Hellmann

I was watching The Longest Day (1962) last night, so your mod came in at just the right moment. Beautiful map design work, thanks for sharing it my friend.

Yes, I know what you mean I'm right there with you. I've started some weathering work in photoshop; loads of sand, scratches and dirt going on. So far only for the vehicles in my desert "Unser Rommel" Deutsches Afrikakorps DAK mod I'm working on though, not Normandy theatre. So I'm also wondering if anyone's thinking of weathering up those Normandy tanks, especially on the German side! I thought the Shermans looked OK though. Actually here's an idea I've been thinking of... if there's no way we can physically pile a load of heavy foliage and bushes on top of our panzers in the form of 3d objects, then maybe just drawing some tree branches and bushes on the textures might go half way to fixing that? Just an idea... though in practice I'm thinking it'd look awful A pity we can't add some proper foliage to those German tanks to make them look right for Normandy... or can we?

Absolutely fantastic job, thanks for releasing this! Haha what puzzles me... is that right now I'm the only person (out of 140 downloads already) to bother giving your wonderful scenario a rating (5 star) on the Repository! Oh well, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your work, even if it seems that no one else does! Superb job, keep going!!

Thank you my dear fellow, I know. I was only referring to the paint-job and Mike's superb texture work, that's all. Of course, that isn't going stop me from working on my CM: DAK mod with desert-weathered vehicles and uniforms (as historically correct as I can make them, given the game engine limitations). If my Afrika Korps mod isn't historically correct enough because my Tigers are unfortunately forced to be Ausf. E's instead of H's, then (if I decide to publicly release it for anyone interested) I suggest you don't download it old chap!

Nice job Mike, thank you! One question; are you planning to release the "heavy" panzers in this wonderful 'factory metal' paint-job of yours? I was thinking it'd be perfect for using that as a base to start adding my own camo and unit emblems. I heard that some of the PzKfwVI Mk1 Tigers went straight from the factory into battle with no real extra camo (or zimmerit) other than that authentic sandy coloured paint of yours, so it'd be absolutely *perfect* if you would "release the panzers" please? That gorgeous Tiger 1 they have at Bovington tank museum is just like that, isn't it?

Wow of course, hexed!! thanks! Ah well... what can I say... outstanding job. I bet I wouldn't be the only one here who'd dearly love to use your fixed officers cap! There's no chance I could ever hex edit that on my own. So please, it'd be amazing if you could upload your v3 for us to enjoy your artistic work sir. And yes I agree I'd love to see headgear like M43 caps in the game... but I'm guessing that, like you say, we "can't" (officially!?) add NEW hats/helmets models... because if we "could" do that, then we could make our own Fallschirmjäger units!! Hehe I doubt we'd ever see THAT mod on the Repository! (not until after the official Commonwealth/SS/Fallschirmjäger add-on is out anyway)

Speaking of the HUD, is there a way to remove it, or better yet, toggle it on/off like we can already do with things like the icons and bright neon zones (ALT+I, ALT+J, etc)? Would also be nice to completely remove things like the compass and "PAUSED" "ALT+TAB" text from the screen to make taking screenshots and watching the WeGo replays a nicer experience, no? Hm, maybe we can make that annoying white PAUSED text a transparent texture... but would that also make other, more important relevant message text also invisible I wonder...

Yes, I noticed this... it's as if different artists worked on the Panzer and infantry officer caps isn't it? I think the in-game panzer peaked cap looks more professionally done, both in model design and high texture quality. Even the lo-res swastika insignia on the "bad cap" texture is mirrored! First thing I noticed about the panzer officer's cap was the nice high quality material texture AND the swastika the historically correct way round, same as the belt-buckles. So, if you don't mind me asking, how did you manage to swap the superior panzer officers cap model over with the bad one?? I mean, to appear in-game on the infantry units? Outstanding job if you managed to do it!? Or did you just photoshop the above image to illustrate the point? Or maybe you changed the names of the textures and dismounted the officer from his tank to make that picture? I hope we can actually get rid of that bad cap model in-game for good. Can we?? (and don't forget editing the pink panzer piping to the correct silver/white officer Waffenfarbe for infantry and SS).

