Lucky_Strike

This is very creative, could certainly change the look of those. Yes, and 16 is a lot of mods to make, many of which probably only get used by a few players, especially 'cos they have to be added when a scenario is created, so takes effort. I reckon we get the defensive works set done then see how much interest there is. I got a couple of external USB C enclosures for NVMe M.2 drives - they connect to my Mac via Thunderbolt (USB C) and are actually faster than the internal drive. I have one just for real life work stuff and the other is where all my CM stuff and photos etc live. Mmhuh ... Interesting - does the PaK spring back at all - those things certainly have a kick. Yep, witness the forums at the moment ... For sure, we press on regardless. I get annoyed but at the end of the day folks here give me plenty of inspiration. Yes, certainly wouldn't go amiss. We all have only so much time to give to this, even complete CM devotees have a RL somewhere and interests can easily wane over time. None of us is getting any younger. If BF are interested in making more games and / or money then the younger bloods are where they really need to focus, and those guys will have much higher expectations of their games that old lags like us had at the start. But I know all this has been said before ...

Thanks Nigel, I'll take a look, see what I think.

Hey JM here's something that may be of interest to you (and others) in your quest for MDS goodness ... I was rootling around the internet, like one does, searching for more info on the .mds format when I remembered the link you posted above. It happened to tie in with some other info I found on a dead forum about Castle Wolfenstein (CW), anyway the guy who was mentioned was the same guy as in your link above. So I went to your link drilled down through it ... surprise, surprise ... it's on a github page set up by a fella named Norman Mitschke who has written a very complete looking addon with tutorial for Blender to import and export MD3, MDC, MDS, MDM/MDX and TAG, all model formats linked to CW. Notice the MDS format is in there. More importantly the addon can be downloaded from his github. Now, before you get too excited on your holiday, unable to contain yourself and jump on the next plane, train or automobile home, I have already downloaded it and installed it into all the versions of Blender I currently have installed on my Mac - 2.79, 2.81, 2.83, 2.93.4 - it installed on all, though it's written for 2.80 (presumably upwards), and only complained on 2.79 that it was not meant for 2.79 so might not work. Of course I immediately tried to import a CM MDS file, but on all Blender versions, except in 2.79, I got an error which looks to be a script error perhaps - 'unpack requires a buffer of 52 bytes' - or something like that. In 2.79 I got a whole string of error messages about missing armatures (this perhaps suggests it's in the right ballpark). Hmmm . I don't really have enough interest in this to pursue it. My brain already hurts just from working with MDR files in Blender, but I know you are very keen to learn more about these MDS files. What I did notice is that at the bottom of the home page in the first link above is a copyright notice Copyright 2019 Norman Mitschke which is very recent (in CM terms), you can click on Norman's name to send an email to him ... he is based in Germany by the looks of his email address. Maybe a step closer ...

My new mod project - Girls und Panzer ... THIS IS A REAL THING!!! I'm going to bed now to dream about my next modding project!

Yes, why not. It would still retain the qualities of the picket fences, but look like a metal fence. I remember @Falaise wanted a stone wall with metal fencing on the upper part, like one sees in many towns and villages in Normandy, and here for that matter. I think both would be doable. Where'd you get that model Nigel?

Yes there are several things like this scattered throughout the games. Odd textures or models not actually employed in the relevant game. I remembered a big discussion about SturmTigers not featuring in the CMRT Fire & Rubble module, but the model is there in the data folder, no doubt because of the shared nature of the game engine. Yes, would be nice. Also maybe a set of free slots not categorised as anything but with some way to alter their cover and destructibility ...

LOL this makes me laugh thinking about it Yes I remembered you mentioned this JM, and from time to time, usually if I haven't opened a game in a long while, I also find the game Can be slow to start. I don't know why, it might be because it's sifting through all the files trying to find something specific, though there are only data files in the folder so I can't think what it might be. Otherwise the games run perfectly. On my Mac which I use a lot more than my gaming PC the games all open really quickly, so it may just be something to do with the Windows file system. I haven't reinstalled the original brzs since I emptied them out, just haven't needed to. I only access the Z folders in the game folders, never need to go near the actual game data except to copy original textures or mdrs over to my work drive. And since the games are on my main boot drive whilst my mod work folders are on fast external drive I don't worry that I might delete anything or move it accidentally. Yes that's how I see it. I'm pretty certain that when we get a new module for a game the assets will be installed in a new, separate brz which can then be opened and rearranged just like all the rest. If not then we revert to the original backups, update the game, then rearrange the brzs (which we've also backed up of course). It's not for everyone but for those of us who mod and are happy to spend a bit of time organising stuff to our liking, then I think it can work quite well. Heck, I bet that BF don't constantly open up the brzs all the time when they're developing the game - would be an inordinate waste of time.

