Suchy

Hah, let they try Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz from Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
 

For those wanting more content, feel free to jump into the editor and build some new scenarios for the community.  Trust me there is nothing special that the CM Betas get that you don't when it comes to the editor. The unit editor is already incredibly powerful if you know how to use it. Oh and it's part of the package if you've already bought the game.
For those wanting fantasy weapons and a vehicles like tanks with automatic 120mm cannons, I reckon you'd love it for about 15 minutes before the novelty wore off and you never used the content again. There's a reason WW2 remains a popular time period for wargamers after all this time, and it isn't because of questions like: "What if the Panzer VIII Maus was deployed in 1945?"
Can vouch for each of those guys listed and the effort they put into creating official content, I'm desperately trying to scramble to keep up with that standard. I still bow in awe at benpark and his effort to recreate 1945 central Berlin. The research undertaken to try make the most accurate recreation of historical engagements and help out in designing accurate TOE/OOB is in my mind second to none among the BFC official staff and the wider volunteer circle.
Want an example? A small tidbit from my own work last Friday night. I've been recreating an engagement that includes the US 2nd Armored Division and been drawing from various historical and printed sources. Well I stumbled across digital scans of the divisional day by day reports and hand drawn maps of unit movements from June 1944. What was there was information that went against what was printed in some major history books by some big name historians. Though it was clear where the confusion over the years has come from given certain 2nd Armored battalions were detached from the Division in early June. Well this discovery slowed down putting the scenario together as it required me to go and edit my unit files and swap formations to ensure the scenario you play is the most historically accurate as possible.
Finally, keep in mind that many of us have day jobs so working on CM content is on the side of "paying the bills"* and because we have a passion for wargaming, CM and most importantly history.
* Feel free to send next weeks winning lottery numbers my way.

Hi fellow CMFB-ers,
have you ever thought of making your own campaign but were intimidated by all the hard work that goes into it?
I’ve been recently tinkering with the scenario editor to create a historical campaign in CMFI and, in my recurrent drunken stupors, I came up with an idea to quickly create fully randomized campaigns: The Quick Campaign Generator!
The QCG creates a 10-battle campaign in just a few clicks (well, a few hundred…) putting you at the head of your core force, which you must lead throughout the campaign to achieve glory and win some medals, recording their progress in the meantime. It is in part reminiscent of Robo's quick campaign generator for CMx1 titles (as some of you may remember).
Essentially, it is an Excel spreadsheet that lets you create a ‘bare-bones’ linear campaign comprising ten battles without having to do any historical research, map-making, briefings or artwork, i.e. the exact opposite of @Ithikial_AU’s excellent tutorial (https://community.battlefront.com/topic/137921-fire-and-rubble-preview-the-anatomy-of-what-goes-into-a-stock-campaign-release/) that I’ve used for my historical campaign.
The purpose is to have fun with all the goodies (tanks and vehicles especially) that CMFB has to offer, without the headaches. Pure CM sex with no emotional involvement 😉.
All the Scenario Editor choices, for example Weather, Ground Conditions, Experience, Headcount, choice of troops etc. are completely randomized to let you try out all possible combinations. Although, these battle are heavily biased in favor of armor, I must admit.
When you open the spreadsheet, you will see:
a tab called ‘Battle generator’, which provides random battle conditions,
two tabs called ‘Human ATT’ and ‘Human DEF’, which generate a random force composition to be used in the various battles if you’re attacking or defending;
the ‘Allied AAR or Axis AAR’ tabs, where you will be recording your progress during the campaign. Beware, your performance will be accurately monitored and judged 😉.
Ignore the other tabs. They contain data used for the formulas. I’ve protected the sheets to avoid mistyping into a cell containing a formula.
 
This was the situation for my Elite Panther platoon in a German Wehrmacht campaign called “Panthers on the Prowl” that I created using QCG:
 

 
 
Notice the nice array of medals my core force troops earned! (Well, it was on Easy mode...)
 
As you progress in your campaign, your results will be recorded and medals awarded. Statistics include tank kills, tank losses, infantry casualties, etc.
 

 

 
 
Your overall performance will be duly monitored as shown here:
 

I did pretty well, apparently.
 
