Knokke

As anybody played the russian demo yet? I've noticed two bugs already: there is a problem with the orientation of the gun barrel for the turret of the Panther. Also, the infantry has a lot of trouble entering buildings and to position themselves at windows. This seems to create loops in the AI with the soldiers trying to find cover inside buildings. I suppose this comes from the model of the building itself (perhaps the building being to small causes trouble with the pathfinding square of the soldiers?), because I never noticed anything like this in Afrika 43.

Mission editor works fine with Vista32 bits version.

You should use MshConverter118 to open the soldiers models from ToW1 and see how they're configured, and if the new soldiers models from the ModPack can be used to create new units.

The problem with the collisions not working is solved (my collision object was bugged). The troops and vehicles are now able to cross the bridge without problem - only the bigger armored vehicles have sometime difficulties crossing the bridge in ToW1 because they have the biggest pathfinding square in the game (same problem as the stock B1 bis not being able to cross some bridges in the stock campaign). This is not a bug, this is more a "feature" . The cure is easy enough: to make the bridge a little bit wider by one or two meters than in real life, to allow the AI to cross without fear of denting the paint of the armor. Actually, the bridges are the simplest hier.him objects to create for the game that i've tried so far. They work exactly the same way in ToW1 and ToW2.

Sorry for the late reply, I've no idea how many polygons should be used to make a weapon in ToW (i've never tried yet). But you could find a definitive answer to this by installing MshConverter118, and opening the *.msh files for a weapon similar to the one you're designing. You'll even see of the different LODs were made and what's the view distance for each LOD.

Great job Tartari! I was away from internet this last month, but in the mean time, I've been busy with creating buildings for ToW2. Unfortunately, the result is not up to my expectations. I'm able to do a "semi-working" building only: I've trouble with the scripts from the mod pack not being up to date with the latest ToW technology. Even for ToW1, this is a lot of trouble as the scripts are giving me problems with a lot of names that are not recognised. I can work around that by cheating a little bit and manualy editing the msh files, but this is far from being easy and straightforward. For ToW2, the biggest problem (and one I can't solve), is the interior view of the buildings. I can create a building that is working only as far as the camera doesn't go to close to it (untill the x0y0_damR mesh should be displayed): as soon as the camera pans close enough to the building to display the interior view, the game crashes. The same thing is happening when I click on one of the windows to tell a soldier to go inside the building and position himself inside at one of the "shoot" positions. The mod pack scripts are accepting only 7 collision objects per bones, and even a very simple building will usually require more than that (ToW2 african houses have a number of collisions per bones a lot higher than that... I'm still working on it, but I don't have much hope. I'm not a programmer, and I can't modify the modPack Max scripts to make them fully compatible with ToW1, and even less with ToW2. The modpack scripts are working for ToW1 buildings though, but this is quite a difficult task, trying to cheat the script to make it work, and editing the msh files by hand. The scripts will work without problems for simple statics objects, so they're still very usefull as his. If peoples are interested, I will make a tutorial for it. -Knokke

Any idea why AVAST is reporting dump.ru as a malicious site?

I have been working a lot to create new buildings for ToW2, and in the process I have had a look at the buildings of the mod pack. It is my understanding that ToW1 buildings (and mod pack buildings) are not working as is in ToW2 (even adding the correct entry for them in the static.ini) For me, mono.sim buildings are working in ToW1, but not the hier.him kind of buildings (they simply don't appear in the editor, without an error message). Mono.sim kind of building are "kind of" working in ToW2, except both intact and destroyed versions of the building are showing at the same time, and collisions are no longer recognized. This is because destroyed versions of the buildings have a different name in ToW1 and ToW2 (in ToW2, the game engine looking at the names of the destroyed LOD of the buildings, simply think that they're just an other piece of the intact building). Changing the names of the destroyed LODs to match the names in ToW2 should do the trick, and allow the buildings to work properly. This is not surprising, as collisions are working in a different way from ToW1 in ToW2: the names of the collision objects are different, and this is probably the reason why the game engine of ToW2 can't recognize them as collision objects. Where in ToW1, collision objects for building where just a bunch of simple shapes englobing the whole building, in ToW2, different collision objects are needed to make a distinction between walls, floors and roofs. ToW1 buildings (and the mod pack buildings) will be working in ToW2 if they are provided a new set of collision objects in the ToW2 style to replace the old types of collisions. It should be possible to use all theses building, so the mod pack is not "useless"; but it involves quite a lot of work to make them working. As for why I'm not able to make the hier.him type of building working in ToW1, I still have no idea. I had some problems with buildings requiring textures like fund.tga, fund1.tga and fund2.tga that I couldn't find amongst the files extracted from the SFS files. Theses where textures used for the fundations of buildings. Some of the buildings started to appear in the editor once I've created new "fund" textures to substitute to the ones I could not find. So, the mod pack is not really useless, but to make it usable is a lot more work than it seems at the first look. I would have been glad if this mod pack was released as a fully working add-on (even if it means we would have to pay for it). Still, it is really usefull for any one willing to do modding for ToW, as it provides a lot of good examples.

