Berlin CMRT Map

[NPye]

I don't mind about the thread guys carry on it;s great to get all the info on 1 page.... Cheers some great stuff happening here...

[Vacillator]

Totally agree.  And it's not quite the longest thread on the forum.

[Lucky_Strike]

17 hours ago, JM Stuff said:

Mean that some FO can be destroy, depending that the choice of the modder ?

If I take a crate object to replace for exemple a car, but cannot be when I choose a fountain for exemple ?

I never thinking about this, but is interresting !

JM

 

Yes, I'm gonna go and shoot up some flavour objects with some 37mm flak, see what damage I can do ...

17 hours ago, JM Stuff said:

I was also making some experiments with junks dirt and destroyed things on the street, like book papers broken furnitures...this take time, but is funny, I will try to find it and show it on pic.

What could be good is to make a "street" with broken tree and leave this is your domain Lucky !

and Harry will make holes and trenchs...  

Harry,  I dont understand "functional" dragon teeth ? 

Yep we need all this type of stuff. I found creating the burnt ground texture that flavor objects aren't very good at sticking to the ground, they just tend to look a bit off. I ended up using one of the ploughed field textures which work well so long as the texture scale is corrected. 

I like the idea of all of this. Very interesting models there JM.

16 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Yep, flavor objects can be damaged then vanishing from the map. For some (large) HE does reliably if hitting near its placement node (within 8x8m grid).

Dammit, I guess I can put my 37mm away again!

This is really useful stuff Harry. I do wish the search engine on the forum was more useful so that we could consult this type of material more easily. I just know I'll forget some of it and not be able to find it easily again...

15 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

I use a mod tag that I add or remove (import or clear in map editor mod tag section) as required.

Can this be done on the fly, so one doesn't need to keep saving then reloading a scenario but rather just adding or deleting the mod tag to force the 3D view to show, or not, the tagged mod?

11 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Btw here´s my take on rubble and rubbled indi buildings concerning wet/moist weather conditions. The buildings crumbled walls as well is higher standing and the inside got more of a burnt out looks. It´s just a draft made from earlier works 2 years back. Something for you to tackle maybe @Lucky_Strike?

I have toyed with the idea of alternative textures for alternative weather conditions. Shed load of work, could perhaps automate it a bit using scripts for darkening ground for wet weather. I wonder if it would be possible to achieve mostly in a shader. So have a wet weather shader (rather than a movie shader), a snow shader. Can shaders be mod tagged?

I use ReShade for creating some atmospherics in game, but it's quite time consuming and not very portable, as well as being PC only. I wish that BF would incorporate it into the CM engine somehow, it's great software which can really alter the worldview.

I'm not very familiar with buildings, haven't really looked at modding them, though I would dearly love to have some better rubble textures. NPye's Berlin textures are a huge improvement to how urban maps could look. Your building is a great addition, I will have to go and download it to take a look.

I looked at your Entering Germany map last night, fantastic map! Really like the way the land undulates and how well you managed to integrate the bunkers . Also, and I have no idea why this would be, I had barely any slow downs panning around the map, even the very dense pine forest didn't cause hardly a judder, and that was with my own heavy tree mods installed. They can cause quite nasty frame rate drops sometimes. I can really see how the dragons teeth could enhance a map like this. We need dragons  

Edited October 11, 2022 by Lucky_Strike

[Lucky_Strike]

4 hours ago, NPye said:

I don't mind about the thread guys carry on it;s great to get all the info on 1 page.... Cheers some great stuff happening here...

It's all grist for the mill! Hehe, you'll be on version 10 of your Berlin mod before you know in N, lots of extras to integrate. The list just keeps getting longer ...

I've started to clear a bit of my other RL projects backlog so hopefully will be back onto modding CM real soon.

[Lucky_Strike]

4 hours ago, Vacillator said:

Totally agree.  And it's not quite the longest thread on the forum.

Ah but we can push it off the top of the forum activity page on occasion ... like this post will do ...

edit yes, three posts above it and counting!

Edited October 11, 2022 by Lucky_Strike

[JM Stuff]

Just install an added old addons for md3 mdc mdm mds files name is RtCWET on a new vers of blender, but doesn t work !

a short clip with errors buffers 52 that I dont understand.? . yours opinions guys !

