WimO

Incredible! Just incredible work! Yesterday I completed all but the flavor objects for my Bénouville-Ranville master map. It now includes Blainville-sur-Orne, Bénouville, Le Port, Ranville, Le Bas de Ranville, Le Haut de Ranville, Longueville, Hérouvillette, le Lieu Haras, Le Home, Le Mariquet and the ring contour. That will allow me to attempt to recreated the situations of the British Oxf & Bucks 6th Airlanding Bde as well as those of the 7th, 12th and 13th Para Bns, 5th Parachute Bde. It does not go south far enough to capture the action of the Ulster Rifles who on D+1 moved beyond the ring contour to Longueval (note the difference LongueVILLE vs LongueVAL) and got engaged with the Germans to the SE in St. Honorine. While this would make very intersting game play, it would mean expanding the map even more and right now my computer can barely manage my current map before even adding any troops. Likewise the area and operations to the north that involved the British 3rd Para Bde and the Canadian 1st Para Bn (sorry boys) are not covered.' With Kohlenklau's creation of the Horsa glider for my project, this is now a collaborative project by the two authors, 'WimO and Kohlenklau'.. Three cheers. In the meantime I have added another Benouville building skin - the 1909 building.

Great stuff.

The truck sounds like a great idea. Perfect in fact. The ability to go back in for supplies is so historical what happened.

Taking orders.

Wow! Thank you guys for the support. A crashed glider would be fine. for the first scenario - Operation Deadstick - gliders landed both intact and broken up by crashing. I will be happy to have either one. In a subsequent scenario - the reinforcing lift on DZ N I need to add 'quite a few' landed gliders. Alhtough they landed in various 'conditions' of intactness or demolished, I am glad for anything at all. As for creating buidings for you folks, let me know. My skills allow me only to do reskins. I do not have any modelling skills. Currently I am working on adding a few more Normandy modular skins for Operation Deadstick. I do this by 'walking' the ground on Google maps and taking screen shots of stone walls. Then I 'adjust' these to fit for CMBN. In this way I am currently adding some missing cornerstones to my existing collection. Unfortunately some of the reskins do not 'stretch' very nicely and need to be redone. This is especially true of buildings whose rows of stone are a bit slanted. The stretch then looks horrible.

In a number of books I kept reading about the need to extend the airborne perimeter further south east of the Orne with the British 12th Para Bn, to cover "the ring contour" and later to advance towards this position. However, ne'ery a map to be found where this might be. The modern topography has been significantly altered by roads and a highway 'cutting' through the terrain in the area in question. So I started with an assumption based on my earlier work with "Bloody Buron Overhaul". In that operation, the Canadians were to occupy the 80 meter circle contour south of Buron after securing the latter, only to discover that there was no such contour and that the terrain instead sloped gradually towards the south. This was an error on the 1:25,000 military maps in use at the time. Interestingly, on all such maps there is a disclaimer that the contour lines on the map might not be reliable! Indeed. Thereafter I was lucky to stumble across the 1:25000 map for Ouistreham online which showed a smallish heart-shaped 30 meter contour SW of Le Bas de Ranville, the south edge of the latter being the position taken up by the 12th Paras. So I went on the assumption that this might be the 'ring contour'. Today no such feature is discernable. Then, in an old (1976) publication, "Dropzone Normandy" by Napier Crookenden I stumbled across a small, line-drawn map which showed exactly that position marked as the ring contour. The print was less then one millimeter tall. Success! If you glide at ground level across my forthcoming map you will not discern a ring countour. Instead there is just a large area of sloping ground with lines of sight disturbed by tall crops and hedges. There is no sign, no circle drawn on the ground, no distinct bump that says, "Here it is. Here is the ring contour". I try to imagine what the young paras at the time must have seen and thought. Interesting.

During the creation of my forthcoming campaign, Operation Tonga, I was disappointed to discover that there is no Tetrarch light tank available to the British Airlanding troops. Number of these arrive during the lift on D+1 although many (at least 11) were subsequently disabled when their bogies were jammed by tangles of parachute cords on DZ / LZ 'N'. Two more were lost when their gliders collided. I have no numbers for how many survived to be put to use.

Unpacking campaigns to be able to play individual scenarios has a significant impact on play balance. Opposing forces in each scenario are drawn from the campaign's 'core units file'. When playing a scenario within the framework of the campaign, the strengths of opposing forces are modified by the results of previous actions as determined by the settings between scenarios for Restore, Refit, Resupply and Rest parameters. There is no such modification in an unpacked scenario resulting in opposing forces being at full-strength! This can have undesirable effects on play balance. It is for this reason that I have created 'free-standing' scenarios for all of my 82nd Airborne campaign scenarios. The force strengths of the free-standing versions have been adjusted to simulate historical (casualty reduced) numbers. In addition, accompanying instructions and text files must usually tell a slightly different story within the campaign vs free-standing scenarios, with the latter needing to be a bit more situationally descriptive.

I had a look at Aquila's glider file. It appears to my inexperienced eye to be oncomplete and currently not yet useable - by me.

Does anyone out there have the ability to model a Horsa glider flavor object for my forthcoming scenarios and campaign "Operation Tonga". I expect the expanded version of the master map to be completed by the end of next week. It has now grown to 4160 m x 3168 m and will encompass the actions all three parachute battalions of the British 5th Parachute Brigade and the Oxf & Bucks of the 6th Airlanding Brigade. For those not yet in the know, this all revolves around the capture and holding of the two bridges across the Canal de Caen and the Orne River on D-Day and subsequent.

