Lucky_Strike

Ahh yes, you've been Tangoed ... I live just up the road from a place named after Monty's big desert bash, not a station though.

There's a good example of deploying a rolling barrage of sorts in the AAR for The Battle for Hamel Vallee by @sburke and @Broadsword56 here: Makes for an excellent read as well.

Yes, and no easy way to automate most of the process. I'm gonna have to take a look at this so I can visualise what they're up to. I wonder is we could make our own shape with a sort of raised platform area for HMGs. I think each trench is one action square so it may preclude having a specific spot for HMGs and part of a squad, it would probably have to be it's own section of trench An invisible trench, I like. A 2m deep ditch that offers better cover. This is very interesting. I wonder if foxholes could be treated in this manner, a single action square ditch with the added protection of invisible sandbags, gotta look better than the current version, could even add a large crater perhaps to give the impression of a dugout. Off to play ...

Is this something to do with Marlon Brando?

That's very interesting, I like the way the terrain steps up to the forward position, kinda looks like a raised weapons pit. Does the HMG fire from the normal trench but with animation showing it at the bottom of the trench, or does it just not fire from the normal trench at all? I know when I did some quick tests attacking with a few Germans squads and a PzIV against a few squads of British in the trenches the British won every time, once the PIAT took out the mkIV. They certainly could use their Brens and the Germans were completely oblivious to the trenches until they closed to about 200m in flat open terrain with just long grass for concealment. Trench gave pretty good protection against the HE the panzer lobbed at them, though the occupants did end up rattled. And your pictures are very nice! I think they could, but I read somewhere else on the forum that they didn't do it because of the way the terrain is deformed by sinking anything like trenches and foxholes into it - sadly a bit of a give away in terms of spotting at the moment. Although the trenches themselves aren't spotted in advance the ditches are easily seen by the opponent, kinda spotter plane fashion. Probably not an issue if playing the AI, or with a rule set against a human. If they could come up with a way to maintain FOW with invisible trench-sized ditches then it would work, otherwise they need to come up with a very different solution for below ground level defences, and it's sadly not a priority I guess. Also these ditches need to be pre-planned into a map/scenario so they are probably not good for quickbattle maps.

Erwin's greatest hits then?

Only thing that really appreciates all the rain is my garden, starting to look like the bocage out there, going to need a demo charge soon just to get to the shed!

Thank you kind sir, more to come soon ...

Me thinks you could make a big bundle to post on CMMODs

So, I spent an evening in the trenches to answer my question about : And the results are interesting ... this is the Blender model ... ... following kohlenklau's lead, I worked on the trench 1.mdr but used textures from Aris's CMRT mod; what I did was raise the trench up by what I guess is a metre or so, then dropped the base of the model back to it's original underground level, the floor of the trench was then adjusted down. The wooden walls are not yet adjusted, easiest way would be to repeat the wall texture/model to avoid texture smearing with consequent need to redo the texture UV maps. Speaking of which, the trench earth parapets are seriously smearing because of all the model distortions, so they need to be redone, more learning to do to get that right! Anyway, after a few goes, and to see if it fits better into the ground, I decided to try to squeeze in the bottom underground edges plus front and rear faces to create a narrower, pinched in model, think V-shape with the bottom chopped off, I also extending the top of the front and rear faces to create a kind of ledge. Biggest issues initially were getting the trench ground level right, solved by trial and error, and getting the sandbags to reappear, they kept disappearing inside the earth revetments; this was solved by using a trick posted by @Aquila-SmartWargames - in Object mode selecting all the model hierarchy and then Object > Apply > Rotation & Scale before export. In game the trench is set into a 2 metre deep ditch using the ditchlock method. On level ground this gives the occupants about a 100metre field of view, not great but with the trench on a slight rise in the land things improve massively, in the map I used they can easily command a few hundred metres in front when placed behind a hedge; at ground level from the enemy perspective, nothing is visible at all; the downside is that the terrain is deformed so it's obvious something is there from above before full spotting reveals a trench. The troops still disappear into the ground when wounded or dead, just their feet sticking out, and sometimes, as they move in the trench, their feet disappear as if in mud; but they stand and don't clamber up onto the parapet for a better view, which is what happens if one sticks a normal trench into a two metre deep ditch ... ... our boys have those fields covered ... ... what trench? The enemy's perspective. Thanks @kohlenklau for showing the way! Sorry for all the greenery in your desert thread. At the moment I don't have time to do much more on this as doing all the trenches would be quite a big job, so if anyone fancies a crack at it you're welcome to my reworked model which I'll happily upload somewhere for you to grab. Otherwise I may get to it after more bocage and trees and steppe and ...

This is a good thing, save the grave detail a job. (Sorry, morbid humour) I will do that for sure! This is what makes it all so worthwhile!

You need the gentle sound of summer rain falling on leaves to calm you my friend.

This sounds (pardon the pun) like Erwin's natural sounds mod, appropriate for when I'm wandering around the bocage countryside like some tourist, you gotta release it ...

... but keeping the trench as trench.mdr? Not making it into a flavour object? Must be some magical properties in the rock that anchor the trench to the ground again. I will have to take a look at this myself. I certainly had stuff float off into strange places in the past when I Blended them, maybe scaling is why.

