Philippe

The best place to start is to read MadMatt's essay over at CMHQ. He'll introduce you to some basic steps, which will give useful practise for when you get serious. Getting Serious: Get CMMOS. Get all of CMMOS. That will take you several weeks, unless you have a really fast connection. It can be found in the CMMOS section of CMHQ. N.B. -- CMMOS still doesn't work on Mac. General Procedural Comment: A good first step is to look inside the game directory and try to get a handle on how the program is organized. Mods ultimately go in one of three folders: bmp, scenarios, or wave. Never put anything in any of these folders that isn't native to them, and never put folders inside these folders. I'm often accused of going about this in a labor-intensive way, but there are advantages to my approach. Make a folder for all your mods, and inside it you might want a folder for your the zips you download. Whenever you download something, put the zip in the zip folder, then make a folder for whatever the mod is, then unzip to that folder rather than your CMBO/BMP folder. There are often odds and ends that you don't want in the game folder, and you may want to refer back to them later. It is also a good way to keep track of what you have installed. How to install a CMMOS Mod: Go to CMHQ, go to the CMMOS section, download all the CMMOS operating files. They are self-installers, and when you run them they will create a folder called GEM Software Productions/CMMOS. Do not put this inside any part of the game directory. Your path should look something like C:\Programs\Gem Software Productions\CMMOS. Look inside it to get a feel for how it is organized. When fully installed there will be a bunch of RuleSet folders, and a few other things. You'll also notice a log file [very useful to read if you have a probelm]. Read Gordon's readme file quickly, but don't worry too much about the nitty gritty of it just yet. Then download a CMMOS mod into a safe place (probably the mod/zip folder that you I mentioned above) and unzip it to a separate folder named after what it is. You can look it over inside that folder, and read any notes that came with it. Then copy all the bmp's (but just the bmp's) to the bmp folder in your CMBO directory. There's lots more to learn and do, but this should get you started.

Ouagadougou was (and still is) a town in French West Africa, so for a Frenchman to name a tank after it was a bit like an American naming a tank Lubbock.

I've now managed to get my hands on MP3's of some Guy Lombardo, as well as Frank Sinatra singing I'll never Smile Again. I haven't encountered MP3's of any of the other songs mentioned, so for them to get considered I'll need some more help, guys. I've only got a military band version of Maple Leaf Forever, and I'm afraid that doesn't really cut it. I'll also entertain a good version of "When I'm calling You..."

If someone feels like making the mod and writing the CMMOS rules, you can have different markings for each different model that appears in the game. We already have that now to some extent, particularly with the Pzr IV's and the german halftracks. What we can't do is have three different markings for three otherwise identical Pzr IV's. And what is really unfortunate is that we have to use exactly the same uniform for each man in a squad. (That becomes an issue if you care about how partisans or Volkssturm look, or if you want your troops to look a little less uniform). But that pales in comparison to the fact that if you put a shoulder patch on an infantryman's left shoulder (other than on a paratrooper), it appears in mirror-reverse on his right. Or if you write the name of a tank on one side of the hull (e.g. Ouagadougou, the name of a real French tank) it appears in mirror reverse on the other side (the nonsensical Uoguodagauo).

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I don't recall anyone from Battlefront ever suggesting a particular date. So I'm not sure it's really fair to hold them accountable for dispelling your wishful thinking. I couldn't help but notice that there are fifteen winners for the modelling contest. If I understand what that means (and there is no guarantee that I do), then those are fifteen vehicles that the graphics gnomes haven't even started to make yet. I don't know what their production cycle is like, but I suspect the results of that contest represent a solid month of work yet to be done. And that doesn't even take into account all the other odds and ends that will have to be attended to. So next time you see a gnome, buy him a lite beer and send him back to work.

