AlexUK

Considering there are a number of bugfixes waiting on the CMCW patch (e.g. M113 .50 cals being able to see through smoke), is there any chance of releasing the patch without PBEM++?

I guess we can hope BF decides to reward it's long standing customer base with more than a few of the PRO features. Even if at a small premium. Hoping.

Seeing NATO in what looks like Black Sea had me in my "Shut up and take my money!" mode.

Minutes Nineteen to Twenty One
KG LINKS
All quiet on this flank, the teams bound their way up the field and are quite close now. Either the buildings are not occupied or he has outstanding fire discipline.



KG ZENTRUM
It's around about this time that I noticed something odd. Nobody in 1st zug, 2 kompanie has a C2 link even though the HQ team is close by.

Inspecting the panel it appears there is no zugfuhrer in the team so none of the troops have a leader. Curious.

To remedy this situation I decide to bring up the kompanie HQ to provide moral support.


Meanwhile 2nd squad is pushing to the right of the scout team to see if we can uncover anything. The AT rifle team are still sitting on the hill not reacting so I assume he hasn't seen me yet. He can stay there until he does and then I'll have to drive him off or knock him out.

KG RECHTS
The AT rifle team goes to ground and we lose the spot. Next turn I order some area fire from one of the HTs and the AT rifle pops back up and takes a shot at my firing HT, hitting the weapon at a range of about 200m and knocking the gun out. Damn. The driver gets a bit spooked and backs off but I move him back up decisively in an aggressive way next turn so Grunt thinks the gun is still operational. There were no casualties but I can't let this HT operate alone.


I order another HT to area fire in the AT rifle team's vicinity and he soon runs back into the trees and we lose contact.



2nd squad/A team have finished tending to their dead comrade so I bring them into the treeline for cover. They did not manage to recover the MG42.

Meanwhile 1st squad continue to push into the trees along with the scouts.

SITMAP

Mortars continue to kill snow, it's a slow rate of fire and I suspect on at least a long or maximum duration mission so if he wants to waste ammo blowing up scrub then that's fine by me. Everyone else is still scouting. Given where that AT rifle near NAI4 came from and retreated to he seems to have his MLR set quite far back. I'm expecting to run into something at NAI1 but still no enemy activity yet.
MMM

Ok, typical grogs, all standing around arguing.  Ran a short test scenario (see attached).  Setup is best attempt to re-create conditions described by OP.  Ran the test 10 times and got the following results:
Test
1 - 2 shots until a kill
2 - 1 shot kill
3 - 3 misses and the Bradley killed the team
4 - 1 shot kill
5 - 5 misses and Bradley killed the team
6 - 1 shot kill
7 - 1 shot kill (Bradley managed to kill the team at the same time)
8 - 2 misses and Bradley killed the team
9 - 2 shot kill
10 - 3 shot kill
So in 10 engagements we saw a 70% success rate (i.e. Bradley killed) with about 1.5 shots per kill.  So what?  RPGs not too bad at 225-ish ms at least according to these conditions.
RPGTest.btt

What was the designation for the HEAT round? And what is the source for this? It is worth pointing out that the Gen 1 Abrams had anywhere from 600-1500 RHAe equivalent protection against HEAT on its frontal aspect. Soviet 125mm HEAT shells from the mid to late 80s would have had an extremely difficult time penning the Gen 1 Abrams frontally, let alone a much smaller 76mm HEAT warhead. 
In fact, most contemporary sources have the PT-76 using the BK-350M HEAT round. A round from WW2, that had only ~280mm RHAe of penetration. And on the other end of the scale, the Soviet BK-21B, BK-29, and BK-31, which were all HEAT rounds for the Soviet 125mm gun, and fielded in the 80s, only top out at around 760mm RHAe of penetration. 

Thanks all who have PM'd me on this as well.  Fight Club has messaged me as well and I will respond as I supported the initiative initially because it was something that was much needed.  If I ever have the time in between Battlefront projects I will properly reengage with Fight Club as I think the group could use somebody who knows their way around the editor.

