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Author Topic: Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself  (Read 1374 times)

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Mr.Pibb

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 Hey

 This has been racking my brain for years, missions that are so utterly immersive and expansive, realistic that they stand out above all the rest, missions that continue on for hours/days, mp or single player.

 I do understand the huge amount of time and effort required to pull of these style missions, and to even call them missions would not really be right, more like seperate 'games' in themselves.

 A few missions have been released that have come close to my idea of what a really great ofp mission could be, but what I dream of can be done, and hasent yet.

 Heck, I even spent huge amounts of time writing up a detailed description of this sort of mission, a mission which really didnt even have a definite end nor actual 'primary' objectives, aside from trying to survive and maybe even prosper within a very 'volitile' and alive enviornment. But as time wore on through making the mission I realized that I personally no longer have the time nor the energy to work on a mission for the next 6 months after having just recently spent 3 years working on my completed GR mod, that alone was difficult to fit in with my busy work schedule and vowed to never again.

 So, heres my rough description of what would be nice to see in a mission, I wont actually describe the mission I spent time starting on in case it actually does get done someday(yea right :P).

 Entire island utilized
 An alive enviornment, not just a few guys hanging out in towns, real stuff goin on with a purpose. Convoys. And not just dumb whatever convoys, give every action a reason. Convoy moving from a town to another town to transport and sell goods? Convoy moving to carry troops to reinforce a position? Convoy moving arms and ammo? And stuff like that, the convoy dosent just get from A - B and thats it, like to see it ALL - guys get out, give em a continuous purpose to their cause, maybe moving to and from the supply vehilces as if unloading the supplies.
Civilian actions, realistic to their situation.  Interactual scenarios would be nice too. Another words not just civilians thrown around to and fro to make it seem more 'immersive' , give em a purpose, give em a real life.
A heck of alot more involved in the mission than just killing, the scripting possibilites for ofp are almost limitless. CTI proved that. Make a huge realistic money system, where you can goto certain places and buy, just like in CTI, and even sell.
 And so the players can interact with this alive enviornment, join fights, fight eachother if desired, buy weapons/vehicles, explore, go on adventures for rewards that are usefull, and much more all in a mission that may be able to go on and on. And of course realistic negative reactions should be implemented for players attempting to ransack freindly areas, to remove cheating possibilities and to also allow total freedom with realistic consequences. And players can accumulate money and get better weapons/vehicles etc.

 And oh yea, only 1 or 2 ai instead of having 6-12 guys to try to manage. If the enviornment is done right in this sort of mission it should easily be enough and not need to provide such massive armies, which would only distract players from being immersed in the experience. And also allowing one or two ai would put a high price on finding good, well skilled ai to join you in such a mission, rather than having a dumb soldier that cant shoot strait. Of course this also helps manage lag and individualizes the mission and lastly gives everyone a chance even if they arent experts in strategically managing their ai yet still allows ai avaliable to efficiently use tanks and such.

 I'll put this bluntly: No mindless unit spawning. I have seen enough of this in missions that would have been much better without it. Spawning units can be good for lag, but dammit if a unit is gonna be spawned, it should be done in a manner where that spawned unit will function as if it Had Been There The Whole Time, thats how its supposed to be. Spawning units should be a very presise science where the player should Never know there was any units spawned, nor should a player be 'jipped' of a righteous victory because of unfair unit spawning. I wont go any farther on that.

 As I stated, an alive enviornment. Some sort of alive 'system' that really works, and keeps on working. Towns trading with eachother, ai groups waging war at times that players can get involved with, the list goes on, an alive island, the real deal.

 And im not typing this to bash missions that are out there, Im typing this cause I cant find it in me to do this thing myself and I really want to play a mission like this, it can be done, this I do know. The mission that I started work on thats similiar to this sort has already been described in detail in text documents, its all doable, but I cant spend that sort of time on mission modding anymore.

 Anyhow, its all whatever. This is just a concept for missions that I will probably never see come true because most modders dont have the time to do it all. Back to looking for a good cti game online  ;D .
« Last Edit: 20 Mar 2005, 04:57:42 by Mr.Pibb »

PrejudiceSucks

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Re:Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself
« Reply #1 on: 20 Mar 2005, 15:43:51 »
I have also tried making a mission like that, and it is incredibly hard to keep going with.

I made it in FDF mod, so that I had a far greater choice of islands/troops etc. and also downloaded a mod which adds animals, which is quite nice for the rural environments.

The problem I found with it was really all to do with making it a challenge without it being too hard.