 

Sorry quality is not the best here a screenshot 

 

JM

Edited October 11, 2022 by JM Stuff

[RockinHarry]

1 hour ago, JM Stuff said:

Just install an added old addons for md3 mdc mdm mds files name is RtCWET on a new vers of blender, but doesn t work !

a short clip with errors buffers 52 that I dont understand.? . yours opinions guys !

 

Sorry quality is not the best here a screenshot 

 

JM

Umh.... never seen any that UI and menues before. What Blender and MDR im/export script file versions is that? I´m still on Blender 2.79 and the script files made for it. I´ve another Blender 3.2 install but I don´t use it ATM. Btw I´d successfully copy pasted a META block from one MDR file into another. Had the fountain large and a wooden boxes file loaded the same time and then did the copy pasting between both of them. Is bits of a lengthy and awkward process (each data entry got to be c/p´ed individually) but still manageable. Now doing bits of testing with original and edited files.

[JM Stuff]

4 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Umh.... never seen any that UI and menues before. What Blender and MDR im/export script file versions is that? I´m still on Blender 2.79 and the script files made for it. I´ve another Blender 3.2 install but I don´t use it ATM. Btw I´d successfully copy pasted a META block from one MDR file into another. Had the fountain large and a wooden boxes file loaded the same time and then did the copy pasting between both of them. Is bits of a lengthy and awkward process (each data entry got to be c/p´ed individually) but still manageable. Now doing bits of testing with original and edited files.

Yes is also new for me I was talking about a new vers that I could use yesterday this is the vers 2.92 I have also to starting the new interface, and lot is changing vs the 2.79b where I  am also very familiary, but because the addons that I was trying to import in the 2.79 was not working, I was try for recent vers de 2.92, I had the hope mais this doens t work also.

Happy moments for you, I see,... this moment that we have a light smile in the face, all the procedure can be long and delicate, important is to scaled the model than export it in mdr dont forget the metadata, depending, if your model is from a game or not do do it correctly check again and again the clip from Aquila is the best.

I think to have some infos about what we are searching about mds we have to check the old game like Quake, Return C Wolfenstein, Doom, Juke Nukem...this kind of game are also using md3 mdd mds and perhaps we can find a converter.

I will try to put the file with the name rtcw wet blender model tools master (down to download) let me a little time to provide a link I don t remember where I took it on the net, but like I said to me doens t work  and is not specilaly for mds but more for md3 and others...

link added hope is work le me know the result and your job.

JM
 

 

Edited October 11, 2022 by JM Stuff

[RockinHarry]

43 minutes ago, JM Stuff said:

Yes is also new for me I was talking about a new vers that I could use yesterday this is the vers 2.92 I have also to starting the new interface, and lot is changing vs the 2.79b where I  am also very familiary, but because the addons that I was trying to import in the 2.79 was not working, I was try for recent vers de 2.92, I had the hope mais this doens t work also.

Happy moments for you, I see,... this moment that we have a light smile in the face, all the procedure can be long and delicate, important is to scaled the model than export it in mdr dont forget the metadata, depending, if your model is from a game or not do do it correctly check again and again the clip from Aquila is the best.

I think to have some infos about what we are searching about mds we have to check the old game like Quake, Return C Wolfenstein, Doom, Juke Nukem...this kind of game are also using md3 mdd mds and perhaps we can find a converter.

I will try to put the file with the name rtcw wet blender model tools master (down to download) let me a little time to provide a link I don t remember where I took it on the net, but like I said to me doens t work  and is not specilaly for mds but more for md3 and others...

link added hope is work le me know the result and your job.

JM
 

 

I don´t quite understand what you attempt loading or installing with your Blender 2.92 Does @sbobovyc scripts don´t work for you anymore?

So that MDR converter you try using very likely is not compatible with Combat Mission MDR format, like is animation files. This is where most likely your error messages came from. Maybe it´s just that META data section buried in the file that is alien to your converter app. Don´t think it´s worth time wasting on that, but maybe you find something out. Good luck. Think I´ll remain with the proven 2.79 scripts files as they enable editing at least parts of the currently "known" META data sections. Even if none knows what these actually do in the game. Here´s what it looks like when I manually transfered the 70 or 71 META data entries between fountain large and the wood pile:

[JM Stuff]

37 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

I don´t quite understand what you attempt loading or installing with your Blender 2.92 Does @sbobovyc scripts don´t work for you anymore?

