wherever you see your unit's flag, that's where you go). Because there are so many different styles of German uniform options, you just need something that is more akin to a reminder to use certain camo types, or not to use any at all. The remark can be made relatively spoiler-proof by always listing all of the categories of uniform style (there are only three or four). Note that some of these may actually appear in the game even though they aren't involved in the scenario since the program intentionally misidentifies units. An example would be Heer: no camo; SS: summer camo; Fallschirmjaeger: anything but dress uniform; Volkssturm: non-military; Panzer crews: anything but Assault Gun crew uniforms. Since the game misidentifies units with delightful abandon, one approach is to specify camo on the Heer units in SS-based scenarios, and SS in Feldgrau in Heer based scenarios. Or the reverse. The one uniform you have to be careful with is the Luftwaffe Field Division uniform, because that is not supposed to get worn by Fallschirmjaegers.

Well! There're plenty of those right here on the board! Michael</font>

Hi Ed ! As far as I know both the winter and summer buildings should all be included in the same download. I just tested your CMMOS buildings on my computer, and the program installed both summer and winter textures, as it is supposed to. Are you saying that you don't see a separate zip file posted in the CMMOS section (you shouldn't), or that you have downloaded that particular zip and winter textures aren't included in it (that would be a problem)?

The main repository of CMMOS is in the CMMOS section of CMHQ. Go to combatmission.com and look about a quarter of the way down the menu on the left-hand side of the page. Be prepared for a lot of downloading. The terrain section is encylopaedic, the vehicle section is getting that way, and the uniform section is about to become that way. The only downside to CMMOS (apart from promoting obsessive behavior when it comes to mods) is that we haven't yet figured out how to adapt it to the MAC. This is mainly because our tecnical minded people aren't that familiar with MACs, and we will eventually change that, if we ever figure out how.

That's essentially it. In the case of the Americans and the Germans it would only be necessary to identify the division, but with the Commonwealth the shoulder patches and collar tabs are available for each regiment (so in this case there are three different possible regiments).

Have you checked out the buildings in the CMMOS section of CMHQ ? I thought it was complete as far as winter textures went. And if it isn't I'd like to know about it so that I can do something about it.

In a very short while CMMOS is going to be able to present people with an even more mindboggling array of choices than it does now. But to make full use of these capabilities, it is necessary to have a couple of pieces of information immediately available when you fire up a scenario. 1)Physical environment. Is this a snow scenario (start pushing buttons in Winter Wonderland) or a non-snow scenario (run to Field and Stream)? Should the terrain be muddy, dry, or lush (more Field and Stream, and there are several terrain sets for each of these). What style of buildings should get used: Magua, Magua Normandy, Panzertruppen, or Ed Kinney (each one is a little closer to a particular geographical style of architecture)? 2) Order of Battle. At a minimum, we should be told the name of the division that each side belongs to, and told this up front. CMMOS is going to give people the capability to use their unit's divisional emblem or flag as the unachieved objective marker. Not much use if the division is never mentioned. I've gone through a lot of scenarios looking for this kind of information lately, and it's almost never easy to find. Sometimes you have to actually start the scenario to find out from the second briefing, and sometimes the information is even wrong. As a final remark, the next CMMOS release is also going to include extensive capability for unit shoulder patches, lanyards, and collar tabs. Once again, there's no point to having correct uniforms for the Americans, Canadians, Brits, Poles, Dutch, Czechs, and Belgians if you don't know exactly what unit was involved in a battle. So please try to include this kind of information up front in bold letters in your scenario description. It's a real drag to set up the flags and the uniforms, start the scenario, and then discover, after you've gotten a spoiler peek at the battlefield, that you have to start, reconfigure, and start all over again. And it would also be nice to know if there are any particular uniform selections that are recommended. This doesn't have to be a spoiler. You can mention one uniform type from each group every time, regardless of whether that type shows up in the scenario or not.

At the risk of being tastelessly serious, I just did a quick web search, only to discover that I'd done it a few months ago and had gotten too distracted to follow up. There are a lot of birders out there. And they're obsessive. Almost as bad as CM modders. Some of them post birdcalls on the web (undownloadable bits of European nightingale and oreole), and a couple of them sell cd's in the UK for thirteen quid with all the European bird calls. So all we have to do is figure out which European bird it is that should be chirping in the background. Then we convince someone who lives in the UK with some sound skill to buy the CD and...do the pirate thing on the little bird. Then we give the pirated bird to one of our German or American sound-editing experts, and I promise that I will write up the CMMOS version. [CMMOS is necessary because there is no way we will agree as to which bird, so we'll need to switch in and out of the different background sounds featuring thrush, lark, nightingale, and loon.] I'd even take a shot at the sound editing myself, but being around when I turn those things on must be really hilarious to watch. And because figuring out which bird to use really will be the hard part (since most of us are orninthologically challenged), I'll even volunteer to call the American Museum of Natural History in New York and talk about it with one of the bird curators. But I'll only do it if I know that there will be some follow-through with the rest of this. And after we fix the North American robin, we can get to work on that silly arctic tern... [ August 02, 2002, 08:33 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

I can't speak with any technical authority, but trying to do this on a laptop may be the problem.

