We're having title issues today. Can you tell?

So we're going to take a break from BFV mapping for a second, and talk about books. Because, really, there's only so many files with things like

GeometryTemplate.create StandardMesh EuroCarpet2_m1
GeometryTemplate.file EuroCarpet2_m1
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 0 0
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 1 10
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 2 20
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 3 30
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 4 60
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 5 100

ObjectTemplate.create SimpleObject EuroCarpet2_m1
ObjectTemplate.geometry EuroCarpet2_m1
ObjectTemplate.setHasCollisionPhysics 0

that you can take at one time, you know? I mean, there's only so many times you can see the debug exe not find the template EuroCarpet2_m1 before you go mad gibbering crazy, you know?

What? Knife? I'm not holding a knife.

*hides knife*

Anyway. Books. We'll start with the latest Guy Gavriel Kay offering, Last Light of the Sun.

Now, Kay has this thing going, where his books are pretty much quasi-historical fiction, taking historical places and people, fictionalizing them, and adding some random fantastic elements. Now, given previous rants on the subject, you might figure that I'd be annoyed at that. But no. But no. It can some days, such as the Sarantine Mosaic, which was close enough to a story I knew very very well to be annoying. But usually no. And there's a pretty simple reason for this.

Kay can create characters, do plot, all of that, but lots of people can do that. The reason we're reading Kay in the first place is because the man can string words together into sentences in such a way as to evoke deep emotion almost effortlessly, and in such a way that it becomes about the closest prose writing gets to poetry.

Seriously. Read Tigana sometime, and you'll understand what I'm getting at. The skill is such that I'd bet Kay could write a book about the beauty and grandeur of tapeworms, and I would go home singing the praises of tapeworms, and longing for the lost glories of the tapeworm kingdoms of old.

And...oh, the book, you say? The book. Well, it's about Vikings. And Anglo-Saxon England. They're not called that, but that's what it's about. And people do cool things, and cool stuff happens, and it's all very good, and it makes me want to go play some Viking Invasion.

Seriously, folks. If you've never read GGK, you are directed to drop whatever pathetic trash you're now reading, and run, do not walk, to the nearest bookstore. Do so now.

Why the hell are you still here?

Well, ok. Since you're still reading, I guess I'll talk about Island in the Sea of Time, sequels, and Dies the Fire, too. Because, you know, I keep talking about ISOT as if its some sort of cultural icon everybody's read, when I know full well I'm the only one of my readers who has a clue what I'm talking about, unless SM Stirling reads this, in which case you're awesome, and when's the next book coming out?

Anyway. Island in the Sea of Time and the two sequels (Against the Tide of Years and On the Oceans of Eternity) are based on a pretty screwy premise - the island of Nantucket somehow gets transported through time from 1998 AD to 1200 BC. That having been done, the whole device is abandoned, and it gets down to doing highly interesting (from my historian's perspective) stuff. Because, well, swashbuckling Coast Guardsmen with Civil War tech running around in the Bronze Age is pretty cool, when you get right down to it. Yeah, the black lesbian Coast Guard commodore is pretty strange, but whatever. The whole idea is so awesome, I'm inclined to run with it.

Dies the Fire is the other side of the coin - what happens back up in the 20th century after Nantucket gets up and walks off the planet. The plot device here is even screwier, and when they start talking about guns and IC engines not working you just sort of have to shrug and go along with it. But, and this is a big but, the idea of Oregon getting turned into some kind of fucked up Postmanesque quasi-Medieval anarchy with longbows and guys with chainmail is pretty damn cool.

And that's how it is. And if you don't like that sort of thing, well, I'd be pretty wary the next time I saw any squirrels, ok?

If you were expecting real bloggage with actual things of interest, sorry. That would mean I actually DID something, as opposed to attempting to debug my BF42/BFV Operation Market Garden conversion.

But we'll make attempts. Starting with commentary on Mechwarrior, along the lines of, well, if it's a collectable game, I ought to, you know, collect stuff. Like, say, all the Ullers. Everyone say hi to Malisa Nova Cat. Yay Malisa!

