Lucky_Strike

Nice. Do like a snowy scene. Are you porting from other CMs? FR or FB?

Very true. In a lot of respects we are very lucky that the demands of CM are quite modest by modern standards, no RTX 3090 required - the ability to play on relatively light-weight systems is sometimes a blessing despite all our grumbling about lack of optimisation etc. Hehe. So off he went to look at his Christmas trees again. Managed to get snow on the front face and no snow on the back face of my leaf branches, but short of sticking each one individually to the tree the right way up I haven't yet found an easy way to make them work how I'd like. Still does at least give me some food for thought. Now back to playing in the bocage ... or should that be with the bocage ... as you say games within games

Thanks Ben, much appreciated. Yes I have added the extra textures in Blender specifically for the ash sapling and brush undergrowth. The way the bocage was originally constructed actually allows for a lot of flexibility with the extras. I have found so long as I keep to the general naming hierarchy then I can add extra sub objects/meshes. And there doesn't seem to be a need to use the original metadata that is imported with the original model's mdr. I guess that the metadata is pretty generic for these models - transparency, shadows etc always seem the same across all the models other than the 1-bit or 8-bit alpha used in the textures dependent on model category. Incidentally do you know why the bocage has 1-bit alpha channels whereas trees etc have the 8-bit greyscale alphas? Was it done originally to save on processing? I have tried a few winter trees and may have a partial solution for gravity defying snow cover. Some deciduous trees can just have their main branches with snow modelled onto their upper sides, those that lose their smaller twigs with their leaves, like ash. For coniferous trees and those deciduous trees that hang onto their finer twigs I maybe able to use the rotation controls in the hair particle system I'm using for leaf branch distribution in Blender. I think the leaf/twig branch models are mostly, if not all, distributed facing the same way up/down, or at least that might be possible using some of the particle system rotation and phase controls. So the snow could then appear on upper surfaces. PAUSES ... deep in thought - Hmm, just had a thought about the face/backside models for the leaf branches of course which have to be included - for anyone following this who is not aware ... take a close look at a leaf branch when next in game, what you will see is that the branch is actually composed of two identical textures sandwiched together - a front and backside. The game uses these to render, unsurprisingly, the front and back faces of the leaf branches, this is also the case for many other textures. Without the back face the textures look very thin when viewed from behind, in some cases textures actually disappear from view when seen from behind without the back face. Resuming normal service - I wonder if we can have a backside texture and a frontside texture? There's a thought - may have to distract myself AGAIN! Arrrrghhghghgh it's never-ending! Thanks Ben!

Yes, the modelling of this is not very well done and could do with revisiting. IMHO if an engineer were to just chuck a couple of satchel charges into a section of bocage the likelihood is a lot of smoke and debris but not much of a passable hole. As you rightly point out they would have been more liable to at least dig a hole to pack with explosives, taking a few minutes, but honestly digging through the kind of tangle of roots that are under hedges is an absolute nightmare, factor in a couple of MG42s blazing away at you as well ... I'd reckon a minimum of 10 minutes to make it passable to vehicles. Yeah, I think you are right JM, it's really been modelled for the sake of the game rather than what reality is like, which is, to my mind, at odds with the whole ethos of CM. Anyway we should NOT be talking about blowin' up my lovely bocage! Topiary - maybe, but no more talk of satchel charges please.

Thanks Erwin, I'm glad you think so.

I agree, but sadly this isn't very easy, and definitely not an effiecient way to breach bocage. I did a small test map targeting a road with bocage along it and a couple of adjacent fields. I set up two full battery barrages, one from a 30cm nebelwerfer battery the other from a 170mm cannon battery. They were running concurrently and, despite many direct hits, still only managed to knock out about 3 sections of bocage whilst turning the rest of the landscape into an impassible moonscape. Not really very realistic. Bocage was no doubt difficult to destroy in real life, but a 30cm nebelwerfer shell carried something like 45kg of explosive whereas the average satchel charge was only about 5kg. I know all explosives are not equal but I do think the modelling is just wrong here. Direct hits from a few nebelwerfer rockets would make a mess of most things. But for now the Rhinos and engineers are the only sure way to get through bocage.

Okay here you go guys, a sample of the proposed style of new bocage to try out, grab it here for a limited time ... unzip it and drop it in your z folder, it should override anything else you have installed. Couple of things to point out: this is just one section, the rest of your bocage will still be the same as you normally play with; if you take a look in the extracted folder (I hope you do) you will notice there are some textures with names that are not used anywhere else in game. This is how I am managing to add extra features to the bocage - eg your ash sapling - and NOT affect the game default bocage nor trees and brush etc. If you don't like it delete the folder and your bocage will be back to plain vanilla. Enjoy!

Heh - they are very different. I am just about to upload these so take a peak at the files to see for yourself. They are for most purposes indestructible. I can't change this unfortunately as this is the default behaviour in game, anyway most players are used to it. They can still be blown up by breach teams - do they carry more explosive than a 301mm nebelwerfer shell could deliver - somehow doubt it, but hey ho ... Also your Sherman Rhinos can still batter their way through.