It is a good book, I have that one too but my copy says £17.99 on the cover inlay.. hm, you got a good deal there! :eek: BTW, do you have 'German Army Uniforms of World War II in Color Photographs' by Wade Krawczyk? I really like that one, particularly as the photographs are of such high quality and detail. Anyway I just wanted to say thanks for your work, I love it. Keep going!

Awesome work sir! When do you plan on releasing it, or have you already? Oh and I won't be complaining about any historical inaccuracy! After all, it's your mod, and it's up to the player to decide whether to use it or not, or even to *edit the textures themselves* in Photoshop using the many reference books available on uniforms if they aren't happy with your work. No complaints from me, keep going and thanks for doing it!

Couldn't agree more, well said Mord. Oh, and I think your CMSF US Army sound mod works perfect in CMBN, nice voice acting! And Vein's uniforms and texture work is frighteningly awesome... like you say guys, it's all about the options, options... As I already pointed out in Sergei's "Desert Fox" mod thread, the modding options with the base CMBN engine are huge. Buying CMBN is probably the best value-for-money game I ever bought! So c'mon guys... stop posting in here and get back to work! A full Afrika Korps mod with desert uniforms and dusty weathered vehicles, and don't forget that side order of Battle of the Bulge snow mod, hurry up what are you waiting for! (hehe j/k take all the time you like)

Thanks for making this map Sergei, it's beautiful! I haven't had so much fun with a game since Microprose's original M1 Tank Platoon! You really did a wonderful job. Well, I just wanted to add that I enjoyed your map more by making my own "desert environment mod". I'm sure you've already done this, but for anyone else here's what I did: I swapped out the ground texture files from my original CMSF install (using RezExplode, of course), making sure to keep the original 'ground sand.bmp' texture with the correct "dunes" look to it (extracted from the 'Version 100.brz' file) as I believe the texture in later patches was changed to a more grittier/rocky look with blackish dirty particles (as in CMBN, which to me looks like wet/beach sand, not dry desert sand). Nothing wrong with that - it's to be expected for Normandy, after all. The rocky plateau area looks better (to me) with original CMSF desert rocky terrain textures too. I then copied and renamed the CMSF 'ground dirt.bmp' to 'distant ground.bmp' to ensure the green world CMBN background was altered to the exact same texture used in CMSF, to line it all up with the distant desert mountans. As a finishing touch, I copied and renamed the ambient "windy" sound file from CMSF to 'background day combat.wav' to change the ambient sound of birds chirping to the correct windy desolate desert sound. Of course, I did all this file copying and editing in a seperate folder called 'z_my_desert_environment_mod" and dropped it into my CMBN Data/z folder. So, whenever I want to go back to Normandy, I just move my desert mod folder out to somewhere else. I was thinking of uploading my little desert enviro mod to the Repository, but then I thought it wouldn't be the done thing... as in, the original textures and ambient sound would be from a different game (CMSF) and not technically legal for me to do that. At least it isn't too difficult to do it yourself, I think I already covered how to do it above. It then occurred to me that with a few extra graphical tweaks and some mission editing, it wouldn't be impossible to completely change the game into CM: Afrika Korps 2!! I mean, what do you think? We know we can edit the textures of the uniforms/vehicles... anyone else thinking how cool it would be to make a complete Afrika Korps mod with full Rommel Campaign? Oh well... of course, we'd still have to wait for the 'Commonwealth' add-on to have full access to "Monty" and the British units... at least we could have a taster of things to come eh? To me this shows once again how much this game is worth every penny I spent on it, and I thank Battlefront for making your engine so moddable! Speaking of different environments, I guess we can't have Ostfront in this engine without the proper Soviet units/models, but we could absolutely make a snowy Ardennes forest Battle of the Bulge mod, couldn't we?

