Philippe

This isn't really my period, but wasn't there a XIV Armee under Mackensen that was organized by Kesselring in response to the Anzio invasion? I believe it covered Rome from the Alban hills.

Two points easily overlooked: 1) Many mods come in folders. The program can't read folders inside the CMBO/BMP folder. So make sure you don't have any folders inside your CMBO/BMP folder, just BMP files. 2) Make sure you exit all progams while installing mods. Do not pause in a game, run to CMMOS, and wonder why that mod you just installed doesn't appear. It won't. You have to get out, apply, and go back in. Another very common problem (I do it my self all the time) is that you install a mod, go into CMMOS, click on the icon, and wonder why nothing happened. The reason is usually that you forget to hit that little apply button at the bottom of the page. A tip: if you're having problems with getting a mod to show up in CMMOS, go into the GEM SOFTWARE PRODUCTIONS directory (which should not, by the way, be installed in your CMBO directory), look inside the CMMOS folder, and you'll find a log file. Take a look at it. If something is wrong or if you're doing something wrong, as often as not it will tell you what the problem is. If none of this helps, I'll ask you to tell me, exactly and explicitly, how you installed CMMOS, where you installed it, which version, which mod, exactly what you did, and that kind of thing.

Bocage can be found in the Shrubbery section of Field and Stream and is included in the hedge listings.

3.02 is the most up to date version of CMMOS, and represents a major advance in functionality. First, it has sound support. Second, it has an overlay feature that will allow RuleSet writers to perform incredibly repetitive functions without bloating the computer. Why is that a big deal ? Well, we can now have a sleave with all the battalion patches in the Commonwealth that doesn't take up much more room that two sleaves (instead of two hundred). Third, all the major CMMOS releases for the last four months have been made part of this release. For example: The German Uniform edition The Hills are Alive (a music mod) Winter Wonderland (mods for most snow terrain, rules for all of them) Road and Track (roads -- needed for Tom's Bulge Mod) Many important updates to the German, Commonwealth, and US vehicle sets A ruleset, by the way, is the thing that houses a group of instructions for changing a mod. If you want to know more, download CMMOS 3.02 and read Gordon's readme file.

Take a long, slow, very slow, careful look at Gordon's e-mail address. If you copied it wrong, or did something too fast, or weren't paying enough attention, of course your e-mail wasn't going to get to him. I cannot speak with absolute authority, but I haven't heard anyone in the CMMOS cabal complaining about not being able to get through to him. Doing things too quickly without paying enough attention is the number one cause of things going wrong in CMMOS.

I was hoping Gordon would get to this before I did... Not sure how to answer this. I'm afraid I'll need some specifics. Pick one texture that you're having trouble with, tell me if it's showing up disabled in the CMMOS control panel (unlikely if you've got a log entry, but lets be thorough about this), tell me what change you do or don't see after you hit the apply button (Quick battles with only one vehicle selected are a good way to test things, save after you've got your guinea-pig), then look in the log file and tell me exactly what it says. Then re-install the bmps you downloaded one more time just to make sure. Another (slightly risky -- requires a very steady hand and don't change anything) thing that you can try is to manually inspect the contents of you CMBO/BMP folder and look in the general area of the texture that you are having trouble with. What do you see ? Is the bmp there ? Damaged perhaps? Did a space creep onto the end of a file extension (nearly invisible to humans, but the program will read the empty space) ? And maybe by then Gordon will have noticed this thread and give a coherent answer. I'm not sure it's appropriate in this case, but in general, remember, there should never be any folders inside your CMBO/BMP folder. If there are, neither the game nor CMMOS will be able to read their contents.

