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Author Topic: (Review Completed) [SP] Dak To ('Nam mission)  (Read 11072 times)

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Offline Hawkins

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #45 on: 15 Jun 2005, 10:37:42 »
Thank you Mathias! :)

I will curse that ciggy error to hell. ;D I'll look into it, thoroughly. :)
And about missions, you can count on that there will be more 'Nam missions from me. ;) This is just the calm before the storm...

Offline burroughs

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #46 on: 22 Jun 2005, 13:53:57 »
Hey,Hawkins - where's the HawkNam?I mean - how much longer is it going to be offline?And when is the beginning of the storm?Any Ranger/MACV SOG missions ready to deploy me back into the steamy South Asian hell? ...
"...1st rule regarding SpetsNaz: you do not talk about SpetsNaz.  2nd rule is: you do not talk about SpetsNaz.  3rd rule is to obey the first two. ... "/ V.Suvorov, "SpetsNaz; the story behind the Soviet SAS."

Offline MrN

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #47 on: 29 Jun 2005, 00:11:53 »
Benchmark 6410, ECP, Vet mode, no super AI

Nice intro. Works well and is atmospheric.

All stuff in briefing was simple, well laid and to the point, no typo's that I noticed.

Mission starts and I get 2 sliders up. Hmmm. Sorry, no heroics from me, Friendly 1, Enemy 0.  :D
The choppers turn up in a very nicely choreographed move with lots of chopper dust. Love it! Move on and get ejected from chopper in an interesting way. Must have a look at that.  ;)

Can't report accurately how this started, suffice to say you had the desired effect of what appeared to be a fairly major battle going on. With no lag either. Chopper gets shot down and I lose most of my squad getting up the hill. Get to road and leader dies, so I'm in charge.

One niggle. Combat ambience. I'm not a big fan. In theory it should work but because it's a sound effect heard for 4 years or so it's a little tiring. Maybe a different sound effect could be used or just rely on the actual battle for the ambience.

Carry on towards the town and apart from a few scattered AK rounds going off it seems quiet. Get lazy and get whacked by a bunker. Hmmm, not noticed them. See custom death cam, nice.

Retry. This time doesn't go quite so well. Get injured pretty early on and most of my squad are down.  Crawl on my belly towards the town, take out the first bunkers and hear some DHSK fire. More bunkers, if you have constructed these, good job. They are evil.  :-X

My heart lifts when I see a med-tent and I start to crawl towards it and I'm introduced to Death-Cam again. Bah.

And again.
 
And again. X4

The downside to Death-Cam is that I can't get to retry quick enough. ;)

Finally clear the town and Hint box and radio message appear. I use this opportunity to finally try and get to the medtent. Get whacked by a loon by the med-tent. Harumph.

Also at this point notice a dude in the medtent and after healing I head towards the napalm to have a look and notice a MG sticking out of a wall. Whack it.

Don't know what to say about the next bit apart from it was very very messy and me getting very acquainted with Mr Death-Cam. Also wondering if you've played an evil trick with those difficulty sliders and made them the opposite of what I'm expecting.

Despite it being very addictive I have to call it a night. This needs a restart and hopefully more west will survive because I'm on my own and definitely feel outnumbered and outclassed. This is tough!

No bugs so far though. ;)
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

Offline Hawkins

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #48 on: 29 Jun 2005, 12:30:51 »
Thanks for playing MrN! :)

The sliders should be the right way around, I've checked this many times. In fact I just checked it, it was the right way around. ;D
Didn't pay that much attention to the combat ambience, I use my own set of sounds in OFP. :P
It's good to hear that you played with ECP, since I myself made the mission with that. It ran smooth on my comp too and I didn't even get any ECP errors, so it's nice to hear that you made it out without any too. :)
Yes the downside of the deathcam is indeed that the retry takes a bit longer to pop up. Though, that should encourage the player to try and stay alive. :P ;D
I'm glad you enjoyed the mission! This is just a small "throw your brain out of the window and kill them all" type of mission, a remake of my first one which was made back in the day when OFP 'Nam was just a newborn child. :) Thanks for the excellent feedback!

Offline MrN

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #49 on: 29 Jun 2005, 20:08:55 »
Grrrr. Determined to finish this but you appear to have implemented a hunt MrN script that I have yet to find.

"that should encourage the player to try and stay alive"
Trust me I'm trying.  ;)

The hint box that indicates the area is clear lies, might be an idea to just bring in the reinforcements rather than having messages.

First napalm strikes to the far west.  Second napalm strikes to the North east but doesn't seem effective. I don't even see or hear the plane I just hear a faint "Karump" as the bombs go off. How about, dare I say it, giving target control for the napalm to the player. I've been playing around with LCD's Airstrike + Napalm (map click) script which is pretty cool. The only downside is that you need the napalm.pbo addon. But lets face it, people playing ‘Nam missions should have it anyway.

This is a nasty nasty mission. I like it!
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

Offline Mikero

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #50 on: 29 Jun 2005, 21:08:00 »
Quote
The hint box that indicates the area is clear lies, might be an idea to just bring in the reinforcements rather than having messages.


I felt the same thing. I was busy rooting out a few of many bunkers with all these messages going on that clearly weren't ahem, quite right, and then saving my backside from loon attacks north and south. I felt the mission would flow better if it all just happened.

