Ryujin

I think it's somewhere between the two posts above . A lot more value is placed on force preservation these days and I don't think the US/UK/NATO are going to go all "Stalingrad" on most objectives. Political factors aside, I do think at a operational level there is going to be some limit to acceptable casualties in most cases (unless maybe it's something really key). In most CMSF scenarios it seems you can take a pretty big number of BLUFOR casualties and win as long as you achieve all the objectives. However, taking 30% casualties or such in one battle seems a bit extreme and unsustainable. You do have to fight carefully and not throw away your troops.

Well my modding for other games has picked up a bit so I'm not sure. I may try to put out a "beta" of the whole slew of mods like I did with the sound mod and improve it slowly and leave it open to other people tweaking it, I'll throw in the .PSD files to make it easy. This way I can work on it when I have a chance and you guys won't have to wait for it. A lot of it is near done or at least of good quality (ACU uniforms don't have all the patches and such, but one set is pretty much done and the DCU needs some tweaking, but is more than usable as is). Currently I'm a bit swamped with improving my modeling/UVing and C++ skills.

most western AFVs have thermal optics, and you'll set it under that "component status tab or whatever it's called (with the green cross and stuff showing the status of all the different parts). You'll see IR optics in there. Vehicles with IR optics can see through non-IR blocking smoke (white and black smoke). You get a grey line (only gunner, sometimes commander can see through) when you target something on the other side of smoke. Tan/brownish smoke is IR blocking, you see this mostly on the strykers. So you can use this to your advantage as BLUFOR, by using large amounts of smoke, yet being able to shoot through it while the syrians will be blind, except for the latest and greatest equipment in their inventory.

It might be worth noting the suicide car bomb for the UNCONs, probably one of their deadliest weapons when employed correctly. I think this the suicide component to the UNCONs, and is less of a static VBIED, if that's how you were referring to it? Smaller person-sized bombs are not featured and maybe not as useful in high intensity fighting (pretty much all of CMSF scenarios). You can however sit a IED triggerman on top of his IED and hide him next to a structure as a sort of suicide boobytrap. BLUFOR enter the structure, the triggerman usually spots them before he dies and touches off the IED with little regard to the fact he's sitting on it. Often takes out the wall and anyone inside the building he was next to. This little trick has worked out pretty well for me in multiplayer.

generally the highest resolution you can do will give you the best and clearest ingame visuals. Only reason to run less than that ingame is if it hurts your performance. Some people do not like really high resolutions for their windows desktop as it shrinks everything down to a tiny size, but this is not the case with CMSF in game, the menu may appear to shrink because of ow it was designed, but that's it.

What strikes me is that in MP everyone is going to carefully examine the replay to see exactly where that flare came from. Want to find the enemy infatry in the woods? Peek a tank out for a few seconds and they'll all give away their exact positions... But I have a feeling I may be taking c3k too seriously. It may have been wiser to just smile and nod and make an escape at the soonest opportunity...

I'm running pretty much the latest catalyst drivers for my 4870x2 and haven't had any CMSF issues. Give it a shot, worst case you'll just have to go back to the drivers your running now.

Monitor is probably what will limit you to 16:9, but you'd have to check on the manual/box to see what the max resolution is. Your card should be capable of 1600x900 and I'd recommend updating your drivers if you haven't in a long time. What's the model of your monitor? Most shoud be able to do 1600x900 or similar.

I run 1600x900 fine, so anything in that 16:9 aspect ratio should be fine.

That's the catch, you need BFs set of plugins/tools/etc. Otherwise it's very hard to do anything beyond very simple tweaks as you have to exploit what little bits you can actually control and that isn't much at all.

I hope that wasn't a Warhammer 40k reference......

If you want to make/edit 3d geometry, I would lean more towards impossible, unless you know how to write a plug-in to open them.

