Cpl Steiner

Great mod! I hadn't seriously played CM:SF for quite a while until recently. When BFC fixed the nVidia "flashing" bug I started playing again and installed this mod soon after. CM:SF is like a totally different game now. I play mainly on "Elite" in "RT" mode. WEGO mode is good for the replays but I find it takes a lot longer than RT for the same reason. The next mod I would recommend is something that gives both BLUEFOR and REDFOR troops a "ragtag" appearance. I play as the Brits quite a lot (replaying the Brits campaign currently) and there is a mod that gives the Brits a ragtag appearance that includes T-shirts and rolled up sleeves. My Brit troops really look the part now!

Yep, LMTV Armoured Truck is the fellow and comes with the "British Forces" module, not "NATO" as I said originally. I'm pretty sure the "Marines" module gives the USMC something similar. By the way, just tried an LMTV truck platoon against a load of enemy combatants in a quickly thrown together battle in the editor and despite lots of small arms fire coming their way the LMTV platoon only suffered one wounded, who was a passenger or driver, not one of the M2 gunners.

There is an armoured truck with an enclosed .50 cal turret on the top that comes with the Marines module and another similar truck for US Light Inf. Battalions that comes with the NATO module. They are not based on the Humvee though. Personally I would find the suspension of disbelief very difficult if a briefing told me that some completely foreign vehicle is actually supposed to be a Humvee "Gun Truck". It would be better in my opinion to just accept that the Humvees in the scenario are weaker than those used historically and just take something off REDFOR or add something to BLUEFOR to balance things out. By the way, really looking forward to playing JOKER-3 and any other scenarios you create from your Ramadi map. The map is a work of art for sure. If you use Marines in your scenario, you might want to remember that if you set their equipment level to "Poor", all of those fancy rotary grenade launchers are replaced by standard M203s.

There is indeed a difference (I think untreated WIA have a 20% chance of being converted to KIA at scenario end). However, as far as I can recall, the point allocation for WIA and KIA is identical, so I don't think it actually makes any difference to the score. Personally I just role-play it for extra enjoyment. I do my best not to leave wounded behind and I try not to call in air or artillery strikes on them.

