Ryujin

You seem to be able to really load down a squad with ammo, but it will have an stamina penalty. You won't see something in the acquire menu if you can't take it. I forget how many launchers/at rounds you can have per soldier, I think it's one jav, but maybe 2x LAWs or M136s. As far as the uses of the Marine AT assets, -you have the javelin (self expanitory) -SMAW, crew served and like a RPG-7 in the sense it's reloadable and has a wide range of rounds , High Explosive Anti Armor (HEAA), High Explosive Dual Purpose (more explosive, less HEAT warhead), and Novel Explosive (NE, thermobaric anti-building round). SMAWs are good against the widest range of targets, I often use them on buildings and positions. Real lifesaver in urban combat (for the Marines anyway , not so great for the other guys) . Sorta compensates for not having squad or platoon level Javelins. Also a bit more accurate a longer ranges than the disposable AT launchers. -The M136 (AT4) is the usual single shot launcher, good for lighter armor or flank shots on tanks. 84mm HEAT round that can hurt older tanks, especially without ERA. -The LAW is a very light disposable launcher, less punch but less size and weight. As such you tend to have more disposable AT around than M136s alone. These are best for BMPs and the like. 66mm HEAT round, not a lot of armor penetration, but better than your M16s... never had much luck with these vs any tanks. APCs though can be taken out, especially with multiple hits. The brits have a version of this called the Light Anti Structure Munition (LASM if I remeber correctly), with an HE warhead.

Just took it for a spin, very nice! Been playing through the first couple missions. The house to house combat is pretty nice in the first mission. Had to take a screenshot of this, crashing an insurgent party with a frag:

I don't know, the toyota pickups are really tough. Those guys on the show "top gear" couldn't kill one by drowning it in the english channel, lighting it on fire, hitting it with a wrecking ball, and putting it on top of a building that was then imploded with explosives... and they got it running again after all that with a couple basic tools. So... relatively speaking, several .50 to the engine may be a minor nuisance . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg4bBPlWzT8 pt 1 of 3, neat show, crazy what they do it it

Eagle eyed game dev student to the rescue!!!1one1! The best way is to look at existing textures as BFC haven't put out template. This will give you a sense of "what goes where" (what parts of the texture deal with which part of the model). The models have had "UV maps" made of em, best way to think of it is like the model being like a set of clothes and the UV map is like cutting the clothes so you can lay it out on the floor (or texture) with no cloth overlapping. This turns a 3d object into a 2d "map" that can be used to apply texture, in this case we're just concerned with a "color map". For example, UV map of a cube http://modetwo.net/darkmod/wiki/images/thumb/f/fe/Cube_Representative_UV_Unwrapping.png/800px-Cube_Representative_UV_Unwrapping.png Now what BFC has is a set of wireframe templates. We however do not have those, but we have the templates they've doodled on (the textures in the game). You can the a look at the name of the texture (ie US helemet) and what's on it to get an idea of what corresponds to what. In may cases I will put small dots of different colors on a texture and load it up in game to get an idea of what goes where on the model and if it's has any distortion/stretch. Here's the MOLLE texture and my test dots for a recent project. I hope this will be an easier way of seeing how it works. Texture: Ingame: I hope that helps, please let me know if that wasn't clear. Anyway to get at the textures included in the game to use as templates and make a working mod, you'll need to.... 1. Open the .brz file containing the textures you need. These are found in your "combat mission shock force/data" folder. "Version 100.brz" Contains most of the US army, misc, and syrain textures. If you have the British or USMC expansions, you'll see .brzs with the respective labels. 2. Once you got a .brz you want to open, go to the "Combat Mission Shock Force\Mod Tools\RezExplode\input" folder and COPY the file into there. DON"T CUT OR DRAG, your game still needs it . Run the .exe in the "Combat Mission Shock Force\Mod Tools\RezExplode" folder. This is an unpaker for the game data files. End result will be in the "exploded" folder. Grab the .BMPs you need and draw your texture over em as mentioned above. 3. Once your ready to try something ingame, go to the "combat mission shock force/data" again. If there is not already a "Z" folder, create one. Make a new folder inside "Z" with the name of your mod (i.e. "Syrian Desert Camouflage") 4. Drop your textures in that folder, make sure the names have not been changed. The game will then load these tyextures instead of the orginals. 5. run game and you should see your textures if it worked. I know that's a big chunk of text, I'll check back to see if you have any questions and I'm sure many other members can also help you

I can't wait for the CV9035 (if only because it's one of my favorites in steel beasts). The lack of ATGM isn't great, but I don't remember off hand what the dismounts have. I noticed the LAVIII says "M242 with TIS", just incase this isn't just odd phrasing, the CV9035 has TIS too, as does the Marder (I think, I know the CV90s have it, pretty sure about the marder). Just saying....