I've finally got the big valley map to a point where I'm happy to use it as a 'master map', it takes a little while to load, but it's stable enough once it does:

It's not quite as detailed as I'd like (CM:A Flavour Objects are not the easiest to place, the rocks really hate steep slopes, which is kind of unfortunate), but I've done my best with it.....I dread to think how many times I've clicked on tiny components of this map in preview mode! 
Here's some scenes of daily life in the valley. 
The day starts early for the water sellers who, like almost everybody else, are forced to hire guards to protect them from bandits as they go about their business in this lawless province:

Before their shift at the local mine a group of workers and their guards enjoy a hearty breakfast of local produce:

A large consignment of ore is ready to be delivered to the refinery in a nearby city:

Meanwhile, near the highway, a DRA Army convoy has stopped to refuel and gather fresh supplies for their journey.....The convoy commander engages in the timeless ritual of haggling with the locals over their scandalous prices:

Map can be found here:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/gsrzlgkxrv6yl2t/[Map] Afghan Highway Valley.btt?dl=0
This is a totally blank map, no AI, no setup zones, no labels.....Nothing. 
Feel free to use & modify it in any way that pleases you. 
PS - Ctrl+Clicking to fast move around this map in preview mode within the game editor is not recommended.....You may well delete or modify something! 
 

Wow, just saw what Steel Division 2 is doing. Come on, this is really cool, and should have been in CM first.

Sorry about the taxes, here in Canada we know a thing or two about getting fleeced at the checkout.  Regardless, thank you for your purchase and support, I hope you really enjoy the game.  As I type we are working on the next module, more to follow on that.

I recall a poster a few year ago relating a story about his urban warfare training. Something along the lines of the instructor saying 'You're now going to learn how to enter a building through a window. NEVER do this in combat.' If I recall the conversation correctly there was some concern about accidentally shooting yourself or a comrade while scrambling through the window, not to mention the risk of being shot by someone in the building while you're halfway through the window.
If you look close in CMSF2 you'll see a number of natural impediments to entering through a window. 
 

Pretty surprising the number of added items that have been requested for. long period. Now which are going to come to CM regular?
 
Multiple players by side, entry through windows, and full replay would be particularly good 🙂

BF have said there is absolutely no way the Professional version is coming to a retail market.  Absolutely no way.
Sounds like they are on the fence, so I take that as a definite maybe. 😁

As they are developed already, and the costs have been paid for, wouldn't it be good business to transfer some at least? BF has made it a practice to offer engine upgrades at a relatively modest cost. I have been on-board with all of those so far. 

Been lurking on this one for a bit and first off it is a bit of a testament to the community that we can have this discussion without it becoming all "nasty" or silly.  So a couple thoughts:
- As to the OP's first set of questions which really surround the ROEs (Rules of Engagement) within the context of the backstory of CMSF, this is not a simple nor straight forward issue.  In RL, every nation is responsible for their military ROEs and they vary vastly on any given operation along with the notorious "national caveats".  That said the coalition does have a  high and low water mark for these.  So for instance if a nation, bent on revenge shows up with overly aggressive ROEs they will find themselves withdrawn from the theatre, or totally on their own, very fast.  
- So what happens if a lot of nations experience catastrophic attacks?  Well here it is very tricky and very political.  The first question has to be "were these attacks and threat of follow-on attacks existential?"  If the answer is "no" then no matter how terrible the community of nations are not likely to risk breaking the Rules Based International Order.  So, if for instance Country X declares "total war" on a sponsoring nation of a WMD terror attack then they will likely 1) find themselves going it alone and 2) suffering some significant repurcutions within the international community which can impact things like trade and neither of these conditions are really good signs of success.  If the attacks are existential, and in the case of the CMSF backstory they really are not, then, yes it is possible that the gloves will come off and a modern form of "total war" would be collectively waged...we are literally talking WWIII here.  Then really bad things start to happen, which we know exactly what they look like because...WW2.  Internment camps during the Second World War are a stain on both the US and Canadian history but they are were an existential war takes us.  
- So what about in-game?  Well the WW2 titles are already there, but remember even then we did try to adhere to a Law of Armed Conflict on the western front (eastern not so much).  Cold War is definitely on the doorstep and maybe Black Sea at least regionally but at the end of the day..."so what?"  Steve is absolutely correct, modelling civilians is not only expensive, it is not a feature anyone in their right minds would see as "fun".  The professional military market wants them, they also are going to want stuff like logistics, military engineering and C4ISR because it is the job.  War gamers want to play realistic, to a point, and most of it centers on military combined arms units, equipment and tactics.  Adding civilians would be a game playing nightmare coming at it from just about any angle.  Players would either find it very frustrating or just ignore them and neither one are a feature that really plays out well.
My two cents anyway.  

