missinginreality

Well am well am truly stumped on this one ND [bTW, apols to Scipio for the partial hijacking of your thread on the explosion mate; but it's a relevant discussion on Alphas too I guess]: Thanks for the files ND; most illuminating. OK so after some exhaustive testing [and boy a 3d image viewer for BF models would save a lot of time ] here's what I found; yes amazingly your vest texture works great. And if I duplicate your alpha channel onto another texture and re-save it works great too. And if I delete your alpha on your vest texture, make exactly the same alpha and re-save..guess what..doesn't work!! Something very very odd going on here. It's like, your actual Alpha channel works, thus duplicating it to another image works. Hold onto that mate it's gold dust!! So am officially out of ideas but determined to get to the bottom of this..maybe one of the original modellers can help? Got to do some work for a bit but will come back and try an few more things later.

ND - Yep would love to see the one that works; I'll PM you my email address. Scipio, thanks for those; yes it looks like the edges of the matte are pretty hard i.e the alpha channel doesn't grade to transparent gently but goes from black to white over a short space of pixels; try running a gaussian blur or radial blur on the alpha channels of each frame to soften it out a bit that may help? You may lose a bit of detail at the edges but in essence thats what you need to do anyway.If you look at the original SF explosion frames you'll see what I mean about being soft at the edges.

Great work ND, great work.

I just started playing Red side and the first few scenarios I got devasted; until, as Steve pointed out, I stopped playing Red with Blue tactics and started playing differently. It makes a heck of a difference. Ok, that's only playing agains AI but when one embraces the limitations and works with them instead of trying to force Red into Blue tactics things certainly work out. Careful use of covering fire, overlapping arcs, L-shaped ambushes and bearing in mind that pretty much any direct fire on a Red team will more thanlikely end in them being PINNED for a good few turns; taking care of the RPG teams, running them around so they don't stay in one place too long; being aware of slow spotting compared to BLUE..many things are different but I think for me that's what makes SF such a great game; not only is every map a different set of challenges but the whole mindset between US, Syrian and UNCON play tactics is totally different.

Mord, Respect to you for having the courage and determination to make changes and do what you want in life. MiR

That's really weird and very confusing.. Does that original texture still work now?

Hi Scipio, over at the other thread and in response to NormalDude's raising of the point about some alpha's not working; I think some of the materials on the models themselves only use 16 or 24 bit bmp files and thus are intrinsically at the model level not able to handle the extra channel with alpha info.

To clarify what I'm hearing donnieitaly is that ShockForce runs fine, but CM1, 2 and 3 now don't? Perhaps would be better to post for help in those forums as you may get more help in relation to those titles in their respective threads? As ShockForce is working for you it's possibly more beneficial to check the tech support forums on the titles that aren't working. Hope you manage to sort it out MiR

ND; have gone through every possible mode of saving BMP and alphas and do indeed concur some textures just aren't set up to handle the alpha no matter how it's presented. This leads me to consider whether the actual material applied at modelling stage is ignoring it. All of the 3d modelling softwares I use, a material has to be explicitly defined to use either the alpha for transparency or RGB intensity, otherwise it is ignored. This may be why some SF bmp files make use of it [windows,balconies, etc.] and some don't. If the modeller did not specifically flag the material to use the textures' alpha channel then it wont neccessarily show up on screen.Which OK, doesn't help, but it may be an explanation as to why and thus we can't do anything mod-wise about it. Which also doesn't explain how you got the work-around of the parts of a single bmp file to disappear.

Scipio, Just a thought; when working on explosions and things with semi-transparency in video and especially at edges of opacity, to get a seamless smooth transition from texture to background the edges really need to be pre-multiplied, usually with black; software then either does an "add" or "screen" type overlay and this black-mixed edge disappears into the background. Looking at the SF explosion .bmp files the the alpha is very soft at the edges of the white - black transition, so am wondering, and please excuse if I am sounding patronising, I don't mean to be but is your alpha channel by itself ranged from white to black through lots of shades of grey or is it just black and white? I only ask coz that would explain the hard egdes totally and would also explain why inm one case your image preview looks OK coz it's previewing on a black background and the other case where it's previewing with the alpha channel which is only and on/off 100% with no semi-transparent grey areas at the edges. If you want to upload a frame from the image in question am happy to take a look at it for you. PS And you're correct in that .bmp probably isn't the best format to handle transparency; tif and tga are the more usual texture formats with alpha channels yes.

LOL He's got that resigned look about him hey?

I'd second the "go for it why wait" sentiment; definitely worth it.Plus unless your PBEM opponent has a 1.08 exe file they saved before they added the Marines module you wont be able to play it.

very nice Birdstrike

Oh folks, just had the biggest laugh for a long time over those, man they were funny.Belly laugh funny.

Don't know what he's hoping to find but his mate sure aint happy about it

Silhouetting was my main reason for requesting a change to the "jumping over the wall animation" as I was under the impression that SOP was to roll over walls thereby reducing silhouetting.

Yay thanks Moon

Felt the need to resurrect this coz i just this minute finished playtesting a scenario from a small campaigni'm slowly building up. Fairly simple blue move through heavily held village in mountain country. Red [syrian Regular Mech] has an FO and a number of command/HQ units and 2 x mortars available. Throughout the 30 mins of game time [i forgot to set the time to 120min duh] Syran artillery was a constant headache to Blue - first off they called in smoke rounds on an isolated hoiuse where the FO was located and Blue was trying to take with a large assault. Secondly, throughout the rest of the battle mortar rounds were constantly dropping in short fire missions at numerous places where Blue units were holed up, either in buildings or outside. It totally threw one assault down a forested slope when 3 platoons got hit with a few rounds of AP on the way. At the end of the mission, reviewing the map, 2 Syrian HQ units had area fire mission targets to Blue positions. I was pretty impressed with the way AI handled it's artillery assets in that mission.

Maybe it's a simple animation change then? Coz a unit that is under a MOVE command has a more pro-active response to coming under fire than QUICK and FAST and is more "situationally aware" but less so than HUNT. if the units under MOVE actually looked like they were in a combat zone rather than a mall it might serve to assuage some of the grieviances around movement orders without needing a whole lot of new code.

relevantly, does anyone actually use the "walk in the park" MOVE command for units? I keep off it just coz it looks way too casual for most scenarios. It would be good if there was something between QUICK and HUNT that was less indifferent. Maybe it's just a case of changing the animation but keeping the response. I'd personally like to see the wall crossing animation a little more responsive to situation too; currently the jumping over thing seems a bit out of place; aren't units meant to roll over low walls in RL to minimise exposure and silhouetting?

Totally seconded

Yes indeed Steve I can well imagine and understand your frustration totally - and it also demonstrates the personal commitment and dedication you invest in CMSF.I guess it's an ongoing process that's always got a "just one more thing"

Awesome thank you Steve that's so good. Iotally agree wasn't significant enough to hold up 1.10 indeed. But am grateful it's in 1.11.

I know it's a tiny thing but hopefully a tiny thing to fix too? When i split a squad the naming goes all awry like squad1/squad 1 repeated three times rather than squad 1 /team 1,2,3 or squad 1/A squad 1/B etc.I lose track of who's who very quickly. Is it possible BF? Much thanks.

..and check here coz in Vista my outgoing email folder is in my Virtual Store e,g: maindrive:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Combat Mission Shock Force\Game Files\Outoing Email