Personally I would just use Brit and Marine troops so that they talk in their own respective dialect of English. Admittedly, SF units don't look much like regular troops, and in the case of the SBS one of them was using what looked like an M16. However, I could live with these inaccuracies more easily than I could with SBS or Delta guys talking in Arabic! The map would be amazing if you used large elevation differences to create the walls of the fortress. Depending on which stage of the battle you were portraying, you could have Brits or Northern Alliance troops up on the walls firing down into the "court yard", with Taliban firing back from below with everything from RPGs to heavy machine-guns. Don't forget, they raided the armoury building at the start of the uprising, so they were very well armed. I tried finding the fort on google maps and I think it's at 36.76765,66.899943 as the shape of the fort matches the 3d graphics in that film. [Edit] Nice description of the fortress here (extract from Doug Stanton's "Horse Soldiers"): The line of six trucks halted inside the fort, and the prisoners stepped down under the watchful eye of a dozen or so Northern Alliance guards. Suddenly one prisoner pulled a grenade from the belly-band of his blouse and blew himself up, taking a Northern Alliance officer with him. The guards fired their rifles in the air and regained control. Then they immediately herded the prisoners to a rose-colored, plaster-sided building aptly nicknamed "the Pink House," which squatted nearby in the rocks and thorns. The structure had been built by the Soviets in the 1980s as a hospital within the bomb-hardened walls of the fortress. The fort was immense, a walled city divided equally into southern and northern courtyards. Inside was a gold-domed mosque, some horse stables, irrigation ditches encircling plots of corn and wheat, and shady groves of tall, fragrant pine trees whipping in the stiff winds. The thick walls held secret hallways and compartments, and led to numerous storage rooms for grain and other valuables. The Taliban had cached an enormous pile of weapons in the southern compound in a dozen mud-walled horse stables, each as big as a one-car garage and topped with a dome-shaped roof. The stables were crammed to the rafters with rockets, RPGs, machine guns, and mortars. But there were more weapons. Six metal Conex trailers, like the kind semitrucks haul down interstates in the United States, also sat nearby, stuffed with even more guns and explosives. The fortress had been built in 1889 by Afghans, taking some eighteen thousand workers twelve years to complete, during an era of British incursions. It was a place built to be easily defended, a place to weather a siege. At each of the corners rose a mud parapet, a towerlike structure, some 80 feet high and 150 feet across, and built strong enough to support the weight of 10-ton tanks, which could be driven onto the parapet up long, gradual mud ramps rising from the fortress floor. Along the parapet walls, rectangular gunports, about twelve inches tall, were cut into the three-foot-thick mud -- large enough to accommodate the swing of a rifle barrel at any advancing hordes below. In all, the fort measured some 600 yards long -- about one third of a mile -- and 300 yards wide. At the north end, a red-carpeted balcony stretched high above the courtyard. Wide and sunlit, it resembled a promenade, overlooking a swift stream bordered by a black wrought-iron fence and rose gardens that had been destroyed by the Taliban. Behind the balcony, double doors opened onto long hallways, offices, and living quarters. At each end of the fort's central wall, which divided the interior into the two large courtyards, sat two more tall parapets, equally fitted for observation and defense with firing ports. A narrow, packed foot trail, about three feet wide, ran around the entire rim along the protective, outer wall. In places, a thick mud wall, waist-high, partially shielded the walker from the interior of the courtyard, making it possible to move along the top of the wall and pop up and shoot either down into the fort, or up over the outer wall at attackers coming from the outside. In the middle of the southern courtyard, which was identical to the northern one (except for the balcony and offices overlooking it), sat the square-shaped Pink House. It was small, measuring about 75 feet on each side, too small a space for the six hundred prisoners who were ordered by Northern Alliance soldiers down the stairs and into its dark basement, where they were packed tight like matchsticks, one against another. There, down in a dank corner, on a dirt floor that smelled of worms and sweat, brooded a young American. His friends knew him by the name of Abdul Hamid. He had walked for several days to get to this moment of surrender, which he hoped would finally lead him home to California. He was tired, hungry, his chest pounding, skipping a beat, like a washing machine out of balance. He worried that he was going to have a heart attack, a scary thought at age twenty-one. Around him, he could hear men praying as they unfolded hidden weapons from the long, damp wings of their clothing.

I would LOVE someone to make a scenario about this: Qala-i-Jangi There are some good 3D computer-graphic maps of the fortress in that documentary, which would help a lot. I would make it for CM:SF + Brits + Marines and use the Brits as SBS and the Marines as US Special Forces. You would have Red Combatants for all Afghan forces (Taliban + Foreign Fighters and Northern Alliance). A scenario based on this battle would have everything - gorgeous map (clever use of elevations could create the fortress walls and the basement of the "pink" building), multiple types of units (Brit, US, Red on both sides), a Northern Alliance tank, plus airstrikes. To portray it accurately you would have to have something like a company plus of Taliban/Foreign Fighters and only a handful of Brit/US special forces and a somewhat larger force of Northern Alliance. I would also limit Airpower to maybe one or two bombs only by giving the air support reduced ammo in the editor. You would have to also give the Taliban/Foreign Fighters as much cover as possible in the form of foliage, flavour objects etc. It would probably be a massacre - much as in real life - but it should not be over in minutes. In the actual battle they held out for a couple of days!

Isn't that the Humvee that has to "open up" in order to use the roof-mounted optics?

I started this thread after reading the following message by Volltreffer: "OMG!!! First time ive played CM:SF in months....due to the flashing light issue - Thank god its fixed before Normandy comes out..." The number of people who post on forums is a tiny fraction of the number who actually buy a game, and yet here was someone else who, like myself, had been turned off playing CM:SF because of the nVidia flashing issue. I can only imagine there must be hundreds of players in a similar position. Anyway, I still think an updated demo would be a good idea.

That's only really an option if you play nothing but CM:SF. For most gamers though, rolling back the drivers would result in poorer game-play for their other games. An updated v1.31 CM:SF+Marines+Brits+NATO Demo might help their sales. As for players who have left the fold, perhaps a prominent "sticky" thread in the forum and a splash-banner on the main www.battlefront.com home page would win them back.

