Ideas and questions for the ECP, CoC, and the FDF - MOD teams

[makkaramies]

Hello everybody!

I served in the Finnish military 94-95. so I have some real life experience to back up my points of wiew. IÂ've played OFP for meny years now and tried to keep up with the latest upgrades and so on. ;D

First topics:

Bullet hits on the water surface (snow/ ice)?
Bullet hits on the wet ground on wet places, or during wet weather (snow/ice)??
Exploding ordnance hits on water (snow/ice)

I think that this is the most important effect that is missing from the OFP allmost completely. Somebody (ECP) has tried to do little about this but the results are quite eerh... how can I say this, well bad. It is surprising to me because now days the game actually starts to be quite realistic. Some  modÂ's are simply fantastic ;D and they have put amazing attention to detail, visual effects and functionality. But sometimes I wonder if anybody has ever seen even pictures of the things that happen in real life situation. Example 12,7 AT tracer rounds hitting sand or hard groud from 600m, or 100m range? The "cloudlets" of the game are not accurate effects compared to the real thing, not even close. But in the game they are ... I guess they are ok, just too small. When people can do amazing realistic effects aroud other realism facts, why this is so difficult to produce?

[makkaramies]

HELLO AGAIN!

Second topics:

Back in the days... ;D in the military I had the opportunety to train and fire with quite wide range of different weapons in the Finnish military.
In the OFP people have done a great job with the weapon systems available. ;D

But has any one of you guys ever fired live rounds from MG? I bet you have but why there is a very very important realism factor still unsolved
That is when you take a your rambo style supressive fire rounds on target, lets say 200 metres. and the target is standing still in font of a little hill or something. You know that most of the bullets dont penetrate the ground or the target. You cant see them all but you can see the tracer rounds. They are bouncing of the ground in all directions, some of them go far and fast, and some remain spinning on the ground, you know what I mean. In the game no body ever gets hit this way. That is not realistic, is it?? In real life bullets are buncing of from metall, sand, wood, and allso water, depending of the fire angle, range, caliber, and the type of the round.

Is it possible to make the bullets randomly bounce of surfaces, change direction and speed, or is it too complex cpu -power eater thing to do?
I think this would make people really impressed and the visual effect/realism would kick ass ;D

[makkaramies]

HELLO ITÂ'S ME THE SAUSAGEMAN AGAIN ;D


Third topic of the day:

This is basically for the artillery makers.
Well lets start with the CoC- people. You have made fantastic modÂ's.
Your artillery works great but one thing is certainly missing:
The different artillery rounds explosion killer effects are basically based on presure wave effect, depending the size and type of the rounds/shells, am I right or wrong?
Anyway that how it seems to go when I play.

In real life even the smallest ap mortar rounds explode with killer shrapnels flying up to 200 meters. None of your artillery rounds have killed/wounded me that way from a distance yet. The explosions shure look like there is a lots of things flying in the air, but, only direct or nearby hits kill, and only with "preasure wave"? Adding to that As far as I know, direct hits from mortar can tare the whole body to peaces. In the game the soldiers are flying with all "fingers and toes" still on their right places after getting direct hit from a bomb or tank shell.

Can you do something to this?maby camcreate one or two mines/Bettys, etc inside the explosion to shoot around killer shrapnells ?? what about flying bodyparts?

The explosions of your heavy artillery rounds are really far far away from the real thing. can you make them look at least 2 or 3 times bigger, then they would start kicking serious ass. ok ;D

You Have allso created a fantastic collection of mines. Claymores are the finest!!! ;D The other thing is that when the Claymore goes off, the little "cloudlets" are quite... well looks like little stones are trown at you. But itÂ's ok when its firing from hilltop far away. ItÂ's not a long range weapon.

cheers mates!!! ;D Sorry about my bad english....

[KTottE]

Note:
All three threads have been merged into one.

No need to create three threads to discuss issues that are clearly related.

edit
I also moved it here, to Scripting Ideas since that's what it is.

[penguinman]

well 2 of those topics I have posted about before.

first off the second one, the tracers ricocheing,
im sorry but it was concluded that it is impossible with out some serious scripting.
I know exactly how to do it but i will save my breath because by the time the brave scriptor who trys finishes that one, ofp2 will be out.

the first one: about the dirt spraying up and stuff
i posted about that one, but I wasent able to get results because i did not have an example picture of this effect.
So if you can find me a picture of dirt spraying up from where a bullet hits, and it must be dirt or sand. then i can get you some results. as that wont be to hard to script.

The third one as you said that i got a very violent picture in my mind of an arty strike, worse than saving private ryan.

And i think i got just the thing to make realistic violence.
whenever sombody is killed by an explosion

what we need:

severed limbs and torso, they need to be very gross to look at upclose with great chunks of bloody meat hanging off them. a bunch off different softball sized chunks of meat.
with the same violence and blood as the limbs. and some assorted organs.

what to do:
make a script,
when ever sombody is killed  by an explosion very swiftly(about a 10/th of a second) delete the body and camcreate a bunch of the limbs and meat chunks and organs(maby 2 arms and 1leg, 3 softball sized meat chunks and 1 torso) in the deleted bodys place. these will be launched by the explosion and will fly through the air maby give them a little spin.
there you go.
i think that covers this.