Basic knowledge of how the CM Scenario Editor works is of course recommended, but not a requirement. Full instructions are provided.
Inside the package you will find:
-          - three versions of the QCG spreadsheet (one for a US campaign, one for a German Wehrmacht campaign, and one for a Waffen SS campaign);
-          - a pdf file containing Instructions (and a Quick Start Guide);
-          - six campaign script files “(QCG) Campaign Script.txt” (easy, medium or hard for Allied and Axis forces);
-          - five text files for the type of battle you will be fighting;
I’ve also added a couple of campaigns that I have created using this system, with the related Excel files that only contain the AAR tabs.
Enjoy! If you have any questions, just let me know.
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bA3jnnT6tjh0xdKZHnAl5pyr5e2LBA6_/view?usp=sharing
 
 

we´ve come a long way since. 😎 Things that were deemed impossible by the "officials" are now daily bread and butter. Thanks to those who invented hacking MDR files and then @sbobovyc who made them accessible for everyone to try as well. Sorry to BFC, but that customer unfriendly monopoly had to be broken. I´d purchased far far less expensive games that allow database and geometry modding by default, so WTF?

"BUG" but just missing/incorrect textures. It seems that the normal maps for German senior officer greatcoats are incorrect and show y-straps.
This is for CMFB and CMRT AND CMFI. CMFI seems to not even have normal maps for the base module nor for Gustav Line  module but then finally they shipped with Rome to Victory. But shipped still incorrect. 3 strikes and you're out.
I have never been invited to be on the BFC BETA test team but I recommend that each guy get some "specialty area" to be in charge of. I THINK from grape vine and forum comments, that they all get a loosey-goosey "play the game and report stuff that seems wonky". Put a guy in charge of uniforms. Put a guy in charge of vehicle models. etc etc All the piddly stuff we see that slips on through. MAYBE it does get diligently reported and MAYBE gets diligently fixed but SOME-EFFING-HOW it gets right back in the folders? That is a QA issue somewhere.  eggshells in the omelette. 

I believe these were heavy AA guns intended to engage high altitude bomber formations, and would not be able to fire on the ground attack planes we see in this game?

In commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the start of Operation Uranus on 19 November 2022, I am diligently working on a few CMRT Romanian Mod scenarios...
ROM KLETSKAYA BALKA BASH
ROM GROUP LASCAR
 

Messing about with trying to create a generic muddy looking landscape for all the WW2 games - I started in RT. Replacing a few textures at a time to try and figure out the mod tags (that's another story 🙄). Anyway I've gotten to a point where I think I can make it work across ALL the WW2 titles for ALL locations and ALL seasons/weather (excepting snow for obvious reasons - though slush might have to be thunk about separately), using one generic set of ground textures to look really muddy - think Spring Awakening in RT, Hürtgen in FB, Anzio bridgeheads in FI ... you know the kind of thing.
So I was just looking at some of the textures in FI, checking how the tags work when I noticed that the generic ground grass (and ground grass yellow) texture tile looked different than in other titles (BN and RT, haven't checked FB). Further investigation shows that the Italian terrain uses a higher perceived resolution of grass tile than the other titles. Grass is one of the worst texture tiles IMHO, it is a complete blurred mess at anything close up, only really resolving into a texture when looking down from quite high up, and it looks really poor next to a nice sharp AFV for example. This may not be an issue for many folks, but I like to play down in the long grass so I find it irksome seeing the ground texture. The reason that grass tiles look so blaah is because each tile is stretch across 50 x 50 m2 that's 2500m2 - to represent the texture correctly would require a tile of 20480 x 20480 pixels - the existing stock tiles are 2048 x 2048 pixels.
Many modders have tried to improve the grass texture over the years but really there's not a lot of point as they all just end up looking either nasty at low level or weirdly out of scale from up above, this is not a reflection on the modders but rather how the game handles the texture. However, it seems that the game engine is not so equal as I thought, and that with a little tweak from on high we could have a higher resolution. I don't notice any particular hit on my GPU/frame rate with the alternative tiles used in FI so I wonder why this hasn't been implemented across the other titles? It's not like we would need to redraw maps, or anything like that, as it's an engine based change affecting how much each tile is stretched or repeated within a specific area of terrain. Plenty of the other tiles occupy much less relative space, that is, they are stretched less and repeated more often. Here's some images from RT and FI for you consideration. The ground grass tiles have been replaced with a different texture that I was considering for a sodden ground grass texture, the doodads are the same in both games (from my Hedgerow Hell mod 😉)
First RT from ground level, as close as possible ...

