How do mods work?

[John_d]

Been playing CMBO for ages without mods and then bought CMBB. Recently went back to CMBO and it looks horrible! I've downloaded CMMOS v4.03 but I have no idea how it works or where to get decent mods from. Could anyone explain how CMMOS works and where I can get some nice mods from please?

Also, I've noticed lots of people moaning about the lack of civilians in CM. Has anyone ever made civilian mods for any of the CM series? Just wondering...

[Philippe]

The best way to use CMMOS 4.03 is to go to CMHQ, Madmatt's semi-unofficial Combat Mission site. The address is combatmission.com.

In the upper left you'll see a menu, and one of the items on the menu is the CMMOS section. Go there. If you've downloaded CMMOS 4.03, where did you get it from if you didn't go there? I thought CMMODS had the later version.

Ninety-five percent of all the moddable textures are modded in CMMOS 4.03. You get the mods by going into the CMBO CMMOS section at CMHQ. There's a fair number of them, so it will take a while to download.

There are extensive readme files in the CMMOS program that explain how everything is done. But here is what you need to get to your first hurdle:

CMMOS consists of a basic program (that works with CMBO and CMBB, by the way), rules and rulesets, and mods that have had their file-numbers changed so the CMMOS program can use them.

There are complex variations on this that might work sometimes, but what I'm about to describe is relatively foolproof if you do it correctly.

Make sure that CMBO is installed someplace normal. By that I mean that it is on the same hard drive that CMMOS is going on and that it is not in a folder called games. CMMOS looks around your computer for the instructions and the mods, and if anything is in an unexpected place, bad things happen.

Install the CMMOS program. It has an installer, but make sure that you have as many background applications turned off as possible before you try installing it.

To Make CMMOS work, you need to have downloaded the rulesets and rules. They're in the CMMOS section that I mentioned above. They also have an installer. Go with the default setting.

In CMBO CMMOS the rules should be packed in with the rulesets, so when you've installed one you've probably installed the other. To make sure that you've got them, go into the the GEM/CMMOS/CMBO folder and look for the rulesets. If you look inside one you'll see a bunch of textfiles (and a few other things).

To make CMMOS work you also have to install the mods. This works a bit differently than the other mod manager program. Set up a holding folder somewhere safe. Download the mods into that folder. Unzip the mod into that folder. There is usually a readme file that you should look at inside of it. Take the bmp's (and only the bmp's) and copy them into your CMBO/bmp folder. It won't overwrite anything because CMMOS mods have different file numbers than the game. To tell if a mod has been installed, go to the CMMOS control panel and look and see if the icon for that particular mod is visible or not. If it's x'ed out, you either didn't install it, or you did something wrong.

Finally, always remember to hit the apply button when you're trying to apply a mod, and learn to read the CMMOS log file -- it really is one of the most useful parts of the program.

And read the readme files a couple of times. They're a bit dense, but it's all there.

[melb_will]

I'd just make one suggestion. Get your mods from cmmods.com instead of combat mission hq, there are heaps more cmmods mods there now.

Someone will be along in a moment to tell you where the cmmos program is at cmmods but to get to the mods

click cmbo mods

then sort by designer

then click cmmos

cheers

Will

[Philippe]

No, the best source to learn to do it is from cmhq. The version at cmhq was put together by the cmmos cabal, a group of about twenty people who were fairly obsessive about quality control. cmmos 4.03 lives in its finest form at cmhq. If you have any problems with it I can support you because I was one of the editors. I don't know the intimate details of what went into the the forms of cmmos that live at cmmods, and I don't intend to learn. The cmhq product works. Once you've learned on it you can branch out from there. What I'm not willing to do is to try to answer incoherent and confused questions based on mixups between 4.05 (what is at cmmods) and 4.03 (what is at cmhq and what is also native to at least one of the CDV special edition disks).