Nice work! Looks pretty interesting.

I've heard these are duds/screw ups by the pilot. Some times they seem surprisingly common, I've only seen em with what I think were bombs. Both fixed and rotary will seek out targets if given area targets. If given a point target they will attack that exact spot reguardless of spotting anything. I don't know how/if information on targets gets passed up the chain of command, that's an interesting question.

I'm not sure it's high enough resolution (and CMSF doesn't have any complex lighting effects) for that kind of detail. I'll experiment a bit, but don't get your hopes up . Yeah, there's a noticeable increase in detail between this and the beta, I was able to really do things better this time around. As far as eta I would tentatively say before October, but of course this is not set in stone due to various university related stuff.

Been playing around with ways to make better looking goggles, went with painting eyes on them with a slight tint (to cover up skin color, on light skinned guys they look tinted, on dark skinned guys it looks more untinted). Avoids some of the "terminator goggles" look of solid black, I'm still working on getting the eyes just the right size and placement. Also working of the IOTV, a few accuracy changes and hand drawing bits to conform to the UV better. New gloves too.

I think you guys are getting a bit ahead of yourselves... BFC needs a physics engine integrated before you could even think about something like euphoria (which would be pretty awesome). Then there's fun process of getting euphoria and you're physics engine integrated. Of course when you're a big name studio like rockstar, I'm sure the NaturalMotion folks were bending over backwards to make it work for them. GTA and RDR actually don't push the full features of euphoria, mostly realism and environmental stuff that would feel out of character for a more arcade game. They went for more stable character movement (probably a good gameplay choice in this case) and more flying ragdolls. If you realy wanted to you could always have euphoria running on your character. Trying to run round surface like a pipe or running full tilt into a shin high wall would have interesting effects. You could also have very interesting persistent injury effects to your character (walking after being shot would be challenging or near impossible. Not good for a game where you take in lead like a pencil factory). Lots of potential, but would take getting used to a character that reacted and moved like that. Also takes a bit more work to keep it fulid, GTA had some issues with odd behavior and running full animation through it would take a bit of work to perfect. There's some GTA mods that let you do more with the euphoria and turn it on at will. It's not really meant for that use in GTA, but it does make for some funny youtube videos... A cheaper and easier alternative is to take something like endorphin and generate a ton of animations with it. No physics engine needed, you run endorphin (a program with the same physics based animation as euphoria) and you can set up and capture animations (and make them pretty quickly, I've played around with the endorphin learning edition). No as much environmental interaction, but less CPU needed in game and no need for the whole game world to have physics. Anyway, it would be nice to see a basic physics engine at some point in CM, just it doesn't seem likely as it'd be a notable jump in CPU use (and CMSF isn't multi-core friendly) and would require some reworking of things like buildings (IE less abstraction, no paper thin walls, etc). Seeing as CMx2 didn't start with physics support, it may be a bit hard to go back and add it.

Well......... it's 4am and I got a bit carried away..... I got a plan for restructuring all this to make it more modular and user friendly, a bunch of .brz packs for each component that should be a bit easier to manage. Anyway, my efforts are primarly on infantry a the moment, USMC infantry in the works, and I'm improving the US Army to v2, after reviewing and improving from v1, and of course the US faces pack. Here's a peak at US army v2, (now with mags in the pouches, among other things ): BREAKING NEWS! USMC CLEANS GOGGLES! ....I know I missed a bit, will be fixed later

No offense taken personally, I'm just going for a "plausible" mix of faces. It's hard to control what mix the randomization gives you anyway, I just do a few more Caucasian faces than others and you get a decent mix. Shouldn't be notable unless you're counting or something. At the moment I'm more worried about making decent glasses, it's not easy .

Darn edit time limit! One last round of WIP shots for today: (farthest guy is stock for comparison, main difference is more natural skin tones and such)

One thing at a time . At the moment I'm just going to focus on what effects my HD USMC/US Army. Need to get that done first.

I was thinking of a couple more than the stock game in terms of actual faces, probably adding a few more asian/latino faces in the mix. Then I'll probably make a few variations of some of the faces with glasses/gloves, etc. As you mentioned there's already that good syrian faces mod, so I'll probably leave those alone and refer people to that mod.

Started a bit of work on new faces. Bit tricky without good face reference (side and front, etc). I opted to leave them a 512x512px for various reasons (namely I think people may want it not HD for use on lower end systems and etc. So here's a sample at 512x512, I think it still looks pretty slick being photo based instead of hand drawn like the stock faces. thoughts?

You could texture a building as a tent, but it'd retain the solid construction and be a remarkably well protected tent. Maybe a building minus all the walls, I'm not really sure...