You do need 3DSmax to export the model with the meshtools. You might be able to export your model from Blender3D if you use MshConverter instead (as Blender can save in *.3DS format, and MshConverter118 can convert *.3DS files to *.msh files) I never tried though, so I'm not sure it is working But direct export from XSI is not possible. -Knokke

there should be folders with names like clear_summer_map, clear_winter_map inside your maps directory. Theses are the starting point for adding new maps to the game. Simply pick the spring_clear_map and copy the content to your own map folder (if your battle is happening duriing the spring season - if the time of year for your map was autumn, you'll need the use the clare_autumn_map files instead)

Using the latest filelist.txt posted in the battlefront repository, you should be able to extract all the files you need for modding the GUI

according to previous info on the russian forum, it should be an add-on to ToW2

make sure you have the latest filelist.txt (the list should include all the xml files in the folder Data\gui\skins\ordinary\). If not, it might be the reason why the extractor is not extracting the xml.

you don't have to convert your Maintex.tga and farmaintex.tga back to IMF format. The game will accept normal TGA

It would be great to see an addon with less known nations like Romania and Hungary. By the way, it would be cool also to see the war between Finland and Russia (Winter war and Continuation war).

As far as I remember, this is a normal 32 bit TGA file uncompressed. Try the 24 bit though, if it doesn't work, since it's a long time i've done this, I don't really remember. But the moire patterns are the result of saving in incorrect format.

The best is the first one in my opinion. The worst would be Kasserine Pass, followed closely by Sbeitla (no good deployement area, ennemies attacking before having a chance to redeploy to better defensive position, overwhelming ennemy superiority making the mission so difficult as to be no fun)

the texture underneath the grass is going to give the color to the grass. If you paint sand on your texture, the grass you'll put on top of the sand will take a sandy color. If you paint your texture red, the grass you put on top of it will be red.

For the bump map textures, you've to use the render type brush

the grass takes the color of the ground underneath it. You don't really need IMFViewer for creating the Maintex.tga or the farmaintex.tga, unless you want to modify an existing texture. If I were you, I would use a picture of the real El Guettar area as a basis for the Maintex.tga (simply save it a normal 2048x2048 tga)

Peoples using Vista 32 bits sometimes have problems because they forgot to launch the game and editors with administrator privileges; other than that there is no problem. There was a problem with ToW2 editors and Vista 64 bits, but a patch has been released to correct the problem.

I've the same "feature" too. The more I learn about the inner workings of this game, the more I discover i've still a lot to learn

@ sukor313: Do you have extracted the SFS files with SFS extractor? If not, then, this is normal that you don't have the 'models\Human\sk_0\ger' files in your main ToW folder: theses files are packed inside *.SFS files. Simply unzip the archive to ToW main folder; the new files will be read by the game before the ones compressed in the SFS and will replace them. Your problem probably comes from having extracted the files to the wrong place. make sure you have the files extracted to a path like this: "C:\Program Files\1C Company\Theatre of War\models\Human\sk_0\ger" If you're not sure what to do, it is probably better to extract to a temporary folder first, and then copy and paste the content of the zipped archive to the correct folder. I don't have installed thoses files yet, so I'm not really sure what the content of the archive is, but seing that it is skins to replace the old textures, I'm pretty sure they'll have to be extracted here: "C:\Program Files\1C Company\Theatre of War\models\Human\sk_0\ger" I hope this will help. -Knokke

I'm also pissed with Vista, but I'm having a grudge after M$, not after ToW devellopers

no, german soldiers models are different in ToW2 (if that's what you mean by different versions)