Erik Springelkamp

I understand. This is the first time I ran into a scenario that I couldn't load, for all CM2 games, even though I just upgraded RAM from 2 to 4 GB. So I posted this because I am curious if other people have run into limits, and with what system specs. And I know the Mastermap is not meant to be played, but I suppose for Russia people will create some very large maps. And I like large maps with real movement.

I could walk it in 3D in the preview mode of the scenario editor. Loading in 2D was very fast, but opening the 3D view took very long (I think over 15 minutes). After that moving around in the map was not too bad though, and some places seemed rather familiar - others have changed quite a bit since then. But it failed to load from the Battle Menu.

Because I have lived in Nijmegen, I wanted to look at the Nijmegen City Mastermap, but it proved to be too large for my computer system. After giving it a long time to load (I went out shopping), it had loaded something, but the user interface was green and purple, and the map itself was showing grey goo, in which I vaguely recognized the Nijmegen city plan and the bridges. Fortunately the map could be loaded into the scenario editor and there I could admire the map, but unfortunately my former house was just off map (and my other former home in that area, in Beek, was just off the map of the Devil's Hill, but also that map had some recognizable features). Anyway, I am curious what kind of systems can and cannot load that large a map. My system: Windows XP 32bit, 4 GB RAM, videocard 1GB ATI. I will upgrade next week to Windows 7 64bit on the same hardware, and I hope the 64bit OS will give me a little bit more RAM in user space, although I understand that CM is a 32 bit program.

When a game loads, I usually Alt Tab to my browser to read something. It works generally well, and I see the background change (CM doesn't repaint while loading) when the game is ready to be played. But sometimes in CMSF there are textures missing (some pieces of landscape are pitch black) when I start this way. When I quit the game and restart without Alt Tabbing (and make a coffee while the game loads), all is fine. Have others experienced similar things, or is it just a coincident, and is something else to blame?

There are Germans up on the hill, in the outskirts of Groesbeek and they have LOS from the buildings there.

Yeah, the spotting model doesn't produce a realistic result here. Maybe in the first step of the spotting model for efficiency reasons the infantry section is only represented by a point that is missed because it is outside the viewing angle of the car at the moment of the spotting calculation. But here the infantry unit so close in reality is an extended entity that should be impossible to miss if every soldier was taken into effect. But that probably only happens when the first calculation with only the point produces a spot. In this video also shows the following: When you spot a few soldiers of an enemy section, the icon of the unit is often not above the spotted soldiers, but apparently above the centre of the whole group, so this gives you some additional information about where their buddies are.

Transport, battle taxi, an alternative Jeep, maybe long range fire support. Probably much of the same arguments as in the German Halftrack discussions. From my memory of the battle reports of the Canadian Battle of Groningen in 1945 they were not used much in combat, except in one case fighting in a park where they did an overrun after most of the defences were destroyed by flamethrowers. But many photographs show them transporting men (overcrowded) and guns and stuff.

A Combat Mission game/module cannot be finished until it is replaced by a new version.

But it only shows in fields that have no crops, so on some maps the effect is rather limited.

Maybe I am going to do a CMBN mod, using your historical symbols, but in the 'letter-like open' style. One thing I didn't understand when I rezexploded the pack is why some icons are 128x128 while most are 64x64. Does the game scale these larger icons back automatically?

I think I didn't have to activate the Market Garden module when I used the big bundle including Common Wealth. Had me confused for a while, because I didn't trust it, but everything worked. There was probably one key to rule them all.

They are very nice, but to be honest, I liked your CMA and CMSF small open symbol icons much more. After I found a useful link to the free painting program Artweaver, I did a quick rough trial to produce something along the same principles, for the moment for only one icon, the blue HQ 1 icon, and I think it would also work very well in CMBN: I know it probably isn't even the right symbol (this is a German HQ isn't it), but it is just to show the general idea.

Just last week I saw it in Combat Mission Afghanistan, I didn't even see the mission until I heard it, and then I discovered the Fire For Effect was on the other side of a mountain :-) However, next mission, same spotter, same battery, was right on target, although after a lot of spotting rounds that were pretty far off. This was Afghan Army artillery, spotted by a BMP HQ.