.mds are infantry models. You can open them with hexadecimal editor, but this will only let you do some limited fiddling, not change the models. You can change the names of textures and animations it calls and that's about it. Speaking of which I have some bad news. While I could swap a UAZ for a picup truck and get decent results, swaping a BRDM for a HMMWV seems much more complicated. Most likely the models wock on a series of proxies, "door1", "seat1", "gunbarrel", which are references of locations in space relative to the model center to place soldiers in seats and animate slections of geometry. The UAZ and Pickup most likely use the same proxies (2 doors, driver seat, passenger seats). BRDM to HMMWV could maybe done with some hex editing of the proxy names within the model, but it's a mess. This isn't so much pushing the envelope as trying to build a house, but someone withheld all the nails and tools so your trying to do it with string and superglue. A real pain to achieve what are very simple things for the developers. CMSF wasn't really built with modding in mind so it's a slow and tough process.

Actually, yes that may just be possible. So far I've only used pretty simple vehicles to test to avoid a tear in the space-time continuum, but I could in theory make HMMWV gun trucks and allow for both IA and US HMMWVs to be in the same scenario. I haven't really tested how the armor system will react with that kind of swap. I'll give it a shot later, I'll try an extreme example like the crazy offspring of a T-72 and a taxi cab.

What johnny said is correct, making or altering models requires a set of plugins for some modeling program. Editing the "code" is also tricky, I haven't had any luck there yet. The best you can do is swap around the models. For example I turned the UAZ into an Iraqi Police pickup truck using the existing pickup truck model and swapping it for the UAZ model, but you can't make a whole new model. I'm still working on figuring out how to change the models, but scripting a plugin isn't my area of expertise.

yes, it'll be one big package. I also may have found out a few new tricks, I've been doing some more messing around. Also been doing the war torn buildings and wrapping up the iraqi police. However, I'm taking a couple day's break to work on my real modding. Gotta put some BUIS on and texture this baby: http://www.crymod.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=72535

Well hold on a sec , we'll have to see what BF says about that. But if you ever need a artist, I do 2d/3d/etc. Though it would be nice not to have to do little "hacks/kludges/whatever" to make things work (a benefit of the dev tools and info). Speaking of kludges and hacks, I made the UAZ an IPS pickup as an experiment, seems to work fine so far as the two are so similar. It has a separate texture set, so the normal pickup is unaffected.

Unfortunately there is only a "tactical blob". The best way to get a formation is to split the squad into teams and move the teams in a formation.

Iraqi Police Service WIP (nearly done). Replaces SF texture and replaces black plastic AKs and etc with AKMs and other wooden furniture models (not done yet). (the guy on the left in the second screenshot looks like he just lost a contact lens )

I didn't even know those were out there. Problem solved.

I got a bit of free time, so I'm on it. Got an idea of how to use some model swapping to mix it up a bit too. The blue digital camo is a more recent IPS uniform, might be useful in some of the later scenarios, I don't know exactly when it was adopted. I think it's pretty wide spread now.

well yes... you can mod the sound file for that and you can mod it to be nothing or different music. I take it you're not a "power user" so I'll get back to you with a quick fix. In the mean time kick your computer while flapping your arms like a chicken and screaming. It's been known to correct the issue.

Being recon units, many of the snipers functions are irrelevant to CMSF. However they are decent at picking guys off, but 500m+ is best (to be out the effective range of enemy AKs and your own M4s). If you sneak in close it seems like everyone in the team starts shooting and gives away the position. The best for close in shooting are the lone British sniper HQs (you have o be very very slow and careful. Also the accuracy of CMSF shooters/weapons is reduced to be closer to reallife statistical values. It may be a little too harsh on the snipers, but on the other hand, they may shoot to fast. If set up in good over watch at extended range, snipers will slowly suppress and kill off the enemy. I've seen some pretty good 800m+ shots. Your just not going to get them crawling into position the night before, setting up a hide and drawing range cards and such.

While true, in CMSF you have to play as everyone down to the fireteam leaders. The AI just has to be micromanaged, there are no "subordinates" to delegate to.

It plays out more like a board game. It encourages you to stop and plan every 60 seconds and makes it easier to control large forces, but hard to manage individual units (only can giver orders every 60 seconds, a long time). Real time with pausing is probably the best compromise if you pause regularly. I think most people are used to the turn based mode and I'd hazard a guess that many are more traditional "wargamers". It's really down to personal preference. I tend to play games where I'm commanding in real time at ground level, so I tend to play in real time and down in the action.