When I was in the 82d we did an exchange with the Cdn Parachute Regiment. We paused for tea on the drop zone after a jump. Mess truck came out for the troops and the Colonel's driver brewed up for the officers on the hood of his jeep. Very civilized (it was an admin jump - we weren't doing anything tactical after the jump, but even then there's always tea).
I lived in England for some years too (work assignment), which my wife and I LOVED, and we do miss the couple of tea houses in town we used to frequent. One was a very British one, tea and cakes and scones and clotted cream, and the other we really liked was run by the Buddhist monastery in town. Nice tea and really good food. We lived next to the Lakes District in the northwest for anyone familiar with England. Gorgeous countryside, small towns. Idyllic, really. And civilized. We don't just miss the tea - we miss England. It suited us - ocean and mountains, lots of places to walk (nothing like the footpath culture here in the US), and the people were as nice as could be.
Dave

Great idea about incorporating into the bocage🙂
 
I was wondering whether changing the model has any impact on LOS/LOF? 

I was pondering about what @AlexUK said regarding hawthorns and got to thinking that our bushes are a bit uniform and neglected so I decided to see if I could first make a large, shaggy bush ...
OK at this stage I will say it so that nobody else has to ... titter ye not!

Right, now moving on ...
just for a quick experiment I took one of the tree models into Blender, scaled it and replaced the textures, bush one; repeated and rotated a few bits - two much bigger bushes, a hazel and a hawthorn. What's nice is that if a single or double bush is integrated onto a bocage tiles they will add real depth to that run of bocage AND, because they're bushes NOT bocage, they sway with the wind, something that bocage doesn't do - so it gives a bit of life to the very static bocage. So here's a few pics to give you a flavour, they're by no means done, and need more work, but you'll get the idea ...

A 250/3 parked between a couple of hawthorn bushes for scale ... yes he's sporting a bit of foliage camo, something else I played around with ...

... that PaK 40 again, nestled behind a great wall of bocage, hawthorn bushes on the same tiles appear embedded in the bocage ...

... three of the original bushes in the foreground with a couple of hazel bushes, left and hawthorn, right, on the edge of a copse. They can be used as small trees as well, could even do a version with some form of fruit for a young orchard.
Anyway, there you have it - big bushes. Next maybe several bushes on the same base with a variety of sizes, or perhaps a very large bramble patch ... all sorts of possibilities.

Hawthorn, must be one of the most common small trees in Normandy. 

Hawthorn, must be one of the most common small trees in Normandy. 

Feeling ambitious, and buoyed up by some success working with the 3D models in Blender, I decided to experiment with a bit more scratch modelling. I remembered that someone had mentioned having pine trees that reached down to the ground, that looked a bit more wild and less like plantation trees. So here I give you an old spruce. You're either going to love it or hate it depending on how you play and what you like to do in forests. I've staged these in CMRT because that has eight tree varieties so it's easier to mix in two types of spruce, my new old one interspersed with the type with a very bare trunk. Mixed in this way creates a much more dynamic forest. I can even see an excuse for replacing all the tree models with spruces and pines in various stages of growth, even some tiddlers - image ... 🎄🌲🎄 ...


new spruce on the left, spruce with bare trunk on the right ...



the view out from underneath - probably needs a little bit more foliage ...

ideal for mountainous scenarios ...

So there you have it. The model I've made is a combination of reworked found and original BF. Interestingly the found was much higher detailed than the normal models we have, meaning a lot of extra info is stored in the file to create a more naturalistic tree. I thought these would fail miserably in game, leading to poor performance and lots of stuttering if they worked at all. To my delight they are fine on my system which is fairly conservative in terms of GPU. This bodes well for future model making and I hope it's a sign that I can push the envelope a bit further than before ... guess what's coming next ...

Good day everyone. Today I will be playing through the 'Abu Susah' scenario of CMSF2.


The mission is simple - my two Stryker rifle platoons must bypass the village of Abu Susah, known to be held by hostile irregulars, and destroy any enemy anti-tank weapons. I have 45 minutes to accomplish my task.
I know little about my enemy, only that Abu Susah is home to an infamous radicalised madrassa and that there are 'many bad men' with 'many weapons'. The briefing warns me of RPGs and ATGMs. There could also be recoilless rifles. As I am facing irregulars I will also have to be on the lookout for IEDs covering the roads and other chokepoints. Civilian density is moderate, so I will have to be vigilant. The enemy could be hiding in plain sight.

The AO is about 900 x 600m across. Abu Susah sits roughly in the centre, north of my start line and stretches to the west, nestling in some rolling hills and straddling a crossroads. The ground is very dry and the weather is hazy and warm, with a light wind blowing from the northeast. Sightlines are relatively open, the AO being dominated by the few multi-storey buildings dotted about the place.


Atop hills to the northwest and northeast of my start line are some small farm buildings. Their elevation will provide me with vital observation posts over the AO and into part of the village.

The highest building in the AO is a three-storey just on the eastern edge of the village, which I have dubbed the Savoy.

The other high point of the AO is a two-storey atop a hill north of the village, which I have dubbed the Ritz. These buildings would make for excellent observation posts and good (if obvious) positions for heavy weapons.