So that MDR converter you try using very likely is not compatible with Combat Mission MDR format, like is animation files. This is where most likely your error messages came from. Maybe it´s just that META data section buried in the file that is alien to your converter app. Don´t think it´s worth time wasting on that, but maybe you find something out. Good luck. Think I´ll remain with the proven 2.79 scripts files as they enable editing at least parts of the currently "known" META data sections. Even if none knows what these actually do in the game. Here´s what it looks like when I manually transfered the 70 or 71 META data entries between fountain large and the wood pile:

 

I don´t quite understand what you attempt loading or installing with your Blender 2.92

My old 2.79 was in mode "cycle render" that I dont see directly, and I couldn t no more working, this is why I was trying to working on another vers, but like you I will come back to the 2.79 when I work for CM, I am more familiar.

Edit > Sorry forget to precise that wast to working with the addons md3 like explain above not the mdr files...

You have a nice clear interface is nice to work in this way.

Effectively you have a lot combine datas and you are working differently as I do, but the result is the same, and this is the most important.

Are you yourself working and created scripts with Python? This is a plus point to know scripts.

You dont have any problem with textures, sometimes the mdr ask to have the correct textures, otherwise he dont want to save it correctly ?...

Nice job you are now fixed with your job done...

JM

Edited October 11, 2022 by JM Stuff

[RockinHarry]

15 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Dammit, I guess I can put my 37mm away again!

This is really useful stuff Harry. I do wish the search engine on the forum was more useful so that we could consult this type of material more easily. I just know I'll forget some of it and not be able to find it easily again...

We´ve yet to test on individual sturdiness for flavors vs the different HE types, directly or indirectly fired on them. Seems 105mm and above does most the work well, while more smaller calibers need (more) direct hits on the flavors placement node. Got to test this more elaborately and with all appropriate modding candidates before I could likely tell more. Unless someone else has this info already and likes posting it here (a link to related thread is equally good).

And yes, that´s the main problem with related info. It´s scattered all over the place and I even got to do a search on my own past posts to find things I almost forgot as I found out then.

15 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Can this be done on the fly, so one doesn't need to keep saving then reloading a scenario but rather just adding or deleting the mod tag to force the 3D view to show, or not, the tagged mod?

Think I just swap tags by means of clearing or (re-)loading them and check back in 3D editor. Can´t recall ATM if I need to save mission first, but I believe I did not. Will check again.

15 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I have toyed with the idea of alternative textures for alternative weather conditions. Shed load of work, could perhaps automate it a bit using scripts for darkening ground for wet weather. I wonder if it would be possible to achieve mostly in a shader. So have a wet weather shader (rather than a movie shader), a snow shader. Can shaders be mod tagged?

I use ReShade for creating some atmospherics in game, but it's quite time consuming and not very portable, as well as being PC only. I wish that BF would incorporate it into the CM engine somehow, it's great software which can really alter the worldview.

Hm... never tried using ReShade for any my games and I bits of doubt we can achieve sort of wet effects with it in CM. But I don´t really know. I always use my own little CM movie shader (ALT - M) but it just contains few edits on lightness, contrast and color saturation. Fits my needs enough so far. Hard to tell if one can do more with it, but I have little to no knowledge on the shader language. @BarbaricCo seems knowing most of it and has most experience with that.

15 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I'm not very familiar with buildings, haven't really looked at modding them, though I would dearly love to have some better rubble textures. NPye's Berlin textures are a huge improvement to how urban maps could look. Your building is a great addition, I will have to go and download it to take a look.

Me neither. I mostly did bits of texture editing and loaded some building MDR´s up into Blender, investigating visible geometry and META data. What rubble textures do you mean specifically? There´s a couple of them. My main wish is preserving any the buildings usability for infantry units. I got many problems while try using Nigel´s buildings on my own test map. At last I got to remove the building parts of the Berlin mod to see what´s going on there. Anyway... since Nigel´s working on the V2 version there´s not much need to play around with the current version I think. Same for flavor objects. I need to check and compare with the stock game ones (containing original META data) to better understand individual flavor types in game properties.

