Zveroboy1

We'll have to wait for LongLeftFlank to chime in but personally I think the height is good now. Or perhaps the equivalent of one floor shorter? As far as the width is concerned, hmm it is not easy to say exactly but perhaps 30% thinner would be my estimate. Also I don't know what you did but the object is now a lot easier to select and move around in the editor so that's nice. Is there a way you could improve the lod a bit? If you can't then it is not the end of the world and it will work as it is but the minaret vanishes after 200 m or so. By the way don't be sorry, you're doing a great job, having a minaret will be super useful.

I gave it a try because the minaret interests me a lot. I think it is way too short and it should probably be twice as tall imo. Right now it is about the same size as a two storey building. Unfortunately it appears plain black to me and I can't see any texturing on the model even though I see the texture on the dds thumbnail itself. Maybe this is normal, I am not familiar with the way dds files work. Finally it is extremely difficult to select it and move it around; I only managed to reposition it once after clicking furiously for two minutes; but I suppose this can't be avoided.

Good job.

For Steam, you don't use the "my document" path. Instead you go to your CM SF2 Steam install and create a folder named "Z" inside the data folder.

It is not just for the editor. There are basically two types of mods in Combat Mission and two ways to use them. The only difference between the two types is that the mod creator when creating the mod has appended an extra bit of text in brackets at the end of the file name. Afghan houses example : no modtags : balcony1.bmp modtags : balcony1 [mudhouse].bmp Method 1 : No Modtags You simply extract the mod in your Z folder. Now the mod will be active and visible at all times, in scenarios, campaigns and quickbattles alike. This is the easiest and simplest way but it can be a problem because in this particular case here, you will have Afghan houses all the time. Even if the scenario or battle that you are playing takes place in another part of the world. So the workaround is to remove the mod when playing in a different theatre/setting and reinstall it when playing in Afghanistan. This can be cumbersome, that's why there is a second way outlined below. Method 2 : Modtags You install this version and forget about it; no need to remove it from your Z folder ever. The thing is that if you use modtags then the mod itself will only be active and therefore visible in the game if the corresponding modtag has been added in the editor by the scenario designer or by yourself and it won't work at all for quickbattles for the simple reason that quickbattles don't have modtags. Now it is not obvious in the link you provided but my Afghanistan mod actually comes in two versions : one with modtags and one without them. So it is up to you to decide which version you prefer and is more suited to your needs. Both versions can be downloaded in the link below :

Just out of curiosity here, how do you see this working exactly? Battlefront already struggles with the current schedule and barely manages to publish a new game every year or every other year. Granted they could in theory have people work on scenario packs in parallel. And fair enough they have done so in the past once or twice. But in any case, this is only feasible if you assume the current official scenario designers do not already have their hands full and are not already busy working on battles or campaigns for the new games in the pipeline. And let's say they do happen to have finished their assigned jobs and their battles are ready; you would have to put them back on the virtual assembly line right away so they would basically have to do it all year long full time? Because where else do you think these experts in the art of scenario design would come from? Perhaps there is some sort of secret untapped scenario makers travelling guild for war sims whose members ply their wares to the highest bidder across the lands? And when they hear through the grapevine that Battlefront is looking for designers, all the best and brightest will come knocking at the castle gate with offerings? Sure I'd buy scenario packs but personally seeing as they're likely to be few and far between I'd rather rely on the community to provide extra content.

No offence but I think you clearly got pretty hung up on my elitist comment and as a result you're completely missing the point. This isn't what this is about at all. It is about encouraging more people to play with the editor and publish their work. I have no idea where you got this idea in your head that this was in any way related to a "competition".