At that risk of moving the discussion slightly off-topic, I was wondering if our learned contributors have had any thoughts on German versus Russian cavalry doctrine since our last horse discussion ? Did anyone actually have cavalry doctrine ? The Germans had quite a few cavalry units, and didn't just use them on the eastern front (the Balkans and Northern Italy at the end of the war, I think). I have to admit that my interest in cavalry is very sentimental and has to do with my senior year in college, many years ago. There was a tailor shop with a wonderful collection of 19th century military headgear off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Every afternoon, around four, the owner would get bored, break out the single malt, and start recounting the folklore of Philadelphia's cavalry troop, which had last seen mounted action during Black Jack Pershing's Mexican incursion. Apparently Pershing needed every cavalry unit he could get his hands on to hunt down Pancho Villa, and there just weren't enough Buffalo soldiers to go around. So the when Philadelphia's finest were summoned to the Southwest, since they included many of the senior officers, directors, and major shareholders of the Pennsylvania Railroad, they had no difficulty in arranging for a private train to bring their Studtz Bearcats and polo ponies to the front with them. Legend has it that the "war" ended when Pershing threatened to make the Mexicans pay their bar bill.

You mention CMMOS V3. Do you mean 3.02, or are you working from the mod CD that comes with the European store version ? What jumps out and grabs me when I read your discussion is the bit about low resolution. I suspect that may be the culprit. The grass mods were meant to be high resolution, and, to be honest, I never wanted to have anything to do with the low resolution feature so I never tested it (if Gordon were around right now he'd probably want to quarantine me for saying that in public...). I used the high resolution patch at some point way back when, but I've never applied the low resolution one. I don't want to tell you to start over from scratch without consulting Gordon because the prospect is too horrific (or at least it would be for me, but then I have a lot of stuff in my BMP folder). And I can think of several methods to actually put this into practise that would reduce the level of pain to...well...horrible but not intolerable. But let's not go that route just yet. Besides, Gordon will reappear in a couple of days. I think you should try to play around with a single grass mod, and strictly in high resolution. So uncheck your low resolution button if you have it checked, and try re-applying the high resolution patch over again. [i don't know as much about those patches as I should...but I'm guessing that the presence of something from the low resolution one may be causing some internal confusion]. I think we need to get you back to a point before you applied the low resolution patch. I'm making a couple of assumptions, by the way. I'm assuming that you don't have an antique machine, and that it is modern enough to handle high resolution. I'm also assuming that your CMBO preferences file is set up correctly: if it's not, just erase it and the game will prompt you to go through the steps next time you fire it up. Pick two grass mods that don't look anything like each other. I would recommend Magua's Normandy and Nicholas Bell's. Magua's is not extrememly high resolution, and Nicholas' grass is distinctly brown, so they will be easy to tell apart. Install them into separate work folders somewhere safe (i.e. completely outside of the game) and spend a little time looking at them. Then copy them into the CMBO/bmp folder. Now go into the CMBO/bmp folder and take another look at them while they're in there. This kind of onsight visual inspection is very useful, but you have to be careful not to change anything. Now get out of the CMBO directory, and fire up CMMOS. You should see the two icons for Magua and Nicholas Bell in the Leaves of Grass directory. Click on Nicholas bell, click on Apply, close CMMOS. Launch CMBO and pick a small scenario. I usually use the tutorial. All the grass that you see should be brown [except the middle background -- the file that controls that dropped out of one of the more recent versions of CMMOS, but that will be replaced in the next (imminent) release]. Close the scenario. Close CMBO. If you got a partial result, check the log in GEM Software/CMMOS, do another visual inspection of the CMBO/BMP folder. Repeat the whole procedure using Magua. If you get a partial result it will stick out like a sore thumb because the Nicholas Bell grass is brown and Magua grass is light green. When you've done all this, tell us about it. The alternative to doing this is to rip out all of your mods and start over. As I said before, that's too horrific to contemplate, though there are ways of doing it that will lessen the pain. So give my diagnostic reconaissance method a try, and if that doesn't clue me in to what is wrong, we can try consulting a few people who actually know something about computers. By the way, a very common reason for a file not getting applied in CMMOS is that it somehow picks up a space in the coding after the extension. In other words, if a file is number 12345 in its natural state, it might have a CMMOS name like 12345_mag. I don't understand why this might have happened to you, but if the coding somehow becomes 12345_mag[space], that [space] is really hard to detect by visual inspection. And the program will read it as a character. By the way, if you go into C:\Programs\GEM Software Productions\CMMOS [assuming that that is where you have the program, because if it isn't you'll have problems], you should see a bunch of rulesets, including RuleSet351, which is the one that interests you. Take a look inside, see if you can find a textfile for DD's grass [Rule351-001]and for the other two that I mentioned [Magua's is Rule351-003 and Nicholas Bell's is Rule351-020]. Be careful not to change any of the textfiles. If any of this stuff is not there, you will have a problem. [ June 12, 2002, 12:16 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Personally I have always suspected that culture affects how you go about problem-solving in the most fundamental ways. North Americans tend to get hung up on gadgetry, and assume that the answers flow from the hardware. My favorite (albeit half-baked) example of the influence of culture on thought process is the German attempt to use a philosophical solution (Stosstruppen tactics) to end the stalemate of trench warfare in WW I, rather than relying (at least in their imagination) on more artillery, more tanks, more blood. Continuing in that vein, given the disparity of national cultures involved, I am sure that the French, the Poles, the English, and the Germans, presented with an identical problem and given identical hardware, would tend to come up with different solutions to it simply because their culture (read: education and training) would compel them to think differently about what they were facing, and equip them with different problem-solving styles.