Re building it´s actually not a building but rather the textured geometry used for ALL indi buildings when they got their walls damaged or the entire structure destroyed. You can also do this in 3D editor by using "CNTR click" or "SHIFT-ALT-click" on the buildings. On some buildings you´ll see some "free floating" building parts (a piece of wall floating in the air), but I find its looks still better than original almost flat like ground type. Shouldn´t be a problem for you editing the 4 included texture files and make them look really outstanding! But one got to understand their layered structure first which can be bits of tricky initially.

16 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I looked at your Entering Germany map last night, fantastic map! Really like the way the land undulates and how well you managed to integrate the bunkers . Also, and I have no idea why this would be, I had barely any slow downs panning around the map, even the very dense pine forest didn't cause hardly a judder, and that was with my own heavy tree mods installed. They can cause quite nasty frame rate drops sometimes. I can really see how the dragons teeth could enhance a map like this. We need dragons  

Thanks. It was a prototype for more missions I´d hoped to create thereafter. But then came the pillbox bug and I had to throw a handfull of mission WIP´s into the trashbin unfortunately.

Most the added mod parts have textures fairly LowRes and the map is comparatively small (less than 1 square km). Also at time of creation I still used my old and crappy WinXP machine. So there were some limits so to say. lol

Yep, trees do receive and cast shadows I think (not sure with receive ATM). I usually fight serious performance issues by switching shadows off (ALT-M). And/or shaders. Switching off shadows at times is not a degradation of visuals when we have overcast or rainy weather conditions. I find the cast shadow strength for overcast much too strong anyway.

Replacing X beams with might be impossible I fear. Due to their multi object composition and placement nature similar to foxholes and trenches. Otherwise the above mentioned flavor object replacement method might work (flavor + ground tile).

 

[RockinHarry]

35 minutes ago, JM Stuff said:

 

I don´t quite understand what you attempt loading or installing with your Blender 2.92

My old 2.79 was in mode "cycle render" that I dont see directly, and I couldn t no more working, this is why I was trying to working on another vers, but like you I will come back to the 2.79 when I work for CM, I am more familiar.

Edit > Sorry forget to precise that wast to working with the addons md3 like explain above not the mdr files...

You have a nice clear interface is nice to work in this way.

Effectively you have a lot combine datas and you are working differently as I do, but the result is the same, and this is the most important.

Are you yourself working and created scripts with Python? This is a plus point to know scripts.

You dont have any problem with textures, sometimes the mdr ask to have the correct textures, otherwise he dont want to save it correctly ?...

Nice job you are now fixed with your job done...

JM

Okay. Hope you get your 2.79 issues fixed and can continue working with it. I´m noob at scripting anything. Beside some very basic stuff I mostly find out by trial and error. I won´t spend much time in Blender anyway. Just transfer some META data between files and then see what it does in game. If there´s something noticeable at all. Safe info is they provide beeing obstacles to infantry and vehicle units movements in greater or lesser degrees. Re cover I remain unsure. What some the META data apparently beeing Hitbox (or collision box?) geometry does I don´t know as well.

[Lucky_Strike]

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

And yes, that´s the main problem with related info. It´s scattered all over the place and I even got to do a search on my own past posts to find things I almost forgot as I found out then.

LOL, me too.

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

We´ve yet to test on individual sturdiness for flavors vs the different HE types, directly or indirectly fired on them. Seems 105mm and above does most the work well, while more smaller calibers need (more) direct hits on the flavors placement node. Got to test this more elaborately and with all appropriate modding candidates before I could likely tell more. Unless someone else has this info already and likes posting it here (a link to related thread is equally good).

I'm not the man for this, I just like to shoot stuff with my 37mm Flak. There were some tests being done by someone but I think they were related to the frag / shrapnel effects of HE on targets in the open and in cover.

I always do an quick HE test on my tree and foliage mods to see how they work versus the original game models, it's no surprise that it's easy to mess stuff up in Blender so that the new models don't work correctly - getting things like tree branches waving in the wind or progressively disappearing with more HE hits is not simple.

 

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Hm... never tried using ReShade for any my games and I bits of doubt we can achieve sort of wet effects with it in CM. But I don´t really know. I always use my own little CM movie shader (ALT - M) but it just contains few edits on lightness, contrast and color saturation. Fits my needs enough so far. Hard to tell if one can do more with it, but I have little to no knowledge on the shader language. @BarbaricCo seems knowing most of it and has most experience with that.