I would think that with all the sound editing talent out there, by now someone would have found a recording of the correct continental birdsongs and stuck them into the appropriate places on the background sound files. If someone actually does this, I'll ghostwrite the CMMOS mod for them.

Not sure if Gordon will be able to pass by again any time soon, so here goes... As far as I know the installation process should work, so we have to identify some unexpected anomaly. That means, unfortunately, describing this whole operation in a painfully literal way. If this does not turn up a problem, then CMMOS 3.02 might have gotten corrupted when you were downloading it (it happens), so you should throw it out and try downloading all over again. It's not that big a file and won't take very long. I will assume that you are starting from scratch. Turn your computer off. Wait a few minutes. Turn it back on again. Wait a few more minutes. You have CMBO in a folder with a path very similar to C:\Program Files\CMBO (in other words you aren't confusing the program by keeping CMBO in some weird place). You do not have a Gem Software Productions folder. You make a temporary folder for the occasion with nothing in it, and have downloaded the latest version of CMMOS 3.02 from the CMMOS section of CMHQ into this folder (one of the older test versions that never got officially posted produced results somewhat similar to what you are describing on my machine -- not that you would have a pirate copy of CMMOS, or anything like that). You do not use any kind of shell program for any part of this process -- you are doing everything manually. You have as many things turned off as possible before you start trying to unzip or run anything (i.e. go into Task Manager and shut down anything that isn't absolutely necessary for your computer to run). You don't try to specify any particular path if the program asks you if an installation path is ok (this is tedious for me too...I'm trying to define plain vanilla). Oh, and I'm assuming that you aren't trying to do this on a 100 MHz Pentium I... If, after all that, you still can't get CMMOS 3.02 to install (and which version of CMBO do you have, by the way), then what you probably need to do is send Gordon an e-mail. Having said all of that, if there were any glitches that are causing what you are describing, it should have turned up in testing, and I'm surprised that more people haven't mentioned it. So my guess is that you probably have some kind of basic configuration conflict that is causing the problem. If you don't, Gordon will have to get involved. So for the next step, before we drag him into this (this is purely selfish on my part -- I need him to look at some work that I'm doing, and he is very short on time right now), could you describe in explicit detail exactly what it is that you are doing ? My sense is that you aren't doing anything unusual, but now is the time to ask...

I am looking for the bmp files (CMMOS version) of Tiger's Panzer IVs and Bfamily 33's Panzer IV (included with Ruleset 850) and the bmp files (CMMOS version) for: Audace & Pawborns Panther A Malfunts mottled camo Panter G & G(late) Tiger's Panther G and weathered G (late) again these files were inculded in ruleset 851 Thanks for your help.</font>

I also just downloaded the entire CMMOS files. There are some disabled icons(Pnz IV & Panther) and I just need the bmp files from Ruleset 850(Pnz IV}and Ruleset 851 (Panther). I had these files in my old HD unfortunately it was lost when my Hard drive went up in smoke.</font>

As far as I know all the official CMMOS mods should be on the CMHQ site. There used to be two or three different places where you had to look on that site if you wanted to find everything, but as I understand it that was consolidated after the CMMOS section was reorganized twice, and it is now all supposed to be in one place. Having said that, there are gremlins on the loose, just as in WW II. Things that are supposed to be there occasionally vanish for mysterious reasons. So if you are looking for something that you think is supposed to be there and you can't find it, please tell us about it. It may have gotten snatched by gremlins. You can usually tell if something is missing or not by looking at your CMMOS control screen and checking to see if you have any disabled icons. Fortunately the gremlins are terrified of the Great Bald One, and Gordon has his own special way of making them cough up the goods. [ July 29, 2002, 02:00 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Unfortunately the high-numbered rulesets are "reserved" for non-official rulesets. As a result no two people will necessarily have the same material in these rulesets, if they even have them at all. I just did a quick check in my [fairly complete] CMMOS folders, and I don't have the ones you are referring to, and even if I did, there's no way of knowing if I would have what you want. I hope that makes sense. All is not lost, however. Several versions of CMMOS back we started folding unofficial material into the main rulesets. For example, the German vehicle section now includes the vehicles of people outside of the CMMOS Cabal, but presented in the "official" format. Point being, all of your missing unofficial German tank material is probably included in the official ruleset. And if something isn't included, if someone tells us what it is, unless its hideous, silly, or otherwise objectionable, we'll try to include it. You mentioned a couple of high-numbered rulesets but didn't mention what was in them. If you can try to remember the subject matter and approximate content someone might know where or how to direct you.