Michael, by now you must have realized that I'm impressed with everything that you do. Far from not caring about how the CW dealt with tactical issues, what I yearn for is a kind of grid, nationalities across the top, tactical situation down the left side, so that you can see at a glance what, in the crudest terms, you are supposed to be doing in a given situation if you are role-playing a tactical commander of a given nationality. And this grid would have lots of useful little notes like "before Decemer 14, 1944, the American commander is not even allowed to whisper the word 'overwatch'." [ June 11, 2002, 05:38 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

No offense taken, and, to tell the truth, I was delighted that you had replied since you were the person I was hoping to hear from in the first place. As for being directed to seminal works, well, I like seminal works, especially when I'm unfamiliar with them. Must have been all that Quellenforschungen... [ June 11, 2002, 03:03 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

Please explain what you mean by "a few patches". After that, please give a detailed description of how you installed the CMMOS grass. The Grass works, it has been used by many people for several months and there shouldn't be any problems with it. If you're having trouble with the grass, you should also be having trouble with all the other CMMOS mods as well. The usual drill is to review how you installed the grass mod (unzipped bmp's without any folders in the CMBO bmp folder), and make sure you installed both parts of CMMOS (the general part and the part that has the control panel for the mods you are trying to install -- what I'm really saying is that you must install ALL of CMMOS, which is easy because it has self-installing files ). After that, take a look inside the GEM Software Productions/CMMOS folder and pull up the log file. It will tell you what actually happened when you tried to use the grass. The two most common reasons for not getting CMMOS to work are 1) clicking on the icon for the mod that you want, but forgetting to click on the "Apply" button; and 2) forgetting to completely exit CM before applying a CMMOS mod. Both techniques, which I have used and will continue to use often, produce no result. Nothing happens. Nada. Zippo. So please come back and tell us what you've done, and we'll get you straightened out.

This reminds me a bit of when I was in school: whenever I asked an elementary question my advisor (who lost a leg on the Eastern Front) would get a devilish glint in his eye and tell me to look it up in the Handbuch (while muttering something about Quellenforschungen). Herr Professor Doktor, where would I go if I wanted to read the German Military Handbook ? Can it be found somewhere on the web ? And don't think you're off the hook on the other nationalities. In about three months, assuming I can find the Handbook, I'll be back to ask you about the French, the British, the Canadians, and the Poles.

