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Hi all,

I'm trying my hand at creating a RCG called Operation Typhoon (Oct 2 - Dec 6, 1941).
I'm basically taking the JTCS dynamic campaign (of the similar name) and converting to PC:Karkov.

Please check this post often for download link and any new edit notes.
I've colozied edit note to blue to make it easier to find.

DESIGN NOTES :
- It will be SHORT campaign, only 10 battles. I figured it might make a good short camp considering most short camps last 20+ turns for a Panzer Division.
This might make a good "quickie" for those that like to jump in but not get too bogged down on the length.

- I'm planning on two versions, one played as Germans, other as Russians.

- Most of the current short campaign's have 20 units for a core force. I might bump this up to 30, maybe.

- I'm considering these core forces (armor only), see screen shot from JTCS OOB, representing :
1. Company / I Battalion /6 Panzer Rengiment / 3 Panzer Division / XXIV Panzer Corps

Rob

EDIT NOTES :
- Historical Accurate??? - at the moment, not really ... just a base short RCG. Besides, how accurate can you be when your'e talking RANDOM CAMPAIGN.
- Goals - as stated, to just make a basic short RCG on that time frame. Once I'm finished and upload it I want everyone to feel free to make changes and upload their own version.

Stridor,

First question ...

1. Can the CORE FORCES be randomized each time the RCG is played?

Basically randomizing WHICH company you'd start as your core forces.

If not, please add this to wish list.

Look at first post screen shot from JTCS OOB editor. Those are the % values I'd like to use per company. With a 33% chance that you'd be assigned to the 1. ,2. , or 3. company.

Thanks,

Rob

Excellent! It is good to see modders already getting stuck in!

If you need any help making your RCG just holler. Rememeber that you can customise virtually any aspect of it (see the example random campaigns and the documentation). For dates proposed you will be playing on winter maps.

ORIGINAL: Stridor

Excellent! It is good to see modders already getting stuck in!

If you need any help making your RCG just holler. Rememeber that you can customise virtually any aspect of it (see the example random campaigns and the documentation). For dates proposed you will be playing on winter maps.

Winter maps ... I'd like to use the new Karkov maps but with winterized terrain.
OK, my next question ...

2. How can I change the terrain palette to winter? Or is this "in-the-manual".

I'm a good learner, and have the tools to paint ... which is all I want to do. Perhaps making new BMP's and referencing them in my new winterized Karkov maps?

Thanks again!!

Rob

Rob,

There are three types of forces for a random campaign.

1. The main-core force. This force is fixed. If you wanted to have a main-core variable force ATM you would have to make another similar RC. Something along the lines of what you want is being considered. These guys follow you through and gain exp, medals, etc.

2. The aux-core force. This force also follows you through, but can be set probabilities to appear or not. These probabilities can be tied into the current battle (eg unitid="Mortar 81" probability="A=0.1;D=0.8" this means a 10% chance for an attacking battle, but 80% chance for a defending battle). These forces also gain exp, medals, losses, etc

3. The auxiliary force. These forces are not core so do not get exp, medals, etc carry over. Neither are their losses carried over.

If you can have a look at the example random campaigns. Hopefully they will answer a lot of questions. You can also use the campaign editor in "Random Campaign design mode" to help you out with editing your RC. You still need to do your battle plan xmls by hand however (in your xml editor of choice - I use notepad.exe [:D])

ORIGINAL: Stridor
If you can have a look at the example random campaigns. Hopefully they will answer a lot of questions. You can also use the campaign editor in "Random Campaign design mode" to help you out with editing your RC. You still need to do your battle plan xmls by hand however (in your xml editor of choice - I use notepad.exe [:D])

Thank you Stridor, I will have to read everything first and then sit down and have a go at the editor. Right now, I just opened the manual and the RCG Editor so I'm familiarizing myself on everything ... this might take awhile but my goal isn't to make it historically accurate, per say, just a quick RCG on the operation. As I "grow" and take inputs from others I'll make changes.

For starters, I might just use the 1st Panzer Div 1941 Short campaign as a base template and make changes as I go.

Thank you again for your work on the RCG/RBG ... [:)]

Rob

ORIGINAL: Mraah

ORIGINAL: Stridor

Excellent! It is good to see modders already getting stuck in!