I am neither a millennial nor gen Z, no one is expecting a cookie or a pat on the back. I just wish there was more scenarios available to play and trying to encourage new people to contribute and post their work. That is all. And knowing how long it takes to design a scenario and how victory conditions is the last step in the process, I personally tend to not look a gift horse in the mouth too much. Because before you can do VP calculations, you first have to do some research on the battle you want to portray, work on the map and this part alone can take several months, then worry about units placement, then AI plans. And by this stage you have already playtested the battle 3-4 times easily to make sure the AI does more or less what you want and that the balance is right for each plan. Now on top of it you have to conduct more tests for VPs. This is usually the point where it stops being fun and can easily become a chore. Then there is the elephant in the room. Except in a handful of lucky cases, there is almost zero feedback when a scenario is published. So yeah personally I am not going to be too picky if everything else is good and polished and the last stage is slightly less so. Frankly I find the role reversal here a bit disturbing. Someone goes out their way to flesh out something they have been working on in their spare time for free and that took weeks if not months to finish, posts it for the community to enjoy and you are worried that they might waste -your- time? Sorry but this is taking the piss. Again this attitude is imo one of the reasons why we have only a trickle of new scenarios published. It is my conviction that the community has become too demanding and it has a stifling effect. In other words if we have less community made scenarios it is not only because creating scenarios is harder or because lots of designers got co-opted by Battlefront. It is also because lots of people who before did release their work don't do it any more. Right now I bet there are probably hundreds of scenarios or pet projects sitting on people's hard drives in various states of completion. Almost none of them would make the cut or see the light of the day because they don't meet the ever increasing quality standards. People can not improve and get better at their craft if the expectations are so high that they never get started in the first place though. Now I realise the OP was talking about an official battlefront scenario so this is probably off topic and doesn't even apply to the situation at hand and I apologize for the long rant. Besides I have already tried to get my point across as best as I could so instead of just repeating myself I'll take a rain check.

I don't think anyone ever said that, this is a plain straw man mate. Clearly testing it just once won't do. But there is a difference between testing it several times and expecting amateur designers to spend 6 months working on a scenario. I strongly disagree as well because this is way too elitist an approach for me. What you propose is a great set of guidelines for the purpose of making official Battlefront scenarios. I know that you meant well and were trying to be helpful but for the average aspiring scenario designer it is simply unrealistic and detrimental to expect this kind of work and it is setting the bar way too high. If you have been reading the forums for a long time, you're bound to have noticed the number of people who regularly post in a thread about an idea they had, who started working on it in the editor and never finished it. Or at least never published their work. You know it is something that happens a lot. The way I see it, we should encourage these people to release their work. Again I know you meant well but when you basically say "if you don't go to these lengths then you fail at scenario design" that just contributes to the problem imo. I guess it is a matter of quantity vs quality in a way. But personally I'd rather have a lot more community content available even if it is not of the highest standard than the situation we have now where it is barely a handful of published scenarios per year for each game.

@Erwin Yes but my point is that there are probably dozens and dozens of CM players who have toyed with the editor and experimented with it in order to create something for their own use that would be perfectly fine to share with the community. I for one would be delighted to have more content to play with even if it is not of the same quality as the official Battlefront scenarios. Because really this is probably the number one reason someone ends up publishing a scenario. They create something for their own use, to test things, explore a particular match up or a situation and then they decide "Hey maybe someone else would enjoy that too. Why not share it?" And most of the time other people do enjoy it even if it is not perfect.

I have this small basic scenario I made before to test various IED related tactics. I just loaded it and played it versus the red AI in scenario author test mode. It seemed to work fine for me.

These are helpful and very good guidelines no doubt. But personally I can't help but think that expecting this level of work and testing in particular for amateur scenario designers is both unrealistic and in the end also counter-productive. For me it is one of the reasons why we have so few community made scenarios being released these days. The expectations and standards have become way too high. And what this does is just create more hurdles for aspiring scenario designers. I mean put yourself in the shoes of say someone who just bought the game on Steam and wanted to give scenario design a try for fun. Chances are they are going to read this and just become disheartened and most likely give up, never publishing their work because they deem it is not good enough, leaving us with just a handful of scenario designers co-opted by Battlefront and barely anything else on the side. I actually strongly push for the opposite approach myself. Simpler scenarios with less work involved. We want to foster more community based content and not require someone to spend 6 months or more working on a scenario. Maybe this is appropriate for an official Battlefront scenario but it should never be what's expected of an amateur scenario in my opinion. I remember fondly the days of CM1 and also SF1 to some extent, and this is not just nostalgia talking here, where you had hundreds of scenarios being published over the years by the average joe. Maybe someone who never published anything else but had a cool idea, worked on it a little bit in their spare time and shared the result with the community. A lot more people seemed to take a crack at it back then. They just fiddled with the editor and posted the results for other people to play and enjoy. Were all these scenarios good? No of course not. Most of them were really lacking in one area or the other, some were disappointing or just sloppy. But in the end we had way more content available to play.