Ah yes I see, but you're right that having 16 for each category is actually quite a lot anyway and probably more than enough for most applications. ... he says in a resigned tone. LOL It certainly doesn't take long ... my main drive is only a 500GB SSD so I have to manage the space quite carefully. I really don't get the protectionism of their 3D models. I don't believe there is anything in them that is secret at all. There's no way anyone is going to open a 3D model, nor even an animation, and try to reverse engineer them into a competing game. I was looking at the model for my Panzer IV bunker trying to figure out what makes it rock backwards and forwards when it fires its main gun, like all the tanks do in-game. Thought it might be an action point so I gradually deleted a whole load - nada. It's either buried in the metadata or, more likely, hard-coded in the app as a simple instruction for all the tank models. Can't affect it. If we just had access to the skeletons and animations as well as the models, but with a tool that meant we don't get errors exporting them, that would be half the battle and might even encourage a few more people to give it a go. As it is we are quite close, IMHO, to running out of folks willing to take on modding. Many of the textures have been done already to a standard that most players are happy with, and it's so hard to get into the models that folks see little reward in doing it. I see tons of stuff I'd like to do but I know, and you know, and I'm sure Nigel knows, that we just can't do it all. And, whinge, whinge, whinge, it seems to me that BF could care less. I've not once seen them comment on ANY mods or congratulate a modder ... I love these games, and choose to do this stuff for myself firstly, then for this community, but I do feel that a little encouragement and a helping hand go a long way, otherwise folks might just bugg*r off and find something else to do. Whingey bit done.

Harry's talking about my presets from my Hedgerow Hell mod, but yes same problem, I struggled with Herrtom's as well. I think that so much changes with ReShade as newer versions are released that preset become redundant quite quickly. Same issue with some I downloaded from various places, barely any work as expected sadly.

Yes, I do wonder if it's actually doable. Once I get stuck in I really enjoy it so what the hell I'm gonna try anyway. Christmas trees ... that reminds me ... Now if only there was some way to light it up and put a nice warm glow in the windows of the church and cottage it would look idyllic. There are some very good free resources out there on the web for textures, so I say go for it. Customising it to your personal taste is what it's all about. If you want any of my original layered files give me a shout. Now is certainly the time to get out and take some pictures of fallen leaves. Yeah presets can be a bit of a problem if the version of ReShade is different (newer). Lots of the fx may have been replaced or superseded. Even on my PC some of my older presets don't seem to load the complete set of FX. Thanks Harry, you're more than welcome. And yes, I'm determined to get this one finished.

I think SweetFX used to be a stand-alone app in itself some years ago. I'm definitely going to try the latest version of ReShade.

Nice one! Like the texturing on the mantle.

Thanks so much Butschi. Map pic looks great, does it look familiar to you? Does it look like home?

This is interesting. I wonder if I create a file in the mentioned location would the game pick up on it, I don't see why not. I have a problem on my 5K iMac - it's such high res that running the game at native resolution makes the GUI really tiny. I use to the aforementioned EasyRes to switch my screen to a workable resolution, trouble is that's a little different than my preferred everyday resolution, so it would be good to have a specific resolution set just for the game without having to change it for all my other stuff as well. Worth a shot.

