WimO

No. Red skull in a circle means "DEAD".

I am reworking some of my 82nd Airborne in Normandy scenarios and creating new variants for the purpose of 'trying' to assemble them into a single campaign. Along the way I decided to add some pop-up messages like, "I don't like this sir", and "I think we should fall back sir". I do this using 'Touch' objectives set to 'unknown to both' and type in the aforementioned message. Then when the player moves a pixel soldier onto or over that touch objective, the message will pop up. No guarantee however, that the player will notice it. I wish there was an option to select the colour we want to use for text labels and messages. The red labels are horrific at times.

That is a surprise. Could it have been a mortar round instead of a mine? If it was a mine, could it have been within the radius of the first sign, since mines are laid in groups?

I also appreciate Kohlenklau's work.

Expression of gratitude to Battlefront team. Like other players of Battlefront's Combat Mission series, I have my own wish list, of things I'd like to see that I think would make the game better. Now at the age of 72 and wargaming as my primary hobby for 64 years, I have learned that such expressions of "I'd like to see it done this way", appear to be an inevitable response to any set of rules and any game. Tiresome sometimes. To rules writers, game coders and games masters, such feedback can be a bit discouraging. So at this time I want to say: I am VERY HAPPY playing the WWII Combat Missions series 'as is'. It is afterall - a game. From my perspective it is a perfect follow-up or replacement for miniature wargaming. To me this is what it feels and looks like. Except it looks better than minis, I can field larger armies, and I don't have to learn a 60+ page book of rules! When we gamers sometimes appear to gripe about this or that feature no implemented - we might as ourselves, "How long have I been playing these games." For me the answer is "Continuously since the release of series one - Combat Mission Barbarossa to Berlin, CM Afrika Korps etc." So I must have been enjoying it as is. No? So many years of fun. And I LOVE having an easy to use Scenario Editor. I probably spend more time tinkering with map making, or tweaking graphics than actually playing. I have yet to play through all of CMBN's over 300 sceanrios in my collection. In conclusion. THANK YOU Battlefront for many years of happy gaming, for your many hours of coding work, your responses to the community. Given my wonky ticker, I don't knwo if I'll be around to enjoy engine 5. I hope so. Dr. Wilhelm C.T. Oudshoorn BA, DDS (a.k.a. WimO, a.k.a. Kandu)

Love it! Love it! Love it! Be still my heart.

Engine 5 for CMBN? Hope it will: 1. Allow troops to ride tanks. All Canadian reports both written and verbal direct to me from veterans now deceased, indicates that they did so routinely from D-Day on. 2. Stop trees blocking AT rounds. 3. Allow building fires. To mention just a very few.

Hello JM: Thank you for the kind words and drawing my attention to your airborne mod. Downloading it right now. Looks interesting as you have added new items such as the yellow gloves to the troopers. Cheers

Where do we d/l the file for Normandy and Cheat Engine?

Further investigation into the Shader caused shadow bug revealed that all building categories are affected (independent - house, church, commercial, modular) but not every building in the category. East-West facing is worse than North-South facing with side most affected depending on time of day. Season, snow and otherweather do not reduce the artifact. Only two things remove the artifact: (1) turn shaders off, or (2) with shaders on raise the player view (i.e. camera angle) to about 45 degrees off the ground). Camera angle closer to ground makes the artifact worse, higher camera angle eliminates artifact.

Substituting BarbaricCo's Warfighter Advanced Shaders for the game's inherent Shaders, does not resolve the issue either.

Yes, the issue appears to reside in the Advanced Shaders 'ON'. Shadows ON has no effect if Shaders are also OFF.

The attached screen grab shows a shadow bug in CMRT's two and three storey independent buildings. The shadow appears only on the south side of the buildings and has no relationship to any structure. The images were taken of an unmodded original game with no 'z' directory and no mods installed. The game is updated to v2.11, game engine 4 with FIre and Rubble installed. The issue appears in both unmodded and modded versions of the buildings. Any ideas how to get rid of this?

sometimes this occurs when a preiously saved file has the same name and number

CM is still a decent game. Despite the fact that I (we) have a list of gripes and wishes, it's still a decent game, way better than any of the miniature wargames I have been playing for 50 years, or any board wargame, or any other WWII computer wargame. Just about any other game 'looks' better without the cubic terrain constraints but what other game gives us a scenario editor in which we can create maps and scenarios or allows us to mod all the graphics? I love 'making' stuff and have spent way more hours in the editor creating maps than playing scenarios. As for the minor stuff I don't like, like tiny trees blocking A/Tk shots, I just say to myself, "Well, its the same for my opponent and it's just a 'game' after all." Any time I feel a bit blue about CM I just compare it to the miniature games we play once a month with all the dice rolling, table look-ups, so-so terrain, rules 'discussions', and then I'm happy again.