 Administrator:i think you should move this to advanced scripting section
"people need to learn that money is worthless.its what you buy with it that has value" *this is what i live by*
what that means is you shouldnt keep all you money and not buy anything. because once you die you loose the opertunity to buy things. buy stuff and make your self happy. you could be the richest person in the world but still live like a bum

[makkaramies]

Thanks for your reply penguinman ;D

So you have tried to do your self, or did you made questions to people about the rounds and explosions hitting water/snow?
What was the answer/reaction to that?
 
Is that allso as difficult to do as the ricocheing stuff? I wonder why? Because people have made fex: some helicopter effects hovering or flying low above water and blowing white water around the surface quite nicely. Secondly even the games default PBR:s look really good when doing high speeds with white water animated on both sides of the boat? Whats with the explosions then?
Or am I too stupido to get this trough my thick skull ;D

Did you allso ask, or have you made experiments with explosions spreading shrapnells? Or do you know anybody else who has scripts for this, maby CoC? Is it possible to camcreate fex: CoC:s bouncing bettys inside explosions?

Pictures for you... bullets hitting... hmm....
I dont own a weapon, and none of my friends either, so itÂ's not that simple to do.... ItÂ's winter in Finland so the outdoor firing ranges are are not too populated... Anyway the safety regulations are quite heavy... hmm....
The only possibility that comes in my mind now, is that I would have to sign up for a volunteer weekend rehersal training trip for Finnish reservists and, then get myself to the live assault riffle shooting range... do some serious crawling... and sneaking... close to under and behind the targets..... huh.... where a big bunch of OLDFARTS are TRYING to hit their tables....would get me killed or courtmarshalled.... NO FUCKING WAY MAN
Sorry got little carried away there ;D

I would be satisfied if the bullet hit animations just would look bigger or higher with a littlebit dust floating after. Specially the 7,62 and 12,7:s and ofcourse the miniguns.... ;D 5,56 caliber hits are just about bearable as they are now...
No sweat dude If you really need pictures, then I recommend watching CNN or BBC NEWS Irak stuff... and there are some good modern warmovie/documentary DVD:s that have some quite realistic effects/pictures...
INTERNET.... ;D you know...

Your ideas about increasing serious violence in the explosions is disturbing... ;D but I like it a lot, and for a realistic wargame this should be done! ;D (allso in the OFP2.) The realistic feel and violence effects/sounds are important things that create exitement and stress(in a good way) to make me to play this game. "Knowledge is pain..."

IÂ'm newbie in scripting so I suck at it, and IÂ'm old dude, so IÂ'm sloowwly getting in to it. I Play Drums for a living, not computers... ;D ;D

Hey by the way, has enybody checkÂ'd out lately the Nightcrawlers mod? Few pages back there is a topic about more wounded less death. There were very very good stuff about getting wounded.... ;D ;D

Oh shit.. I type too much. CHEERS MATE!!  
   

[Dinger]

Artillery:
the problem with shrapnel is that we have to soft-code it.  In the mines we found a way to do this with small AP shrapnel; even with some refinements we have that can speed up the AP explosions several times, it's still too slow to do artillery shrapnel this way: there's just too much of it, and the way it flies isn't very realistic (drag doesn't really work in OFP).

As for the explosions, the UA 1.0 explosions are default OFP.  For 1.1, we've enlisted some former artillery professionals to make big clouds of junk. If you run 1.1 (currently in testing) with the WGL mod, the results are both more impressive and lighter on the CPU/GPU than OFP stock explosions.

[penguinman]

i dont understand by what you mean as soft code.

you dont need to actually put pieces of shrapnal in the air.
from my experience there really invisible and dont make a wizz sound if they go by u. u guys have to remember, go with the game not against it.

its easy to simulate shrapnel w/ out having to make it.
you just script.
eg:                                   and : SD = setDammage

any units 5m or less from an arty explosion are sd 1
with a 1/5 chance of sd 0.65

any units 5.0001-10m from explosion have random sd of from 0.4 - 1     with a 1/3 chance of 0 sd

any man 10.0001-15m from an arty explosion have a random sd from 0.2 - 0.57 w/ a 1/5th chance of sd 1 and a 1/2 chance of sd 0

any man 15.0001 - 20m distance from an arty explosion are random sd 0 -  0.3   with a 1/8th chance of sd 1 and a 2/3 chance of sd 0

any man from 20m - 50m from explosion is givin random sd from 0 - .15 with a 3/4 chance of sd 0 and a 1/40th chance of sd 1

this may seem like very deadly arty but remember.

1. this is for the bigest arty shell the 105mm
2. in battle if you are within 25m of a shell you are pepered with shrapnel ranging from mostly smaller than pea sized fragments to very rare golf ball size fragments, remember the closer u get the more and bigger fragments u take.
follow those figures exactly and you will have very reallistic arty. remember to include the fraction "Chance" miracle survivals, and very unlucky 1/40th chance deaths from 50m.

thanks
i hope you guys will trust me and just try it.
there shouldnt be any camcreated shrapnel, or bullets, or what ver you guys were using. ;D
keep up the good work.