ReShade is very clever but I was never able to make a convincing wet-look. It's quite difficult to get the balance right colour-wise as it tends to be a bit all or nothing, easy to darken stuff, but because CM is quite an old engine the way effects are applied is a bit crude so ReShade can only do so much - darken one colour and everything will go dark. What is good is how it can do things like atmospherics, glow, mist that kind of stuff. Nice if one was into making CM movies.

I know your movie shader as it's the one I use - you were kind enough to share it with me previously and I still use it as my everyday shader - it rocks! 

I do think there's more that could be done with shaders but as you say the language is pretty difficult, my poor old brain's just not wired to understand code ...

 

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

What rubble textures do you mean specifically? There´s a couple of them.

I don't much like the flat textures that have to be applied to small hills to give any semblance to piles of rubble, they just don't work for me. I'm not a big fan of flat textures that try to imitate 3D, but I do realise there are limitations in the game so we must make the most of what is there. I think a lot can be achieved with rubble and wreck flavor objects, JM is doing some work on this that should hopefully bear fruit. When I think of battlefields I always think of the mess and detritus that is left behind, it's something that I really would like to see incorporated into the game from a purely immersive point of view. But I think it's way down on the list of stuff that is important for most players.

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

My main wish is preserving any the buildings usability for infantry units. I got many problems while try using Nigel´s buildings on my own test map. At last I got to remove the building parts of the Berlin mod to see what´s going on there. Anyway... since Nigel´s working on the V2 version there´s not much need to play around with the current version I think. Same for flavor objects. I need to check and compare with the stock game ones (containing original META data) to better understand individual flavor types in game properties.

Re building it´s actually not a building but rather the textured geometry used for ALL indi buildings when they got their walls damaged or the entire structure destroyed. You can also do this in 3D editor by using "CNTR click" or "SHIFT-ALT-click" on the buildings. On some buildings you´ll see some "free floating" building parts (a piece of wall floating in the air), but I find its looks still better than original almost flat like ground type. Shouldn´t be a problem for you editing the 4 included texture files and make them look really outstanding! But one got to understand their layered structure first which can be bits of tricky initially.

Yes, playability is what most players are going to complain about, if stuff doesn't work as expected they soon become vocal. I know that Nigel did a lot of reworking to get the Berlin mod into a playable state, again limited by the games underlying geometry and modelling.

Inspired by this, and your ruin mod, I had a look at the buildings in Blender - I didn't even know we had the mdrs for buildings! Anyway, yes I can see there's a very complex set of textures to deal with. I'm sure there are things we could do with the buildings that might allow us to create something unique like the Brandenburg Gate. I had a bit of a brainstorm and wondered can we use building models from one game in another, not a unique thought I'm sure, but if we can port game models then, theoretically, we can port new models into the game. I don't know what restrictions there are on the numbering/naming of the models - I think we'd have to steer clear of the modular buildings and just work with the independent buildings. So I tried this ...

The First Russian Orthodox Church of Normandy ...

What I noticed is that the pixeltruppen happily occupy it but they treat it like it's the original church so they stand where the original windows were. I will fire test it later, but it's got me thinking about a Brandenburg Gate based on something like two reskinned windmills next to each other ...

 

Edited October 12, 2022 by Lucky_Strike
Note to self ... the submit button is not a save button

[Lucky_Strike]

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Thanks. It was a prototype for more missions I´d hoped to create thereafter. But then came the pillbox bug and I had to throw a handfull of mission WIP´s into the trashbin unfortunately.

Most the added mod parts have textures fairly LowRes and the map is comparatively small (less than 1 square km). Also at time of creation I still used my old and crappy WinXP machine. So there were some limits so to say. lol

Yep, trees do receive and cast shadows I think (not sure with receive ATM). I usually fight serious performance issues by switching shadows off (ALT-M). And/or shaders. Switching off shadows at times is not a degradation of visuals when we have overcast or rainy weather conditions. I find the cast shadow strength for overcast much too strong anyway.

Replacing X beams with might be impossible I fear. Due to their multi object composition and placement nature similar to foxholes and trenches. Otherwise the above mentioned flavor object replacement method might work (flavor + ground tile).