This may be one of the last times anyone has to address this issue in quite this way, but here goes... There's Old Style and New Style. Old Style (pre-3.02) builds character, and New Style (3.02) is just around the corner (ETA is a state secret to which only the Bald One is privy at this point). Old Style can be sloppy or labor intensive, as you prefer. The reason for being labor intensive is that most of these zip files have a lot of little things in them besides the bmps -- if you dump the whole thing unexamined into your CMBO bmp folder you'll end up with an accumulation of crud and unread readme files where it will do you absolutely no good. Ok, enough with the introduction. Here, for what may be the last time is how the Old Style works. OLD STYLE: Components: RuleSets, File List Additions, BMP files. Don't assume that you will encounter all of these in every case. Sub-components: RuleSets ( Icons, Disabled Icons, Rules, Description Files, Advanced Rules, Information Files); File List Additions (File List additions); BMP files (bmp files with funny extensions after the numbers). HINT: Never mess around with the contents of a RuleSet. In fact, don't even look inside of it, it will give you a headache. WHAT GOES WHERE: 1) BMP files go inside the CMBO\BMP folder. 2) RuleSets go inside the GEM Software Productions\CMMOS folder. 3) File List Additions go inside the GEM Software Productions\CMMOS\File List folder. 4) Loose RuleSet components (see above) go inside the correspondingly numbered RuleSet folder inside of the GEM Software Productions\CMMOS folder. GENERAL COMMENT: If you're feeling brave and/or lazy you can close your eyes and unzip that bunch of bmp files directly into your CMBO\BMP folder. Your expensive computer is a tough machine, and it can take it. It really is ok, honest. Of course, the fact that no two people put these things together in quite the same way and that there might be a readme file of monumental historical or social significance (not to mention the occasional x-rated photograph) tucked away in there somewhere shouldn't be allowed to dissuade you from cluttering up your CMBO\BMP folder with useless files that you'll never see. On the other hand, making a habit of dumping the unknown contents of zips into a separate folder not only protects you from organizational chaos, it makes the inside of your hard drive prettier and builds character as well. The choice is yours. USEFUL COMMENT: Just to clarify, when you go from one version of CMMOS to another, the ONLY thing that is getting altered is your GEM Software Productions/CMMOS folder. All those CMMOS mods that you laboriously unzipped and copied to your CMBO/BMP folder are completely unaffected. Moreover, if a particular mod works in one version of CMMOS, it will work in a later one as well, unless that mod as been completely scrapped and replaced by a new one (in which case someone would be giving you the new bmp's as well). Switching from an older version of CMMOS to a CMMOS 3.02 takes about a minute and a half, assuming that you are as computer challenged as I am. A normal person can probably do it in well under a minute. So go ahead and use the older version of CMMOS until 3.02 comes out. NEW STYLE: Components: Self-installing CMMOS programs, BMP files, WAV files. Sub-components: BMP and WAV files (bmp and wav files have funny extensions after the numbers). The other stuff exists, but the program will take care of it. WHAT GOES WHERE: 1) BMP files go inside the CMBO\BMP folder. Nothing different about this. 2) WAV files go inside the CMBO\WAVE folder. 3) The Self-install program takes care of everything else. GENERAL COMMENT: For all intents and purposes, CMMOS 3.02 is backwards compatible as far as the bmp files go. No, you will not have to re-install all those mods that you went crazy over getting inside of your CMBO\BMP folder. CMMOS 3.02 now allows the switching of sound files. However, sound files tend to be very large, and to make them transportable they are usually presented as MP3 files. In order to install them you will have to convert them to WAV files first. A quick search with your browser will turn up any number of freeware converters on the web. CMMOS 3.02 relieves you of having to worry about what to do with all the pieces that make the CMMOS engine work. The downside is that it probably won't be updated more than once a month, if even. FINAL COMMENT: That section in Gordon's notes that says don't read this unless you are planning on making one of these things is actually very interesting. Knowing how to write CMMOS instructions actually makes it easier to understand what, if anything you might be doing wrong when your turret shows up in a different color from the rest of your tank. ABSOLUTE FINAL COMMENT (Honest): Inside GEM SOFTWARE PRODUCTIONS/CMMOS there is a log file. Get to know it. This file is your friend. Reading it will tell you things like the reason that mod didn't change is because you didn't hit the application button (I do that one all the time), or the mod simply isn't installed. You don't have to do anything with this file, just consider it light entertainment. [ May 03, 2002, 03:39 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

When CMMOS 3.02 gets released you will find that it has a music mod in it with a score of pieces of period music that can either be played while you poke around in CMMOS, or played as intro music when the game first launches. And the icons for the music were made from a slightly unusual collection of war posters. The music mod was intended to introduce the new sound switching capability of CMMOS 3.02, and with any luck, should encourage a few people to write CMMOS sound mod rules. To make the mod work with the game you have to turn off the video, which can be toggled on and off by using the shift key about half a micro-second after you launch the program (you can do this now, by the way: see page 7 of the manual). You'll also need a program to convert MP3 to wav files; there are several good ones available as freeware, so this would be a good time to do a little research. The release date for CMMOS 3.02, sadly, has been pushed back a week or so. Gordon seems to be having so much fun on his business trip that they're not letting him come home quite yet.