[Dinger]

I gotta disagree.  SetDammage is well and good but the problem is that
A) you can't read how much health someone has to begin with, only a percentage.
B) there's no distinction between in cover and out of cover.  If you hide behind a building, shrapnel should hit the building. One of the main advantages of using UA is that everything interacts with the terrain.  If someone fires HE/QUICK at a hill and you're on the reverse slope, chances are the shell's going to hit short of the ridge, or plop below you. If they fire HE/VT, and the thing fuzes just at ridge height, you're going to have more problems. But if they fire VT into trees, the things will fuze too high, and be largely ineffective.  Any shrapnel system we adopt has to be at least as robust; otherwise we're not adding to the realism; we're detracting from it.
C) HE effects are only the beginning. We've got to worry about APICM and DPICM fields, which involve a ton of shrapnel flying around.

The largest shell we use in UA right now is 155mm. I have seen attempts to measure the LOS to each unit in range, and that might be a viable way to do it, but it still seems processor-intensive.

"Soft Code" in the sense that we have to write it in our stuff. Shrapnel effects would work really well if they were coded directly into the game engine, since BIS can make stuff run a lot faster inside the engine than we can through scripting.

[penguinman]

good points

but the concussion of a shell is going to collapse the building and killl the player anyways.

the hill, i dont think there is any hill steep and thin enough for it to be in my sd range.

and about the cover thing: almost all arty is airbursts these days. the air burst is coning to kill you unless your in a tunnel or somthing. and thats impossible in ofp

if there was it would look more like a tower than a hill. and the player would never be able to climb this so called ridge.

what do u mean only get set dammage as a pecentage?
in a few secs you can turn a percentage in to decimal and add them.

eg:     the player has 50% dammage already that is .50 and say he was close enough to the shell to get a random dammmage and he got sd .50 then he would have a total of sd 1 (.50+.50)

like i said just trust me and try it and then u will see.
you guys are fighting the game engine too much, just go with the engine. it will always beat u, u cant win fighting it. weather it beats you with lag, wears u out so u give up, or just drives you crazy when u try to create millions of tiny bullets through scripting.

just believe me and try my idea. please ;D

[Dinger]

Not all artillery is airbursts.  For example, if I'm trying to hit some trucks parked under forest canopy, I'll use a delay fuze thank you very much.  If I want to take down some bunkers, I'll use a concrete penetrating fuze. And if I want to pop some tanks, I'll use a sensor-fuzed artillery shell.
If you fire HE/VT HA at a ridgetop, the airburst might not be as damaging as a round of quick would.
If you plop DPICM in a forest, the trees are going to absorb a lot of shrapnel and aren't going to have the same effect as if you fired them at a target in the open.
units have a certain number of "points" set by the armor value. We have no way of knowing what those points are. All we know is the percentage.
If we didn't fight the game engine, we wouldn't have artillery at all. We can, and do, beat it.

[penguinman]

Ok but..
1. you have only argued against one of my points,
2. U should get a basic working arty shrapnel system before u start on different types of fusses and stuff like that, it is pointless. the player wont notice what type of fuse is in the round. Hes not gona find out how many pieces of shrapnel hit him and then get a book and see if thats realistic for that type of round and fuse. all the player will notice is that there is arty fire, and that there is shrapnel flying(even if its simulated with sd.)

 the real unrealistic thing is your plan. Your trying to do somthing that 1. is really impossible.
and 2. that if u ever do acomplish it it wont be aprieciated.

and last but not least.
3. u wernt a fire control officer for an arty section of 105s
so u best just trust me and use the set dammage thing.

[Planck]

the real unrealistic thing is your plan. Your trying to do somthing that 1. is really impossible.
and 2. that if u ever do acomplish it it wont be aprieciated.

I was under the impression that the CoC UA was already done and much appreciated already?



Planck

[Dinger]

The only thing we haven't accomplished is a proper shrapnel system, and we've approximated that by tinkering with the levels of shell damage. We still don't get those chance hits from a couple hundred meters away, which would really help in suppression, but we are working with people to add in additional artillery effects like these (suppression, confusion, and so on). Basically, a system that just works for a few HE rounds isn't going to satisfy me.
As far as it being really impossible, well it depends. I didn't go out and make separate Mechanical and Electronic time fuzes. But pretty much the major stuff is there, and it does make a difference. Delay fuzes drop right through the trees and flip trucks parked underneath. VT stuff gives a pretty reliable burst if it's free of clutter. I wouldn't recommend trying to kill anything with HA/TIME. Hell, we even got our copperhead footprints pretty close to the real thing.
All that stuff does make a difference, but most people don't care or need to know about it
and you're right. I've not spent time with the real stuff.  That's why I work closely with a former FAC, a former coastal artillery officer, and a former ANGLICO, consult with a current FDC guy, a former M109 gunner trainer,a couple former MLRS operators, and a former mortarman, among others. I'm always interested to hear ideas and concerns; I'll just tell you why I don't like 'em sometimes

[benreeper]

Please no SetDammage!

CoC & UA are amazing.
--Ben