Lucky_Strike

Oh I wonder on quite many things beeing left out in the game series. But that´s something for one the Wishlist threads and there´s lots of stuff I could add there (and have added already). But oh well... 😐
Yep, as I just figured myself the game engine won´t care as long as there´s right stuff in right order in data folder. Good.
That´s some great and resourceful organizing your CM files and folders stuff! 😎 Good to know something like that is doable and the game does not beef about it. Might do some similar organizing as since my latest loading and messing with mods, another 10GB of HD space got eaten in shortest of times. I´m already down to below 200 GB of my 1TB HD.😛 Although I think I´m fairly well organized, things still are confusing at times. Particularly with backup files when trying out different versions of a same mod. But my head ain´t exploded...yet. 😅
I´ve un-BRZ´ed allmost all my games data files. Think I got to get rid at least of those that I don´t need or want to mess with NOW. ATM I want most of them remain, for my investigations on META data. That to compare different types MDR and updates between game versions, which can possibly be revealing re detail changes, both on geometry and it´s META accordingly. Yeah...BFC I´d like making new missions and maps instead. 😛 I wonder what actual company "secrets" would be "revealed" if making certain data public and accessible. 🙄

Here´s with sets of 12 and 9 size editor buttons. My game resolution is standard 1920x1080 on 24" monitor, Win10, Nvidia GTX 1660 and 16 GB memory. No idea on OGL drivers in use on my system.
Size 12

Size 9 (two times halved from original 36, ->18, ->9)

As can be seen it´s not so much actual button size but rather a button matrix limitation which seems fixed at showing 4x4 only. I´d hoped it "expands" to maybe 5x5 or even 6x6 "automatically", thus adapting to downscaled button sizes, but that didn´t happen. Also going beyond button/object range of 16 gets these messed up buttons show up. (pic from my previous posting)

But I´m fine with just having 16 immediately placeable flavors available for my own projects. Each mission likely requires some slightly different sets that I´d put together just for editor use. Once objects are in place it´s just made to be sure a player has the right (flavor object) mod in place.
I´d thought more towards general usage for certain mod compositions that could make good use of having more buttons and slots. I.e @JM Stuff wrecked vehicle mod contents is scattered all over various flavor categories. Would´ve been cool to have them available in just 1 category alone. I.E "cars" just has 2 default ones in use so all the wrecked types could be dumped in there quite conveniently. But only BFC could make something like that happen it seems. 😐
 

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.

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 luck with adding more generic editor buttons and associated objects for flavor objects beyond 16. Game didn´t complain while loading my edited and then repacked BRZ data file (red thunder v100a.brz). But that´s not the problem. It seems editor UI ain´t prepared for loading more than 16 generic buttons. Anything tried to be loaded with 17+ buttons is messing up the 4x4 button matrix. New/different buttons will be sort of overlayed on top of existing buttons with tiny blue and green squares in an odd way.

Parts of them can be clicked (and flavor placement activated), but others not. So seems we´re stuck with 16 buttons/16 flavor objects per category.  😐
Unless maybe @Battlefront.com reads this and decide for expanding the flavor object matrix to include more than possible 16 ones by default. 🤔

Hey, sharing knowledge is what it's all about in this tight corner of the internet. 

Since you can't relax on your holiday withut knowing the answer to this I did ...

When you get back, copy the smoke black.bmp to your Z folder and rename it smoke gray.bmp
Then you can drive around polluting the countryside with your sooty exhaust fumes - note that you may be charged extra to drive into some cities because of your emissions ... 💨

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.

Heheh, yes CM reacts in a very psychedelic way to ReShade 🤪.
I think it's the Home button to bring up the ReShade interface and the End button to toggle it on and off. You can customise just about everything to make it work just how you like. And yes there are tons of options. I chucked out all the shaders that either don't work in CM or that do things I'm uninterested in just to narrow it down a bit.
Because CM is not a modern game the GUI is tied into the game very closely, so ReShade will affect it as well as the actual gameplay. What you need to do is to create a mask for your screen which is like an alpha channel so that the GUI elements are masked from the effects - don't forget the compass and small area for the display text at the top. This means you can have your game running without losing the GUI. The mask looks something like this:

Do a screen capture of your whole screen with a CM game running at your normal play resolution, then convert it to greyscale and draw over the areas you need masked, the fuzzy one is a softer mask just for the important game text. Save it as a png, then it needs to go into a folder within your game .exe folder - textures or something like that. It has to be activated by a specific masking shader - there are also masking shaders for making stuff like black strips top and bottom for a cinematic widescreen look.
The DoF uses a kind of mask as well, but one that is already in the game to determine areas of focus/depth. As the game engine is relatively primitive, it's only got about three - near, middle and far - finding the boundaries and making adjustments is the key. I'll try to do a few screen grabs later to show you how it might work with the specific shaders I use.
I steered clear of much of the AA stuff as it's quite heavy on the GPU so needs one with a lot of grunt to do the work. 
Good thing, as you discovered, is that it's very easy to uninstall or disable, and can't do any damage to your game installations as it's self contained.