I'm the farthest thing in the world from a vehicle grog, and I'm only writing this as a teaser to provoke someone with a better knowledge to answer in detail, so here goes. At the start of the war the panzers were blue-grey. How blue and how grey is open to debate. And yes, I'm sure they were'nt very blue after riding around in the dust for a week. At some point in the middle of the war the germans decided that dunkelgelb was a more useful base color. I can't remember if it was '42 or '43, but it was long enough before the start of the period covered by CM:BO that it would be unlikely for there to be any formerly blue-grey vehicles driving around. German units in the field were issued paint, supplies permitting, and they had had several years to cover over that older color that we all love from our early kit-model days. They also issued regulations, from time to time, about what colors to use in camo schemes. This is where things get a little complicated. A regulation for camo schemes can get issued in one month, paint may or may not be available at the factories or in the field, and it is not clear to me how universally applied a given paint scheme would be. The one thing that I think I'm begining to understand is that the Ambush Tricolor camo scheme wasn't around before October '44 (or was it November...somebody correct me on this). There was also some complicated side effects to some color regulations that came in around the end of that year involving reddish base colors. Apparently the paint shortage was starting to be felt by then, so I'm not clear on whether very late-war camo scheme color regulations were even observed. I suspect that by December '44 the german army as a whole must have been very eclectic in appearance. What I'm still not clear on is whether this was from unit to unit or from vehicle to vehicle. A lot of camo must have been applied in the field, and it is not always that obvious in old black-and-white photographs, unless you know what to look for. I suspect that there was a lot of frantic bi-color and hasty camo improvisation in the face of allied air superiority. I was surprised by one photgraph that I saw recently of vehicles abandoned in the evacuation of Paris: almost all of them had camo. There is anecdotal evidence that moving around on roads in daylight could be a very dangerous undertaking for a german vehicle. There are a couple of good sites on the german army on the web that have discussions of the camo colors, and if you take a look at MadMatt's thread about the two recently released blue-grey panzers you'll find more information. I leave it to those who really know their panzers to provide links and more accurate detail. I hope, eventually, to provide some kind of a camo-scheme chart for CMMOS.

I don't have the exact details in front of me since I don't usually collect this kind of information, but I've seen, several times, line by line (wav.file by wav.file ?) translations of the words uttered by the different nationalities. If I were looking for this kind of information I would begin the search at Michael Dorosh's Canuck site. If the sound information isn't there, take a look at Tommy, and then maybe Grossdeutschland. The other site that I'm pretty sure has some of this information is Appui-Feu. You'll still be missing some unit dialog, but it's out there, somewhere. I've seen it, just can't remember where. Maybe one of the sound grogs can help. [ April 26, 2002, 10:58 AM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

If you get CMMOS 3.02, which will be released within two weeks, you will notice that each German uniform and helmet comes with notes that you can see on the application screen to indicate how historical or common it was. There is a movement afoot to include this kind of information for all categories of skins in CMMOS, but that will involve a lot of research and work. [ April 25, 2002, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: Philippe ]

This is not meant to be an entry into the great debate, but I think that it is important to keep in mind that there is a difference between American and European thinking about the use of cavalry, particularly during the nineteenth century, and the effect of this difference in thinking is still with us today, though in subtle ways. Many followers of American military history tend to be a bit cavalier about the other way to use horses, and sometimes seem to suffer from mild amnesia when it comes to military events between the Great War and the American Civil War. Europe had several confrontations involving modern armed forces after 1860, and the cavalry of the major powers got to trot around in an increasingly difficult attempt to fulfill some of their traditional roles. The American school assumes, probably correctly, that the only rational way to use cavalry in a modern nineteenth century setting is in the American style, which is more akin to using it as mounted infantry. The traditional European school argued that the nature of terrain in the Americas precludes the stirrup-to-stirrup approach. As an aside, if you want to get a flavor for what cavalry thinking was really like at the end of the nineteenth century, take a look at the article on cavalry in the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910). Besides being a goldmine for miniaturists who want to understand how to model the movement of large bodies of formed horse, it shows surprising sophistication about the modern environment. The cavalry charge has always been a pretty weird tactic, but against disordered and demoralized troops it can be quite effective. Provided, of course, that you don't get shot to pieces in the process. The real value of cavalry lies in other areas. Horses (and bicycles) have a few advantages over trucks and halftracks. They don't need gasoline, they're fairly quiet (though a bit smelly at times -- and eventually you get to like it), they can move single file at night in terrain that is impassible to vehicles, they are easier to hide in a forest, and they can help you stay warm in the winter. And they're great for patroling the wide open spaces between your fortified villages. And until recently there were still a few units that performed in exactly this way down in South America, on the Chilean-Argentine border. And they imported their saddles from Germany. But cavalry charges against machine guns ? Well, I suppose if you put enought vodka or slivovitz in someone anything can happen...Which brings me to my own personal favorite that I think BTS should model: Bicycle Troops. They even had them in Normandy, and let me tell you, a bicycle charge is no laughing matter.

Give that man a cigar !

Give that man a cigar !

The sad truth is that most war photographs tend to be staged, especially the more memorable ones. And nowadays, through the wonders of digital photography, you can even move the Sphinx if your National Geographic study of the Pyramids in Egypt needs that little something extra. "Yeah, I know there's nobody in there, but could you attack that abandoned bunker a few more times untill I get this shot right ?"