Hi all, I begain to play CM:SF less and less when the "nVidia Flashing Bug" appeared, and from reading some other posts, it seems like I was not alone. BFCs decision to fix this problem was long overdue in my opinion. It is all very well saying, "it's a driver issue", but if players start deserting your product in droves because of a bug in their graphics card, what business sense is that? Anyway, I'm very glad this problem has now been "fixed" or "worked around" or whatever, and have been playing CM:SF for hours this weekend with newfound enthusiasm. So, what do we do about players who may have given up on CM:SF? They might not even be visiting the forum anymore. How can we advertise the fact that this issue has been resolved?

This would indeed help with situational awareness. I like the idea of messages setting the focus to the relevant unit when clicked on - just as if you'd selected the unit and pressed <tab>. The unit would be selected by clicking the message and the camera brought to the unit's POV, to allow a quick reaction order to be given. In terms of programming I don't think it would be too difficult as the <tab> key does essentially the same thing - you would just have to write the GUI code to display the message and allow the <tab> key function to be called when the message was clicked on. Good GUI design is all about calling the same routines from different places (menu, keyboard shortcut, icon, etc). The main thing that would have to be got right is to avoid too much screen clutter. You would need to choose a part of the screen not used for some other information, and maybe have an "<alt>-m" or similar key combo to display/undisplay the event log. I don't think you'd need more than 5 or 6 event messages to show at any one time - older ones would disappear as new ones were added. With so many events happening in the game though, the game would have to prioritise what to report and what to ignore. For instance, "taking fire" messages for the same unit would be ignored (i.e. the code to display the message would check that there wasn't an identical type of message for the same unit already displayed).

I was reading an AAR of a board game called "Labyrinth - The War on Terror" (GMT) and thought immediately of CM:SF when I read the following passage: "2011: The Syrian War The Taliban open the new year with an attack on the United Nations, killing the leader of the long UN mission in that country and resulting in a UN pullout. A separate Taliban plot in Kabul goes awry, but another in Pakistan absorbs authorities’ resources. With most US troops at home, global Islamist proselytizing begins to take an anti-violence bent, denting al-Qaeda and Taliban finances. [“Vieira de Mello Slain” blocks UN; failed Plot removes Afghan cell, Plot in Pakistan Alerted; “Hizb -ut-Tahrir” Funding down to 6 (Moderate).] All this is but preamble. In the spring, the powerful jihadist organization in Syria finally makes its move on the regime. Asad’s security forces—focused on countering Israel—prove a weak reed against the popular internal uprising. With only moderate losses, the Islamists seize control of the country in a month. Not resting a minute in the onward march of the jihad, fighters immediately begin to infiltrate the Syrian-Iraqi border into the pro-Islamist population of al-Anbar province. [successful Jihad in Syria, -1 cell to 7, Syria to Islamist Rule Adversary, Islamist Resources to 4 (of 6 needed for win); 3 cells Travel Syria to Iraq] This time Washington divines that containment is not enough. It quickly assembles Coalition backing and launches a summer invasion of the new Syrian Islamist state, quickly pushing jihadists eastward out of Damascus. While there is little cheering in the Muslim world, shock and revulsion at Asad’s weakness keeps protest mild this time. A provisional government of appointed anti-Asad Syrians proves itself popular and surprisingly competent. To show that the Central Asian “terror states” are not to be left off the hook, US special forces based in Afghanistan raid northward. [Regime Change Deploy 6 troops from Track to Syria, US to War, Syria tests Fair Ally, Islamist Resources back to 2 (for Central Asia), Prestige -1 to 4 (still Medium); “Special Forces” removes cell in Central Asia.] Jihadist efforts to strike at US troops in Syria and the new government there are largely self-defeating; terrorist plotting inside Iraq adds up to little that Saddam’s security services can’t handle. Iran meanwhile uses agents within Pakistan to strike jihadist interests there. The jihad’s only success for the remainder of the year is the recruiting of new cadres in its Central Asian bastion and formation—aided by jihadist use of the Internet—of a new cell in Lebanon. While stabilization work in Syria remains, the US feels confident enough in the Fall to draw down its troop strength there by a small percentage. [5 Plot ops in Syria with only 1 success (Alerted) eliminates the 4 cells remaining there; 6 Plot ops in Iraq also yield only 1 success, but the Alert to stop it triggers “Jihadist Videos” that places a cell each in Central Asia an Lebanon; “Iran” removes a cell from Pakistan (despite “FATA”).]" N.B. - In the alternate timeline of this particular AAR, Iraq was never invaded in 2003. All above from links on this page: Labyrinth on GMT See also BGG page: Labyrinth on BGG I might pick up this game as a Christmas treat to myself! P.S. - I know advertising of "competitor" games is against forum rules but I thought I might get away with this one as a) it's a Strategic Board Game, not a Tactical Computer Game, and this particular AAR has some relevance to CM:SF in terms of the invasion of Syria. If not, then apologies and please remove.