That aside, yesterday I sat down and said "I need to listen to U2's Slane Castle show some more." And I did. And what that really meant is that I listened to Until the End of the World and Wake Up Dead Man until, oh, I dunno, an hour ago. Straight. And when I drove up to Corvallis, I popped Achtung Baby in the CD changer so I could listen to Until the End of the World some more.

Because around here, we do that every so often.

And apparently there's a new Guy Gavriel Kay book out, and apparently it's sitting on my bed waiting for me to read it, because apparently the library is really awesome. Like how it hooked me up with a copy of On the Oceans of Eternity because apparently Borders just wasn't bothering to carry it.

Apparently is apparently a cool word.

I thought about sticking in a longish talk about Island in the Sea of time, the sequels, and how completely and utterly awesome they are, but Mom made brownies, and there's one staring at me with that "eat me!" look on its face. So I think we'll be doing that now.

Remember kids. Just say no.

You say 'Burninating the countryside, burninating the Romans, etc.'

Adjani laughs uncontrollably.

Adjani says 'I could almost picture you singing that while playing, too.'

You say '"And the onager comes in the niiiiiiight!"'

Well, I finally got RTW screenshots to work. By downloading a third party program to do them with. Bah. But at least I can finally show off some stuff.

I talked in my last post about trying out Pharaoh's gear, and that's what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I think yet, but then, I haven't got to see it in action, much. The Seleucids just fell over and died, pretty much, and Egypt has this simply monster econ that isn't made any worse by taking over the rich Seleucid lands. I don't seem to be winning a whole lot of the fights I do have, but I haven't been in many and haven't quite figured out the tactics yet. So we'll see.

But here is what the homeland of Pharaoh looks like these days, minus Thebes. On the other map, the yellow is me (I own Crete too, just 'cause), grey is the Seleucids, purple is my good buddies the Parthians, the blue-grey west of me is Numidia, the blue north of me is Pontus, the black is Macedon, and there's some grey you can't really see that's Greek cities. The green/red/blue/purple over by Rome is, well, Romans of various sorts. The big red blob up top is Germania, and there's some green below it that's Gaul.

There's a nifty feature wherein you can zoom in to see what your cities look like on the battle map, plus see your citizens walking around and stuff. So here is the palace of mighty Pharaoh, may he live forever, in Memphis, as seen from the great plaza. Note my cronish hag female citizen down there. Citizens are scary looking. As I told Whir about my Roman citizens, "the women look like men, and the men look like some sort of cross between Nazis and the Beatles." That having been said, here is a shot of more of Memphis.

And for sheer randomness' sake, I was chasing down the Seleucid heir to assassinate him with some Bedouin mercs, and apparently his guys were so scared, they lept in the river. And you can drown in rivers.

And here are a few charging across the desert.

Now, as I like to do from time to time, I'm going to talk about flaming stuff again. Except this time, I have screenshots. So as an illustration of all this flaming onager stuff I keep talking about, I set up a simulation of what a typical battle in the civil war in my Julii game might've looked like. I got my usual 4/4/2/2 Legionary Cohort/Archer Auxilia/Roman Cav/Onager army, with typical weapon upgrades, and the Brutii got a typical AI Roman army of mostly heavy infantry with a few skirmishers and a general's cav bodyguard.

here is my army neatly drawn up. Legionary cohorts to the front, archers to the rear, then onagers with cav to the flanks.

And here is the Brutii horde, from the point of view of the flaming onager projectile heading straight for them. Which then did some damage when it landed.

That having been done, the archers started opening up, which combined with some more onager hits caused disarray in the Brutii lines.

You have to be careful, though. Sometimes your onagers can start shooting too low, causing friendly fire casualties. Yes, that's my general, all nicely zoomed in. You can thank the game for that - it automatically zooms in if a general dies on either side.

