Kieme(ITA)

Last building for today, the other brick one.

If I am not mistaken BMP "commander" is the commander of the carried infantry unit, and he dismounts with his men.

Thanks everybody. Another side to side with the brighter vanilla brick building:

I have a lot of master textures, already prepared, the buildings should not take too long, couple of days. Contrary to my own tradition I will "disrespect" original textures; by that I mean I won't keep some of the original concept with my mods. There are 3 original buildings made of wood, too many out of 8 in my opinion, so I will leave only 1 wooden building in the mod, 2 will be changed to plaster. Then, 8 more buildings (probably in packages of 4) to be added (at least half already done). bringing the options for new scenarios to 16 different modular buildings.

Thanks, about making new threads I will consider it, eventually only for the final releases, while this thread could be used for previews. PREVIEW modular buildings (HD) vanilla building (modded dirt) modded building:

PREVIEW CMBS Alternative Crops Mod and Modded Horizons This mod will change some of the crops in game, introducing the vastly common sunflower and corn, it will include new buttons and Tiles for the editor: Meanwhile, the new horizons will spot some additional distant objects to give an impression of modern times, in this case, high-voltage towers.

PREVIEW CMBS Reworked Foliage Mod Will include all new interface buttons and tiles to better distinguish tree types, shapes and dimensions in the editor

Vanilla rocky ground and grass: Modded rocky ground and grass:

Hello everybody! here comes a new adventure into modding CMBS. I will use this forum thread only for all my mods, discussions, previews and releases, in order to avoid clogging the forums. For now I can't to use CMMODS site because it does not support CMBS and I have no way to recover/reset my lost account; I don't want to use the official repository in its actual state; if you don't mind you'll find download links from a free upload site, at least for now. I will add posts like: PREVIEW XXX or RELEASE XXX, toghether with screenshots, descriptions and download links. Feel free to comment, suggest improvements, point out mistakes or problems. I'll try to post a summary from time to time with a list of released mods and downloads. Now some words about my way of modding: as many others I mod for myself following my personal taste, therefore there's no claims about any mod if not that they follow my personal view and preferences. Generally speaking, I try to follow to some rules with all my mods such as: the use of more detailed textures, HD textures (2x or even 4x the original resolution size) when possible, more desaturated colors, use of photorealistic textures and decals. My main interest has always been modular buildings and terrain modding, but I'll try to mod vehicles too. Some comparative screenshots to let you better understand what I'm talking about: PREVIEW: CMBS Reworked Foliage Mod Vanilla foliage: Modded foliage: PREVIEW: CMBS Terrain Mod Vanilla pavement: Modded pavement:

MikeyD I say I am positively impressed by the Italian stereotypizing, (if this was not a verb, it is now).

This is very childish and uncalled for, I will report this for removal.

In my opinion the game engine is forcing into much reduced visual distance capability for all units for simulation reasons. Given also a random factor that will most probably be there I'd say the game engine is doing a good job in lowering visual distance capability of units given the scenario setting and time. In conclusion I see no bugs or problems here but a precise game design feature, that is aimed to simulate the conditions. We could discuss all day long on what our own opinions are, and if a vehicle could be spotted at 100m of distance we would have a forum complain about it being not realistic enough, but all of this doesn't change the fact that the game design is there for the above reason and it is doing its job. Given the actual development of the game I belive this is fine with what the engine rendering capabilities are.

You might want to come back in few years when the game will reach another level of development then.

Yes, hazy and dusk condition and you get a situation in which line of sight of units is extremely reduced, much like a dark night. Also, as Wicky noted, the time must have been 21-22 at least, PM. That means the dusk turned into dark. I just ran a test and a similar vehicle I was commanding spotted a fixed BA-64 only when it was less than 10m away.. Consider that condition, dusk+21-22 hours+hazy cond. as very hard for LOS.

Quick battle map no.0039

Take a look at the same situation but with that building placed in the middle...:

Now, using another piece of that mod, I made a proving ground, this is a 3x3 squared area, which uses a texture that covers 100% of each square, and this particular texuture visually devides each terrain tile into 4 smaller Tiles: As you can see the plotter does not places the waypoint exactly in the center of the squares... Note also that the other ground type is larger on the right and smaller on the left.. so there's another case of skewness of the terrain grid, which is misplaced with regards to the logic grid of commands.

On the grid problem. Here is a thing: I Painted 4 squares using a highway mod, the highway Tiles go over the terrain and fill exactly at 100% a single square, with no fading at the borders, so you can see that these 5 squares covered by the building are 100% Painted by the concrete, as you can see the building appears to be exactly in the middle of the X, like showed by the editor: The image shows my movement command and you can see that the highlighted square is not precisely aligned with the terrain grid, and the resulting waypoint is not exactly in the middle of the square as you would imagine... especially if you see that the door seems really to be in front of the terrain square corner. Moving the mouse over the right square reveals a bit of overflow on the other square. Therefore there's a wrong alignment between the command grid system (which comes on when you plot waypoints by means of the yellowish highlight) and the real terrain grid.

Wait, the cabbage garden is a flavour object and you can't see it in the editor. But I understand what you mean, take a look at the fence, in the editor you can see that the fence opening tile is exactly aligned with the building side, it's directly in front of it, right?: Instead, in game, it's not precisely aligned: There's a sort of skewness in the 3d rendering yes. So, the door is not exactly in the corner of 4 Tiles, it's a bit on the side, you can see it if you plot a waypoint, the highlighted yellow square is not precisely in front of the door.

