Panzer Elite vs. Combat Mission!

[Caspian]

Well, the PESE comes with the first five Ostpack scenarios. I've downloaded the rest and am just downloading the winterpack. No problems so far. I've tested it afew times and the only thing I've noticed is that some of the original wavs aren't used such as conformation of changing formation.. I'm hoping that I just have to copy these from the main directory or will it be better to download a new wav pack?

[klesh]

Nope, thats intentional. For me, the repetitiveness of "Loading special AP...click.... Still loading Speacial AP.....' etc becomes monotonous. Therefore some of the crew waves and other sound effect have been altered. You'll come to like it. Also, keep an eye out for one or two of their scenarios with the special 'seamless' terrain. I can't recall which they are right now. Pravorot perhaps?

Anyway, when doing the terrain for a mod, or in this case even the actual off the shelf graphics, there is a tendancy for the 'auto dithering' that is, the blurring of the seams between terrain tiles. Unfortunately I think the PE terrain generator messes up the process, leaving us with a very patchy looking terrain.

One genious over at the forums tested and amazingly found out that if you match the edge pixels of each tile with the next in PE's version of Terrain1.gif you get what most of us can only assume what the game was intended to look like.

Problem is... the procedure to edit the exiting terrain file takes absolutely forever. I mean it. Tedious as you can imagine. There for little work has been done to release 'seamless' versions of every existing scenario. (as one minor alteration between 2 scenario's gfx means another 40 hour project to edit the terrain file)


I'll see about doing a little mock up to illustrate the ingame effects. They are startling... Oh what could've been with this game... really.

-FMK.

[klesh]

Crashes with mods enabled are often something not jiving within the mod itself. BUT, sometimes its just good ol PE acting up. Its like an old friend that stiffs yuou here and there, but you go back because he's such a good guy anyway.

Often you can talk to the modmakers on the PE forum and discuss specific missions and lockups. I dont fancy the bitmods or monty vs rommel all that much so I am not terribly familliar with them.

1)First install the Ostpak Mod from your PESE bonus disk.

2) Dowload the Errata document to fix the poor auto-installation that just occured.

3) Run mod to verify things are working.

4) As Caspian said the time of the PESE release, there were only 5 Ostpak scenarios finnished. Here is a full list of them. I think you can avoid the huge PESE Ostpak patch found there, as all it does is fix the errors you just fixed with the Errata. I haven't been arsed to DL it either

Aditionally, I will suggest the brand new Winterpak by the same team. It goes 'into' the Ostpak mod and makes everything updated to the latest and greatest.

http://panzer.jowood.de/~cotton/Winterpak.exe
http://panzer.jowood.de/~cotton/PrikolotnoyeWP1.exe
http://panzer.jowood.de/~bobr/SychevkaWP0v1.exe
http://panzer.jowood.de/~bobr/WinterstormWP00v1.exe
http://panzer.jowood.de/~bobr/ManhayWP9v1.exe


The later Ostpak exe's install to the PESE directory path, whislt the older ones excecute to the old PE psygnosis directories. So be sure to make sure things are straight. Also, it is very important that when you are installing mods, scenarios and such, that you have no mods loaded with the Mod enabler. This is very very important.

Prepare to possibly re-install PE if things get messed up in the installings etc.

Aditionally, here is a shot of the seamless lanscape as Kampfgruppe Klesh assaults the village of Pravorot.

-FMK.