Nevertheless, the massed fire pretty much broke up the Brutii force, and after a brief hand to hand melee, the surviving Brutii routed, and my cav chased them down and took scalps.

So here is the victory screen, and here is a detailed casualty breakdown. Note that since the game doesn't count friendly fire casualties, you have to figure it for yourself, in which case 21 of my casualties were from friendly fire.

All in all, I played a bit sloppily, but that's about how an average battle in the civil wars could play out.

I'm never ever ever going to bribe a faction army again. Ever. Because, well, the civil war was like this for me: I was rolling up Italy no problem at all. Nobody could stand between Caius Julius Caesar and his legions of awesomeness. Carthage, more of the same. They run up with a full stack army to seige Carthage, I sally out and obliterate them, then repeat. Out east, Dacia/Thracia way, things were rough. Full stack Brutii armies all over creation. All the cities had wooden walls, which meant instant obliteration for me on sallying out. I was getting rampaged on hard out there. I was going to win, but it was going to be a long hard slog uphill to do it.

Then, just out of curiosity, I bribed an army with a diplomat. 4k denarii or so. Not a problem, given my 20-30k bankroll each turn. Now, in every preceeding bribe I had ever done, it cost the same or more (and I was pulling in like, 8k per turn), and the army just disbanded. Not here. The entire Brutii army JOINED MY SIDE.

Dude.

Well, I can see the Path as easy as the next man. Order up some diplomats, who I guess get more influence from being trained at my rather prevalent academies, and go to town. Suddenly, the civil war is a non-issue, and the Brutii front actually becomes EASY as I bribe their huge armies, then turn around and seige their cities with them. 10 years later or so, it's over.

And according to everything I've read, Julii gets BAD econ. I don't ever want to see what this is like with GOOD econ.

But now I get to try out Pharoah's gear, so that's all good.

Also, I want to mention something I touched on last post, and that's archers and onagers, and the flaming projectiles thereof. I've known for a long long time, since MTW if not STW, that massed archer fire is pretty much God as long as you have the ammo to keep up the shooting. That hasn't changed much. Now, artillery was always good too, but it was a pain in the ass to lug around, was useless on the attack, and you couldn't really aim it well. Well, that's changed here too.

So, I've always built my armies with a solid core of archers. Lately, I've been adding onagers and such to the mix, too. So I'm capable of sending lots of pointy things and big rocks downrange at anybody who attacks me.

Now add fire to that. It is, in a word, absolutely devastating. It's also visually stunning, in ways that I find it difficult to describe without a replay I can't provide. I mean, in MTW you see your masses of longbows dropping guys, and you're thinking "Damn, that's got to suck." But it's nothing compared to seeing 240 little streaks of fire arc towards the enemy, dropping men in little flaming human torches, followed by screaming.

And then you hear a *WHUMP* *WHUMP* sound, and four balls of fire come sailing into view, and when they land there's an explosion and suddenly that 40-man cohort is reduced to a handfull of guys running around on fire, screaming. And in that cav unit over there, man and horse both are little blackened smears on the grass. And there's more screaming, and units running around in panic and disarray.

And then it happens again. Holy shit.

So I go to bed Sunday night with a major headache and a runny nose, and wake up Monday certifiably sick. On the one hand, I'm sick. On the other hand, it's a good opportunity to play some RTW.

Because you see, the Spanish were being dicks. They're like my best trade partners the entire game. It's going great. I'm slaughtering Germans left, right, center, you name it. And then the Spanish decide "Oh ho! We shall seige Numantia for two turns then retreat!"

What?

"Yeah, you heard us! We're going to seige Numantia for two turns, then retreat!"

Well, ok.

"It's a great plan! You Romans will fear us!"

Not really. In fact, let me move up these enormous armies to crush you.

"Well, uh, crap."

So to make a long story short, Spain ends up having a bad day. A really bad day, actually. But, meanwhile, my cities are being most non-triumphant about the whole thing, and decide to rebel a lot, which coincides with both the death of my awesome 7 management faction leader, the death of everybody in the Spanish faction leader's entire family, the death of Spain, and the acension of my best general to faction leader. Unfortunately, my awesome 7 star general had a whole 2 management, so everybody revolted and I had to kill them.

