GreenAsJade

Note: I've added "Map" to the possible "mod types" list. I may add "Scenario" as well, or I might do a whole another section for CMBN scenarios, like it is for CMSF. Cheers, GaJ.

+1! I'd like a grid mode too please!

One thing: the discussion about flavour objects, and indeed any "above ground" object is a red herring to the original point. There remains quite a basic question which is "what is this stuff at the ground level?" The cheat sheet posted a few pages back is fantastic. As I said, it means that one needs to mod terrain with great care... and why all this trouble? Why not tell us what the basic terrain under the pointer is? The things on top that are made of polygons we can see by what they look like what they are. Fountains, tree trunks, logs etc. I don't need a tool tip to tell me that it is a log. But what is the log lying on? GaJ

mjkerner posted a new CMBN mod at the CM Mods Warehouse: Bocage Country by mjkerner "This is a 600m x 600m map of bocage country, including woods, marsh, fields and sunken roads. Please beware this map..." GaJ

FWIW I also discovered I could dramatically speed up the front page loading. It's still hosted on a free server (heroku.com: totally recommend for rails apps ), so subject to all that this implies (slowdowns when the load is high, the occasional timeout), but at least the process of getting that page drawn is much better now If speed/timeouts become an issue, the next level of performance will cost $36/month. At the moment I can't fork that out myself (I'm already paying for the storage of all the mod data at Amazon S3). GaJ

I was going to start a thread about this. Clearly here is one place. However, there are clubs of gamers where you'll have a much better chance of an audience guaranteed to want a game and more likely to finish it. It's a sad fact that the drop rate for games "with a stranger off the street" is high. Each club has it's own emphasis and feel. Some major variables are the range of games played and the competitiveness of the place (how much of a "ladder club" is it"). Off the top of my head, I know about: We Band Of Brothers This is the one I like, where I hang out mostly. It is "BFC WWII Combat Mission Only" in terms of games played, and in the middle of the range of "competitiveness". Players are ranked, but it's not a "ladder club" with a fierce battle for who's at the top. It has a very strong emphasis on completing games that are started. If you drop games, you're out ... so you know that generally when you get an opponent at WeBoB your game is going to complete (there are _always_ exceptions no matter what, of course :S ) They regularly run tournies (friendly) and have a "challenges" forum for opponent finding. The only slight downside is that the signup process for this group is a bit involved. This is to make sure that members really will finish their games. The Scenario Depot This is "the" place on the web for CMx1 scenarios, and it also has a friendly opponent finder function. Totally not a competitive place. The Few Good Men I know less about this group. There are some well known CMx1 figures who hang out here. They have a forum and a ladder. They play at least all the BFC games, and a few others. The War Gamers Club I know that this club exists, but that's all that I know. It's actually hard to google for because there are so many unrelated hits on those words. HTH. Maybe others will add more. If you like PBEM, it's definitely worth checking some of these out. GaJ

At first I thought, with "abstract representation thinking" that it doesn't matter that it's difficult to make each individual man get into a foxhole, because surely the game knows that the squad is entrenched. But reading about geometry blocking bullets etc, I'm thinking actually this is bad, right? If you plonk a mortar unit into a foxhole, and half the guys are clustered around the mortar tube but not _in_ the foxhole, then those guys are really exposed. Ouch! Same with trenches: it seems to be quite a trick to get all the men of a rifle squad into a trench... so the guys who line themselves outside the trench against it's "back wall" ... they seem to be worse off? Do trenches protect against HE? Are these guys who are "outside" the trench not protected in that way? GaJ

I realised that this "more complex terrain scape" doesn't rule out a simple report of what is being pointed at by the targetting line. At least, it seems not... ... take the example of boggy ground covered by light undergrowth that was given before. Since each of these elements is represented by geometry (did I understand that right) then simply report what is the geometry under the pointer at the time. If I'm pointing at a leaf, say "shrub". If I'm pointing at the ground, say "boggy ground". What's wrong with that? GaJ

