Lucky_Strike

Favour time everyone/anyone interested ... I'm messing around with the dragon's teeth normal maps and, being the decisive person that I am, I can't really decide on my favourite style. This is subtle, but looking carefully one can see the differences more or less. So, I have uploaded a quick mod set and part of Harry's Westwall map (hope that's ok Harry?) - adapted with the new mod in mind. If you would all be so kind as to download it pop it into you CMBN Z directory and add the scenario to your scenarios folder and then run it. Open it as German's then what you'll have is a chunk of Westwall with graffitied 1-4 dragon's teeth, all the same texture but with different normal maps. In one corner by the right side of the pine forest, facing you, is a bare patch with, hopefully, textures 1 to 4 in a little cluster ... If not have a wander around the Westwall to see the various textures. Get down close and inspect them with shaders and shadows on, see if you have a preference as to how the normal maps affect the surface, toggle shaders on and off to see the normal map pop in and out of use. Movie mode makes the contrast more pronounced but is not essential to see the normal maps, they are used only with shaders on. Move around the teeth, the normal maps are more noticeable in shaded areas rather than full, direct light. If you feel adventurous open the scenario in the editor and change the time so that different light influences them, or try different weather effects. You need to deploy Axis units to actually see the teeth in the editor. Once you've decided on your favourite please let me know. Thanks Download scenario and teeth here

The trench - I just need to look at it again to make sure it doesn't do anything really odd then you can have it as a beta - keep in mind it's just the one straight section, any other shapes connected to it will be normal or might even go a bit haywire. The chateau - looks really cool - did you release that one? And when can we come to stay in it? Does it have a heated pool?

Dragon's teeth texture 4. Very rough finish, moulded with thinner shutters than previous. This one also includes normal maps which come into play when shaders are toggled on.

Great. Very elegant set of buildings behind, is that your chateau? So used to seeing these amongst ruins ...

Absolutely, which is why I'm a bit hesitant to take it on. I have at least two or three big projects I'm really keen to complete. My tree mods are really my first priority; then I also want to do general terrain mods for each title (a lot can be shared between the various landscapes so it's not quite as intimidating as it might seem); then there are the seasonal variations for each terrain, though our friend @Falaise made a good fist of micro seasons for Normandy, perhaps others could do similar work for other regions. Beyond these I also have my burnt terrain, the defensive works and a couple of smaller uniform mods. I still think I can get it all done before BF move us to CMx3 ... So there's plenty of time for this. Great idea. I have no idea how Blender/the models scale so I'll have to look into this. Which I have ... thanks Yes, and this undoubtedly will explain why, when we try to make a squad move to a position, say beside a building or behind a hedgerow, we as often as not can't actually place the movement marker where we would like it, but when they actually do arrive there the pixeltruppen will then seek the cover we wanted them to, or sometimes will disperse to better cover or somewhere that offers a better compromise with their LOS and cover. These could all be very involved subjects to take on if thinking about making scenarios and campaigns, Budapest in particular is a giant of a battle, especially if considered in the context of the broader fighting in Hungary and the relief attempts. Breslau is interesting as it's often neglected and the defenders held out there for so long. And Blender/MDR import scripts have a habit of being very unforgiving without warning - make a mistake without noticing and that can ruin a day's work. I'll check it out, but I really have so little empathy with code and big sets of what looks like gibberish I doubt I'll make much headway. Hahahah haven't we all seen that - what the hell is he doing all the way over there do some weird dance!!! It does make you wonder ...

I think Harry explained this pretty much. What is quite clear from doing these experiments is that the game's complexities tread a fine line between simulating reality and abstraction, quite often erring towards abstraction to solve a lot of the difficulties involved. BF are always telling us that when correcting bugs they can quite often create new ones; messing with the model geometry demonstrates how easy it is to break things in a visual way even if the under lying mechanics remain the same. This of course doesn't explain why some of the visual bugs hang around for so long, nor why BF didn't put more effort into better simulating defensive works. From my perspective what is quite reassuring is that I can't really break the mechanics of the game with all this messing about, so it will continue. When I dust off the trench mod and see what was happening with it I'll certainly look at the pause command thanks. I always forget we've got it as a command, probably explains why my pixeltruppen are so often knackered. I really want to get the trenches at least looking better, but we may have to compromise how they apparently function, we might have the troops knee-deep in the bottoms of trenches or climbing out a bit too often. The latter is more problematic if they are more exposed so it's the one thing I'm really keen to avoid. Perhaps when they're a bit closer to a general release you would be willing to do some play-testing for us?