One of the things that dissapointed me about that book is that I was hoping to find a compare and contrast discussion of how the Americans as opposed to the Germans or the British or the Canadians dealt with three or four of the more common tactical problems. It doesn't seem to be in there, and we probably shouldn't blame the author. So at the risk of being accused of highjacking a thread, I wish some of our more learned tacticians would outline what makes a German assault different from one made by Americans, British, Canadians, or Poles. It seems silly to spend inordinate amounts of time dressing up Germans, Poles, Canadians, etc. in historically correct uniforms and kit, and to get absolutely frantic about having them look authentic on the battlefield, only to turn around and have them act out of character when they actually have to do something. So please, somebody, tell me how to make my Germans act like Germans when I play CM. [ June 10, 2002, 05:47 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

"...And it's pretty scary." Michael</font>

I think the file that you are referring to is 00000171. It has been modded two or three times by people who didn't like to end on a loud bang. The one that sticks in my mind is a very funny (and slightly tasteless) one done by Kitty of Hamsters-at-War fame. You don't have to wait around for someone to make a sound mod that you like: you can make your own. Any wave file that works in the game can be renumbered and substituted for the big bang. I have no idea exactly what would happen if you tried this, but there's an appropriate song sung by Vera Lynn (We'll Meet Again) that you can get by ransacking the Sound of Music section of CMMOS over on CMHQ. For this purpose it doesn't really matter that CMMOS doesn't work because you're on the MAC, you're renaming the file anyway (after you convert it from MP3 to WAV, that is). An easier alternative might be to use Taps, or just go through the wave folder and find a sound that you prefer. As an aside, the Vera Lynn song currently on CMMOS will be replaced with a clearer and higher quality version of the same when I get around to doing the next version of Hills are Alive, sometime in late June or July.

Never actually learned it, and haven't really played it. Too busy modding...

Gordon is one of the most patient and selfless people I have ever encountered. Truly refreshing in a world where everyone seems to be out for themselves and nobody else. Just about everything that I have learned how to do in CMMOS he has calmly explained to me, sometimes several times. And he doesn't even blink when I have a tantrum or, god forbid, try to think something through on my own (he did mention something about comic relief once...). And for an embarassingly long time he was making almost all of my disabled icons for me without a whimper, until I finally (after several embarassingly abortive attempts) got the hang of using the saturation button in Photoshop. Besides doing all the things he does so well, he has set himself up as chief flak catcher for CMMOS. I shudder to think of what his e-mail inbox must look like. Then again, most people would only know that if they read the readme files, but nobody reads those things anyway... From time to time Gordon threatens to retire and work on his imminent Buddhahood. CMMOS has come a long way in the last nine months, and its not hard to imagine that at some point in the next year it will have covered all the things in CMBO that need to be done. Let's just hope that by that time he won't have burned out to the point that he will be unable to enjoy the collective applause and adulation. Too bad there's no such thing as CMMOS groupies...

This is probably best addressed in the tech forum, as it may be specific to your computer or connection. Gordon checked the DD Winter zip file this morning and didn't have any problems with it. Has anyone else downloaded this file, and did they have any problems?