Well, for the troops using the "wrong" door the waypoint must have been different than the one shown on my test and also on Tripps' test, which both handle the same result. I'd say the original plot was in e square. Otherwise there's no explanation for the troops using the wrong door to reach the ordered c square, unless, in that particular case, the AI failed to recognize the presence of the "right" door, which is abasolutely possible because, as you said, there were many reports of problems with building entrances etc. and that kind of bug took most of the patch development time for what I understood. I don't really trust these independent buildings.

I found the right building, it's not exactly the one I picked before, because this one is turned 45°, adding more complexity to the pathfinding. The building in question is sitting on a 5 squares position. Where the middle square is entirely inside the building, and the other 4 squares are covered by 1 half each. The game engine works with squares, as we know, but these squares are devided in two parts if the situation occurs, such situation is, for example, a fence running amid the square thus dividing it in two, both logically and for the game's brain. Now, this picture shows where you can place your command, it's a half square (or a triangle) due to the presence of the fence, the White marks indicate the grid. As you can see the door is closer to the right outside square than to the left outside square... So that's the reason the AI recognizes the right side square as the closest one, and as per my description in the previous post, the AI will go there in order to re-align with the grid system before reaching the first waypoint. The first waypoint is directly outside the building, that's true, but it's 2 squares away in the game's brain eyes, therefore the closest square to use is the one on the right. I replicated the movements and no matter where you place the first waypoint outside the building, the units will go to the (in this case) firezone before aligning to the waypoint. So it's a matter of grid. Take a look at this: from the game's brain point of view, the troops are in square a, and they are ordered to go to half square c, they can't go directly there, so the game picks the closest square between a and c in order to "fill the gap" of the logic command. It picks b, because it's the most logical square to use in order to reach c.. in order to re-align with the grid system the troops will have the tendency to reach square b center before turning towards the waypoint. A gridded terrain mod might help with precise order plotting, although I belive BFC should add a "show grid" option or quick hotkey, enabling or disabling the fictional grid system used by the game. In a far future game development they could either reduce the grid size, thus allowing for even more precise plotting (and terrain detailing) but raising the calculation complexity; or they could somehow disloge the ground grid from the order plotting (waypoint plotting), but I am not sure how the system works so whatever.

The sniper team, just after exiting the door, goes a bit to the left before they start going to the right towards the waypoint, that is due to the fact that the game ground is devided into grids, and troops move from one grid center towards the other (more or less all of those within a team). As I showed you that building is sitting in the middle of 4 squares. The troops inside are in my belief treated by the game engine as they were in a single square, because the inside of the building is in this terms a free zone, when going out of it they find themselves hanging among two squares, one a bit on the left, one a bit on the right, They went left instead of right because the game engine recognized the left square and made them move there in order to re-align to the grid system of the ground. Then they recognized the waypoint and turned to that. We can all see that in this situation that move was a disaster, because they went into a fire zone, but the problem is releated to the interaction between units, the building, and terrain grid. It's not a bug per se, it's a limitation of the game engine, if you will. You can plot precisely a route as long as the system recognizes the squares. I still belive that the building placed in the middle of 4 squares obliges the AI to reach one of the outer squares' center before it can follow any other path, and I still belive that placing the building among 4 squares is what makes this move happen.

Examples of orders given: In this last case the left door was used: In conclusion this situation doesn't show a bug but a complex condition due to the position of the building within the grid, which leads the ordered waypoints to be either skewed North or South of the right door. If the skewness is extreme enough it will make the left door chosen due to a shorter path, thus the AI will use the left door instead of the right one. Solution: map designers might avoid placing building in between squares. By the way these kind of replies happen when a new CM game is about to be released but it's not out yet.

I found the building and did a quick test: With this kind of plotting they used the door on the right: With this kind of plotting they used the door on the left: In the end, it's all up to the position of the waypoints, if it's well on the right side of the building they will Always use the right door (correctly), if the waypoint is slightly low and on the right side they will choose the left door because (evidently) that's the shortest path to the next waypoint... and again correctly in my opinion. Also, my soldiers never glitched in the wall corner, but that's another problem. I can see another problem, and potential cause of problems in this situation. In my opinion the exact problem of what happened, and it's not a bug: The game is divided into a grid as we all know, made of squares. That building is placed not precisely inside a square but on 4 different squares. The waypoints in game are only placed inside a square, precisely in the middle. This means that you can't place a waypoint exactly on the right of that building, because it will either be a little on top of it (check my first screenshot) or a little on the lower part of it (check second screenshot of mine) (looking from a top down point of view)... Thus, your waypoint was closer to be reached using the left side door. Picture showing the situation from the editor:

Yes indeed, it would be perfect if we could se the orders given, that way we could better estimate what caused the problem. For example, in the last video the soldiers seem to run over a fence, then turn and run over it again, we could guess anything, from the presence of a waypoint on the other side to a huge bug. Without the commanded paths shown it's impossible to say anything.. The first screenshot shows some arrows, with the path you had in mind, did you set up that kind of movement with commands? Looks like 4 or 5 waypoints were needed. Did you plot those? Or just a straight line assuming the troops would have followed that path you imagined? Example: if the command given was this: Then you can't say exactly what will happen. It's not guaranteed your troops will follow your projected path with arrows. Instead if you did this: then there's no reason for the troops to behave like shown in the first video. A possible explanation would be that they were ordered like the last image I posted, but for some reason (bug) they didn't recognize the closest door (going to the right) and selected the other door (going to the lower-left) to be used. This lead them to move to the building lower-left corner, where the door is, but they didn't go through the door exactly, they glitched in the corner. (second bug). The second bug might be caused by the presence of the fence, which touches the building corner, a potential nest for a bug.. The first bug might be related to the programming of that specific independent building. Anyway, if we can track which building was that we could reproduce this easily. Seems to me independent buildings are in subject here. From what I have seen in these years modular buildings work much better than the independent ones, which are those causing most glitches.