Well what ever magic potion you sprinkled on that map it works really well. For me I like to keep shadows and shaders on but do wish the boys at CMHQ can include some soft shadows for overcast conditions.

Trees do cast and receive, which is why they are such aggressive resource hogs. Which is why we need the game optimised for modern GPUs and CPU multi threading ... either that or we all do our development and modding on old XP machines! 

The  would certainly be complex but still worth a look. I will have to take a look at the mdr at some point ... just add it to the list.

 

[Lucky_Strike]

15 hours ago, JM Stuff said:

Just install an added old addons for md3 mdc mdm mds files name is RtCWET on a new vers of blender, but doesn t work !

a short clip with errors buffers 52 that I dont understand.? . yours opinions guys !

JM maybe you need to install the add-on into an older version of Blender. Those games you mention are even older than CMx2 so there's a good chance that the add-on doesn't like the new Blender environment. Worth a punt. Any file you manage to open could be saved as a blend file to open in you normal version.

I admire your determination to try and open the mds files, but don't drive yourself nuts over it, remember if you can open them and edit them your next big problem then would be how to get back to a mds that you can use in game.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Lucky_Strike

[RockinHarry]

Some my interpretation for parts of META data section in CM *.mdr files.

If taking a look at META data "meta_Unk1" and "meta_Unk2" (bottom of list) one could well imagine these triplets present XYZ coordinates defining a bounding box and likely relating to the whole (composite) objects center point (where the object is to be placed on ground according to the game´s AS 8x8m snapping points). In Blender shown as white circle with blue-red-green arrows. Think this data is measured in meters. Remains the question what this probable bounding (or hit-) box is used for in game.

Example for CMRT tree8.mdr and tree trunk part (wood) beeing selected:

[RockinHarry]

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I'm not the man for this, I just like to shoot stuff with my 37mm Flak. There were some tests being done by someone but I think they were related to the frag / shrapnel effects of HE on targets in the open and in cover.

I always do an quick HE test on my tree and foliage mods to see how they work versus the original game models, it's no surprise that it's easy to mess stuff up in Blender so that the new models don't work correctly - getting things like tree branches waving in the wind or progressively disappearing with more HE hits is not simple.

Yup, blast radius takes its part for removing flavors from map as well.

Do you work on original games MDR files or inject something new as well? And lol... messing up things in Blender is my second name.

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

ReShade is very clever but I was never able to make a convincing wet-look. It's quite difficult to get the balance right colour-wise as it tends to be a bit all or nothing, easy to darken stuff, but because CM is quite an old engine the way effects are applied is a bit crude so ReShade can only do so much - darken one colour and everything will go dark. What is good is how it can do things like atmospherics, glow, mist that kind of stuff. Nice if one was into making CM movies.

I know your movie shader as it's the one I use - you were kind enough to share it with me previously and I still use it as my everyday shader - it rocks! 

I do think there's more that could be done with shaders but as you say the language is pretty difficult, my poor old brain's just not wired to understand code ...

Think Reshade likely works best in games with sophisticated game and graphics engines and then tweak and adding stuff to it.

Ah yes, I recall you mentioned using my little shader file tweaks. You can still adapt to your own preference (settings are adapted to my own personal thus subjective likings) by tweaking following lines (excerpt from the file blur_shader.frag)

fxaa_color = overlay(fxaa_color, vec3(0.33));
    fxaa_color = BrightnessSaturationContrast(fxaa_color, 1.0, 1.1, 1.0);

gl_FragColor = vec4(fxaa_color, 1.0);

gl_FragColor *= 1.05;

There might be other my tweaks but since I´d not always added my own remark lines, I don´t know ATM. Got to compare with original and unedited blur_shader.frag file again.

Don´t ask what the parms all are in detail and relate to each other. Figured by trial and error method (and forgot again since tweaking couple years ago). Think one got to learn Open GL language for some better understanding but leaves the questions on how variables are actually beeing used in game.