I kept trying different things, like a campaign-esque type mission base, but it kept either getting too out of hand (like the US getting involved, with chinook landings one I joined the army (as a Finnish soldier) and got to a high enough rank) or being too empty, really.

It's hard to make a mission feel realistic with the current waypoint system so that civilians look like they are being active, and the army (in this case the Russians) patrolling areas which were 'off limits', but full of cool weapons etc. without it seeming like they were just robots, patrolling in a constant square.

Still, it had a nice little system of saving, in which you saved in 'safehouse' areas, such as your house, a few barracks (if you joined the army) and other areas like certain garages in cities.

As I said, though, there was a certain point where it bridged the gap from 'immersive but dangerous' to 'ridiculous'. But I did quite like the music selection on the radio and the little 'Personal Messages' system of hints. That was nice.

Mr.Pibb

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Re:Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself
« Reply #2 on: 20 Mar 2005, 17:46:02 »
 Ya, I hear ya on keeping things 'balanced' as to not make the mission too hard. Thats why I envision a mission that allows you to choose multiple avenues, where there are many 'missions' within the mission that all vary in difficulty and often will reveal rewards in form of weapons/vehicles or even cash. The mission I started was designed so in certain instances it would be extremely hard to accomplish certain tasks, unless the player were to join with other ai units in an attack, therefore not to allow players to be able to ransack enemy bases too quickly. But then there is also all sorts of less diffucult opportunities, like seeking a rogue band of rebels in the wilderness and eliminating them or even just finding their camp and therefore recieving a reward from the ai group that was seeking them(because that rebel group was assaulting their convoys or something ;D).
 A mission as i said that would provide enough immersion that players wouldnt be motivated to just attempt to run around and try to kill everything (which would indeed be extremely difficult) but rather would be more interested in the adventure, the money concept would be very helpful in making the mission good, where the difference between someone having an AK47 and an M16 would be substantial therefore accumulating money to buy a good weapon would be a motivation in itself, and vehicles, etc.
 But yes, if the only real objective was to kill everything enemy on the map then the mission would prolly get old quick, which is why the more realistic and alive the enviornment is, the more people will be interested to spend their time adventuring, exploring and aquiring wealth through 'missions' within the mission.
 Id love to just copy and paste the mission description from my text document to here, but I then fear someone taking my exact mission design, but the general concept has been described about as much as I can.
 Another good example of a concept similiar to what I am describing would be the very old role playing game Twilight 2000. If anyone actual played around with that way back when, they'd know what Im talkin about. A military style role playing game, thats really not a role playing game but merely fit into that catagory, a game that set you in a volitile enviornment full of danger, twists and turns where you basically learned to survive and attempt to prosper through accomplishments and most importantly just had an adventure!
 And I gotta go lol.


DBR_ONIX

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Re:Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself
« Reply #3 on: 20 Mar 2005, 19:03:29 »
The CessnaFun creator done something similar to this (A lot less millatry-orinted tho). I.e make everything with a purpose..
He manged it quite well, but.. while hosting it online my FPS never got over 5.. I have a 2.8GHz, 512mb ram, nVida GeForce FX 5600 graphics card (128MB), and it still laged a LOT (It laged less in single player or if your not hosting, but still...)

The only way not to do this is to have a script that adds all the AI into an array, with their locations and ammo (Not gonna be easy..), and spawns them when the player is within x meters of them. You could maybe do this on the guards, or everyone in a patrol apart form the team leader?

The problem with that is if you play it in coop, even with 2 players, you have to spawn two areas worth of people. What happens if one player flys away form the other, will the people disapear even though the other player can see them, etc etc..

What you were saying about having 2 man patrols etc could work, espicaly if you use one of the smaller islands. Capture the Island worked quite well, and only started lagging (while hosting) after sevral hours. It had 2 to 4 people on average in each village thing, and some had none at all. I think what makes it lag is OFP trying to keep track of which houses, bushes, trees etc are flattened, where that bit crater was, where the heli wreck is etc..

The idea could work, I played around with a mission (Can't remeber the name, it was sevral years ago) in that you were a group of 5 (Works in coop or single player), there was patrols of ~4, on Malden, you got droped of from one of the islands, and there was some helicopter's flying around. In the forests there were deserted (resistance) camps that had weapons, there was 2 bases with enemy helis and stuff.. It was an open mission, you could radio in an extraction helicopter (I think it just took you back to the base, can't remeber)..