Very nice screenies! I liked the B&W 'old' style as well.

@Aragorn2002 If the only reason to unpack my Mission Boston is to get to the individual scenarios, then these and more are posted at the scenario depot as a single update package. If there is anything else you want to see, just PM me.

Great stuff. Very much looking forward to this.

In my CMBN installation I use both z and JSGME. The z dir is used for over 90% of my mods. I use JSGME only to swap a few mods in and out when playing campaigns and if I want to changed the vegetation using Falaise's Juin, Juillet et Auout variations. I have also added Septembre early and late. The new buildings shown above are all extra idependent or modular building skins using the next (0#) number in the sequence. They are all in Z but once I reach the maximum permitted by the program then any more new skins will be swapped using JSGME. Another method for installing more than the program permits it to mod-tag them for specific scenarios. The new buildings have no special effects in the game. They are only eye candy for player's with an obsession for historical recreation.

Ah. Now I understand, thank you. If I discover anymore that I can use, I will ask you thank you JM.

What is "epoch decals?"

References used are contemporary photographs. The buildings are 'unable' to reproduce these exactly so my creations are "based on" and "in the style of". LA CHAUMIERE: I have two photos for La Chaumiere. The most commonly published one with only the "La Chaumiere" sign on the side is older and not correct. It does not have the gasoline pump out front. But in Neil Barber's book, "The Benouville and Orne Bridges, Their Capture, Defence and Relief" there is a photo contemporary to the event. It has the gasoline pump and the advertising for Motricine gasoline painted on the wall. The older sign is absent but I added it anyway. RESTAURANT YVON: This is the building on the immediate SE corner of the pont tournant, i.e. the bridge across the Orne. If one examines the photo with a magnifying glass the sign painted on the roof and the words CAFÉ and CIDRE painted on the front wall can be seen. CAFÉE GONDRÉE: Again, CMBN buildings cannot reproduce the original exactly but the combination of red brick and stucco was already present on both attached buildings when it was still Café Duval. A photo taken shortly after the action show the (white) shutters closed during the day. CAFÉ PIROT: I did not need to reskin this building because CMBN already has a near-match storey and a half post-and-stucco skin. THE GARAGE: CMBN's garage is twice as big as the historical. Umlaut created a skin that has "ANTAR" painted on the wall. The original and my version has it painted on the roof. The advertising painted on the wall was discovered by magnifying the original photo. The TRAM station: This is a poor reproduction of the original using one of CMBN's small barns. The original was one third post-and-stucco, one third post-and-brick; that is to say, the bricks were artistically arranged between the post spaces - very cool, and one third wood and glass. The tram tracks still existed, running along the tow path on the east side of the Canal de Caen, from Ouistreham to Caen and also originally turning to cross the two bridges and running to Ranville. It carries open-sided passenger cars. It was impossible to reproduce the water tower beside the tram stop. During Operation Deadstick, one unruly British para shot two A/Tk rounds through the water tower from the capture "French" A/Tk gun the the 'Tobruk'.

Café Gondrée, La Chaumière, the adjacent garage, the tram station and Restaurant Yvon.

What I like about modular buildings is their flexibility. The ability to add floors, remove walls, rearrange windows and doors and trim,rotate in place and create and cycle through new skins are all wonderful. .... BUT! ... as a modder and scenario creator there are some things to hate. Before I let off steam about my number one hate I want to point out a "silly bit". In the Scenario Editor, modular buildings #2 & #3 are identical as are the pairs #4-#5 and #7-#8. Don't be fooled by the icon which shows them rotated 90 degrees relative to each other. After all the buildings can be rotated by the user. So instead of 9 orthogonally arranged buildings (not counting the diagonal ones) there are in fact only 6. This is further cemented by the fact that the "pairs" share the identical roof, With 2-3 using roof 2, 4-5 using roof 3 and 7-8 using roof 6. And that leads into my 'hate' rant. I hate the fact that the roof graphics cannot be cycled in the manner that we can cycle the building graphics. This has the undesired result of roof skins not able to match all building skins. For example if building #1 can cycle through stucco, brick, stone and timbre skins, the roof skin is locked into just one option which frequently does not match. The result can be awful - at least it is to me as a building modder. At the very least Battlefront could have made the roofs for the "pairs" of buildings different. And at best, the roofs could and should be cycleable with SHIFT + Left Mouse through a series of user modded options. Blah ....

I will put both into our shared Dropbox today.

Just now I created two 'fixes' that clarify TaL's blocked up door. The first blocks it up with rough brick and the second eliminated the door altogether. Now no more confusion.

Thank you for drawing my attention to this. I had a look at my collection of small barn reskins and additional skins including both those of TaL and myself. The image you provided is a reskin by TaL and is the only small barn with two doors. However, the second door has been boarded up as the image clearly shows and is therefore non-functional which is what the image is meant to convey. Consequently, I do not understand the problem with this building. Are you suggesting perhaps that the second, 'boarded up' door should be removed or perhaps that the boarding is made more irregular to make it clearer that the door has been sealed? You can also fix this in your own setup by deleting that barn from your folder, making a copy of one of the other barns and renumbering all of its graphics to match the numbers of the one you deleted - quick fixx.

It has been uploaded to The Few Good Men / The Scenario Depot III.