Elizabeth scowls, "Noddlehead gets venison pasty, and quarts of Whitehall XXXXX every day."

Yup, agree on all. The last thing on my purchase list with "old" engine will be CMFB CW module. Then will skip everything else, incl. stuff I´ve no (big) interest in anyway (FI, CMSF2, BS and CW). Then wait for game engine X. If we´re still among the living then off course. 💀👻

Thanks! (run out of likes again) 😎 Woah.. that´s lots of stuff indeed. Guess I´d just activate for screenshots then anyway. Though could do lots of these in GIMP as well and I´m fairly well aquainted with it. Hm... will see...... 🤪
Yep it´s "Pos1" on my keyboard activating menues but "end" was what I was looking for when my brain started melting. 😱

Hi Folks 
New scenario released by Kohlenkau today and be sure tocheck out all the most recent scenarios over at The Scenario Depot.
 
https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-final-blitzkrieg/cm-final-blitzkrieg-scenarios/cmfb-busting-out-of-bras/
 
 

lol 😅 and when doing the black smoke rename to white smoke we´ll get... black phosphorous! 🤪

 

Since you can't relax on your holiday withut knowing the answer to this I did ...

When you get back, copy the smoke black.bmp to your Z folder and rename it smoke gray.bmp
Then you can drive around polluting the countryside with your sooty exhaust fumes - note that you may be charged extra to drive into some cities because of your emissions ... 💨

That's what I said as well - maybe this IS JM's holiday, a week of just CM forums - pizza, beer, CM non-stop 🍕🍺 🌴

Since you can't relax on your holiday withut knowing the answer to this I did ...

When you get back, copy the smoke black.bmp to your Z folder and rename it smoke gray.bmp
Then you can drive around polluting the countryside with your sooty exhaust fumes - note that you may be charged extra to drive into some cities because of your emissions ... 💨

I might run that healthy lifestyle regime past my doctor sometime.

Yes, and this is where there are severe limitations in the game engine that many feel BF need to address - whether they do or not - who knows ...

Have to point out for balance that GeorgeMC doesn't use any mods to enhance for his maps but they do have a fantastic natural feel to them regardless. After playing one of his scenarios and wandering around his maps they stick in my memory like real life places.
I personally appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to leverage anything out of the game that is natural looking when frankly the graphics are not about that. Guys like Ben and Pete have put an inordinate amount of time into these games and are respected for that, and there's no doubt in my mind that given the tools they would produce stunning work, but that's not their remit. We all know the game has limitations in its appearance but some players - myself included - find that augmentations for a slightly more realistic environment provide added enjoyment to playability, whereas playing on stock maps, which lack these enhancements, is not what we want. I personally wish that BF would devote a little more time to this.

I will find out later for you which version of ReShade I'm using ATM, I know for certain it's not the latest, I tend to stick with a very stable, non-updated versions of most stuff on my PC since I don't trust updates to not ruin my setup ( yes, that's you I'm pointing my finger at nVidia). It's only for playing CM so it's fine tuned for that and nothing else. All my development work and real life stuff is on my Mac.
DoF is such a sweet effect but a bit difficult to get right, I'll see if I can isolate the settings I use to send you an ini file for it. CM has a very simplistic depth framework which means setting up for it has very little room for manoeuvre. There are some useful tools in ReShade to help analyse draw distances which are helpful to set up DoF. The actual in-play overhead for these effects is not too bad as well, less than stuff like antialiasing.
Also worth looking at is using one of the LUT shaders, these employ a simple lookup file to affect the overall colour of the game, think filters and post processing / colour grading in films. I used different ones for each of the colour ways in the images above. There are tons of LUTs available on the web for free and they are tiny files that take seconds to try on the fly. Chuck in stuff like bloom, mist and film grain and the possibilities expand exponentially.
There's one effect I really like which recreates the phenomenon one has of looking out from shadow into brightly lit areas on a sunny day, one's eyes take a little time to adjust and the brightness reduces a little as our pupils contract. I think it's called adaptive lighting or adaptive bloom, something like that.