The idea could work, as long as you
1) Use a delete body script.
2) Use as few enemys as you can, while still keeping it looking like there wasn't an apoclypes 10 minutes ago..
3) Not use to many triggers and scripts with @condion=true. use
#loop
?(condtion):code
~1
goto "loop"
instead
4) Use similar addons (I.e don't use 2 T72s, 3, T80s, 4 BMP2s, 6 BMPs, use 5 T72s, 10 BMPs) so the poor computer doesn't have to keep loading new addons everytime you go into another village..

I was thinking of making something like this, with a nice base with armoury, heli pads, a weapons range etc so the pilots while waiting have something to do, etc.. But me and a few others got removed from the clan (I'll not start :P), and I've not got round to starting a new one yet (Hmm...), but basicly the heli pilots would fly the squad in, then either return to the base, and practise shooting, maybe someting stupid like a radio etc, or provide air support. And then return and pick up the squad, drop them off somewhere else. And have a hostpital where you go when your killed etc.. Infact I might make that :P

The idea is plausbale, the biggest problem is making it not boring.. Making it coop is a big help, so you have people to talk to, but then you kinda need a dedicated server to host it, as the host gets lagged down a lot (Can you tell I host a lot..? :P)

Anyway, that's a long enough message...
- Ben

Mr.Pibb

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Re:Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself
« Reply #4 on: 20 Mar 2005, 20:36:58 »
 Very nice read there Onix ;)

 Lag indeed would be the greatest of 2 enemies, other being time to finish the dang thing :P

 Indeed I use CTI as a reference all the time because it shows that some wild stuff really can be done and have lag managed. The mission I started working on utilizes a number of the CTI options: money and buying, towns takable for income, spawning ai in towns, and prolly more that I cant remember. So I went ahead and started with CTI as a modifiable templete and went from there. Triggerhappy got me the town grudge script which made freindly towns hate you if you killed someone, works great - and its a loop too. Basically reduced the number of towns to something like only 15 of em instead of the 20 some that were there, which significantly increased performance. Funny tho, as I realized theres so much, like you said, that can be done in the mission to reduce lag, and it all requires alot of work. Like changing the town grudge script to only start up for a town where a player killed a freindly in, by using killed event handlers on all townies, therefore initiating a loop script for that town that checks player distance from the town and hence may cause player to goto -100000 rating (renegade) if hes in the town. So theres an overhaul right there on a script that took some time just to get working right, which as is runs for each freindly town on each players computer at start (9 freindly towns).
 And the list goes on, a good money system is already incorporated within CTI but nonetheless would have to be altered to fit the new mission, a big job, complex stuff. Then the new town taking alterations, each player in essence is to his/her own side (even tho they are all west), everyone starts as seperate individuals at their own sperate camps and can interact with other players as they wish even in a hostile manner, its not coop. So the money system along with taking towns is then split up between 8 'sides' instead of the normal 2, each player has their own flag texture and their own individual money and income for their towns. The actual player 'side' that is identified by the scripts when a town has been taken is mostly complete (was neat seeing the new flag textures show for each player, after many hours of adding 8 sides to the CTI scripts) but the income changes needed to be made to allow each player his own income started looking like a huge challenge.
 Most of that stuff is really the hardest of the work that would take prolly months just to get the script backbone solid, then the actual building of the 'alive' enviornment and whatnot would begin, more months :P This isnt even including the fact I wanted to allow players to be able to sell weapons/vehicles/items, which of course isnt included in CTI.
 And not to mention as you stated that spawning units would really be the way to go, although there is a spawn script already that could be added to it would take alot of time.
 Thats how far I got, the town grudge thing works, the 8 seperate 'sides'- one for each player for taking towns works, figured out how to spawn factories at startup in 2 'merchant' towns for buying, and spent prolly about 3 days getting some of the CTI script removed that wouldnt be of use anymore (prolly at least another full 3 days to totally clean it up).
 And as I said, even the Town Grudge script would have to be altered as I have already seen a more efficeint way to do that, which would involve adding a killed event hander to every freindly townie (that would be alot)

 If you bothered to read this far you can probably see why I have quit on it, its like you said, it can be done, its just a matter of whos gonna spend that sort of time on a hobby?

 Neat thing I did notice was there was so far very little lag even with all the triggers and the new town grudge loop scripts running after having removed a good number of towns, and my computer as of now is only 1Ghz, 256 meg, 64 mb Geforce. But of course the additional ai units that would be added would change things, but thats what a mission like this is all about, changing and cutting back as the mission progresses to maintain a good framerate.