Nice grass shame about the boat race ...
Now FI, same distance:

That's better - notice how the blurring doesn't jar so much, it all just melds together better IMHO.
Now at camera Level 1 ... first RT ...

It's all kind of floaty ... Now FI ...

Again, IMHO the grass doodads seem more attached to the ground.
This is a matter of taste for sure. There are plenty who will not care, but for those that do, self included, it would be nice if all the games were created equal in this respect.
 

The Franken-Csaba progress continues thanks to @Lucky_Strike and Mark's superior skills at the PS joystick.
I am adding Hungarian crosses and license plates. I waited for hours down at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to get the damn tags. Insurance papers and my war vehicle license. The lady had it almost all done and THEN said she was going on break and I must return after lunch. DMV joke. FRANKENCSABA  hahaha I have to alter the SdFkz222 MG to be a water cooled looking MG. I had to swap the sides of 2 weapons on the turret,  cannon goes to the left, MG goes to the right. Messing with the crew spots. Effing with the hatches the best I can. Still gotta make vehicle crew uniforms for Hungarians! Fun stuff. Work in progress.    EDIT: I might mess with editing the fenders. I will grab the low hanging fruit to push it more towards a better Csaba look. Am I 100% making it a Csaba? No way man. It aint worth it to me. This is a hobby and I see @NPye staying up until 4am doing stuff. I have to bloody ask where the actual BFC people are. It seems the fans can crank out the content but BFC still has bunkers that shoot wrong for every title. I don't run a business so I guess I work for free here. But BFC must carefully plan the 15 minutes they budget in to have somebody on the clock to do a small 3D change? If SOMEBODY was paid to make those bunkers then it should be warranty work and be done for free and released in a special email. You do not need a big release and activation headache process to give us the corrected files. Very depressing.  

prototype of Kiraly SMG, a few more tweaks here and there.

From what I've seen, the DPM did not see much combat use, if at all, during WW2. I have chosen to replace it with the more accurate DT-27 tank machine gun in infantry use.
This has UI icons for vanilla and Juju's UI. It does not change magazine size or any other specs on the machine gun.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/grotcbjjkj3lcff/DT+for+DPM.rar/file

All my old stuff was lost, so I restarted from what existed as a hybrid of somebody grabbing what I had done back in 2015. Juju still had what he did for me for UI images and sent it to me. I finally sat down and cranked through the voice file renaming using a bulk renamer utility. etc etc Still making some related mods in Blender. Trying to make a Kiraly SMG.
 
 

coming soon

CMRT FESTUNG BUDAPEST UNCLES AND PUPS
^
Buda, Hungary. 1 January 1945.
By 26 December 1944, Soviet forces were finally able to
complete the outer encirclement of Budapest when lead
units of the 18th Tank Corps linked up with forward
elements of the 6th Guards Tank Army northwest of the city
near Estergom. Initial penetrations by Soviet
reconnaissance elements toward the heart of the Axis
defenses, the Vasbegy area, were made from northwest of
the Buda side of the city. These first attacks were
stopped near the new St. Janos Hospital on Christmas Day
by a combined force of squads from the Hungarian
University Assault Battalion and the city gendarmes.
Beginning on 30 December, units of the Soviet 108th Guards
Rifle Division's 311th Guards Rifle Regiment, supported by
SU-76Ms from the 1897th Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment
launched a series of attacks from the area around the
hospital in an effort to dislodge the Axis defenders from
the Varosmajor.
^
You are a Captain in the 311th Guards Rifle Regiment. Your
force is a company of infantry paired with 5 self-
propelled guns. 
^
The Axis force is most likely a Hungarian infantry unit
dug in on their own soil and supported by heavy weapons.
^
Press forward to take the Cogwheel Railway embankment and
the rail station.
^
You have 15-20 minutes to achieve your mission. Points are
awarded for destroying enemy units and getting to several
touch objectives as well as holding them from enemy
counterattack.
Note: this is my translation from an existing ASL scenario. It will also be playable as axis vs AI. The mod makes the Germans look and sound like Hungarians.