That's a shame, thanks for trying all this Harry. It did sound very promising in your explanation of your thinking. I know it would be silly small but can we have an 8x8 matrix - I have no idea how big the buttons would be, tiny maybe only 4 pixels square? Lots of clicking within the matrix area might enable a full set of 64 objects to be placed, then revert to normal matrix of buttons. A thought - one could always reduce the resolution of ones display to artificially enlarge the game pixels, might make it easier to see the tiny buttons - this is sounding really desperate! Man don't you wonder why we have no copy/paste function to work between maps, another of my headscratching what-on-earth-were-they-thinking moments ... nearly up there with the lack of an undo feature, still! FFS!! On an aside, regarding the brz files. The game doesn't actually care where you store the contents of these so long as it's in the Data folder. It does care that a file called red thunder v100a.brz for example exists, but not what's in it. I did some experimenting a year or so ago with the brz archives beCause I kept finding duplicates, old files and unused files in the original game brzs when looking for other stuff. It occurred to me that I could unpack them and clean out all the old junk that they contain, stuff that has been updated and no longer needed. What I discovered, as a side effect, was that these brzs are just a delivery method, serving no other purposes than to contain the textures, models and sounds, and, importantly, to determine which version of the game is installed and completeness of the installation. The base installation contains the majority of files, while each incremental module or update that we receive has brzs that are incrementally named to match, each containing that update/module. So long as files named exactly the same as each brz are present the game will register them and continue to run, the actual game files can be in the brzs OR in another folder in the Data directory in the same way as our Z folders work. What I did was to expand all the brzs, creating empty versions of them to replace the originals. I then cleaned out the expanded files, removing all the redundant stuff - old versions of textures or models, unused files etc, then reorganised the files into a new folder how I wanted them for easy access. This folder is alongside the empty brzs and my Z folder in my Data folder. No more messing with expanding and compressing brzs (except new ones of course), far less redundant data taking up HD space! and finding original bmps or whatever is a breeze cos my system search can find them now. I have backups of the originals just in case I need them, all I'm concerned about now is how an update might behave, hopefully I'll know very soon ... maybe ... someday ...

Autumn, winter, spring, everywhere - yes my plan was always to do a full set of vegetation for all the WW2 titles. Much of it can be ported across between titles so it's a little less work than it might seem. FI is the biggest challenge, the sheer breadth of seasons and climate variations is daunting. I tried HH in FI and, although it works well for some things, it was obvious that it fell short for much of the terrain. If I avoid doing ground textures which are already quite well covered, then it's really the trees and crops that would be most time consuming. Grasses tend to look similar across the wider European theatre, weeds, brush and flowers change a bit, whilst hedgerows and bocage will also need some work. I did start RT but had to stop for a while. However now that I'm back into using Blender I can resume my work on trees and bocage. Probably what I'll do is a second version of HH with new tree models and revised bocage as well as some extras for the Low Countries and the Market Garden operations. Then the proper RT summer set. After that making the autumn/winter/spring sets will be easier, though snow covered stuff represents a bit of a problem which I have yet to resolve to my satisfaction. FI will borrow from all the rest with extras like olive trees and vineyards ... So that's me busy for the next decade , probably just in time for CMx3. As for the ReShade presets in HH, I should probably replace them or not include them, they are pretty old now and I doubt they will give the intended results in the latest version.

I'll have to give these a try next time I fire up ReShade. I don't remember seeing either AMD fidelity or FGFX, they might be from newer versions of ReShade than I have installed. Always cautious of updating ReShade as there are so many things that change it just gets a bit overwhelming and time-consuming to reset everything to how I like it. For one or two shaders though it should be quite trivial to install a newer version and test them, then go back to the previous.

No, the pink was my purple haze specially commissioned for you. Not sure what else uses the grey smoke texture. You'll have to experiment some more when your holiday is over.

Need a good dose of syrup of figs after that lot I should think!

I bet most folks on here don't even know that we can have 16 in each panel. Any more and we'll run out of ideas for objects! Fascinated to see what more you have discovered.

Yes I'm kind of with you on that, get the complete set as it were. I also don't share any interest in modern warfare titles, save for the trees in SF2 which I envy.

Absolutely, I have my on/off keybinding set to the end key. I think the default is an F key or something. I'm guessing AMD fidelity is for AMD GPUs. Bloom as you say has many variations but is certainly one to experiment with, great for so many situations and actually works quite well in CM. FGFX ::LSPOirr catchy name! There are some very interesting night vision fx that can be made, or are ready made, great for modern warfare titles I would imagine.

Well that's useful in itself as a lot of the shaders use terms you'll be familiar with, many are based on the common language of photo editing and colour grading apps. Heheh, yes every time I use ReShade I have to remind myself to switch it off when I finished so as not to have a psychedelic experience next time I fire up the game.

Interesting. I hunted high and low for this, nowhere to be found on my Mac, wonder if it only appears under certain circumstances? What does you file contain? Is it the usual few spaced numbers? More importantly - does it actually make a difference?

Oh alright then ...