There are two routes that I could take to bypass the village. The first is the safest and most obvious route, a simple run along the eastern edge of the AO. This keeps the village at a relative arm's length.

This route has two sticking points, these sheep pens and a ditch along the north-south road. The ditch has only three crossing points: one at my start line, one where it is bisected by the east-west road and one at the northern edge of the AO. The sheep pens constrict my manoeuvre space at the north-eastern edge of the AO, forcing me into a chokepoint and providing a position for the enemy. The ditch then forces me into another chokepoint at the crossing.

The second route is less obvious but far riskier: a run along the western edge of the AO, along a dirt road that loops around Abu Susah to the North. This route takes me very close to the village and leads through a small hamlet or farm on the reverse slope of the hill in the northwest corner of the AO.

An advance along this route would be exposed to fire from the village and would then have to fight through the hamlet/farm (if they are occupied). The one advantage this route provides is that it is far less obvious than the first.

I command the 1st and 2nd Platoons of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 25th Stryker Brigade Combat Team. My platoons are slightly understrength, lacking their weapons squads and I am short one Stryker, forcing my pair of platoon HQs to travel together. This will complicate command and control slightly.

We are supported by two sections of 81mm mortars. My men are veterans and are all well-led and well-rested. I have three grenade machine gun equipped Strykers and four heavy machine gun equipped Strykers. All in all, a nice little combat package, with fire support that should be adequate for the mission.

Right, analysis complete, now to put my force into action. My first move will be to fan out and get some observation posts up on the hills to the left and right of my start line.

In the games where one can promote and award medals (eg Wolves Of The Pacific) it is an additional challenge and fun to see your new inexperienced men/units gain experience and abilities.  I think it greatly helps immersion to be able to ID and "care" about certain of the pixeltruppen units.

Tee-hee! Errr ... I made Hedgerow Hell 😉 But thanks for your concern.
Yes I agree, the original game bark which Aris modded was very nice, then along came a couple of others and they were also improvements; my Hedgerow Hell tree barks were mostly brand new textures which I hoped took the art of bark texturing to the next level, with identifiable species of tree. However, the point of this one is not so much bark, but rather to have tree trunk shapes which are not constructed simply from straight, elongated cone shapes interlocking with each other; the trunk is a cone, the branches are also cones, albeit with non-circular cross-sections. What I've done here is a very different and, dare I say it, new way of making trees for CM (though of course we don't know if BF may have tried this in the past). As I said in my post above, there are caveats which I am well aware of - the noticeable angularity for instance - but I feel this is something that I may be able to ameliorate to some extent. Also there are other implications and benefits from what I am doing which might also possibly help other modders. If you look carefully at the games we have you will notice that most of the shapes used are very simple or combinations of simple shapes, what I hope to show is that we can have more complex shapes, and given today's much more powerful GPUs and CPUs some of this extra horsepower could perhaps be leveraged to improving how the game environment looks. With the up coming release of CMBN on Steam BF will attract a lot of potential new customers and many of them will have an expectation of how graphics can look today, so, IMHO anything that can make for a more immersive experience, whilst still maintaining the fantastic underlying mechanics of the CM games, is all good.

So after a bit of a bocage distraction, I've been messing around with the oak once more, trying to perfect how the textures are applied in the 3D model's file. To say it's not been easy would be an understatement, but finally at about version 15.3i (I started at 01.0a so you do the maths) I finally had a breakthrough, or rather I had the breakthrough whilst cleaning my teeth last night, this morning, whatever ...
Now we can have nicely textured wonky trees, like what grow in nature, or at least a model of a tree that's wonky ... perhaps more ...

... Fritz and his comrades were grateful for the (Re)shade provided by the old oaks that grew in the corner of the field ... 

... no Reshade ...

... and debated the question so many had pondered before ...

... why have just one texture on a tree trunk when you can have two? (maybe)
The point of making a wonky tree was to have an, urm, wonky tree, something a bit more naturalistic. The process of getting there has been painful, but we're all born of pain and why should the oak be any different? As a side effect I think it's time to introduce a tree model that has an extra texture, here an old wound, which won't randomly appear on other parts of the tree which reuse the basic bark texture, it's a texture of it's own only appearing on part of the trunk; think of some ivy perhaps climbing up one side of the tree, or a smattering of moss just around the base, or maybe a dead branch on a pine, devoid of bark completely ... all maybe possible now.
As it stands I have to look at refining the shape a little, the compromise of achieving tree-nirvana is much more work on the shape than I had hoped, the harder lines need to be softened so that our trees are as pretty as can be.