GreenAsJade

What a great community this is. A very kind and generous donor just stepped forwards and helped me pay for a production database. So - CMMODS is now back, and better than ever: I think that the paid for production database is rather faster than the free one we've been using up till now! Yay! GaJ

I posted an update about this in this thread Cheers, GaJ

Hi All, The database at CMMODS has been locked by the service provider. This means that the site still runs, but nothing can be added to it. For all these years, CMMODS database has been hosted at Heroku.com - for free. It stayed within their free account parameters. Recently they reassessed those, and CMMODS fell on the wrong side of the line (actually, I think that CMMODS has been living on the wrong side for a while, they just took the time to look, recently!) It comes at a time when I've been considering the fate of CMMODs anyhow. Already, I pay $15/month for the CMMODS data storage. In order to keep going with Heroku for database, I'll have to find another $10/month, or spend some time to rationalise the database so it's more efficient/smaller and fits back into the free plan. Plus - now there's CMFI, and presumably ongoing additions to be done. Is it worth all that? I started thinking, after BFC turned off the ability for CMMODS to post in the forum, that it isn't. Mod designer interest in CMMODs dwindled at that point - quite understandably. It's more attractive to post in the BFC repo, where you get an automatic sticky post in the forum, than at CMMODs, where you don't get anything (other than having your mod hosted in a nice clean ad-free repository where it is easy to find, in an "album" of all your other mods ). It also comes at a time when RL is a bit of a drain, so I'm not really thinking much about CMMODS. So for now it will sit there as-is - existing users can download, but nothing can be added - till I have a chance to decide what to do next. GaJ

Hey SB - good apology, full marks thumbs up. GaJ

Word. What a sad sad connection that is. Of course, it's what a modern game programmer has to do to harness the power of the GPU .. if modern PC's came equipped with a dedicate Physics Processing Unit (PPU) then game programmers could decouple graphics from engine. Dream on... GaJ

First +100000 cheers for designers who parade the units. The game should do this. I probably spend 1-2 hours for small, 2-3 for medium, 3-4 hours setting up large defenses GaJ

And this would be a "Quick Battle"??? That sounds to me like a "slow battle, design it yourself from a template". Not to mention the search through the existing QB maps for a suitable starting point, because there is absolutely no way to guess what they will look like till you open them (loading 29% wait every time) ... they are so wildly variant. GaJ

If I played vs AI, I'd be looking forwards to your monster scenarios with anticipation GeorgeMc! GaJ

No, the map preview doesn't tell you anything about the conditions of the game. It doesn't tell you your oppo force makeup constraints (can they bring combined arms or only armour?). It doesn't tell you the weather. It doesn't tell you the time of day. The second player doesn't find these things out till _after_ force selection! GaJ

That sure was a good rule. GaJ

Good idea. GaJ

Only time will tell, I guess. On the one hand, it is my impression that the wheels have come off the community support a fair bit. Speaking as someone who put a fair bit of effort into community support, I can tell you that from where I'm sitting, the environment that BFC has set up is not conducive. I doubt if this is deliberate on their part, but nonethless its how it is. On the other hand, as I've said before, it takes time playing a game before the necessary experience is there to be inspired to create new things. That amount of time simply might not have passed yet. Time will tell. GaJ

Yes. IE its broken and the workarounds are painful. (And this isn't just about the map - also the second guy, who receives the first turn, doesn't even know what the conditions are that he's purchasing for! Day? Night? Oppo force makeup?) GaJ

The whole concept of QBs has been completely changed. "We" (someone) have lost sight of what it is that made them work in the old system. Right now QBs are "an interesting map with self-selected forces". Everyone knows ... or thinks that they know that ... a balanced scenario takes hours of playtesting with carefully picked forces, so what makes us think that doing a scenario by making an interseting map and whacking forces on it is going to work? The reason QBs worked in CMx1 is because the maps were _highly predictable_. This is what was _good_ about them. If you wanted to play an ME, you knew what you were up for - you knew roughly what size the setup zones would be, within reason what flags there would be, and "silly outlier" maps were rare. The complaint about the generated QB maps wasn't that they were not "varied enough". It in fact was that they did not look realistic enough. Unconnected segments of fence and road, uphill lakes etc. However, the CMx2 response has been "lets fill the QB selection up with realistic looking maps of all varieties". As a result, you completely and utterly can't trust that you will get a sensible map to plonk some forces on and play a "standard" kind of game (attack, ME, whatever) over uncontroversial terrain. I think that right now we're in a "testing time". People are trying this new way of getting a QB set up, and finding ways to make it work - like each player looking at the map beforehand. This, while being more laborious, might have to be the longterm answer. What we will have lost is the fun of trying to select a force for an unknown terrain, because the unknowns are too much.... GaJ

Spot on. This is probably a general lesson for life too: if you depend on others for your self-worth, you're in trouble Nonetheless, it's easier said than done, and is definitely a thorny problem. I don't think that the reason is that scenarios are being "played less, because it's harder". I think that most people are working their way through the existing scenarios, and demand will start to increase as they get to the end of that short tunnel. Who knows, I may be completely wrong, and QBs are satisfying folk - that might be an unexpected (for me) part of it. At WeBoB, for CMBN, there are a significant number of QBs being reported... GaJ