First off, I've been too busy modding CM to get around to playing the demo, so this isn't going to be as thorough or coherent a critique as I would have liked. And if I've said anything really off base, you have my permission to flame me in public, and I'll try to be good-natured about it. I wasn't comfortable with the way the land masses sat in some of the hexes, and couldn't help but wondering if it would be possible to revisit the terrain analysis a bit. It's been several weeks (?) since I looked at the demo, but two things are still sticking in my (very porous) brain. I really wonder about how the hexes were allocated in Italy. I'm not arguing about which ports should or should not be left out, I'm talking about drawing the shapes of the landmasses. The issue is partially one of graphics, partially one of game function. Bottom line, the top of Italy seemed too wide in the Genoa-Venice dimension, and I'm not sure the issue is one of how much terrain you draw into the coastal hexes. I'm sure there are other nits I could pick around the map, but this is the one that jumped out at me that I can still remember. Second Observation: I haven't played many of the other WWII Strategy games, so I can't give you chapter and verse on where xyz-graphics convention comes from. But one of the things I really hated about High Command was that the US was sitting on a mythical island like High Brasyl in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This is unfortunate and probably unnecessary. Please consider more appropriate visuals (i.e. use the actual shape of the land masses), and would it be all that hard to make the (scrollable) map a little wider and get the distance from Europe and Iceland to the US into correct proportion? After all, it's not like you're limited by the amount of paper and ink the printer will let you use. It would also mean that you could do away with any abstract rules that would be needed to integrate the differences in scale. You might even throw in a little of northern South America (and a bit more North Africa with impassable deserts, for that matter) so that the German player could park a u-boat off of Venezuela or the coast of New Jersey when that time comes. Hex based games have a lot of visual draw backs, but for them to be convincing it helps if fewer short cuts are taken. What is surprising is how Mercator-like you can make a hex map look if you really put your mind to it. And sometimes the analysis that leads to enhanced appearance leads to enhanced accuracy in game play (e.g. prevents a flanking maneuver that is only possible because of a geographically non-existant hex). Sometimes the relief over finally finishing a map gets in the way of going over every section where action is likely to occur and asking yourself how many hexes should this front be represented by, or how many different ways should there be to get into this hex, given the current game mechanics. Exhaustion can be a major factor in dictating map design. Having said all that, the advantage of using hexagons on a large scale is that they are very good for defining abstract relationships. And sometimes you'll want a hex to exist in a certain spot because it helps the event flow even if it has no geographical justification. But the sad truth is that the map designer was not usually thinking much beyond the next hexside when he drew that squiggly line through two hexsides of the Gulf of Alexandretta. [ June 06, 2002, 05:43 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

At some point later this summer, (provided I haven't forgotten how to use all of my sound editors) I will produce an update to Sound of Music. It will include "White Cliffs of Dover" and "Don't Let's be Beastly to the Germans", more Edith Piaf, and some rousing Polish military music. But as things stand, I don't have any Canadian period music. Nothing. Nada. Zippo. I refuse to use "Oh Canada". That's much too obvious and very lame. So I'm appealing to anyone who has Canadian parents or grandparents, or who knows someone Canadian from that generation, to please try and find out what they were listening to during the war years. Glenn Miller is not an acceptable answer. If I don't hear anything credible from anyone I'll be forced to have dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in the East Village run by a bunch of French Canadian folksingers. Their music is probably not period but lots of fun, and I can still remember how my stomach felt a week after I ate their food last summer. So please, please don't make me eat ersatz gluten in the East Village just because you've all been brainwashed by this myth that there's no such thing as indigenous Canadian culture. I know I'll get at least one good French Canadian folksong along with my indigestion. But if I get nothing from any of you for the Anglo side I'll bury my frustration by using Nelson Eddie and Jeanette McDonald. So please save me from myself, before I mod again...

For whatever it's worth, Gordon has started girding his loins to write CMMOS for CMBB. And I've started collecting music for "The Steppes are Alive", the CMMOS CMBB equivalent of "The Hills are Alive". And I had already planned to include many of the pieces of music mentioned in the final product. So eventually there won't be one single CMBB theme song, there will be many. Provided, of course, that people can figure out how to install it...

Weighing in a bit late, but here goes. The site as a whole looks very nice. Congratulations on a job well done. The forum, however, is making my failing eyesight a whole lot worse. I was not a big fan of powderpuff blue, and applaud the fact that you got rid of it. I also rather like the alternating background colors in the posts. However, the background colors that I'm seeing are giving me considerable eye-strain. I'm not a fan of pastel colors, but off-white or pastel versions of the colors you are using would be a lot easier on the eye. The text should be as dark as possible. On the other hand, I was spending far too much time lurking here, so maybe the color change is a good thing as it will free up some spare time.