If you need any help making your RCG just holler. Rememeber that you can customise virtually any aspect of it (see the example random campaigns and the documentation). For dates proposed you will be playing on winter maps.

Winter maps ... I'd like to use the new Karkov maps but with winterized terrain.
OK, my next question ...

2. How can I change the terrain palette to winter? Or is this "in-the-manual".

I'm a good learner, and have the tools to paint ... which is all I want to do. Perhaps making new BMP's and referencing them in my new winterized Karkov maps?

Thanks again!!

Rob

Yes you are getting the idea. You would need to add some "snow" to the pre-existing textures.

I will write you a little tut on how to do that, by essentially creating your own map but with new textures so that you don't overwrite the old one. This will give you a winterized version of a current map without all the effort of making a brand new one. The next question is what camo pattern (summer or winter) will you use for your models? Or are you planning on doing all new camos as well [;)]

Just give me a little time to write it ok. I think it will be helpful to other modders as well.

ORIGINAL: Stridor
Yes you are getting the idea. You would need to add some "snow" to the pre-existing textures.

I will write you a little tut on how to do that, by essentially creating your own map but with new textures so that you don't overwrite the old one. This will give you a winterized version of a current map without all the effort of making a brand new one. The next question is what camo pattern (summer or winter) will you use for your models? Or are you planning on doing all new camos as well [;)]

Just give me a little time to write it ok. I think it will be helpful to other modders as well.

Stridor,

Thank you sir!! Take your time, absolutely no rush !!! I know your desk is full of IE7 issues so don't let me distract you.

Camo pattern ... well, you mentioned the time frame should be winter, so probably winter camo. I mean, I don't know what the month of October had, whether it was snow at the start or not (I haven't gotten that far as researching the exact weather yet).

Thanks!
Rob

ORIGINAL: Mraah
1. Can the CORE FORCES be randomized each time the RCG is played?
Basically randomizing WHICH company you'd start as your core forces.

Yes and no. The problem is that in order for units to maintain their medals, experience and strength, they have to be in every scenario. If they disappear for a few scenarios and then reappear, the game will assume you want to use the version in the most current battle plan and that's what it will do. Therefore, you need to have one core force that does not change and then you can have the "aux-core" forces Stridor described that can be set to show up with probabilities.

The reason we use the "aux-core" is that the game will always purchase all core units, even if you would not normally have enough points to afford them. This allows us to set realistic replacement levels, while also using the "aux-core" to represent other units that would be occasionally available to support you regardless of whether you had enough "points" or not. The true auxiliary forces require extra points and those you can pick and choose from so they give more flexibility but they also don't maintain from scenario to scenario unless they show up in each battle.

I would suggest doing a random campaign for one company, then using that as a basis to do the other two. It woudln't actually take long once the first one is done I'd think.

The existing random campaigns, along with the addendum on the RBG and RCG (in the Documentation folder in the Start Menu) should give you a lot to study. Once you "get it" these are really not that hard to do but there is quite a bit to understand at first.

Finally, I'm glad to see you diving in! Good luck and feel free to keep asking us questions.

Regards,

- Erik

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
Finally, I'm glad to see you diving in! Good luck and feel free to keep asking us questions.
- Erik

Thanks Eirk ... I'll need all the luck I can get!!

I'll mention this here and PM you as well ... Could you create two more STICKY thread for RCG EDITOR and RBG EDITOR so I can ask questions there instead of in this thread?

Thanks again!

Rob

The Mcensk campaign is the opening stages of one prong of operation Typhoon. You can get some unit info from its Briefings.
It started snowing pretty hard the night of Oct 9/10 and continued off and on. But the ground had not froze and was only muddy for a number of days.

ORIGINAL: Mobius

The Mcensk campaign is the opening stages of one prong of operation Typhoon. You can get some unit info from its Briefings.
It started snowing pretty hard the night of Oct 9/10 and continued off and on. But the ground had not froze and was only muddy for a number of days.

Mobius,

Excellent idea!! Thank you.

So, for maps ... I'll see if I can try a mix of maps for OCT and use pure winter for NOV/DEC.