Thanks Artkin. These were using ditch-locking - it was a while back when we were doing this but I think it was 1m. I'll have to pull them out of my archive and try them again. There's definitely some work to do before I can release anything, the height is critical to how the AI interacts with it. It's odd really, much of what we do has next to no effect on the AI but changing the ground level does seem to make it behave differently than perhaps expected. I think as Harry has pointed out the AI is always looking for the best cover, angle, concealment, whatever and reacts to the geometry of the ground to achieve its goal.

Thanks Harry. Yes those are the trenches that I'd like to see in game as well, though definitely without the gruesome duck board. There are definitely additions we can make to the parapets and area around the trench artwork that will improve how it looks. I can imagine having several version for different terrains/seasons, and with more or less preparedness. So start with the basic dirt slit trench - as narrow as it'll go until the game won't tolerate it anymore then build out from there. I do remember pixeltruppen ended up buried in the parapets when it got narrow - I don't recall action points so they must be coded in somewhere. No I haven't - certainly something I'll have to mess about with. I think I tried them for Normandy sunken lanes but that is about all. I suspect the AI knows it's a good bit of cover and concealment - pretty impervious to small arms, just vulnerable to various HE on the whole. I must try to find something in English about the Breslau siege. I thought I had something but it's all just general stuff, nothing specific. Lots about Budapest, and a couple of other festung type sieges like Posen and Konigsburg. Size is likely to be an issue since the ditch deforms the terrain around the subject, so trying to fill that space to make it look more blended with the landscape usually necessitates a lot of packing. But the game will ignore this for spotting and hits since the model doesn't, or rather, can't impact that so far as I know. Could never get my noodle around this stuff - I looked at it when Kohlenklau was doing some changes to the mds files by way of hex editing. Got as far as looking at a file in the hex editor, made my head hurt ... Amen to that!

Hi Shakey.Bridge, welcome to the forum. I just had a quick look but for the life of me I don't know where it should go, tried various places all to no avail. And a quick search of all my CM game folders revealed it doesn't exist anywhere on my Mac. I always deal with it by changing the resolution of my screen - I use a utility called EasyRes (available on the Mac App Store for free or not a lot) which sits in the menu bar and allows for very quick res switching without the need to open up the MacOS prefs panel. That way I can just leave the game set to 'desktop' and switch res as needed. I run a 5K 27" iMac so have to switch res quite often for various things and to save my eyes. Otherwise we'll shine the bat light upward to call @Schrullenhaft who will surely have the correct answer for you.

Thanks for sharing even more Some of these look very graphic novel, but it appears some gangsters have gotten involved ...

Thanks for sharing - some great shots!

Oh boy! - someone's made a Blender one .... https://blendswap.com/blend/12451

I want to make this! Maybe with a door like this at the back ....

Great stuff - I can see there are persistent skirt shadows on your mod as well. Masked turret skirt but shadows still there - very frustrating.

Yes the textures were never finalised, it was just an experiment to see what could be done. There are a lot of different shaped sections for trenches so quite a bit of work. I'd like to remake them sometime. Just not sure when I'll get to them. But for sure the textures would be improved and replace the sandbags - rubble for Berlin me thinks. Removing the sandbags won't help with the height issues 'cos that's probably hardcoded either in our mysterious metadata or elsewhere in the game engine, no doubt a big lookup list somewhere that is referenced to calculate LOS LOF hits etc.

Useful thanks. I haven't had problems yet with with stuff floating. My biggest issue with my Panzer IV bunker is the very off shadows from skirts. The skirts meshes are deleted from the model AND their bmp is completely transparent but still the shadows are there. I have to revisit the base model anyway 'cos its textures are also misbehaving so hopefully can get it sorted in version 2. Just occurred to me ... do any of the other games feature Panzer IVs without skirts? I am using the late G from CMRT as my base model but if there's a G elsewhere without skirts that would be ideal .. off to explore CMFI me thinks.

Yes sir. It's nearly ready just need to figure a couple of things out then it can be released for folks to try out. That's the Rathaus isn't it, I remember having a nice pizza near there. Absolutely freezing when I was there. Arrrggghh - more distractions. Yes we must do something about the bunkers. That's the spirit - You could even completely replace some of the logs completely with other materials, possibly rubble walls and girders covered is brick rubble or concrete slabs. They should still retain the same protection property as the original log structures. And making the turfed ones should also be possible, think ditch-locked with a much wider deformed shape, sloping sides/roof that is covered with a ground texture, then some doodads copied in as well to add some vegetation effects. Would need to be careful of alpha channels as the bunkers likely use a 1-bit channel. There's surely a way to do this ...

Yes got a bit distracted from Dragon's Teeth, what was it they used to say on my school reports ... easily distracted ... Tasty!

