37mm

My suspicion is that it wasn't actually the hedges, more some weird aspect of working on & saving the map to a later version... indeed I just checked @Aquila-SmartWargames later conversion hex edits without any difficulty, Tall Bocage & all. Finishing the conversion is taking a little longer than I'd hoped. On the Japanese side, I have to swap out all the British bunkers (at least the ones not burning) for Italian ones... I'm about halfway through that task. On the American side, the converted forces were kinda screwy so I had to rebuild & replace a lot of them. However the extra time has had some added benefits, for instance motivating me to work on the US uniforms which are now all HBT* (original mods by KilgoreT )... As well as converting the LVT mod for M3a1 Half Tracks (I don't think there are M5a1's in FI)... I've also broken up the "wave 3-5" reinforcement into its individual waves, just to make things a little less daunting for the player. Here's an example of a screwy conversion artifact, a 3 man Sherman carrying Demo charges... I've also added some force backgrounds, a rudimentary splash screen, some music & played around with the floating icons... oh & tidied up the tiny concept scenarios with some basic victory objectives & AI plans. Better get back to swapping those bunkers! *The late war Marines from the original Pacific mod are now activated by a [brown] tag.

The old mods are based on the British overalls & they kind of fit on the Italian uniforms (plus we get to keep the Italian putees). For the officers I went with the original mod style (German luftwaffe models with the British overall textures). It'll do for an early alpha but obviously will need some work. Perhaps the polygon count is too low as, currently, the helmet isn't very smooth? This morning I did manage to convert the Makin map into CMFI*, so I just need to spend some time swapping the Brits for Italians & we're good to go... *Very weird one... a simple hex edit didn't work initially so I, naturally, assumed I had to swap out the tall bocage. I couldn't see the bocage in the editor because of all the trees so I decided to alpha out the editor tree tiles. Feeling pleased with myself, I then quickly swapped all the "tall bocage" tiles for low bocage. Afterwards, the hex-edit worked & I loaded the map up into CMFI... to my great surprise the tall bocage was still there & it turned out that I had swapped all the hedges for low bocage! Why this allowed the hex edit to work I'm not too sure. Either way, I created a tag [half] to thin out the tall boccage as per the original mod & map design as well as another tag [island] for the ocean horizon.

No it's the original bitmap too... plus it seems to be accurate.

Well I spent a few hours today going through the old mods & transferring or tweaking the Japanese. This is where we are now... ... which is a considerable improvement over the concept videos. I've a few more things to tidy up & sort out but we're basically already at an early alpha stage (which i'll release soon).

You're right! There's WAY more in there than I realized including some voices. It looks like a combination of both Germans & standard Brits (not Polish Airborne) were used as Japanese. I'll transfer what I can to the current CMFI modset... might even have a go at converting those scenarios.

I can't recall tea plantations in my vague memories of reading about the fighting in Burma and it seems unlikely to me that there were many tea plantations on Pacific Islands. To be honest, we need some Asian-Pacific War grogs really. Funny aside, grape plantations are suprisingly common in modern Vietnam... French influence and all.

I'll tidy up the modpack & post it soon.

Yeah we figured out fairly early on that you could flood the CMSF trench terrain with water (indeed we initially thought we might have discovered a bug) however it wasn't until I started playing around with some of @dragonwynn's Heart of Darkness maps that I realized just how much terrain could be flooded. Here you can see the new style rice paddies (which will feature in the next version of H&E)... they are shallow ford tiles set to, say height 6, whilst the field tiles around them are set to height 5. The flooding only reaches one action square so you have to create a gridwork of shallow ford squares & surrounding fields.

DM means Direct Message. I believe its smod_italian_helmet-soldier.mdr that's the key mdr... but there's a lot of Italian helmet models & textures (even an animation file) in the brz's.

Content creation could indeed start occuring earlier, the mods will come with time. The IJA would probably be fine making do with the various Italian tanks & tankettes, although if we're proposing to also give them Allied access to Brens they would get that factions vehicles too. I think the Americans would have to use British Crocodiles for flamethrower tanks (possibly model swapped with a tag). You can get low quality American units in FI with springfields rather than garands so even 1942 scenarios are not a great stretch.

For H&E marsh was used to create rice paddies... although last year I did find a (time consuming) way of making actually flooded with water fields.