I thought of the same, Sabaton is my secret guilty pleasure 

Brazil in Flames
 
 
After weeks working, it's finished, gentleman is with much pleasure that i present the Brazil in Flames MOD, A Mod that brings an alternative scenario of brazilian government moving to the extreme left wing party, i tried to bring as much accuracy as i could in portraying the Brazilian units at the current state, i pretend to bring Campaigns and Scenarios, but it will take time, so be patient, i want to give my sincere thx to the Combat Mission Discord users that helped me and for the Heaven & earth Team for they amazing mod that have most of the great content that is present in this mod, so cheers for these brothers and go check their mod ! Is amazing ! Now Let's go for the contents:
 
UNITS: 
 
- Brazilian Airborne
 

 
- Brazilian Commandos 
 

 
- Brazilian T.G ( Basically an Rural Militia)
 

 
 
- Brazilian B.I.B and B.I.M.T.Z (B.I.B for mechanized infantry and B.I.M.T.Z for motorized infantry)
 

 
-Brazilian Conscripts (Your basic riflemans)
 

 
 
-Brazilian Militia (Consists of ex-reservists, ex-policeman, ex-fireman and other ex-members from the security area that turn to the bad side)
 

 
-Brazilian Druglords
 

 
 
- Units Speak Brazilian Portuguese and have Brazilian names 
 
VEHICLES:
- I don't pretend to bring new ones, since i believe that changing models would affect gameplay quality, so that's why brazil is left wing in the mod hehe.
 
Campaign, Scenarios and Maps:
- i pretend to bring all of these 3, but i want to work slowly on them in order to have make them fun and challenging, my intents are to explore Favela, jungle and other warfare environments in the Brazilain Biomes and diferent types of urban areas, all i can say is that it will take time, but it will be worth.
 
 
 
All the credits go to these people :
 
- The Heaven & EarthMod team and those ho helped them with content
- CptMiller, Rice, Frenchy, Kob and the wHole Combat Mission Discord team
- Aquila Smart Wargames 
- 37mm
- John Hansen
- If i forgot to credit somebody, please send me a PM, if your mod is on the heaven & earth content pack and want your part to be removed, send me a PM too, i will delete, it's not my interest stealing content 
 
 
LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pZuJdiujk0yudSpmVn4W2yxLGl1w2B0J/view?usp=sharing
 
 
 
 
 
 

I wrote a little python script to set the elevation in the editor according to a digital elevation model. Those come in various resolutions, for instance, in Germany data for the whole of Northrhine Westfalia is available for free with a 1mx1m granularity. I then use PyAutoGui in order to automate setting the correcting height and clicking/scrolling in the editor. The script currently sets the height information for every square in the editor, not just contours.
An example height map:

The resulting terrain in the editor (3328mx1920m):

Vista somewhere in there.

The script is not terribly fast, making this map took about 7h, but it beats doing all the clicking yourself. The limitation, btw., is the editor, the script could go faster. The advantage is that you can do much better micro-terrain, I think, the disadvantage is that you can't just use an old topographical map and draw the contour lines. It would be possible to do contour lines but you'd need to have those in a machine readable format.
Anyway, if people here are interested, I could polish the code a bit and make it available to everyone, e.g. via github. If there is additional interest, I could imagine doing other stuff that way, like, for instance, drawing roads from Open Street Map.

Hi everyone! I've put out a new video where I compare a combat mission scenario to both the historical events that are portrayed and the actual real-life location. I thought I'd post this on the General Discussion board as it's also kind of about Combat Mission scenario design and research in general.
As it's about a Market Garden scenario, I've slept a quite few hours less the past few nights in order to get this video done in time for Operation Market Garden's 78th anniversary on saturday the 17th of september. I hope you'll find it interesting; spending the day basicly giving myself a battlefield tour and filming the locations of the scenario that I just played was amazing. Geeky, for sure, but amazing 😁.
Props to @Pete Wenman who is the author of this scenario for his excellent research and scenario design.
 
 

Rummaged around in my previous experiments box and found the burnt tree - it's not really finished and would really need some other burnt textures to go with it for best effect. I made a quick and dirty crater mod that gives a nice burnt hole in the ground, works quite well with a large crater but ALL the other craters will be burnt as well. In the long run it may be better to have a flavour object that represents some burnt stuff. Anyway it does make me wonder about a new landscape mod ... Total Destruction®©™ - War is Hell®©™ - type of thing, lots of burnt terrain textures, destroyed vehicles and smashed buildings ... here's a few pics of what I've mashed together ...