I don't get the deathtrap thing. Deathtrap for the AI defending in the house? Isn't it is better for the AI to be inside than two action squares away in the open facing the wrong way half the time? Because as Bulletpoint said they never pulled back into cover before unless there was some cover conveniently located behind the building which happens sometimes but it is just an accident. Now in cover or not, you will have to deal with the defenders in any case. So they will most likely die in both cases. And they will die a lot more easily in the open. If they pulled back to a second position in cover, you would also have to deal with them and kill them too. So you mean unnecessary casualties for the attacker really which sounds a bit odd to me. Because if the AI could perform a pull back to a secondary fighting position in good cover which is lets face it not easy even for a human, then it would be harder to root out and you would end up with more casualties for the attacker, not less. The only way you would have less casualties is if they either withdrew a long way or surrendered. For a human player it is a only a deathtrap if you decide to stay. Or you guys mean if you catch HE fire in the middle of a turn before you can manually order the withdrawal?

Getting the victory conditions right from a scenario design perspective is actually not that easy. Not only is it difficult to get the full spectrum of victory conditions available to the player but you have to take into account the fact that the skill level can vary a lot from player to player. Someone might struggle with the battle while another player will find it a breeze. Moreover it can be very time consuming and tedious to replay the battle several times. Okay sure there are ways that you can use to compute the victory points without necessarily replaying the battle but it is clearly not the most thrilling part of scenario design. At the end of the day though you said the battle was enjoyable, you had a good time and all so maybe this is going to be an unpopular opinion but is it that important what the final screen at the end says? For a human vs human game or a campaign yeah sure it matters a lot more but for a single scenario vs the AI, personally I can tell on my own without even looking at the screen how well or how poorly I did.

Personally I think this is the way it is supposed to be. A 10 minutes firefight between troops in good cover isn't shocking at all if their motivation is good. It is what we sometimes had before with soldiers just fleeing and getting mowed down in the open that was wrong. Now you need to actually maneuver to root them out or be prepared to have a prolonged firefight. I find it both more enjoyable and realistic. And it is not necessary to actually assault the position. A crossfire will usually do.

This is a modern Russian artillery nomogram : Example 3 ( the dashed green line) : Determine how many 100mm cannon and the quantity of rounds needed to destroy dug-in personnel and weapons in a 7.2 hectare target area in a 10 minute artillery strike. Begin at the "duration of fire" axis and find 10 minutes. From that point, move vertically to the 100mm line in "type of fire". Mark that point. Next, drop down to the "area of destruction" axis and find 7.2 hectare. Move horizontally to the 100mm line in "covered and concealed personnel and weapons". Move vertically and determine where the second point on the "type of fire" line and this line intersect. They intersect at 36 on the "quantity of artillery pieces (mortars)". The green line crossed the "quantity of rounds" axis at 1800. Thus the mission will require 36 100mm cannons and 1800 rounds. The Russian Way of War, Lester W. Grau, Charles K. Bartles. Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS.

No. If you want both Afghan National Army and Taliban in a scenario you need to add [taliban] and [ana] without brackets to the modtag file in the editor. Each mod has its own tag. Here is what I usually use : trashsoft mudhouse mudwall poppies ana taliban rubble Yeah I could have used a single modtag for all the Afghanistan related mods but I chose to do it this way because it is more flexible. For instance someone might not want to have poppies replace grain tiles. Also, I will probably never do it, but I thought maybe one day I'd do stone houses that are more common in mountainous regions. So a scenario designer could have stone textures for houses if needed instead of mud houses. Or someone might design a scenario in Africa and find that mud walls and houses fit but he might not want Taliban fighters etc. So It gives you more options and adding 5-6 tags instead of an all encompassing one doesn't take much more time.

Yes great job, it looks almost photorealistic.

Yes but not PC games. Hoplite, Great Battles of Alexander etc.

Well it is either that or glitched javelins.

Yes it has been reported in the British forces campaign thread.

Yes Kieme's horizon fits much better for this region of Afghanistan, I agree. This is what I had been using but I wanted to try something else for a change. Here it is though : https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltxhnyc8mspd5a2/zcma mountains.rar?dl=0

It is a bug as Sgt.Squarehead mentioned in the other thread. It is a bit annoying yes but not a huge deal in practice.

One of the best parts for me was how stealthy some weapons could be. You could have anti tank rifles or even MGs sometimes when firing at long range with a leader with a camouflage bonus remain just sound contacts for a long time. And you had to get rather close to spot them, unlike now where it is rare, it happens but it is rare, that a shooter is not located after a minute or two.

This is based on an episode of Ross Kemp. Ross Kemp: Return to Afghanistan - Joining the Royal Irish Regiment | Ross Kemp Extreme World