Fortunately, he died 6-7 turns later, leaving one Caius Julius Caesar to be the head of the Julii family. THIS rather fortunate event coincided with the plebs in Rome deciding I really was just about that cool, and inviting me to march on Rome. So I marched on Rome with, yes, Caius Julius Caesar and my really awesome best army.

So I'm like "Well, the Senate only has pre-Marian reform troops, so how hard can it be?" And the whole thing starts well enough - My onagers and archers obliterate a good 30% of his guys before I even walk in the gate, although they also kind of obliterated a certain Forum. Oops. But then, well, all my infantry ran in, and realized that highly experienced troops are badass. And died. So I sent another army, which did the same thing. And another army, which finally did the job, leaving me with an entire army of nothing but archers and seige equipment running around led by an awesome supergeneral.

Meanwhile, my backup armies (this is about where I become real happy I had the foresight to preposition a few legions in Italy for this) decided to take Capua. Never mind that Capua had twice as many Scipii in it as I had my troops. You see, unlike some other Romans, _I_ can use the archer. Also the onager. And the whole 800 Scipii vs 400 Julii fight in front of Capua works out about like this conversation between Whir and myself:

Whir: Mmm, Romans.

Me: Crunchy, with a chewy inside. Taste good cooked in boiling pitch.

Whir: I prefer oil.

Me: Oil works too.

Because, well, my onagers were obliterating entire cohorts of Scipii. And the ones that got past that, got shot with arrows. A few made it past THAT, and got nailed by pila. A bare few made it to hand to hand range, and realized that post-Marian legionary cohorts really are better than hastati and principes. And other than my cav riding down a lot of guys, that was pretty much that.

So, yeah. Makes me kind of pity the enormous Scipii army that thinks it's going to attack my gigantic and awesome garrison in Carthage next turn.

"I liked the fact Bush was willing to beat down the moderator in debate 2. He's the President of the United States of friggin' America. He should have kicked his ass. I would have."

Also...

"So Marius! Guess what! I went to a live concert thing on campus this last week!!!

I went to a ...................

PIPE ORGAN CONCERT!"

On the one hand, I'd sort of like to talk about the last presidential debate, but there's really not much to say. Kerry did all the good Kerry things, Bush did all the bad Bush things, except this time he didn't rampage on the moderator. And anyway, Fafblog does it better. Much better.

Or I could talk about the Pentagon Papers, complete with quotes, but since I didn't bring in the first volume from the car, you all are SOL.

Or I could settle for saying that we played Mechwarrior last night, and it was a sealed booster, and I got the best 3 packs I have ever pulled, not to mention THE best pack I have ever pulled, complete with 2 Falcon Sylphs, a Falcon Kelswa, and Ichiba Pryde who's only like the second best Falcon mech ever. And my other packs had other good things, like the Highlander Warhammer (of Doom). And using my Highlander Warhammer (of Doom), I caused hurt upon my badly armed opponents who drew not well, and I thusly won the tournament, and got a nifty prize, and then traded my Highlander Warhammer (of Doom) for Clara Parks, who is shiny and happy and good and causes much joy amongst the small forest animals (who as we all know are rabid Liao partisans because those Davions are all bastards, damn them all anyway).

But since nobody here gives a damn about Mechwarrior, so I won'...damn. Oh well. Put the tar away. And the feathers. Right now.

I'd like to send out a big "fuck you" to my router to doing whatever screwed up crap it did yesterday, which resulted in hours of running around trying to figure out what the problem was, when all that needed doing was a router reset to factory defaults and starting over.

Damn computers, anyway. Damn them.

For those of you thinking my sense of humor is somewhat bizzare, you are wrong. You have yet to read Fafblog. Yeah.

*sees Whir, ducks*

So let's have some politics. Laurent should like this one better than the last one.