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I don't much like the flat textures that have to be applied to small hills to give any semblance to piles of rubble, they just don't work for me. I'm not a big fan of flat textures that try to imitate 3D, but I do realise there are limitations in the game so we must make the most of what is there. I think a lot can be achieved with rubble and wreck flavor objects, JM is doing some work on this that should hopefully bear fruit. When I think of battlefields I always think of the mess and detritus that is left behind, it's something that I really would like to see incorporated into the game from a purely immersive point of view. But I think it's way down on the list of stuff that is important for most players.

Ah.. the ground tiles you mean. I bits of help myself with adding either black or blue 1m (or more) height increments to the rubble tile action spot. Then maybe bits of "sculpting" it further by layering one the foot path tiles on top. Similar to adding rubble piles bordering buildings directly, by using the 4m placement offset where appropriate. Finally bits of spicing with some the junk flavors.

From some my small test and trial sceneries. Volkssturmers roaming around in ruins. Also seen here some my replacements for 8x8 buildings timber frame roofs.

 

Edited October 12, 2022 by RockinHarry

[RockinHarry]

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Yes, playability is what most players are going to complain about, if stuff doesn't work as expected they soon become vocal. I know that Nigel did a lot of reworking to get the Berlin mod into a playable state, again limited by the games underlying geometry and modelling.

I can well imagine. Great achievement thus far and guess V2 will give some further improvements. I browsed through all the files and organisation looks bits of confusing. While it´s all great for just the Berlin series, I bits of find it hard creating my own maps from it. Thus I´d asked Nigel for some overview added to either a TXT or PDF file helping us other map/mission makers a bit. I.e for my own map making I tend to use just parts of it ATM.

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Inspired by this, and your ruin mod, I had a look at the buildings in Blender - I didn't even know we had the mdrs for buildings! Anyway, yes I can see there's a very complex set of textures to deal with. I'm sure there are things we could do with the buildings that might allow us to create something unique like the Brandenburg Gate. I had a bit of a brainstorm and wondered can we use building models from one game in another, not a unique thought I'm sure, but if we can port game models then, theoretically, we can port new models into the game. I don't know what restrictions there are on the numbering/naming of the models - I think we'd have to steer clear of the modular buildings and just work with the independent buildings. So I tried this ...

The First Russian Orthodox Church of Normandy ...

What I noticed is that the pixeltruppen happily occupy it but they treat it like it's the original church so they stand where the original windows were. I will fire test it later, but it's got me thinking about a Brandenburg Gate based on something like two reskinned windmills next to each other ...

Porting between games is possible. I´d myself once successfully ported some CMSF building stuff over to CMBN. Think it was some the flat roofs I wanted for some 8x8m CMBN modular building. There were some issues but I can´t remember ATM.

IIRC the most sophisticated porting and tweaking of buildings (and vehicles) was made for Heaven & Earth project here:

Some other projects like Barbarossa had similar achievements IIRC.

And again your screenshots wetten my appetite for what you can possibly do for other (than CMBN) games as well.

Re Brandenburg gate... hard to tell. H&E guys maybe know best. I´d likely attempt with a Brandenburg Gate made of multi part flavor objects. Or maybe a simplified geometry single part version that got all the decorative stuff added by means of textures and bump maps. Least effort and still good looking I´d guess. Also least draining on game performance instead when using a high poly model from somewhere in the net.

Orthodox church in CMBN. Adding a mosque to CMCW wouldn´t be unrealistic as well. At least for 2022 europe and maybe less for 1980ies.

Where did you put the Ortho Church into (building or flavor category)? Replaced some the 300 series ones? Re pixeltroopers and windows I´d suspect it has something to do with META data or some hardcoded stuff. Maybe also depends on where the replacement building is beeing added/replaced or appended.

[RockinHarry]

8 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Well what ever magic potion you sprinkled on that map it works really well. For me I like to keep shadows and shaders on but do wish the boys at CMHQ can include some soft shadows for overcast conditions.

Trees do cast and receive, which is why they are such aggressive resource hogs. Which is why we need the game optimised for modern GPUs and CPU multi threading ... either that or we all do our development and modding on old XP machines! 

The  would certainly be complex but still worth a look. I will have to take a look at the mdr at some point ... just add it to the list.

 

It´s mostly low res stuff I´d created and added myself. Partly crap quality but did the purpose. Re soft shadows it could well be some settings are buried within some the Open GL shader files added with the games.