Yes, you're absolutely right sir. For gaming, HyperThreading = off in BIOS works best for me, mainly because I tend to play more older games than newer ones (that properly "go around" it). I don't know of any games that utilize/benefit from HT at all. When I need to do a lot of audio/video work then I just re-enable HT in BIOS. Interesting you say all the ToW games are supposed to utilize dual-core though? :confused: In my experience I've only seen my ToW games using a single core, confirmed by the CPU performance graphs. In all ToW games I *never* saw more than one core being utilized in my quad! :confused: Anyone else? Most other relatively newer games I've played are utilizing the 4 cores efficiently. For example, DCS: Black Shark (with the multi-core patch, obviously). Solid 60fps with that sim. Specs: i7 920 EX58-UD5 @ 4GHz, 6GB DDR3, Nvidia GTX 285, Corsair HX 1000W PSU, Win7x64 / WinXP32 dual boot.

Nice one, tanks! Bit small to really see what's going on though... no bigger versions?

Yes, you're absolutely right my dear fellow and I empathize with your frustration. People with older rigs who are used to low frame-rates have no experience of the problem. It doesn't affect them, so they therefore naturally expect everyone else to be satisfied with it. They even try to justify their old rigs by saying "the human eye can't tell the difference in frame-rates over 25fps"... Well, I'm apparently not human as I can clearly tell when framerates drop under the usual 60fps v-synced with my monitor. Fraps is always running in the background and it confirms the painful stuttering my eyes are subjected to when it drops. It's also true to say that I didn't notice this in years past when my older rigs only pushed around 30fps max. I had no experience of the problem before. Ever since I built my latest rig a year or so ago though, anything that drops below my usual 60 is now *very* noticeable (and annoying). As for ToW3, yes I do get the usual solid 60..... when looking up at the sky To be more specific it's normally around 60fps when zoomed out but... moving the camera closer to the units to watch the action up close, it drops around 40fps, sometimes as low as 25. It's fluid and not terribly game-breaking or anything, yet still annoying to me. Would be a far nicer gameplay experience to have the usual 60fps smoothness throughout. For instance I have DCS: Black Shark running a solid 60fps and it's a joy to play. You might want to run task manager in the background and alt-TAB out, or exit the game and take a look at the the CPU performance graphs. For me, ToW 3 Korea is only running on the second core. The other 3 cores aren't being utilized at all. I'm pretty sure this is the answer why it lags horribly. (I have already disabled hyperthreading in my BIOS). I believe ToW has been a single-core-only game since ToW1 years ago though, so I don't expect to see a patch fixing this any time soon I'm afraid my friend! Specs: i7 920 EX58-UD5 @ 4GHz, 6GB DDR3, Nvidia GTX 285, Corsair HX 1000W PSU, Win7x64 / WinXP32 dual boot.

I always thought that the most glaring flaw of the entire ToW series was the simple fact we can't go "unbuttoned" with our tanks, so I've never really taken these games as being a serious wargame really. At least, the Combat Mission series allows for this so I'm looking forward to the new game, hopefully soon!

