Knokke

there should be an help file with the archive explaining all, if I remember well, named ToW extractor usage and setup.doc Here is the content of this file:

For hooks and collision, the meshtools will not understand some of the names of collisions and hooks in the game (all collisions have to be named like collision?_x0y0_dam0). The input for the "real" name needed by the game engine has to be done in the *.mcn file. Most of the hooks have to be added afterward manually in the *.msh (this is just a line with the number of the hook and its coordinates). For tutorials about UV mapping, there are a lot of them on the internet. Even 3DSmax help files should be enough to get started.

Very good explanation, Broadsword! I believe that many peoples having a problem with ToW2 AI are used to a less realistic behaviour of the infantry in other games. The AI in ToW2 in my opinion is pretty realistic, but peoples using tactics that worked in other games might feel a bit frustrated when the same tactics here are not working. I've myself felt the same frustration several times with soldiers cowering behind low walls or rocks instead of returning fire, even where they greatly outnumber the ennemy. The attack will end in failure most of the time, the attacker suffering a lot of casualties. The trick here is that your men are cowering because they are suppressed: nobody wants to return fire because they don't want to be killed. Once this happen, there are not many options left. A solution would be to have a vastly superior firepower to try to suppress the MG. But in the narrow mountains passes like the example above, this is difficult to achieve, because your squads have no room to outflank the ennemy, and it is impossible to call a tank or armored vehicle to the rescue. When attacking a position, I always try to have 2/3 of my infantry sneaking to a position where they can shoot at the ennemy while the other 1/3 are trying to close on the ennemy position, and even like this, it does not always goes smoothly, and I usually suffer a lot of casualties unless I can have artillery or tanks pounding at the ennemy. What is needed is a ratio of attackers/defenders at least 6 to one, or even more, and even if you win the fight, chances are that you'll have suffered a lot of casualties. A well positionned MG (in a place where it is protected and can't be turned, and where armored vehicles can't go) is worth a lot more than it seems.

I believe that the gripe peoples have with the infantry being "too accurate" comes mainly from the engagement distance. I don't think the infantry is too accurate, but they sure start firing at a very long range (usually from more than 600m. On my Holland map where the ground is very flat, the riflemen start shooting occasionaly at distances up to 900-1000m). They waste a lot of ammo, but always manage to shot some ennemies. Most of the casualties result from MG fire, though (not surprising), but the infantry firing with rifles usually waste several ammo clips before hitting anything at long range. I'm pretty sure that if the engagement ranges were reduced to 150-200m, nobody will complain about the uncanny accuracy of the AI.

Maintex.tga is a texture used fo the ground color of the battle area; it is a 2048x2048 texture found in the /maps/name_of_your_map folder. Farmaintex.tga is a lower resolution 1024x1024 texture used for the ground outside the battle area. It is my understanding that the "color" texture brush is not working in ToW2; it was working in ToW1 though. It was only changing the color of the ground (modifying the color in the maintex.tga). It is a different brush that the one used to add bump texture on the map.

To change the color of your maintex.tga texture and farmaintex.tga texture, you can edit them directly in your favorite paint program; there is no need to edit them from inside the editor for this kind of work.

For most of the peoples, ToW2 handles smoother than ToW1, so your problem must come from some graphic option other than the complexity of models. What do you mean by texture LOD and model LOD? I assume you're speaking of 3D models and mipmaps? ToW2 buildings have 5 LOD models displaying at various distances. The first LOD about 800 faces is displayed between 0 and 20m, the 2nd (500 faces) from 20 to 60m, 3rd (410 faces) from 60 to 120, 4th (200 faces) from 120m to 250m, the 5th (12 faces) from 250m and more. That's not a lot of poly, and they seems well organised to me. It means that the frame rate drop you're experiencing has probably an other reason than the complexity of buildings. I also experienced drop in framerates in the russian demo of the game from time to time, and it looked like it was caused by the wind blowing sand and dirt, but I never experienced this in the final product (I didn't notice this effect anymore).

I've started to play mission two "capture Gavrus", and it was going well for me (so I forgot to save the game) untill I had a CTD too. I mention this, because I believe it was related with selecting a sniper (though I'm not sure). Very nice mission, I almost had an heart attack when the fireworks started

You should have a closer look at the way the buildings are modelled in the game; they have several LODs, exactly like the vehicles. If your computer was able to handle ToW1, it should be able to handle ToW2 as well, with even better framerates.

argh!!!! I'll correct this when I'll make a full set of textures for the Typhoon

I've uploaded a new skin with invasion stripes for the Typhoon to the repository.

Hi Sneaksie, I've sent a mail to you, with a link to the files. Thank you very much for your help.

That's a good point! I'll make a new skin for the Typhoon.