 Sorry for the long post

Offline Kendo J

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Re:Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself
« Reply #5 on: 22 Mar 2005, 15:41:19 »
check out my mission idea in my post (mission ideas) Roving Roadblocks, this is an entire map mission where you are a leader of 2 squads of  rangers and 2 blackhawks using  the COC command engine.

you have to do day to day tasks all the while you are called on to do special tasks...

it is meant to be "A day in the life of" a US Ranger mission. you will have things to do that your platoon does every day as well as specific missions that happen as the day unfolds.

it is not quite as imersive as you suggest, because some events happen only when objectives are completed. but many events are random and the western forces carry on with day to day operations regardless of your movements. It is the military, every one is issued with orders and you all have jobs to do!

Regards
Kendo

p.s. mission is still in beggining stages. Only a skeleton model is completed
« Last Edit: 22 Mar 2005, 15:42:38 by Kendo J »

Mr.Pibb

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Re:Maybe a good Idea but no motivation left to do it myself
« Reply #6 on: 22 Mar 2005, 21:06:54 »
 Thank you Kendo J

 Unfortunately I enjoy simplicity and I, when playing for fun(which I usually do) do terrible with managing ai and end up getting frustated, which is why I normally only seek missions that use only the player or a few additional ai, platoon control makes it too complex for me personally to enjoy, many other people like that sort of thing tho, its just me.

Btw - thanks to everyone who posted in here so far. As you might surmise I am awful picky considering all this stuff is free for download, but honestly aside from VBS there isnt another platform out there that is better than ofp, so I woudnt bother buying nothing anyhow. I guess the thing that bugs me is I KNOW THIS CAN BE DONE ::), and I dont think it really has, in fact I dont think it has ever been done in a game, not properly anyhow. And this platform is the one for it, VBS will be the next step as I hear OFP2 will basically be VBS with some alterations, which will only magnify the potential for such missions. I already emailed BIS with an entire detailed mission description for such a mission, but I doubt they will even mail me back (im used to it, RSE did the same for me ;D). And if all this time passes and no one comes up with this sort of mission, regardless of wether its an official addon or user created, then someone tell BIS I will do the thing for em as long as I can get a paycheck and I will quit my job that day and start, and I wont even do it for the money, I'd do it because I know it can be done and I think if the time was spent to do the missions as I can envision them they would be gems. Where I envision myself (a user) coming home from a hard days work, thinkin about switching on the ol puter for a neat game or 2 and to have something like this to play, a continuous mission that could be played for probably even weeks where the players can more less decide how hard its gonna be by what they decide to attempt to accomplish/do in the mission and still recieve some usefull reward for their successes (money/leftovers/etc), or heck, even just hanging around a merchant town (2 of em) and watching for events to occurr, I wanted to even put a couple of pubs here and there, not much interaction in the pubs, but able to do a few things there that wont be of any lag consequences, point being something different, or feeling a little advenurous and going off to explore some wilderness outland area maybe seeking a rogue band of rebels or just exploring. Once again I am probably making someones eyes and head hurt by now, sorry.

 I just got done finally playing some of Cessna Fun after having to download twenty some addons, and personally not impressed which is a shame becasue of the good remarks I have heard about it. I envisioned it to be where you go around, buy stuff, check things out, kinda realistically. Instead I have already found the author placed like 40 air vehicles allover the map for the player to jump in and carelessly take, which really destroys the concept of buying much of anything when you can steal a cobra without any consequences, why would I even bother visiting the gun store or anywhere else, I just walked up and took one of the best vehicles on the map in the first ten minutes of the game. And theres a number of other issues too, the concept of being able to interact with much of the 'enviornment' is ok, but I personally would never have put such a high price on it considering the lag, the conversations are pretty pointless and I'm sure their all initiated by triggers or loops that check distance to ai units, personally not worth the lag along with huge amounts of triggers I have seen in the editor for various purposes- better off having a more realistic enviornment with movement where interaction with that enviornment by use of triggers and loops is done by neccessity. The mission I was working on would have had very limited interaction with other ai, an alive enviornment with a plot that allowed for an almost endless amount meaningfull activity where players could interact muchly because of what is already givens for players in ofp - ie - join a convoy - get in a vehicle, no lag there - snipe an enemy - assist ai group in attacking enemy group - etc. The only primary places of interaction would be prolly one spot in each freindly town to be able to collect bounties, sign up to join that group in an fight and be able to collect reward for success in the fight, sign up to assist ai group with various tasks, like convoy protection, etc and collect upon completion. So there would just be one spot like this per town, which would be of course some sort of distance check, not 10 of these per town to interact with ai units and such, indeed it would be a nice extra but not worth the lag.

 Anyhow, once again sorry for the long post, I will shut up now. Spose I've said about all I can, maybe twice in some places.
« Last Edit: 22 Mar 2005, 22:11:35 by Mr.Pibb »