Hi guys hope you're doing well. Well I took the plunge and bought ToW3 and so far it looks like a nice game, well done 1C/Battlefont! Although, I was quite disappointed to find the same bug re-occurring since ToW1; missing sounds of boots on the ground in large/normal battles! I don't know about you but for me it's a real immersion-killer to hear all the other sounds like vehicles, explosions, soldiers humming tunes to themselves and coughing, shouting, calling out, dogs barking, sparrows chirping and ambient sounds... but no footsteps! Well as I say I've been frustrated by this since I bought ToW1 years ago so it isn't specific to ToW3 Korea in any way. In Tow2 Africa I decided to look into making my own fix; I extracted sounds.SFS with Dr Jones' SFS Extractor and examined the *.wav files. I noticed that the infantry sounds (i.e. steps_dirt_run_fast_01.wav, steps_water_run_01.wav, steps_sand_walk_fast_03.wav etc. are all recorded in 352kbps 22KHz, while the vast majority of the other samples are all in 705kbps 44KHz. So it's interesting to note the missing sounds are different in that respect, don't you think? Well, I up-sampled the offending *.wav files to match the other 705kbps 44KHz ones to see if that would work, but aside from sounding a little crisper (hardly noticeable) it made no difference to them cutting-out in larger battles, same as before. (Yes, I know that up-sampling doesn't improve audio quality I just thought there might be a conflict stopping them from playing properly in the game). Then I thought perhaps it might be related to EAX's incompatibility with Windows 7 x64, so I installed Creative ALchemy and added an entry for ToW; no difference. I then re-installed the games in WinXP 32-bit (I use a dual boot for older games and applications that don't work in Win7 64-bit). Same thing. I then switched from my old 5.1 Creative soundcard to my newer Razer Megalodon 7.1 headset to see if that made a difference. No!! (I'm using the latest drivers/firmware.) What's really frustrating for me is the footstep sounds ARE present and correct in small missions, where I'm controlling say a single squad, like the Russian elite guys in the Behind Enemy Lines mission in ToW1, my own user-created missions, or the tutorial. Same in ToW2 Kursk, the tutorial has the footstep sounds working smoothly. As for a major tank battle on the Kursk salient... forget it. Same in ToW3 Korea, the footstep samples "cut out" in big battles. I'm guessing this is a known bug where the tank/vehicle sounds have an overriding priority to footsteps? I thought maybe the tank sounds were "drowning out" the infantry sounds, but no! If I send a small squad miles away from the main force to encircle the enemy, the footstep samples still don't play. That's the most frustrating time for me, really odd to have no sound of boots on sandy paths when we should be clearly hearing them. By the way, I noticed there is a Battlefront patch we can download for CMSF that states "fix for missing infantry sounds" in the release notes, but as I don't own CMSF I don't know anything about that. Maybe we might finally get a similar sound fix for Theatre of War if it's a similar bug in the audio engine? Or... is it just me and everyone else has no missing infantry sounds in large battles? Or you have a fix for it? I used Google search but couldn't find any results! Specs: i7 920 EX58-UD5 @ 4GHz, 6GB DDR3, Nvidia GTX 285, Creative Audigy 2 (EAX) / Razer Megalodon, Corsair HX 1000W PSU, Win7x64 / WinXP32 dual boot.

Haha YESSS the roller disco in the desert is now closed!! THANK YOU! You just made my day! Actually my dear fellow, I was just referring to the first default German campaign mission, not a user-created mission where I defined my own placement area. However, I just tested this new package with the same mission and uncle StuG is ready for orders!! PS: I was just wondering, if the StuG placement worked fine for you in the old version, then perhaps it made a difference that when I first tested the mod, at that point I'd just freshly re-installed the game so I didn't have a list of (locked) campaign missions to manually choose from. Now though, as I completed the first mission last night (beyond the Faid Pass) I now see a list of missions that I didn't see before. Either way, it seems to work perfectly now so I'm very happy, thanks again. Magnifico!!!! Hehe only thing now is my work last night capturing Sidi Bou Zid is now scrubbed if I'm to stick with the mod, but at least I didn't get too far... I wonder, maybe if it's a confirmed repeatable error and wasn't just me, maybe a mention could be made in the release notes to edit the config to unlock the first campaign mission if that's the true cause of the StuG placement problem. I'm making a note of it in my install notes anyway (if I need to uninstall/reinstall in future). *sigh* Only thing I dearly wish the mod had now though... is proper Fallschirmjäger units (the reason I wanted to try the mod in the first place - False advertising! hehe!! ). I really enjoyed creating paratrooper skirmishes in ToW 1 with the great JSH mod, it's a pity we never had them in ToW2. Oh well, I'm happy enough for now!