It's a great mission Hawkins, one of the best Nam ones out there, probably the best. It's spoilt by messy ending bits. So many Nam's are poorly done with expectations on the author and players part that the eye candy alone is good enough when it isn't. This mission is fierce and I know it's been a long time since you first developed it,  that you're into far more interesting things, but I hope you finish it off. It's way above average.
Just say no to bugz

Offline Hawkins

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #51 on: 30 Jun 2005, 11:00:32 »
Thanks for the continuing interest guys! :) This mission is getting better by every beta test you make.
I've removed the hints, they surely were too much, considering that there's radio traffic.
I've taken the F4 out, completly. The napalm it has just seems to be way too buggy to use. The fire effect seems not to be tied to the bomb itself, which usually leads in the fire burning somewhere else and the bomb dropping miles from it. I'm considering of implementing the other napalm, by shogun. I probably wont let the player deside the drop positions, though. ;)
Now a few questions for you testers:
Do you want to have more control over your weapon? If yes, I can change the mags to non-HD for the player only. Though, if he picks up mags from dead loons, then he would have HD mags.
Should the mission be longer? Maybe a small submission where you need to go on a seek and destroy mission to destroy fleeing NVA? If there's enough men left after the attack, that is. ;)

Again, thanks for testing! :)

EDIT: Hmm I lied a bit, I didn't completly take the F4 off, I still use it. It just doesn't drop its own nape now. :)
« Last Edit: 30 Jun 2005, 11:26:50 by Hawkins »

Offline Mikero

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #52 on: 30 Jun 2005, 12:05:27 »
@Hawkins

I have a few dissapointments with nam missions in general. They are:

loons are almost always past stupid. They invariably sit there waiting to be shot or can't see you and run right past, or worse, your team ignores them.

the topogrophy, the landscape: nam causes targeting to go out to lunch. You can visually see the buggers at 70 metres but nothing can 'identify' them. This is particularly noticeable on any terrain with wispy ferns eg. It's as if the engine treats everything below 2 meters depth as building.

The weapons are attrocious. Using high dispersion (HD) was I believe introduced by BAS and while good in that it prolongs a firefight on *good* weapons, with this crud, it just makes it unmerciful.

The engine appears to be working so hard on the visuals for the island (and the island class underneath the island, in fact three in total) that it sacrifices game play. Basically, there's no crunch left, to give loons of either side any smarts at all. This is almost bearable with tweaks, for loons, but I've yet to meet a vehicle that can go in a straight line, let alone shoot.

You 'got round' many of these issues by effectively removing armor (the plane *would* be an issue here and a big one), by using town terrain (and therefore eliminating grass 'buildings', and, somehow, i don't know how, giving *some* loons *some* fierceness. There are however many loons that are not fierce, are just plain stupid, and cause the hunt the last loon bug. This is noticable on bunkers extreme west and extreme south. All other places are inexplicably unpleasant (that's great), particularly, the center mgun. SO whatever you've done, you're three quarters on the money.

I'm also playing, like you, the riverboat mission here. It's in the same class as yours, thematically immersive, genuine feeling of US grunts and the VC, but it too suffers from attrocious ai, much worse than yours, and I'm sufficiently p*ssed at it that I doubt 'nam has very much to offer game wise, only candy wise.

I haven't played enough nam to 'know' if ai is always this crappy, I mean real crappy. I hope you can restore my faith a bit and prove me wrong because I'm not inclined to bother with this Island ever again. For sp players, there's too much frustration and it might be consigned to MP roles, much like 'grasslands' is.
Just say no to bugz

Offline MrN

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #53 on: 30 Jun 2005, 12:52:33 »
Not looking forward to the kicking I'm going to get then.  :P

Quote
Do you want to have more control over your weapon?
Not sure if this is going to be useful because as you say any ammo picked up is going to be HD. Anyway that's part of the fun, the tension of not being able to hit anything.

Quote
Should the mission be longer?
Only if it's not any harder!
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

Offline Hawkins

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Re:'Nam: Dak To (SP)
« Reply #54 on: 30 Jun 2005, 13:02:40 »
@Mikero
That's some good feedback! I think you should post that to the VTE forums too.  :)
Jungle Everon is indeed outdated. It was a groundbreaker when it came out, but now it's just another "old" island. The new ones have more dense foliage, with some working and some not. It's a matter of how the objects were made. Depending on the development of the model, the AI can see or it cannot see through the foliage. This has been a pain for us for sometime now, since there just doesn't seem to be a good way around this with the current engine. If you place a square, the AI wont see through cracks or leafs that make openings like fore example a texture with leafs, even though the player does. But, once the AI detects the player, the knowsabout goes high and the AI will see the player even though he is hiding behind the "square". After time the knowsabout will go down, but it wont drop to zero even if you teleport the guy to the other side of the island. So, once the AI sees the player or any other enemy, they will shoot, and will keep on shooting if they have a clear sight and there's no solid objects on the way... I hope that made some sense. :D
So basically we can't create a "good" terrain for jungle maps. There will be problems, but with some tweaking (as you mentioned Mikero), we can at least try to make the 'Nam experience as good as we can. It is possible for a player to hide in a grass patch without the AI seeing you even though he walks right past you (for example SOG and other recon teams in 'Nam had these situations). That has happened to me many times, and I can tell you, my heart was pounding like crazy when there was a 9-man NVA squad stopping to take a break right in the middle of our 4-man recon team. :) (In OFP, of course. ;D )
I'm pretty sure your faith will be (at least to some extent) restored. :)


Edit: This mission has been reviewed and is available from the Missions Depot.
« Last Edit: 02 Jun 2009, 01:54:13 by Walter_E_Kurtz »