I don't know about the other horse enthusiasts, but I still have vivid recollections of playing Panzerblitz when I was in college, and practically falling out of my chair when I realized just how omnipresent horses were on the Eastern Front. It's not so much that you fight with them (apart from the odd cavalry patrol and occasional raid), it's just that they're a very characteristic part of the landscape, and you run into them when you break into a rear area. If you take away the horses, it's easy to forget just how primitive conditions really were back then. On the Eastern Front most people were slogging through the mud on foot, and the heavy dragging tended to get done by horses. There simply weren't enough motor vehicles to go around. That's what made the American army so remarkable: they almost had enough trucks (though never enough gasoline).

I'm assuming that you are only having trouble finding Winter Wonderland zip files. You should be having trouble. They aren't there. Due to an administrative snarl-up the Winter Wonderland bmp's never got posted. Someone called this to my attention a few days ago, and I've been rattling the appropriate cages ever since. The good news, however, is that it will all be available very soon. Just to clarify, Winter Wonderland comes in four parts. The first part consists of the BTS textures. That will never get posted, for copyright reasons. However, you have that on your original CD, so all you have to do is put a set of the original terrain bmp's in a folder, and use the BMP MUNGE that comes with CMMOS to rename them ####_bts where #### stands for whatever the file number for that particular texture happened to be. The second part consists of MDMP textures. As far as I know (and this may change), these textures (with their CMMOS extensions) will have to be posted in the MDMP section, with a link to CMMOS. The third part consists of the Abominable Snow Mod, DD's terrain, several bits and pieces. These will be posted shortly. I'm learning not to give ETA's on this kind of thing, but I have been assured that it will be up five minutes after the green light is given. This section comprises the core of Winter Wonderland, except for one mod. The fourth part consists of Tom's Ardennes Mod. This can only be posted on Tom's CMHQ. Tom has the files (in spite of the fact that his mailbox kept filling up) and they will be connected to the Winter Wonderland part of the CMMOS site by a link as soon as he posts them on his own site. Now aren't you sorry that you asked ? By the way, one part of Winter Wonderland that you should be able to use is the personal set saver. I strongly encourage you to use it now, before you get the rest of the bmp's. Why ? because the bridge mod in Tom's bridge mod makes some very radical changes to some very basic textures, and if you haven't saved a copy your roads will look a bit odd. This is also a good time to pull the bts textures off the cd, put them in a folder, and let the BMP MUNGE do its magic.

Ok, now a slight amount of confusion may arise because I suspect that you're using the European version off the CD. I can't swear that I know exactly how that particular one will behave, but I have some familiarity with CMMOS and can't imagine that yours will be much different from the beta versions that Gordon gives us from time to time. The best path for CMMOS is C:\PROGRAMS\GEM SOFTWARE PRODUCTIONS\CMMOS. I suspect that by putting it in C:\GAMES you've confused it. I have a quickie sure-fire solution for you, that you would need to do eventually anyway. Go to combatmission.com [aka the CMHQ website] and look for CMMOS 3.02. It has a self-installer and several features that the earlier versions don't have. And I can vouch for it's behavior quirks (there aren't very many that I've noticed). You might want to remove the earlier version of CMMOS as a safety precaution, and don't let it set up anything in the C:\GAMES directory (I think it defaults to C:\Programs\GEM SOFTWARE PRODUCTIONS\CMMOS -- let it go there if it wants, it knows what it is doing). You will NOT have to mess with the contents of your CMBO\BMP folder. You should also grab the latest versions of the different rulesets after you get CMMOS 3.02. I'm pretty sure your problem is from using the path that you're using. Using CMMOS 3.02 is something that, as I said before, you will want to do eventually anyway, and the self-installer in it should keep you on the right track.