Just had chance to test gooana's fixed BalanceMod_152.EN mod from the Steam forums and it seems all is not well in the German SP campaign. It appears his fix of replacing the old ..Ai\AnimatorSMesh\Animations.ini and TankTables.ini causes problems for me. 1. Infantry animations are now messed up. Instead of running, they now "glide". Also a little too fast. 2. Infantry mesh co-ordinate placement with things like machine guns, artillery pieces and motorcycle sidecars are now off (they appear inside the guns and inside the motorcycle frame). 3. Don't know about the other German campaign missions, but on the first Faid Pass mission where I added a Stug, on entering the mission it appeared stuck inside the enemy placement area behind their lines rather than in my German zone (so I couldn't move it). Of course, after the placement phase was over and I started the mission, the Stug was immediately blown up by the surrounding enemy (making the Stug in the SP campaign effectively useless). So is it just me or is gooana's fixed 1.5.2 Balance mod working fine and properly for everyone else? I did a fresh install of ToW2 + Centauro (v1.3.6) and added the mod via JSGME as usual.

Superb, tanks! Tanks muchly for the custom link too, excellent! Sorry for not replying sooner I've just been fitting a new PSU (Corsair HX 1000W). My Old Coolermaster 1250W PSU fan decided to stop working after two years so I don't think I'll be buying a Coolermaster PSU again for a while... although fair play to them, the PSU was good enough to at least continue to work with no fan for long enough for me to buy a new (hopefully more reliable) PSU! (sorry for off-topicness)

Wow that's an amazing bug, thanks for reporting! I was thinking of buying this soon, mostly because of the improved campaigns, but now if they don't actually work...!? Hopefully it'll be an easy thing to fix, like perhaps a bad line of code or something that we could edit ourselves... Anyway I'll definitely be holding-off buying until there's a fix, thanks again for the heads-up.

Danke Herr OberLeutnant, you are promoted to Feldmarschall!! And Spasiba my dear jcmil for fixing this for me, I really can't thank you enough but a medal is on it's way! Well, we are almost home now, just one last thing... the link you gave for En_texts.utf8 isn't working for me (but the balancemod_152 one worked fine, excellent work). Depositfiles say "Such file does not exist or it has been removed for infringement of copyrights." So, just that one last thing to fix with your En_texts.utf8 file and we're all good and happy again balancemod-wise! Merci beaucoup mes amis!

Thank you my dear fellow, you're most kind. Downloading now! EDIT: The readme file says it's version 1.5.1. So I checked the file and compared it to my old 1.5.1 version I had from a couple of years ago and it's exactly the same file (balance151.rar) the only apparent difference with yours is it's renamed to balance152.rar. In the archive, the filenames, sizes and dates are the same, from 2009. Actually, on second look the dates of mine are around 13:00 hours but yours are around 14:00 hours 22/11/2009. It would seem your version is newer by around an hour or so... interesting! But still, the byte sizes of the files are exactly the same, and shouldn't we have the new 1.5.2 readme in the archive (the one that's on the Russian website main page)? Explanation?

Just letting you know I get a "404 Not Found" when I try downloading the mod (ver 1.5.2) on that page. Temporary glitch or gone for good? Anywhere else I might download it from? Thanks!

Excellent mod, thank you! One question... I have been tearing my hair out all day trying to create the Fallschirmjäger FG-42 detachment (listed above) in the Mission Editor. For some reason, the new unit isn't listed in the editor. (BTW, I know how to use the editor and have created working missions from scratch before.) I am already using the updated "filesid.ini" by Tatari (thanks!) that works for me in 1.3.0 + balance mod 129, yet still I cannot add the Fallschirmjägers in the mission editor! Hours later of searching Google and text editing by trial and error, I am about to give up, so I was just wondering if anybody was actually able to add those paratroopers? And if you did, could you PLEASE let me know how you did it? Danke!