I say "try" because I haven't looked at the restrictions for random map selections to see if it will allow it. I'm still going to have 10 battles so it's roughly going to represent 1 battle per week ... so the first 4 battles (if I can do it) will be 50/50 maps.

Rob

Ok this is the default Khakov_l1b map

It took about 15 mins work to make a brand new "winterized" version called Kharkov_10. Note how it has ominous fog and a different skybox + only one ground texture change, but it changes the whole feel of the map. These type of map changes are easy to do.

Stridor,

Looks very nice ... for the few simple (I use the term loosly for me) changes!!

I'm reading your Map Editing Addendum now, so I'll have a go as well.

Thank you!

Rob

Ok here is how you do it.

I will use the Kharkov_l1b map as an example.

Copy the entire Kharkov_l1b directory (which is found under Media subdir) to a new directory (also under Media), I named it Kharkov_l10. Go into this new directory and rename the scene xml from Kharkov_L1Bscene.xml to Kharkov_L10scene.xml

Ok now open up this xml file in notepad.

look at the first few lines

look at the .dds files above, in this case tiled_grass02.dds, tiled_forest04.dds and Karkov_road01.dds. These are the DX compressed bitmaps which define the ground and road textures.

Next you will need a paint editor or file format convertor which can change between (or save) in dds format. I use photoshop with the nvidia sdk plugins that does this all for me. There are many other free programs out there which can do the same however. In a pinch you can also just use bmps, but these take up a lot of video memory so are not very efficient for vid cards with small onboard mems.

I just made a change to the tiled_grass02.dds in this example, but you may want to change the others as well.

Load up tiled_grass02.dds into your editor (you can find this in the terrain/textures folder) . Make "snowy" changes as you see fit and then save the new file as something else into your Kharkov_L10 directory (like tiled_snow.dds). Don't overwrite the original otherwise you will break all the existing maps which use this texture. The format for the dds is DXT1 no alpha (this gives the best compression).

Ok now you need to tell the game to use this new texture instead of the old one. To do this change the line tiled_grass02.dds in the xml above to tiled_snow.dds (or whatever you called it) and then save the xml.

Now we need a new media xml file to tell the game about where to find these resources.

In the Kharkov_L10 directory make a new xml called "media.xml" and edit it thus

and then save.

You now have a new working winter map!

In order to make some more changes to the map to make it look nicer, you can edit the forest and road.dds as well (using the same technique above, make sure you edit their entry into the media.xml as well)

Open the Kharkov_l10.xml again and then scroll down to the very bottom, you should see this:

If you want to use a different more wintery skybox for your map then change these values to different values as found in the skybox subdir off the main Media dir. You can set the colour of the lighting and the "fogginess" of the map by changing the lighting values. I used the following for my example map

In order to give it a more wintery feel.

At some stage you may want to change the summer trees for winter ones, or summer houses for snow covered ones, etc which you can do in scenedit.

Also this example basically leaves the entire map structure alone, it just changes the look and feel of it. If you want to change the geometry or otherwise that will have to wait for another tutorial.

Oh and one more thing there is a minimap.png image which represents a thumbnail of the whole map. You may want to edit this in your paint program to better match the new paint scheme.

Whilst you now have a new map which you can use in the editor and game, I will need to provide another tut to teach you how to incorporate this map into the RBG/RCG system (it isn't hard provided that you didn't move too much stuff around).

Stridor,

THANK YOU VERY MUCH !!!!

Erik, Please paste this over in the MAP editor thread as well.

You know Stridor, I haven't even begun modding the entire campaign yet ... every 30 minutes I have something else to mod!! LOL.

Back to drawing board ...

EDIT NOTE : I'll probably just swap files name's to convert the terrain ... I'll try my hand at painting some other time! Also, I might convert the PCOWS maps to summer or spring versions.

Rob

Great job, Stridor - I'll copy these to the Map Editor thread.

Any word on the progress of this campaign?

ORIGINAL: gijas
Any word on the progress of this campaign?

The campaign is finished and is 5 scenarios long. The last one is a fight in downtown Mcensk.
Currently waiting for patch code changes to be completed and all new elements to work together. There are a lot of new buildings, bridges, railroad tracks and other new structures that are on the maps so they have to wait for the patch.