Thanks @Erwin @JM Stuff @slippy @Aragorn2002 your support is much appreciated. I'll bundle this section up so you can try it yourselves. Always in the grand scheme. I have experimented with autumn leaves. It's not so much work to make them and is a natural progression from the summer mods. I will probably finish BN and RT summer mods along with some extras for MG before moving onto the autumn/winter sets for FB and RT. Now that I have some repeatable methodology it's all a bit more straightforward. Finally I will look at what I can do for the sprawling mod set for FI. Side benefit is that anyone who plays BS (I don't and have no inclination to) can easily port this stuff to that for themselves with very little effort. It will also partly work in SF2 and maybe CW, but, again, I won't be supporting those games. For trees I am creating new mdrs and LOD packs, reusing my previous leaf branch texture mods from Hedgerow Hell. LODs for trees need to look like the normal model otherwise there is quite a bit of flickering between LODs over distances. I spent the best part of a week figuring out how the various levels of LOD relate to distance and what is used when, also in relation to game options detail settings. For the Bocage I am making new mdrs except for what are called endcaps in the mdr object groups, whilst again reusing the leaf branch textures I made previously with some minor reworks for practical reasons. There seem to be some quite specific naming of meshes within the various bocage mdrs which I am carefully trying to stick with since I believe these parts are referenced elsewhere. But there are also instances of seemingly random naming schemata which I don't think are referenced. Bocage is unique within the game foliage, they are treated differently in terms of rendering in game, they have a randomisation element which none of the other foliage have, they are treated as walls when adding to maps and can be combined with other foliage, whereas other foliage cannot reside on the same square together. I also did some blowin' sh*t up experiments with bocage to see what happens to the variously named parts if different names are used. With trees if part names are changed then the tree does not destruct in the expected way, disappearing all at once or suddenly going leafless for instance. With bocage it's either there or gone so far as I could determine. I dropped prolonged barrages of 170mm cannon and 301mm nebelwerfer on a bunch of bocage which made one or two holes in it, the rest just stayed intact, even the added ash sapling was unaffected by direct impacts, until it disappeared along with it's associated bocage section. The game does not treat bocage in the same way as it treats trees and bushes in this respect - in my view a partial oversight. In terms of their LODs - the ones that exist in game are basically the most distant and only seem to get used when in God's-eye view, and there is only the one LOD for all types of shapes of bocage. I will probably leave these LODs alone since anything I make will not really impact play or improve the visuals of the game particularly. In summary, and to hopefully give you all something to look forward to, I am now able to magic up new trees, bushes (essentially small trees) and bocage models using Blender, and, importantly, make them work as expected in game, so I can now move on to the making rather than messing about with Blender for interminable hours trying to fathom such an illogical interface.

Have been doing some more work on our beloved Bocage this week, trying to remember how far I'd gotten and how to do stuff in Blender. The good news is I have now got a good solid technique going which I can repeat for all the various sections of bocage. I can now make bocage that is very different from the original game stock and will hopefully give us a more naturalistic gaming environment ... ... this image shows the one section model that I have reworked thus far - bocage-straight-1.mdr - repeated three times on a straight run of bocage. What you can see immediately is that it has a much more ragged profile with a bit of light coming through the underside and NO beanpoles, those you can see are from other unmodified sections. Here is the Blender render of the model ... ... fully clad ... ... leaves removed from the main body. Blender tends to give a smoother render than the game engine. As you can see from the last image we have a large ash sapling to one side which gives immediate height, the supporting branches are now more bush like and there is a good layer of undergrowth at the bottom. The ash sapling and undergrowth are fixed, extra textures whilst the body of the bocage is variable. So depending on the number of boccage textures present in your Z folder, there are an almost infinite number of combinations that can appear in-game. This is just one section remember, by the time I have reworked the other fifteen section types for tall bocage alone the variations will be legion. With different extras textures for the other sections along with variations on height and depth we can finally have a representation of bocage that gets us closer to what I envisioned when I started this project last year. If anyone would like to take this for a spin let me know and I'll make a little bocage bundle to drop in your z folder.

Thanks, and thanks for taking the time to make these packs.

Hehe. Love that film, who'd have known that scene was filmed in Surrey! Also can't believe it's twenty years old now!

Thanks @slippy. Answer to your first question, it's a completely new model but has to take the slot of one of the existing trees. So for BN there are five trees, for FI six, for RT eight, this one will take the slot of one of them, probably for most situations the existing Christmas Tree, but it could work in any of those five slots with a little file renaming. Incidentally, when a model is initially created the textures for the model are tagged in the model code so that the model always calls for those particular textures when it's rendered in game. Consequently renaming the model to a different slot will not change the look of the model. So if a pine tree type e is renamed to tree type a it will still look like a pine in every respect. One would then have two identical pines in game. The only way to completely alter what a tree looks like is by remodelling. New textures will only change the bark and leaves. For your second wish Aladdin ... about a page ago I showed what I will probably do with bushes as an option. I am still using both in my test maps and don't really see any issues with them. I'm thinking that I may also do one other that is more like a thicket or bramble patch. You Englanders will know what I mean if you've ever been out foraging for wild blackberries ...

Thanks @Vacilllator, your support is greatly appreciated. I will bundle the Scot's Pine up when I have corrected a few file names and made sure it's ready for beta. @JM Stuff remember to breathe, it's important ! Thanks as always for your support

So does this mean that if we downloaded the all in one pack when the patch was already available then we don't need the patch, I downloaded both at the same time, so can I discard the patch. ta