Reading through the second debate transcripts right now, and some stuff is catching me eye. Such as:

Quoth Bush: "And I saw a unique threat in Saddam Hussein - as did my opponent - because we thought he had weapons of mass destruction...We all thought there was weapons there, Robin. My opponent thought there was weapons there. That's why he called him a grave threat. I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons, and we've got an intelligence group together to figure out why. But Saddam Hussein was a unique threat, and the world is better off without him in power."

So, apart from the really annoying use of "was" in there, I wasn't aware that Bush had given up on the whole WMD thing. Interesting.

Unique threat, huh?

Quoth Bush again: "That answer almost made me want to scowl. He keeps talking about let the inspectors do their job. It's naïve and dangerous to say that. That's what the Duelfer report showed. He was deceiving the inspectors."

Uh. Did I read that right? It's naive and dangerous to let the inspectors do their jobs? Wow. Just...wow.

Both Bush and Kerry have come out against the draft. This is good. OTOH, only Kerry seems to be willing to talk about needing more troops. This is less good on the president's part.

And, uh, about this part...yeah.

And, well, Bush IS right about this:

"This war is a long, long war. And it requires steadfast determination and it requires a complete understanding that we not only chase down Al Qaeda but we disrupt terrorist safe havens as well as people who could provide the terrorists with support."

A bit later...

Bush: "Now, he talks about Medicare. He's been in the United States Senate 20 years. Show me one accomplishment toward Medicare that he accomplished."

Kerry: "Actually, Mr. President, in 1997 we fixed Medicare and I was one of the people involved in it. We not only fixed Medicare and took it way out into the future, we did something that you don't know how to do - we balanced the budget and we paid down the debt of our nation for two years in a row and we created 23 million new jobs at the same time."

Denied, Mr. President. Denied.

"Mr. Gibson We'll get to that in just a minute. Thirty--
Mr. Bush You're right, what--
Q. --seconds.
Mr. Bush --does matter is the plan..."

Way to continually talk over the moderator, Mr. President. Good job.

The spending stuff is hilarious.

"Q. Thank you. Senator Kerry, would you be willing to look directly into the camera and using simple and unequivocal language give the American people your solemn pledge not to sign any legislation that will increase the tax burden on families earning less than $200,000 a year during your first term?
Mr. Kerry Absolutely, yes. Right into the camera, yes. I am not going to raise taxes."

And you can just read my lips, too. No new taxes!

"Mr. Kerry Boy, to listen to that, the president, I don't think, is living in a world of reality with respect to the environment. Now, if you're a Red Sox fan, that's O.K. But if you're a president, it's not."

Heh.

Randomly picking a quote by Bush...

"He and his running mate didn't show up to vote when they could have got it going in the Senate."

Dammit, stop that shit. You'd think they weren't running a campaign, or something.

"Mr. Bush: I own a timber company? That's news to me. Need some wood?"

Hahahahaha.

Quoth Bush: "I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States."

How...1805. Nevermind that he then goes on to talk about the Dred Scott case.

Quoth Kerry: "Well, again, the president just said categorically my opponent's against this, my opponents against that. You know, it's just not that simple."

And that about sums up the man's views right there, which sure does get obscured an awful lot.

The whole last question was pretty good.

Because I will otherwise forget this process:

Adding BF1942 Objects to BFV Maps

Step 1 - Locate the item to be added in BC1942. Note the name.

Step 2 - Open up bf1942.lst in the BC1942 dir and find the object name you just noted. There will be a StandardMesh name in parens after it. Note this name.

Step 3 - In WinRFA, open up your BF1942/Mods/bf1942/Archives/Objects.rfa file. Hunt down the Objects.con and Geometries.con files corresponding to the name of your object from step 2. Extract these somewhere.

Step 4 - In WinRFA, open up your BF1942/Mods/bf1942/Archives/StandardMesh.rfa (maybe _001.rfa) file. Hunt down the .rs and .sm files corresponding to the name of your object from step 2. Extract these somewhere.

Step 5 - In any text editor, open the .rs file for your object. There will be a bunch of things that look like:

subshader "crane1_m1_Material0" "StandardMesh/Default"
{
lighting true;
lightingSpecular false;
materialDiffuse 1 1 1;
texture "texture/crane_s";
}

Note the texture "texture/crane_s"; line. For each time that appears, note the crane_s part.

Step 6 - Back in WinRFA, open up your BF1942/Mods/bf1942/Archives/Texture.rfa (maybe _001.rfa) file. Hunt down all the .dds files for each name you noted in step 5. Extract these somewhere.

Step 7 - Before we put it all together, a check. Open up your object's geometries.con file. You should see a group of lines that looks like this:

GeometryTemplate.create StandardMesh crane1_m1
GeometryTemplate.file ../BfVietnam/levels/Da_Nang/StandardMesh/crane1_m1
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 0 0
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 1 15
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 2 35
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 3 60
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 4 100
GeometryTemplate.setLodDistance 5 300

If that's all that's there, you're fine. If there are more groups of lines like this, you need to do a bit more work. Take note of the GeometryTemplate.file line. Now go perform steps 3-6 again for that object.

Step 8 - Now, to put it all together. In WinRFA, open and extract the file for the map you want these objects to go in. Create a directory called objects in the map's directory, and move the directories you extracted from objects.rfa into this. Move all the .dds files directly into the textures dir, and all the .rs and .sm files into the StandardMesh dir.

Step 9 - Going back to the Objects dir, we want to create a new text file called objects.con. Open it up, and for each object you add, put a line like this:

run crane1_m1/crane1_m1

where crane1_m1 is the name of the dir your object's .con files are in. Save and close.

Then go into your object's dir and create another .con file called whatever your object's dir's name is (crane1_m1.con in this case). Open it up and add two lines:

run objects
run geometries

Save and close.

Open up your object's geometries.con file. On the GeometryTemplate.file line, change it to read something like:

GeometryTemplate.file ../BfVietnam/levels/Da_Nang/StandardMesh/OBJNAME

Where OBJNAME is whatever used to be there. Save and close.

Step 10 - Now, we make it so we can use the object in Battlecraft. Go to your Battlecraft Vietnam dir, and open up bfv.lst. Under the appropriate category, add a line like this:

OBJNAME=StandardMesh(OBJSTANDARDMESH)

where OBJNAME is whatever name you want the object to have, and OBJSTANDARDMESH is whatever the name your object's StandardMesh is.

The crane1_m1 line looks like this:

o_crane1_m1=StandardMesh(crane1_M1)

Save and close, open up BCV, and you should be set to go.

Well, let's see. Things happened. And there was stuff, too.

We'll start with the obligatory political debate, finally back at Tonto for the first time in a while. Along those lines, the debate, which as I mentioned to Whir and Regina, went about like this:

So Kerry was like "Dude, Bush is a fuckup." and Bush was like "Uh. Terrorists are bad, mkay?"

That having been said, Rome: Total War is awesome. I killed the Gauls, killed Carthage, am currently owning Germany in harsh harsh ways, and am gearing up to take on the Romans in the civil war that's coming soon. This will be good.

Too, Whir and I have been 2 vs 18ing all the BFV maps as the US, and we r0x0rz. Even 80 or 90% AI cannot deal with our skillz. Had a little bit of trouble with Lang Vei, because they like to hit two places at once, but after some hectic village and roadblock defense, we triumphed mightily. Quang Tri 1972 was pretty rough, too, since they like to hit all sides, but after Whir defended the base and I went and dealt with a couple NVA spawns, that worked out ok. By contrast, I should note that we are the Gods of Hue 1968. Hue 1968 sees us coming and flees in terror.

OTOH, we are not the Gods of BF1942 doing the same thing. In fact, the only map we won was like Berlin. And let me just point out that the Russian guns SUCK.

Also, if patch 1.2 wanted to hurry the hell up and come out, that'd be nice.