I recently bought a Market Garden bundle that measured 2.3 GB. The download took somewhat less than an hour. No complaints here.

I noticed that enemy contact icons often disappear when you move the camera close to their position, but I can't find a system in their disappearance. Some of the icons stay right until you are within a metre of their position, others drop to the ground behind walls, and others just disappear when you close in. Sometimes it also happens when you zoom in instead of actually moving the camera closer. It is not a problem, maybe a bit annoying, and probably realistic, but I am curious how this works, why the one and not the other.

They don't have to stop to rest. Just walking (MOVE) they will recover, and at least continue to advance. In reality when you are tired from running, you recover better when you just walk, unless you are exhausted, then you just want to drop down. I think this is more or less simulated in the game.

A minor related remark: When troops need to move a large distance, the Move command is pretty slow, but Quick will tire them in a few turns. When you want them to move as fast as possible without getting them tired, you have to micromanage, moving them Quick, then when they are tiring, back to Move, and when they recover walking they can go Quick for a while again. So isn't Move a little too slow on a tactical field? We don't need to march 20 kilometres in Combat Mission, movement always has a purpose, there is always too little time, in practice we would always like to Move as fast as the physical condition allows without tiring. So up a hill Move would be slower than on flat land, and units that are not fresh would move a little slower. On the other hand, formations would disperse that way, with heavy weapons trailing and leaders getting in front.

Must be platform independent C/C++ with OpenGL graphics.

Shouldn't they have appeared by now? Will there be an automated message from the repository in the forum? I am eager to use them.

I am afraid that in an escalating situation rational long term considerations will go out of the window. For now the EU has promised the price of a full Battlefront game out of my tax money as emergency support for the Kiev government. I hope the misery will be limited to that amount. But I would have preferred that Putin would have supplied that money. And when there really will be fighting in Ukraine, I don't think I will enjoy your coming Black Sea game as much. I still remember when we had planned to play the ASL scenario Khamsin, when operation Desert Storm was announced. This put us off playing ASL for half a year.

When you keep the Ukraine together, it cannot become fully Western oriented, because in that case the industrial area in the East would be destroyed: it can only function in close cooperation with Russia, it cannot compete on a free market. Take your example of Belgium: the largest driving force for the divorce is the sad state of the Walloon industry and the social friction it implies. In a Western oriented Ukraine with the Eastern industry destroyed, the Belgian divide would seem absolutely tiny in comparison. And I think that besides all kind of irrational feelings, this is a justified fear of the Russian Ukrainians.

Acting fully according to self-determination, the rational solution seems to split the Ukraine with the Crimea and the Don area going to Russia, and the West of the Ukraine becoming a state within the EU sphere, under protection of NATO if necessary. Keeping up the principles of sovereign territorial integrity for the whole Ukraine will only lead to large scale misery in this case. Like a miserable marriage, divorce can be a solution (but usually not without a fight, unfortunately).

Over the last decades of independent Ukraine, the democratic process resulted in swings from pro-Western to pro-Russian and back, with both sides having about equal number of supporters. The West has been trying to bring Ukraine under the NATO umbrella (often deeply hidden within the proposals) for many years now, and one should understand that that is not acceptable for Russia. Ukraine as an independent nation in its full current extent is historically not completely self evident. The current full support of the West for the government of the uprising can certainly be interpreted as strong aggression towards Russia and also goes against the wishes of a substantial part of the Ukrainian population. Everybody who ignores these aspects in the current situation is just as much a warmonger as Jacquinot.

I think you should not argue with a banned, ex, no more, forum member. All this just shows how much misunderstanding there is among common Western and Russian people that are under the influence of their local propaganda.

So Russia (RL today) has achieved half of her (CMBS) goals - acquiring the Crimea - without a shot. Fighting realistically only to be expected - maybe - in Eastern Ukraine, but at the moment the Kiev government doesn't seem to display much force in the East.