I once wasted a month in blender trying to get a palm tree like this into SF2... https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-river-scene-many-palm-trees-southern-vietnam-dong-thap-image69445091 Replacing one of the huge Pine trees with something like a tall Dipterocarp... https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/5/dipterocarps Also a teak tree would be cool... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teak We replaced hedges with lowbocage in H&E as we didn't need the straight look of hedges & we ocassionally used them to thicken up jungles. I like your thicket idea though, for CMFI, perhaps the grapevine .mdr's would be a better choice to play around with? Infantry & vehicle movement is severely hampered by them already.

All credit goes, of course, to the original modders & content producers.

DM if you'd like the current modset to playwith.

Looks great!

I intend to fully review the old mods & @Aquila-SmartWargames fairly recent playthrough of them... but I don't believe they got round to voices, unsure about UI.

The full version was released a month ago...

@JM StuffI'm well aware of @LongLeftFlankcontributions to the art of Jungle Warfare... indeed at least one of his bush mods still remains in both H&E & the current "Ring of Fire" concept mods. More importantly, the very idea of CM Jungle Warfare & exploring the difficulties faced in recreating it are his baby. IJA defenders may be better based on small teams (which can also be recreated by specialist teams in the editor, as in concept test one) but I suspect IJA offensives are better represented by the inflexible Italian formations (as in concept test two)... besides the strip based MMG's, 6mm rifles & general lack of SMG's are much more appropriate. Either way, there are Poles in CMFI & bren teams could be procured if need be. Also, thanks to the likes of @kohlenklau & @Malaspina, CMFI is gaining the reputation as one of the more experimental & moddable of the BFC games... so may as well lean on that. Help with the helmets would be appreciated @JM Stuff , we also have access to a lot more .mds' than LLF had... I wonder if Polish Airborne are still the best available .mds' today? @Kuliany opinion? Also, the Italians have several different .mds' which means we could have seperate mods for different branches of the Japanese military. A very large non-pine tree & a much larger Palm style tree would be top of the list of to do's @Lucky_Strike. A voice mod would be top priority @Rice & that would undoubtedly include suitable yells @RockinHarry.

I've nowhere near enough spare time to dedicate myself to another CM project and my current backlog will probably take, at least, a year to box off however these past few days I started playing around with CMFI & the Jungle environment of Heaven & Earth... ... I, of course, tweaked the environmental mods somewhat (which are still heavily based on work by @EZ) & added a few bits & bobs from the like of @Lucky_Strike & Aris. Obviously it's full of placeholders, still I think there's potential here for a team of interested individuals to create an Asia-Pacific War mod & content pack. For now, I'm just feeling out potential interest in such a project... as well as fishing for ideas.

Great to hear, looking forward to your independent building mods in particular.

The 'ME Soundscape', I package a custom version with each 'All in One' and regularly post WIP sound updates on my channel.

Ahhh this explains why some modders don't bother with Hi-res grass textures (or even downsize their textures). To make a decent resolution grass texture of that size would require 1.2GB (2.4GB for the green & yellow combined) & that's assuming CM would even load such a huge texture* . Either way, I can confirm that there's a clear visual difference between how the grass textures are rendered in FI compared with RT. Here's a 3x3 action square coloured grass texture in RT... Here's the exact same texture in FI... @BFCElvis is it possible that FI recieved some kind of upgraded graphics as part of the v2.0 engine upgrade of that time? An upgrade which was forgotten about & subsequently never transferred to the other titles? *An interesting aside, it appears that CM will load 256-colour 8bit BMP's (an interesting feature which could shrink the size of a LOT of mods).

Continuing to work on upgrading the "All in One", here I've used small portions of @NPye's mammoth Berlin mod project to help bring to life 'Fire & Rubbles' content...

Our building tweaks were not at all sophisticated... we just used model swaps to add sloped roofs & alpha textures to remove the chimneys. We didn't know about the possibilities blender could bring until @Aquila-SmartWargames started getting involved. As for the Brandenberg Gate... I would implement that, in the game world, by using six tall & large modular towers without windows or doors then create a giant flavour object (either a "floating" Brandenberg roof or a perfectly sized actual replica of the building) to add onto the game towers for immersion/cosmetic purposes. @Aquila-SmartWargames has created such huge flavour objects before...