Man o man, I think you've cracked it, you need to show this to @RockinHarry, he don't like the old trenches either ... The fact that your Frenchmen are all standing is also outstanding. Presumably they do this to see over the edge of the ditch ditch not the raised wall. Many had tried trenches in ditches previously, but it just looked wrong still, remodelling the walls is what it needed. What happens if you make the ditch 2 metres below the surrounding ground level and raise the trench floor up a little to compensate, essentially making a level difference of about 1.5 metresish, or is the trench floor actually the ground? Anyway, fantastic thinking outside the box Sir, I salute you!

Repeated every time I look at the dang things, and those blinking foxholes. I actually tried last night to see if I could figure out how to get the foxholes deeper into the ground using Blender, but nothing I could do would get me to the underverse. All I managed was foxholes with lower walls and floating sandbags, arrggghhhg! I'm guessing there's either something hard coded into the engine that says nothing below ground level or it's a metadata thingy.

Yes, I initially wondered if it was just too much going on for the engine, so it was switching stuff in and out, but this simple map suggests something else. I also thought that maybe it was just an edge of map thing, but as can be seen it happens to bocage in the mid map area as well. When the bottoms appear seems to be random, but usually within the first 10 to 30 seconds of seeing it and after some flickering in and out. And yes I'm certain it's related to LODs in some way, as you say. I don't think the bocage has specific LOD files, I will have to check, if not then I suppose the engine has to model them. The good thing is I don't think it has any impact of LOS, I did some tests with opposing units behind similar rows at a few hundred meters and they didn't really notice each other, I certainly couldn't see anything through the gaps, even when I parked a truck right up by the bocage.

Have to keep you on your toes, plenty more ideas to come now that the Blender genie is out of his lamp. None of this is going to be ready for prime time yet, so in the meantime I think we need some variations on the theme of a Norman summer countryside. Speaking of Normandy countryside, didn't someone request a recording of Norman birdsong last year?

Should have replaced it with a King's Head ...

So just a quickie, as a proof of concept, big bocage ... An ash sapling incorporated directly into the bocage, the normal bocage which it's combined with should still show variations but the ash will always be an ash, it could employ the bocage textures but then it would have some weird stuff like brambles and strangely oriented mixed foliage. Here it is in my test scenario mixed with a standalone tree and more variety of ground ... I think that if I mix in all sorts of different heights we can have something truly rambling and less council-trimmed-hedgerow. The only downside is that the leaf texture has to use the 1-bit mask so it's a little clunky compared to proper trees, but some refinement might improve this. Also got me thinking thickets again ... Thoughts ...

Rightly so, nothing better than a stressed royal.

Just happened to notice this out of the corner of my eye so to speak. Was testing some of my mods and textures when I spotted a floating section of bocage, which I presumed was a bugged-out mod. The map I was using was a custom map with just samples of all the tall bocage shapes, so the floaters are much more noticeable. It is probably harder to spot in a normal scenario/map. I uninstalled all my mods, absolutely vanilla install on Mac, latest game engine version. I made a new test map with just a few lines of straight bocage on a ridge so that daylight would be visible under the bocage instead of the usual earth banks, it only seems to affect straight bocage so far as I've seen: Fairly clear gap under bocage when map first loads ... ... zoom in a bit, still there ... ... zoom in another notch, starts to flicker in and out, we're probably about 30 seconds after game opening here ... ... finally settles and stays attached to the ground. Time for this to happen can depend on how much one zooms or moves towards the bocage, so I'm guessing this is maybe a LOD issues of some sort, but it's very repeatable, at least for me. Not a biggie, but hopefully a simple fix.

Another quick Blender knockabout - I just can't leave those beanpoles alone ... Okay, this one's pretty subtle but once I got a taste for it I decided we could probably do better than the beanpoles, and why not stress those GPUs a little bit more with some new textures whilst I'm at it. You probably can't see the difference initially, so for the less eagle-eyed out there I've done a version with nice colour-coded highlighting (no it's not a return of the Bazzer Bocage ) ... So what you got is the original beanpoles circled in yellow, not liked. Next to these I have inserted some brush into the bocage model (circled in red), this is part of my brush texture adapted for use inside bocage, it is incorporated into a straight bocage section model. Also in that model are two branchy things which I guess are like bare, mini trees or bushes, these are circled in pink. They are models based on something I grabbed from the SF2 demo and are buried deep inside the bocage, sporting a new bark texture which is essentially hawthorn but scaled to fit these models. There you have it boys and girls, a single new bocage model which get's us away from wild french beans. There are perhaps thirty or so bocage models to alter, so I'm gonna be busy for a while with that little lot. I'm also going to try things like adjusting the height and width of some sections, maybe adding some tall, spindly stuff and thinning out some of the textures to create a bit of variety. Perhaps add a decimated stump to a section, or a small tree. The possibilities are now endless ...

Ahh the pub mod ... He'll be alright, he's wearing the ring of invincibility, also is he wearing specs?

Hmm, I guess this comes down to personal preference, I like that fact that I can't see everything and there are ways to find your pixeltruppen without having thinned out trees. I appreciate this is not for everyone, but this is my vision of how I want the game to be so I'm unlikely to make a semi-transparent version at the moment. What you want is actually quite easy and I bet there are other players who share your desire, so I think some kind soul might take this on for you. If I had two of me I might have the time but not just now.