Don't get yourself too out of sorts just yet with the uniforms. CMMOS 3.02 was ready for release about ten days ago, and it included, among other things, Keith Carter's brilliantly encyclopaedic collection of all the German uniforms you would ever want, historical commentary and usage notes on each of them, and a small selection of recruiting poster icons for comparison. The original release (which should have happened a week ago) was postponed because of Manx's departure. Predictions are hazardous, but I would expect a release around May Day. Not all clouds are without silver linings, though. A little bird told me that there might be several exceptionally good new mods in it, including one by an entirely new author.

At the risk of embarassing myself for not having read through the Strategic Command section in detail, the game bears a very strong (though improved) graphic resemblance to High Command, an old favorite of mind. Is there any connection ?

Normally you would get a response on something like this from Gordon, but he's away on a trip and may not see this message for a while. A dirty little secret about CMMOS many people don't realize. If something goes wrong with a RuleSet, you don't have to re-install all of CMMOS. If I thought something had become corrupted in the instructions, if I were in your shoes I would remove RuleSet004 from CMMOS and put it in a safe, neutral place. Then I would get my hands on the latest version 004 and manually insert it into CMMOS. By the way, one thing that can cause the problem that you're describing is not shutting down the Combat Mission program while you're switching textures in CMMOS. I've done that myself once or twice. The other thing that you might want to do is to take a look at the textures that are refusing to change (the fronts and backs of the halftracks) and see what kind of extensions the bmp files have. If they look like CMMOS extensions, take a look in the textfile in RuleSet004 that gives the change instruction (I can't remember if it's an advanced rule or a regular rule)and see if there is any similarity. Another very useful thing to do, probably the first thing you should do, actually, is to hit all the buttons you are trying to make the change with, and then go take a look at the last couple of entries in the CMMOS log file. That file can be found in GEM Software Productions/CMMOS and is very useful when something is wrong but you're not sure what the problem is.

What you are describing is covered in CMMOS. CMMOS can by found in Third Party Mods on CMHQ. The list is rather extensive, but the stugs are in there somewhere. By the way, if you install CMMOS you will be able to switch back and forth between different camo styles and markings.

You might want to take a look at Field and Stream over at CMHQ. It was designed to be as complete as possible in anticipation of some of the sources of mods winking out. What a lot of people don't realize is that it was really a conservation project. Check it out. You may be surprised at what you find. Most if not all of the stone walls are in the Buildings RuleSet of CMMOS. You can find that over at CMHQ as well.

This is sad news indeed to come home to after a long weekend. Your departure from our little world leaves a void that cannot be filled. Manx, I know that wherever you go you will continue to fight the good fight. Don't let the bastards get you down, and never forget that living well is the best revenge. I would be really happy to hear that you recreate yourself before July and can tell your current paymasters what to do with their paycheck, unless it will cost them a bundle if you ride it out to the bitter end [when it happened to me I was fully vested...]. There's a lot of time between now and July if you cast your sights far enough afield and don't get too comfortable with your daily routine. You're doing the right thing by shutting down your commitment to CM for the moment. I hope you will come back soon, but you need to get firmly re-established wherever you land first. I've just gone through my notes and discovered that I only have your combat mission e-mail address. Please drop me a line at padivine@aol.com so we can stay in touch.

Did you try posting your question over at the Polish CM website listed on CMHQ ? Cheers, Philippe

Polish armor. Hmm...I hope this means you're going to do a winged hussar... A friend of mine brought a full suit (feathers and all) back from Warsaw a few years ago. Keeps it on a mannequin named Casimir, who lives in a closet so as not to scare his wife. Whenever we get serious about breaking out the vodka, Casimir gets to join the party. Cheers, Philippe

1) Different explosion sizes depending on caliber. 2) No mirroring as a shortcut for left/right sides of things. No more tanks numbered 808 and named ANNA. 3) Noses. 4) Redundant file numbers and images for common objects. If you have five sets of identical church textures and five different sets of numbers, eventually it will get modded so that if you have a map with five churches, you'll have five different churches. 5) The ability to give each member of a squad a slightly different uniform. 6) German helmets that can have decals put on their sides without mirroring them on the lip. 7) No annoying small but ever-present hard-coded weapons that can't be modded. 8)Borscht.

For those who have joined us recently, if you go over to CMHQ and look for something called Field and Stream you will find that it has a comprehensive collection of trees and bases. The only trees and bases that are not part of it at this moment are the Tanks a Lot trees over at Der Kessel, and these are going to appear as part of CMMOS 3.02. A lot of effort was expended on making the Field and Stream collection as comprehensive as possible. It was intended to be encyclopaedic, and it was also intended to salvage a few less well known mods whose web sites have since winked out. So rather than going crazy searching all over trying to find natural terrain, just get yourself a copy of Field and Stream. It doesn't take that long to download, and we do update it periodically.