Essential Mods?

[David I]

You know, I've been reading the "what mods I should get" columns for a while. I paid little attention to them. So finally, over the last couple of days I downloaded Tarkus' interface, Undaunted's skies, and some of the T-34 mods by Mikey D (I intend to get the rest).

THAT IS SOME F.....G DIFFERENCE! :eek: All the blood ran to my nether regions and I had to go get a towel! My keyboard is ruined and I intend to sue!

Pay no attention to the guys that say uniform mods are unimportant, they just don't know any better.

DavidI

[Elefant]

Philippe, I am mostly there thanks to your magnamious efforts. I can get the German winter mods to run in a quick battle, and I can get the Russian winter mods to run in Danube blues, but I cannot get the German winter mod to run in Danube Blues, the German tanks, halftracks etc. always enter in brown. I am very happy to see a King Tiger in winter in a quick battle. Again, Thanks.

[Philippe]

1) If you click on the icon that installs everything in the winter dunkelgrau mods, and then fire up MikeyD's Warm Place to Sleep, are all of the German vehicles in whitewash? If not, what exactly does the CMMOS log say? Quote the relevant part, and maybe we can figure this out.

2) I'm not as familiar with CMBB as with CMBO, but isn't Danube Blues a late war scenario? In which case, no, the whitewashed dunkelgrau vehicles won't show up no matter what you do. In a late war scenario you'll need to apply the whitewashed dunkelgelbs (I can never remember the year they switched over, but I think it was '43). Once again, if that doesnt do it, please quote the relevant section of the CMMOS log.

3) If anything isn't working on either ruleset, a) confirm that the rulesets are in place, confirm that the rules are in place, c) confirm that you see the icons lit up in enabled form (you still haven't mentioned any of this, so I can't tell what's going on other than the end result), and d) (really important) quote the CMMOS log (yes it's a mantra).

I'm hoping that meditating on the chronology of German camouflage will solve the problem, but if it doesn't, we have to get to the bottom of this. It's probably something that you're doing or not doing that you aren't aware of. But if the icons are lighting up in enabled mode and you see the little dark line in the lower left-hand corner of the screen crawling across the page when you apply a mod, then the only thing that will give us a clue is the log. And full disclosure.

[Philippe]

By the way, the German vehicle rulesets only change German vehicles. To change Hungarian vehicles I think you would need to use the Hungarian ruleset which has rules for summer and winter textures. Same for Italians and Romanians.

[Elefant]

I will fire up MikeyD's Warm Place to sleep chop chop. In Danube Blues he initial forces are Hungarian but German reinforcements come in on turn 5. I'll keep you posted.

Have you ever looked at this game? They are making a West Front game in addition to RGW.

http://www.ghg.net/schwerpt/agwshots.htm

[Philippe]

I wish RGW had the same map graphics. The only thing I have like it is War in the East, which you can now get as a free download from Matrix or somebody like that. I'll probably try RGW at some point next year.

Took a look at Danube Blues last night -- to make it work you would have to use two rulesets, the Hungarian and lateware German.

There's an issue we haven't touched on yet, but I'll mention it now just in case. If a vehicle doesn't change but the rule and ruleset are there and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong in the log, that can sometimes mean that the rule changes a large class of vehicles (e.g. all german vehicles). It is important to realize that it only changes a vehicle if a) a winter mod for the vehicle was done that mod got converted to cmmos format and c) somebody remembered to update the file list with the bmp numbers for that mod. This gets discussed at some point in the readme file. We may not need to go into it, but I'm mentioning it now just in case. If a mod exists and everything else works but the mod isn't applying, the fix is usually simple -- you write down the list of bmp numbers, check the relevant file list to see if the numbers are there, and add them in if they aren't. You have to be careful with that, though, because the file lists are what make the CMMOS program think clearly.

In the simpler case where the bmp numbers are listed but the mod doesn't exist, the symptom is often that the bar in the lower lefthand corner fills up quickly and doesn't crawl across the screen. That means that the mod is either very small, or simply isn't there.

Another thing you have to realize is that the rules and mod conversions aren't infallible. There's a mistake in the Gautrek Dirty Truck mod that was used on the special edition mod cd that makes it impossible to use if you don't know how to fix it. This kind of error takes one of two forms -- a slip of the hand on the extensions (in the Gautrek Dirty Truck the culprit was a double instead of a single i), or a slip of the hand in writing the rule. My favorite almost invisible and incredibly insidious cmmos error is when someone accidently hits the space bar when writing a bmp number extension -- practically invisible, and figuring out why it doesn't work can drive you insane unless you have a very sharp eye.

With any luck you won't need to know this.