I always hunt pink spots in Paint, but then I try to do everything in Paint. Pink spots tend to show up on the border of a transparent area, and are not immediately apparent because they're a slightly different shade of pink than the pink transparent area next to them. So the first thing to do is to try to get a sense from looking at the tile in the game where the pink spot is, and then reconstruct that spot in your mind on the tile. Take a look, and if you see a slightly different shade of pink anywhere, that's the culprit. There are a few situations like tree bases where the pink spots are not adjacent to a larger pink area. There you just have to figure out approximately where the problem is, and then go in and, borrowing the correct shade of pink from an area that you know is transparent, repaint the pink pixels one at a time until you get the little varmit. If you understand what the tile you are looking at really looks like, it shouldn't take you more than a few tries. When a pink spot is next to a large transparent area, there's a quick and easy way to find it. Pick some ghastly color like lime green or day-glo blue and dump it on the pink area. All of your correctly pink pixels will turn the hideous color, except for a few stragglers around the edges, but now they'll be highlighted and easy to find. I have no idea how to do this on a Mac, unfortunately, since I think Paint is probably a Bill Gates special.

Generally what you do in a situation like that is you contact whoever put the mod together, and then fix it yourself. Eradicating pink spots is very soothing and is rumored to build character.

The MDMP's predate CMMOS. The textures in it are necessary improvements on what came with the original CD, and the sound mods are particularly good. While most (but certainly not all) of the MDMP textures have been improved on over time (and these improvements are what you find in CMMOS) it is not a waste of time to install it. The discussion in Matt's guide is very good as it relates to them, and the CMMOS sound library hasn't been built up yet. In other words you'll lose out on some great sounds if you don't have it, and as far textures go CMMOS generally assumes that you are using it as part of your base textures (base = CD + MDMP). And on top of all that, the Great Bald One will probably smile if you download it and say you like it.

If you're going to start from scratch, I think the MDMP's are a very good place to start. I would also suggest reading the very good but now very outmoded essay that Madmatt wrote as a means of orientation. If you want to get yourself heavily modded you should do the following: 1) Get somekind of broadband, cable or DSL 2) Get a freeware download manager with a leach program. A while back the Bald One turned me on to DAP. I'm not in love with it, but it does what it is supposed to. Now go to CMHQ and the CMMOS page. Downloading the operating section of CMMOS won't take very long. The files are self-installing, and you'll end up with a control screen on your desktop that makes switching in and out of the various textures very easy. Download all of the CMMOS mods. Really. If you have broadband and can turn on the leach feature, it won't take all that long. What will take up more time is that you will have to manually unzip each mod and copy it to the CMBO/BMP folder. The good part about doing this manually is that it will keep things that you don't want in your BMP folder from getting in there in the first place. The whole point of the exercise is that it's very hard to tell which mods you like (or which work best in a given situation) without installing and uninstalling them a few times. CMMOS lets you do all that instantly. For example, it has close to a score of different grass types, some of which look better in certain seasons and weather conditions than others. So use one for a damp day in June, another for a dry day in August, and another for a soggy day in November with a bit of chill in the air...and so on. And when you discover how many different uniforms there are to switch in and out of, you'll start to go crazy. What's the point of all this ? Well, if you read a scenario description about a certain kind of unit operating in a particular type of terrain, the chances are that you will be able to set up your choices so that the terrain appearance matches history, the vehicles have the right markings on them, the uniforms are correct, the shoulder patches match (that's coming in the next CMMOS release, by the way), and the unachieved objective markers have the appropriate unit emblem on them (also coming in the next CMMOS release). In short, you can tailor the appearance of the game to the scenario that you're about to play. A lot of choices, true, but it's a bit like the obsession of table-top miniatures come to the computer screen.

Always make sure that when you move mods into your CMBO/BMP folder you only move the mods, and nothing else. The program won't read inside of folders. We've gone to considerable pains to make sure everything gets zipped flat, but every now and then something slips through. For myself, I always make a new folder somewhere safe and unzip into it before I put anything into my CMBO/BMP folder. That way I know exactly what I'm putting in there. And you can save the mod in the unzipping folder as a back-up. A lot of the notoriously unread readme files have only come to light because I follow this slightly labor-intensive practise. In general, CMMOS the program has self-installers: set it up so that it installs to something like C:\Program Files\GEM Software Productions\ CMMOS. Do not install it inside of your CMBO folder ( a lot of people have tried this and have wondered why their CMMOS doesn't work...). The mods themselves, unzipped, not in folders, should go in the CMBO\BMP folder. A lot of people try to put them in the CMMOS folder, and wonder why their CMMOS doesn't work. Since CMMOS 3.02 everything else has become fairly automatic, just follow the prompts in the self-installing program. The mod files do not self-install, that has to be done manually (and its better that way, believe me).