I've a question for the developpers: I've created a bunker with an MG-34 machinegun. I've it set up just like the "dot_hmg" type of bunkers in ToW1. The unit is working perfectly well in ToW1, but doesn't work in ToW2 (Editor and Mission Generator give me an error message and will not start). I'm aware of the differences in naming conventions of the hooks for the crew between ToW1 and ToW2 (the crew in and out hooks), as well as the new ToW2 vision sector hook (I used the Mgun_01 hook in the VisSector hook in data/units/my_bunker/parts.ini), so this should not be the problem. The problem is also not comming from the crew, as I used the Infantry_afrika crew. I wonder if the problem could arise because there is no Dot Navigation type nor Dot AI type in ToW 2; there is no data/AItypes.ini that I'm aware of in ToW2. Does this mean there is no way to have a bunker in ToW2 ?

Congratulation for the optimisation in this version Gnasher, I've played only the first mission of the beta 3 yet (Incident at Cheux), and find it to be much smoother than the beta 2, even with that many units on the map. I've seen only one strange thing: the Bren carrier has no ammo (but perhaps it was intended as an unarmed artillery tractor?)

Yes, you can choose in the battle generator if the mission is single player or multi player.

Well, I had a look at the Il-2 planes, and the possibility of adapting them as new support aircraft for ToW; I don't believe it would be a gain of time to use theses models, as it would require a lot of editing and optimization, so much so that it would be faster to redo them from scratch. The only thing that seems usable almost as is is the ordnance for the planes (for exemple the BK37 gun for the Hs-129, or the WfrGr21 for the Fw-190) Doing a brand new airplane model for ToW is about a week work, so it doesn't seems to be such a good option to spend a week cleaning the Il-2 meshes, patching the parts together, etc...

This is juste eye candy: the glider is just a static map object. It is also not destructible (no destroyed state model). It could be easily made destructible though, using the destroyed horsa model as a x0y0_dam1.msh after renaming and copying it to the horsa directories and referencing this mesh in the static.ini

Here is a screenshot of the elevation mesh on my map: it looks like there is a problem with the area covered by the nearHF.raw texture: the triangulation mesh for the farHF.raw shows that there is "weight" on the vertices of the mesh (black areas for the parts of the map under the water), where the square covered by the nearHF.raw does'nt show any weight on the vertices, even for the parts under water: the riverbed of the Maas river is all white, just like the ground above water. http://pigeonh.free.fr/ToW/Map_Grave_landscape-triangulation.jpg

I agree with the map size problem in ToW and ToW2. Most of the time, the real battlefields where WWII battles occured (and not only major battles) where bigger than a 2x2 km areas. I'm having the problem with my Market-Garden Grave map already: I can't have both drop zones north and south of the bridge at the same time on the map, falling short by about one kilometer. Besides, I can't use the map for the fighting that took place later on the day after the bridge was captured, which means that I'm doing twice the same map with different coverage. I understand that the decision made by 1C to have smaller maps arise from the challenge of calculating a lot more elements on bigger maps, so I can live with it. Besides, the element of having to scout for the ennemy is still present on smaller maps (althouh this is a lot dependant on the landscape - on rugged terrain, this is more important than on a Holland map where the ground is almost flat). Anyway, it would be nice to have maps with a 4x4 km playable area, and I hope this will be possible in next version of the game.

Permission granted, I'll have a look at what I can do with the IL-2/FB airplanes.

Very nice indeed

No, the JSH mod is only for ToW1

Yes, the map as very little slopes, maximum elevation being about 20m. I created the elevation map from SRTM data exported in greyscale raw bitmap (farHF.raw and nearHF.raw), then I painted the course of the river Maas in the editor with the terrain brush to create the river bed. At that point, I had a pathfindcells.tga texture with white all over the map, except the red impassable areas for the river bed of the Maas, several canals and ponds. But it looks like the editor can't regenerate a pathfindcell.tga with the impassable areas now, even when I recalculate the landscape. I tried to delete all the *.bin files to see if they where interfering, but with no success: Some of them (like pfswatermap.bin and pfsmap.bin) doesn't seem to do anything, as it makes no difference wether they're here or not. So I don't even know what they're used for (I thought it was theses files that where generated by the editor to store the information about pathfinding cells). I guess there is probably no other way to fix the problem but to paint the rivers and ponds again with the terrain brush in the editor?

Hi, I've broken the pathfinding in my custom map, and can't fix it, no matter what I'm trying. I made the mistake to try to edit manually the pathfindcells.tga, and saved it in the wrong format. I deleted the offending file, and tried to reload the map, hoping that a new red and white texture would be generated by the editor once I hit the "recalc pathfinding cells" button, but nothing is happening: the texture is still white, and when I check the pathfinding cells, everything is white (except for the impassable zones of the collisions of the static objects). The soldiers and vehicles are now crossing rivers under the water without care of drowning I expected that recalculating path finding cells would create some change to my map, but it doesn't seems to do anything, as the name of the map is not updated with an * (which would indicate that something has changed, and the map need to be saved again). I tried to delete all the files that could be related to pathfinding (psfmap.bin, pfswatermap.bin, pathfindcells.tga, even the pfsnodecache.bin in the Missions folder) but this doen't seem to change anything. Sneaksie, have you any tip to solve this problem? I hope I don't have to start again from scratch...