Seems a reasonable idea to me. I doubt you'd even have to make more clicks for the higher quantities - Charles could just add a couple of smaller quantities to the existing menu.

Well "GTA-IV" was the first Rockstar game to use this engine, and "Red Dead Redemption" is the second. Judge for yourself if this is is a very poor way to make a ground breaking FPS! There are lots of game engines out there and one might even be suited to the sorts of games BFC make (which the Euphoria engine clearly is not) but I think for a small outfit like BFC the license costs and man-hours required to do all the title-specific models and art for it would be prohibitive. [EDIT] A quick search in google came up with this free RTS engine. Well I know CM:SF is technically not a RTS but this engine is the closest to the style of game BFC is known for. Spring Engine P.S. - Before anyone thinks I've lost my marbles, I don't seriously think BFC would go for an engine. I just wanted to defend GTA-IV and RDR against Steve's suggestion that games made using the engine were somehow inferior to games made without it.

In CMx1 didn't Panzerschreks do all sorts of nasty things to the firer if he was in a building - like suppress him or set his building on fire? Sometimes I miss CMx1!

I think the Soviets always used RED for friendly and BLUE for enemy. Red is the colour of communism after all.

Bear in mind the mousemat was supposed to help with the UI but I think several bits of the UI displayed on it have changed since the initial release. Basic game plus all modules is what I'd recommend.

Thanks. I'll check what you wrote on the OpNem site.

I just posted on your site. I'd be interested in having a look at the "CaT" (campaign tool) but you are restricting access to the team HQs. Do I have to take one of those 6-8 places in order to see it?

I did a search and it looks like "World of Warcraft" is having the same sorts of problems with the 19x.xx drivers. Glad to hear it's not just CM as nVidia are more likely to fix the problem in the next release. I think I'll put up with the flashing and wait for the next version.

Can anyone recommend a graphics driver for my rig: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ 2.01 GHz 2.00 GB RAM Windows 7 64-bit nVIDIA 9600 GT 512 MB I'm currently using the Forceware 19.107 driver but all my buildings are flashing whenever there's an explosion and the framerate is pretty poor.

Release notes for the nVidia Drivers I'm using: •Adds support for OpenGL 3.2 for GeForce 8, 9, 100, and 200-series GPUs and ION GPUs. As CM:SF is an OpenGL game, I reckon they've been a bit overzelous in how they've changed the way their driver handles OpenGL calls.

Easy - just add a number at the end of the texture file name. E.g. - Instead of "syria-helmet" you have "syria-helmet 1", "syria-helmet 2", "syria-helmet 3" etc.

Last time I checked the Brits only had about 10 Chinooks in the whole of Afghanistan. It makes me laugh when the British government say the army has enough equipment and helicopters to do the job. Who do they think they are kidding.

I am really looking forward to the CM Afghanistan game - partly because I feel the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s might now, in retrospect, actually look like the good guys. According to this Wikipedia article, the Soviet's were hoodwinked into invading Afghanistan as part of an American secret plot to give the Soviets "their Vietnam". Read the bit about Brzezinski's role in the plan in the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan