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PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 6:50 am 
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[V]Gentlemen it has been a while since I have posted anything. I have collected the Tiller games since the start and have waited with bated breath for each new title, I will always buy them because of my love of the civil war and of war games. However when the campaign series came out something happened to me I found that I loved the battleground graphics and the six gun batteries (so much more quicker to move)but liked parts of the new system my cavalry tactics that worked so well in the bg series were not much use in the new system.
Back to school for an old general. I lost interest in playing.
To the rescue came the club designers they messed around with corinth and filled a gap. Hps did not like this as far as I can see and locked the oob files to stop it. This is all very well but all I want to do is mess around with the unit graphics and have all the nap guns the same unit picture one in grey for reb and blue for union howitzer's the same and so on. There are plenty of unit icons out there to play with but i can not add them to campaign Gettysgurg. Does anyone know how to do this Please Please Please tell me. This may help me to get back into fighting the rebs.[B)]
General Mullins Union Army


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 11:00 am 
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Gen Mullins,

If you want to make your own units.bmp you need to know how the game points to the picture. Each line in the oob looks like this

U 325 6 I R 96 11 19th Ind

In this case 96 is the Unit picture, this points to the unit picture in the units.bmp file. The file is located in the Info folder of the game. This is a 12x12 matrix starting with 0 in the top left going across then down to the next row (0-11, 12-23 etc). You can modify it with any good graphics program that allows you to copy and paste from one file to another, I've used Photo Magic and Photo Shop and made several different versions available at my site at http://home.comcast.net/~krmiller_cor/ some are mine and some were put together by others. These all work with the original oobs so they would not require modifying the oob. If you haven't already looked at them maybe you'll find something you like there.

You will have a problem if you want guns with different pictures for the rebs and yanks. The HPS oob's point to the same picture for both sides for guns and wagons and the oobs would have to be modified if you want each side to have its own pictures. Also there are differences from one game to another, a picture that was a reb in one game might be a yank in another.

Hope this helps, if you have any questions you can contact me by email.

Lt.Gen.Ken Miller
Veteran's Divsion
VIII / AoS


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 3:12 pm 
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Gen Miller...Sir, I am very interested in seeing these graphics but the link you provided does not work. What is your correct URL?

Tom Bridges

Tom Bridges


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:01 pm 
Tom,

The comma got mixed into his link here is the proper link.

http://home.comcast.net/~krmiller_cor/

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Brig. Gen. Chris Cross
II "Jackson's" Corps
Army of Northern Virginia
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:29 pm 
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Ken thanks for the reply. I have been to your site many times and I had worked out the oob bitmap numbers. The thing is there is some black and white pic's which don't give away which is union or reb, also there are icons that are not used in the historical battle of camp gettysburg, (they are used I guess by other battles or scn's) I put an icon in place 32 of the bitmap and directed the oob to use it but got an error on loading the scn. also tried to change the icon number of one gun to an existing one ie 29 for 30 but still got an error. However when I tried the latter in the corinth game the icon changed and the game loaded.
I have read that hps have locked out the oob's in the later games and in the patches. Is this the problem. If so is there a workaround?
All the best,
Frank
Gen Mullins


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 10:49 am 
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Gen Mullins,

My apologies, I have not really fooled with the OOB's for Gettysburg or any of the others since the report came out you couldn't use any custom oobs. I thought they were using the oob names somewhere in the exe but it appears they are using some other kind of check since changing the unit picture number results in an error loading the scenario. Looks like you can modify the units.bmp but not the pointer the oob uses. I tried this in both Gettysburg and my updated Corinth and had the same results. My Corinth 1.01 game allows these types of changes since it was before the update to Corinth that installed them. Looks like you're stuck with the pictures the oob points to in all of the games.

Lt.Gen.Ken Miller
Veteran's Divsion
VIII / AoS


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 11:11 pm 
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Well gents the matter of Gettysburg oob will need deeper investigation what go's in must come out. However this block forced me to take some time and hunt down various things. I have now over 600 bitmap icons to use in the corinth alt games and also found a site and some software that lets me play the games without needing the original cd in the drive. This will save a lot of ware on the original disc.
Still searching.
Frank


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PostPosted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 5:43 am 
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<blockquote id="quote"><font size="3" face="book antiqua" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by old banshee</i>
<br />Well gents the matter of Gettysburg oob will need deeper investigation what go's in must come out. However this block forced me to take some time and hunt down various things. I have now over 600 bitmap icons to use in the corinth alt games and also found a site and some software that lets me play the games without needing the original cd in the drive. This will save a lot of ware on the original disc.
Still searching.
Frank
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

There is another alternative for the CDROM and that is having an HPS/Battleground all-in-one CDROM. This way you can just leave that CD in the drive and play all your favorite games.

For the MASTER CDROM for both HPS and BG games:
Here's instructions on how to make a single cd that will allow you to play all your games from it.

The way I have done it follows. I have 30 games on one disk and it is only taking up 230 MB. Basically there's room for every Tiller title that will be coming out for years to come.

Create a Working directory on your hard drive.
Drag and drop all of your game folders into it.
Make sure each game folder is named EXACTLY the way it is shows on the cd (Caps, abbreviations, spacing, etc.)
Go into each folder and delete all .bmp .doc .hlp .wav files.
I have left the sub-directories in place, but I'm not convinced you need them. (YOU CAN LEAVE THE SUB-FOLDERS IF YOU WANT TO)
Then burn your cd. (DO NOT burn the temp working folder.)Make sure all the game folders are at the root of the CD, don't grab the working directory with them inside of it, as that won't work.

You can keep the working folder intact once you are done, that way when a new game comes out you just have to repeat the process for that one title and can then burn a new cdrom to use.

The above also works for ALL BG titles.




<b><font color="gold">Ernie Sands
LtGen, CO XXIII Corps, AoO
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President, Colonial Campaigns Club
</b></font id="gold">


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