I had thought this, too ... and yet a designer who developer a series of the all time best CMx1 scenarios was pissed off so much by the rating system that he quit. Well - who knows what was going on. Maybe he had to quit for other reasons (RL, burn out, whatever) and this is where the blame got laid. But ... we can't escape from the fact that angst about the rating system is a continuing issue for "designers". Some don't care, but some do. It's easy to say "get over it, bud", but I'm not sure how helpful that is Then again, I'm not sure what else anyone can do about it - I don't have a silver bullet that's for sure. GaJ

Nice idea... but I totally disagree The current QB system is itself a nice idea... but broken (IMHO). I don't want to hijack this thread about the lack of H2H scenarios with a detailed discussion of the QB system - maybe it's time to start a thread on that one now, if folk are interested in that topic (I have strong opinions, but have been holding back as in "what's the point" ) I think that a major factor about a lack of scenarios is simply the lack of time to have them created, and the sudden increase in different kinds of scenarios that need to be created. It's been hardly any time that both CMBN and CMFI have been out, and it takes time to creat scenarios... maybe it even takes time to "get inspired", before you even start creating. I've created a few scenarios in my time (not many, just a few) and in each case inspiration for them only came after a lot of playing... The lack of appreciation of scenarios has been mentioned too. This is a really tough one, and plagued the older titles too. At least one absolutely top class designer quit very publicly due to dissatisfaction with the feedback on his scenarios. In that case the dissatisfaction was actually with the rating _system_. I think that it is a real problem that there is no place to put scenarios where they can be "fairly" rated _and_ easily found. This is one for the community to ponder. BFC's repository absolutely sucks for the second criteria, IMHO: I can never find anything in there. The Scenario Depot's broken rating system was the cause of the first problem I mentioned above: bad rating system. That didn't get fixed because (I _think_) GJK simply didn't have time and money and inspiration to do so. There's little motivation for anyone else to create a new site like that, either - I'm certainly not motivated to do that while BFC block automated posting into the Maps and Mods forums: why create something that BFC actively discourages... GaJ

This thread got intercepted by some discussion about game crashes and other things, and TBH I can't be arsed trying to sort through which is about H2HH and which is not. If you have an H2HH problem, or need help using it, drop me a PM, send me an email, or use Help->Report Bug. Note that H2HH explicitly does not support one player using multiple computers for the same game, if that's what someone is trying to do. H2HH expects you to play a given game from one machine only. If you start doing turns on a different machine, using Dropbox to share your own turns with yourself, H2HH will get very confused: it can't tell the difference between you and your oppo in this case. GaJ

Right. That's what I'm asking about. F12 is documented (in the hotkeys window) as reselecting the last selected unit. And on the PC it does, which is awesome... you click on a unit, plot a course somewhere move over there on the map, then click on the ground so you can see all the enemy units. Then you want that previous unit back again ... OMG, without F12 what a lot of fiddling around... ... but F12 on the Mac doesn't seem to get to the game at all... it activates the Mac sound functions (at least, on mine it does). GaJ

How do you do "F12"on a Mac, to "reselect last selected unit"? No matter what I try, F12 is either "increase sound volume" or "bring up sound menu". GaJ

There is some known wierdness about the state of your internet connection and your license validity. For example, I can play when I am completely disconnected, and when I am connected over ethernet at work, and when I'm connected via wifi at home, but not when I am connected to the internet over my cellphone as a modem. I'd submit a ticket, see how they can help you.

Purportedly, the game does protect people in trenches the way they "ought" to be protected, rather than the way it appears. The reason why trenches could not be put below the ground may have been partly a performance thing, but it was also an FOW thing. The game doesn't have a way to have the ground appear one way when it's FOW and another way when it is known. The ground is assumed known (by the game) at all times. So if they dented the ground with trenches, you'd know about it at the beginning. IIRC. GaJ

Dang, I thought my instructions were pretty good: http://gregories.net/h2hh/H2H%20Helper.html Admittedly, they don't deal with CMFI, because it came along after those instructions were written. CMFI's change of directory structures made things more complicated for sure. However, 1.7.3 and beyond are supposed to deal with it OK. What version are you using? What problems are you having? "I tried everything and nothing works" isn't much to go on GaJ

I think that there's enough suspicion that it _is_ a bug to make it worth treating as one: that is what people are telling you. IE: what you have described sounds sensible, so either things aren't quite as you describe, for reasons we can't tell from your words, or there's a bug. In either case, a screenshot would be slightly helpful, a saved turn much more so. GaJ

I can see that this is the case, but this makes it even _more_ not H2H. Because the human defender simply declines to make the attack, saves all that gear for defense, and completely chews up the attacker, who can't move without being pounded. I've been adding whatever I've played here: http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/H2H_Scenarios GaJ