About scenario names and numbers. Each scenario has two names. There is one name that appears in the Scenarios folder. An example of one of my scenarios would be "WO 82N11 Shaul's Run SP.btt". This same name appears in the scenarios listing as "WO 82N11 Shaul's Run SP". But this is not the name used by the scenario .ema file. It uses the name that was entered in the Scenario Editor's 'Title' box. In this case "82N11 Shaul's Run". This is also the name that appears in the right half of the scenario selection box when you click the scenairo file name in the list in the left half of the panel. As for using numbers in scenario names, a number preceding the name appears to have no effect, whereas a number following the name, messes things up as per IanL's description above.

A CMBN ISSUE OBSERVED: During creation and play of huge scenarios I have consistently observed the following: Repeatedly loading one huge map after another or one huge scenario turn after another WITHOUT first completely closing the program and re-starting it, eventually causes the program to crash and exit; no lock-ups, no computer crash, just the program. Conclusion: CMBN's code appears not to clean up the computer memory adequately after each turn or scenario. Whether or not the foregoing contributes to the problem discussed in this forum, I do not know. Probably not.

Latest update to game Saves not appearing: I have conducted two solo play-tests so far without running into any problems. Test #1: Two-player hot-seat on a single laptop. All sorts of crazy moves were attempted, short moves, long moves, single sections, crowds of troopers moving through a single break in the bocage, units in or out of C2. Purposely created 'lost boys'. Played 34 turns (17 game minutes). No issues. Test #2: Two-player PBEM on two computers. Files moved vial Email In and Out folders and via Drop box. Again, conducted all sorts of movement including lost boys. Played 135 turns and still playing (more than one game hour). NO ISSUES. Conclusion: The problem is not created by (1) lost-boys, (2) CMBN file compression for PBME, (3) Drop Box, (4) scenario size, (5) my computer hardware or software. Hypothesis: The problem may be originating at my opponent's end - hardware or software

Thank you, will give that a try when my opponent sends his next move and we try again.

1. I have asked him to compare his version to mine as well as installed patches and add-ons. 2. We have done multiple resends as well as backed up a few turns, replayed and resent. The problem arose with turn 032.ema. Before that all other turns loaded and played normally.

No.

'Cannot see the next turn' bug. I am playing a huge CMBN PBEM game with a fellow gamer on this site. Twice the following has happened. He sends me his turn via Dropbox and I copy it into the Game Files/Incoming Email folder. No problem so far. I boot up CMBN and open the Saved Games menu item. Surprise, the anticipated game turn is not there! It is not showing up in the Saved Games list. The preceding turns are still showing. I go back and recheck the Incoming Email folder. It is there. Reloading it again from Dropbox does not fix it. Replaying the previous turn and reloading also does not fix the bug. Also tried emptying Dropbox of all other files to ensure there was no overflow. Is anyone else experiencing this bug? What's going on? Diagnostic thoughts: 1. Is the scenario too large for the program to process? 2. Is Dropbox contaminating the file? 3. Is there and issue with the program not being able to resolve 'lost boys'? Lost boys occur when you give a unit a very long move order in difficult terrain resulting in the unit stretching out and splitting up and eventually rearmost troopers stopping and being left behind. This shows up in game as an icon floating over 'no troops'. The actual troops on the ground are partially way out front of the ions and others way behind, i.e. the lost boys.

In terms of scenario content I have the following in my collection: CMBN: 321 scenarios and 30 campaigns. CMRT: 239 scenarios and 24 campaigns. CMFI: 146 scenarios and 19 campaigns. CMFB: 95 scenarios and 11 campaigns. All of the foregoing can have more free-standing scenarios if you unpack their respective campaigns. There are a dozen or so more scenarios for CMBN than I have listed, but I have deleted from my collection those that were not to my liking. I cannot comment on the playability of most except those in CMBN, as I have not played most except CMBN. Why I like or dislike each? I like CMBN for the closeness, i.e. bocage of the French countryside that adds to suspense and mystery. The terrain for my own birth-country, the Netherlands, is flatter, but most of the Market Garden scenarios are relatively terrain full. I like CMRT for the variety of terrain types which include the ability for large armour engagements in the wide open. I like CMFB for the great maps except that the terrain is rather congested. I have not played CMFI much at all and that is only because I got obsessively caught up in creating stuff for CMBN, not because of any identified dislike.