Well, you can always take the US army or USMC (when released) for a spin and see how they work out. Can't hurt, they are free after all. Since I don't know exactly how performance is on slower systems, posting the results of any test would be appreciated.

Same resolution as the US Army HD guys, just better texture work on my part. So you should get about the same performance with them. Personally, I have a very high end system so I only get the occasional hicup when looking at big masses of troops (CMSF doesn't fully use my quad or dual GPUs). I haven't really got enough feedback to say what it does on lower systems, other than if you have trouble running CMSF as is, this certainly isn't going to help .

Not quite US Army HD... had a little time to do some more work: Work in progress, showing off new MTV vest and uniform textures. Final version will be goggle-free. Oh and a sound mod update, made a number of changes, not sure all are for the best, feedback is appreciated. http://www.filefront.com/17211926/HD Sound v0.59.rar

I believe you could probably swap the models around. Give the uncons the mujaheddin models and etc. Just a visual swap like that (Like I've done with turning the UAZ into a pickup truck or having the USMC use the US army model). I would bet it's probably doable, just not sure what BFs take on that would be. If BF would frown on it, I could also say write a detailed "do it yourself" guide, but not actually make a mod including the files. So you could only do it if you already had the Afghanistan game files.

[RECORDED IN SPOILER-VISION!] Personally I found the dismounted option easier because of how the map is layed out. The sparseness of tactically significant positions made it easy to assume there would be MGs/Snipers at each of them and proceed with that in mind. There was only the "orchard" and hidden ground behind it, house, treeline at end of the field (the rest of the field wasn't too bad), and that suspicious little hill in the corner (gamey, but it still got my spidey sense tingling). Taking these as the probable enemy positions, the rest of the battle was much easier. I didn't get every enemy fighter, just made sure to hammer down the positions enough that I could move around. I started by moving up on both flanks, through the fields and the scrub/open ground. Step one was to sneak up on the house and scope out the contacts. I tried to stay as keyholed as possible, to deal with one threat at a time. Then nearly got a guy shot by that sniper on the hill. Since I had tried to keyhole as much as possible, I had a manageable list of suspected positions and put area fire on all of em (house, hill). House got the SMAW treatment too. This addressed the incoming fire issue. Next step was to work the other flank. I had 2 squads moving up bounding through the walled fields, going for the orchard. With the hill and house suppressed, they had a manageable task now. They made it to the orchard with out incident, just a tad bit of fire from the bottom of the house, which hadn't gotten as much fire or any smaws. They moved through the orchard and bumped into the technicals and fighters on the other side. Luckily, they seemed to have the element of surprise and I had 2 squads coming through the woods, they lit everything up and suffered only a couple minor injuries. The one firetime on the roadside edge ran into trouble though, I had issues suppressing and getting fire into the center treeline and when i poked up a team to eyeball the trench from the orchard they got hit bad with one WIA. The wall however save the rest of em and I had them hide. Eventually I was able to get rounds down into the trench from the orchard, bringing a full squad up to rain 5.56 and 40mm in there. At this point I was able to disengage the team up on the side with the house/hill, bring em down, and move towards the exit from the orcard. That damn sniper on the hill was still alive though, and I had to resume suppressive fire to work my way to the exit, keeping a little fire on the house and hill. So i made iot out with only one WIA, but very little ammo...

Personally I found the dismounted movement to contact easier. I had a lot of ammo and the ambush was pretty predictable. Some careful recon combined with some basic fire and maneuver got my platoon through that with only one unlucky WIA. I figure blitzing through with the vehicles would have cost more than that (or does it?).

The trick is targeted dust around the tracks and front end, here's a quick example of what I mean: I did a little dust splatter up the front of the vehicle, made the track area caked in dust, and did some kick up around the back of the vehicle (though I would take the dust off the area where the bags are, I didn't see how it was angled when I was painting. You combine this sort of effect with the subtle dust coating like you have atm. You can also vary the loaction to do both mud and dust splatter on the vehicle (mud will obviously be a tad darker, thinker, and more lower/blob-y). Here's some more developed examples of the effect:

Well, it would be nice if it was handled like a very strong building of sorts, that you could throw grenades into or storm. I have a feeling that they are using the vehicle style for ease of coding, especially for fog of war. With "hidden" trenches and everything now, maybe they might be able to address the bunkers. Still might make integrating a MG into the bunker tricky. Mainly so they can be attacked from the back (I don't think most bunkers of the size shown have big tough locking doors on the back), I want to at least be able to grenade it from the back. (speaking of hidden trenches.... mortar/AT gun emplacements would be nice, maybe with the automatic digging in like in CMx1 and for the scrapes in CMSF)