It's not hard but it is tedious. And who wants to be remembering passwords and who's email is what, and which game is up to where. That's what PBEMH takes care of. I wasn't meaning to say that CMBN the game should support this built in. What I'm looking for is someone doing something like PBEMH. It could be me, if no-one else is already. Unfortunately fuerte disappeared, so PBEMH itself won't be updated. The problem with me doing it is that I don't know how to make a program click another program's buttons. Any clues out there? In the absence of that, I'd need command line arguments for CMBN if I was to do it... GaJ

I had no idea about this aspect of terrain detail. It makes modding terrain a bit scary. You need to learn what things look like, so changing a terrain element is something to treat with new caution in this case... GaJ

Hi Sivodsi, that's barely half of what PBEMH does. That just gets the incoming file in the right place. What about starting up CMBN, selecting the correct game from that ever-growing list, and typing in the password? What about one click to send the outgoing file to the opponent? This is the support that I'm talking about. A good PBEMH will automatically connect to some service like sendthisfile.com and use it to send the file to the oppo with one click. All this can be done: but either someone needs to know how to write a program to press another program's buttons (which I haven't been able to crack) or CMBN needs a command line option to start up a given game. GaJ

It seems to be all fixed. If something doesn't work for you, let me know. GaJ

Yeah, that is cool. Though ironically I _prefer_ the targetting line telling me what I'm pointing at while keeping the good graphics... they had it right in the first place GaJ

I've been using PBEMH forever to manage CMx1 PBEM games. I'd totally forgotten what a hassle it is saving the files in the right place from the email, firing up the game, entering the password, creating the outgoing message etc etc. Is anyone doing anything about this? I'd be happy to frig with PBEMH to get it to work and/or create a new little app but there's one little problem: how to fire up CMBN itself and tell it what has to be done. PBEMH solved this with some cool magic of pressing the buttons for you, based on knowing where they are or what they are called. I haven't been able to find a way of doing that these days. Does anyone know how? The alternative would be for CMBN to support command line options for these things: then a helper program would be a piece of cake... GaJ

(One good thing is how the targetting line goes "through" intervening terrain, so if there is a small rise in the way, this kind of highlights it).

Reload? Oh, you mean vs AI. Real men carry on when decisions turn out to be wrong

I had thought that new illumination and other fancy tricks were going to make terrain shape easy to see. This actually turns out not to be the case. In fact, due to the way that diagonal roads are narrower than perpendicular ones, you can have optical illusions where a road appears to be undulating, but is in fact just winding along flat (eg the tutorial). Bring on the grid mod!!! GaJ

So the broader question: you too are stumped about how to recognise terrain? I wonder why they took away the reporting of what terrain is under the targetting line? GaJ

Sorry is this is a dumb question, but how do you know, looking at the game, what various terrain items are, and whether they are even "anything"? For example, in the demo tutorial there is a patch of brown in the middle of the field on the attacker's right flank. What is that? Is it significant? Similarly: there are various kinds of walls and fences and hedges. How does one tell whether something that looks different is actually the same thing but variously decorated? Thanks! GaJ

GreenAsJade posted a new CMBN mod at the CM Mods Warehouse: Contact Icon Mod V2 by DeutschRitter "Contact Icon Mod replaces the "Question Mark Icons" with Axis and Allies Icons Version 2.0 - Better looking germa..." GaJ

Mordante posted a new CMBN mod at the CM Mods Warehouse: Mord's No Music Mod by Mordante "No Music...for those who like to wait on their game to load in silence...." GaJ

OK, yay - that seems to be working. GaJ

GreenAsJade posted a new CMBN mod at the CM Mods Warehouse: Vehicle and Weapon Sihouettes by Marco Bergman "This mod updates the UI to include more information about weapons and units, and with updated sihouette artwork. ..." GaJ

This thread is where announcements of new mods at CMMODS will automatically be posted.

madorosh posted a new CMBN mod at the CM Mods Warehouse: TWC Contact Icon Mod "Replaces the unidentified "?" symbols with more recognizable nationality symbols, on familiar color-coded backgrounds...." GaJ