Small tree type - kinda works, texture a bit smeared. Would be nice with some of @JM Stuff's burnt wrecks...

Tall tree - works well for this one, textures can be renamed for any of the tree models - just a case of experimenting ...

Large tree type - mmm that's better, big craters as well ...

It burns us ...
More work needed but it's getting there. 
These are all set for Spring with the spring mod tag so they show up in Berlin 1945, again more tweaking could have them show up for any time of year other than snowy winter.
That's as much as I can manage for now folks - not long till I'm fixed and back to it I hope ...

Whether it's good or not, it's here. I've created a Stalingrad campaign map, and semi-historical Mastertoe (reduced for September) for it as well. I used material from Glantz, Joly and youtubers to research. I spent way too much time learning about the preliminaries too, crazy stuff.
I present an Army level assault on a huge map. It will take place September 13th - September 30th 1942. There will be two turns per day, with one battle per grid per turn possible.
The German TOE is 6th Army (One from 4th Army) which had four infantry divisions, two armored, and one motorized. They will be reinforced with two more divisions later on. The Soviet TOE is the 62nd Army in defense which contains too many divisions to list.
The campaign is being hosted on TheFGM since I am able to split teams with a password: https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/thefgmforum/forums/cmrt-top-commander.493/
Formations will start full strength instead of their historical strengths, despite numerous and specific infantry/tank strength reports.
Everything is being hosted in a program called "Geccos" which is similar to vassal. More about that digital campaign tracker in the link above. An image of the campaign in Geccos is at the bottom. It only shows troops on the front line to start.
Supply, Ammo Dumps, Signals, Medical are all planned.
More detailed information at the link above
On September 12th, LTG V.I. Chuikov replaced LTG A.I. Lopatin as commander of 62nd Army, and thus the defense of Stalingrad. That night he entered the city and observed the burned out wreck that was left of it. He was driven 800 meters behind the front lines to 62nd's Army HQ to meet General Krylov, 62nd Army's Chief of Staff and Commissar Gurov. The next day the German Assault on the city would begin.
 

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BFC had an idea way back to make their games have "modability" and sent along the rezexplode and rezpack utility programs. The game manual explained where to put mods. Then at some point the modtag feature was introduced. I can't say if this was really an offering to modders or just an internal feature that helped them and ALSO benefited modders. Either way, it is great. Hey! Whoever thought of modtags, maybe not even BFC?---Thank you! Now, in September 2022, I can't think of anything since modtags that has increased the modability of their games. AI group increases and such do help with writing scenarios but not modding. Modders have limits that BFC could help them overcome but taking on to solve and implement is not on the BFC list of things to get done. I wish modders had a small module that would just be a huge pile of workarounds for modders. For FREE, the modders try and create content. I wish BFC would help modders do more. I guess several of the BFC insiders seem to somewhat like and often support the fringe modder work but at the very top it is a BFC business decision to focus elsewhere. Best wishes

I am in the mood to go back and work on this mod. I am sure I may have lost all my old files but luckily @Suchy picked up the ball and ran with it. He shared to me everything he had. @Kuli Hey ball point pen (inside joke), do you have any time or interest to work on a CMRT Hungary Mod? @pitbull @boygarvin How about you buddy?
I am thinking "Festung Budapest" in the timeframe late 1944 and early 1945. There is an Advanced Squad Leader historical module with many scenarios we can try to translate over to CMRT. "Five Finger Discount" as they say.
Our mod team motto is maybe "We do what we can, BFC has the car keys"

Some news today
to  respond to the wish of my friend  @Aragorn2002 I present you a model sdkfz 251 d ambulance version
 
 

 

 
the vehicle is without damages only an engine problem, that the crew have to evacuated the vehicle !
 
some modifications intern like added more bed 
removing all weapons and amo boxes
changind plate number 
added more "verbandkasten"
I cannot remove the mount behind or I will lose all the vehicle structure and can no more export it in mdr.

 
 
now I see the problem there is no engine hehehe !
 

 
hope will be helpfull
Another version in on the way but first my civilian and soldier bodies...
 
JM

Thank you @Aragorn2002 this is a good motivation.
I try to give a little atmosphere in CM with abandoned vehicles soon more.
 
JM

Welcome back!!! And we are wainting for KV-1 😉