This is something I and @kohlenklau played around with last year? The bottom of the trench can be lowered but there's a limit to what the pixeltruppen will seem to tolerate before they start to clamber out to see and shoot. I made this effort back then: Notice the pixeltruppen are standing - not sure if it's an effect of the trench or the low bocage to their front - I'd have to go and check again, remove the bocage and see what they do. The trench was ditch-locked and the mesh altered to fill the ditch more convincingly. Like a lot of these models the texture doesn't blend with the surroundings very well, it has a hard edge and there's no mechanics for creating a blend. Same applies to my Panzer IV bunker. It's possible to ameliorate this a bit by using flat mesh additions at the top of the model - like the rubble on the Panzer IV - then a healthy dose of flavour objects as camouflage for the edges. The only place the trench blends is at its ends. Flavor object camo netting might be good for trenches as well ... Anyway I do believe we can improve the trenches a bit but I think foxholes are much more complex, they certainly don't seem to want to behave in the same way. Yes I think we found the same issue, 1m is as much as they seem to accept, beyond that and out they jump. Yes, and with the abstraction which is built into trenches and foxholes to compensate to them being at ground level we don't get much wiggle room to improve their looks - 1m. I tried invisible bocage at the front of the Panzer IV bunker. Issues were that there's not much terrain deformation, not anything like the tall bocage; placement close to it is very difficult to achieve, the vehicle tends to rear upwards and sit right on it or just remains further back. It was essentially tidier and easier to place the vehicle in the ditch without the bocage mound in front but instead hide some rubble wall at the front which probably offers some enhanced cover. The origin of the Panzer IV was also lowered, so he's hull down, I don't know how far I can push it, I tried twice and at the second depth he lost LOS down the street ahead. I just wanted to see if it could be made to look good and functional first. I'll try some experiments now with some target practice. I do still think we can do something with the bocage in terms of barriers since pixeltruppen can go right up close to it. Also could be used as say AT gun position, felled tree, PaK 40, you get the idea, stick it at the edge of some woods, camouflaged emplacement ... nice

Look forward to seeing some of these when ready.

Cool! Do like a PaK 40 mounted on something entirely inappropriate - still waiting for the Raupenschlepper Ost PaK 40 ... maybe in a vehicle pack. Speaking of wonderful adaptations. I was browsing through PanzerWrecks' book Panzers in Berlin 1945 (highly recommended by the way) and noticed quite a few Panzer IV hulks being used a makeshift bunkers similar to the commonly depicted Pantherturm. Basically an older Panzer IV minus wheels etc concreted into the ground or hastily buried in concrete and rubble, so ... with a couple of 1m deep ditchlocked squares and some tinkering in Blender ... Has to be immobilised for obvious reasons - can't have this driving around trashing the roads ... Still quite a few issues to resolve - shadows from missing/invisible skirts persist, quite a few gaps at the back of her rubble skirt, play testing ...

Thanks. Does add a certain drama, and I was very lucky that the Sherman Flail cooked off just at the end of the turn so his explosion cloud of smoke froze for me to take a pic or two.

Thanks. I did consider normal maps and may do them if I can figure out how they work WRT the mdr, as you sat they would be great for added texture.

I really like to use bocage with ditchlocking to create the sunken lanes of Normandy, tried it with trenches and foxholes as well with varying degrees of success and failure. Yeah I think shifting the origin (or how it´s called in 3D) is a good idea but sadly I think something controls the perceived ground-level and relationship to spotting etc so the pixeltruppen start behaving in odd ways. Flavor objects is an interesting approach - if only we had something like a bare bocage earth bank I reckon we could achieve something useable AND which looked good in game.

Yeah and for a handful of scenarios they probably just felt it was not important enough to model them. I can empathise with that give how much work is involved in some of the models, but some of the simple things like dragon's teeth and asparagus are pretty easy to make and probably wouldn't add much to the overhead. But I do really wish they had done a better job with trenches and foxholes. Yes but ... ... odd things start to happen like the pixeltruppen don't want to use them as they can't see out even though they could if they stood up ... They must have considered Unreal - there is so much already made for it that could just be picked up and dropped in leaving them to concentrate on the actual game mechanics rather than worry about the modelling. AND it's a modern well supported engine. Yep, and it may not appeal to a lot of younger gen folks who have high expectations regarding immersive game play. We grew up with it and except the way it is, to a certain extent, but coming to it fresh will really challenge some (a lot of) players. Mind you we are all probably of a similar gen to BF themselves so a dinosaur mass extinction event will just consign us all to memory ... There's nothing like it ...