Yes, I remember now. Trees do cast and receive. I once dumped some original CM tree to either poles or stump flavor category and then had that huge performance drop (5-6 trees did suffice already). Guess it wouldn´t be much better with my Win10 computer now.

Re there´s no hurry. Continuing on any the mentioned siegfried line missions is very low priority for me ATM as well. I´ll likely focus on some urban battles in CMRT or something for CMFB and then see what possible mods will be of use there. Guess I´ll follow same approach like in CMBN Enter Germany where´s just minor things added like ground/building textures and assorted flavor objects. It´s easier making the stuff myself instead of requiring a player to load multiple user mods, where just few things beeing used on my maps. Anyway most are just tweaks on stock game files.

[37mm]

13 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

IIRC the most sophisticated porting and tweaking of buildings (and vehicles) was made for Heaven & Earth project here:

Our building tweaks were not at all sophisticated... we just used model swaps to add sloped roofs & alpha textures to remove the chimneys. We didn't know about the possibilities blender could bring until @Aquila-SmartWargames started getting involved.

 

As for the Brandenberg Gate... I would implement that, in the game world, by using six tall & large modular towers without windows or doors then create a giant flavour object (either a "floating" Brandenberg roof or a perfectly sized actual replica of the building) to add onto the game towers for immersion/cosmetic purposes.

@Aquila-SmartWargames has created such huge flavour objects before...

 

[RockinHarry]

13 minutes ago, 37mm said:

Our building tweaks were not at all sophisticated... we just used model swaps to add sloped roofs & alpha textures to remove the chimneys. We didn't know about the possibilities blender could bring until @Aquila-SmartWargames started getting involved.

 

As for the Brandenberg Gate... I would implement that, in the game world, by using six tall & large modular towers without windows or doors then create a giant flavour object (either a "floating" Brandenberg roof or a perfectly sized actual replica of the building) to add onto the game towers for immersion/cosmetic purposes.

@Aquila-SmartWargames has created such huge flavour objects before...

 

Thanks! You still used possibilities to great effect and maintain usability for actual combat. 

Re Brandenburg gate that was my basic idea as well. Thanks for confirming it could possibly done this way. Guess Nigel will be quite happy about that. 

And yes @Aquila-SmartWargames did some gorgeous stuff and giving a big push for CM modding. Praises to both him and @sbobovyc 

[Lucky_Strike]

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Re there´s no hurry. Continuing on any the mentioned siegfried line missions is very low priority for me ATM as well. I´ll likely focus on some urban battles in CMRT or something for CMFB and then see what possible mods will be of use there. Guess I´ll follow same approach like in CMBN Enter Germany where´s just minor things added like ground/building textures and assorted flavor objects. It´s easier making the stuff myself instead of requiring a player to load multiple user mods, where just few things beeing used on my maps. Anyway most are just tweaks on stock game files.

Just a quickie as I must dash out. I couldn't resist those  so had a quick look at the hedgehog objects. Now this is only a first attempt and the texture is distorting like crazy - even though it looks fine in Blender (always happens) but I give you the Westwall ...  We're gonna hang out our washing ... 

These are in your Entering Germany map. As you can see there's a lot of distortion, the  need some . Otherwise the objects come in quite well. The size is about the same as a hedgehog so they space out quite well and en masse give a pretty convincing effect. Next would be to test with yer actual tanks and breaching teams to see how they deal with them. If you would like to have a go I can upload this somewhere for you to grab.

[JM Stuff]

40 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Just a quickie as I must dash out. I couldn't resist those  so had a quick look at the hedgehog objects. Now this is only a first attempt and the texture is distorting like crazy - even though it looks fine in Blender (always happens) but I give you the Westwall ...  We're gonna hang out our washing ... 

These are in your Entering Germany map. As you can see there's a lot of distortion, the  need some . Otherwise the objects come in quite well. The size is about the same as a hedgehog so they space out quite well and en masse give a pretty convincing effect. Next would be to test with yer actual tanks and breaching teams to see how they deal with them. If you would like to have a go I can upload this somewhere for you to grab.

Genial " no pasarán"

[Warts 'n' all]

Bud Flanagan's trilby is hanging up in one of those trees.

[Vacillator]

1 hour ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I give you the Westwall

And I love it Mark, great stuff.

Can you now mod Bud Flanagan's trilby?