Comrades in Arms Discussion Board

Not quite finished yet, but I thought I should show what I've got so far.

The Wilderness is loosely inspired by zombie missions that have an infinite respawn of enemies coming from all sides. This enemy needs no supernatural powers to kill you, though.


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Features:

-Up to 17 players
-Chaotic battle in the massive forest of central Occasus
-New enemies are spawned as old ones die according to a fixed constant (which I intend to make selectable in mission parameters).
-There's a similar infinite respawn of friendlies (not as many of them, though).
-New units always spawn out of sight of the players
-Units that have gotten too far from alive players are deleted to reduce lag
-Selectable difficulty parameters
-Locations of players' squads randomized, but visible during briefing
-Failsafes to ensure that mission ends once reasonable conditions are met
-A number of random players will begin the mission wounded
-Some magazines removed from players at start
-Every effort has been/will be made to optimize mission and reduce lag
-I also intend to add intermittent ambient radio chatter and maybe even a script that will make NPCs talk and scream

A debugging version with radio cheats and map markers showing what's going on is already up on the server. So far it seems to be doing great. I just hope that it won't be a lag bomb if more players play it.

If anyone wants to beta test with me, feel free to contact me. Or you can just beta test it yourself, but I didn't think to give detailed instructions on what's going on in this 80%-complete mission.

Looking good Kurtz!

Good luck with it! Seems very promising. I also saw your OFPEC thread.
One completely personal opinion though. Cut to a minimum selectable mission parameters. I feel it reduce the immersion and the achievement sense when the mission is complete.

Thanks guys.

Quote:One completely personal opinion though. Cut to a minimum selectable mission parameters. I feel it reduce the immersion and the achievement sense when the mission is complete.

Yeah, the big thing that made me want to do selectable parameters was as an anti-lag measure. If when, say, all 17 slots are filled, the mission is too laggy, players can reduce the number of units and increase the enemy skill to make up for it.

Definitely going to check this one out - looks cool!

Sounds great Koortz, looking fwd to trying it on a Sunday.

Once you've done this, would it be possible to send me a copy of the scripts stand alone? I have an idea for a mission using them, and could create a set of scripts like it myself, but every time I go to do it, I lose motivation to do it (I wonder why  ).

Certainly MJ. Actually I'm about 95% done with the first version, I've really just got to delete the numerous debugging features I've built into the mission and see if it still works.

Actually I'd say it's basically done now, sending version 1.0 to Zwobot.

MJ, are you sure you want just the scripts or the mission as well? Some of the scripts might be hard to understand without seeing their role in the editor, and the total mission is only 38KB.

(04-09-2010, 06:04 PM)RKDmitriyev link Wrote:Actually I'd say it's basically done now, sending version 1.0 to Zwobot.

MJ, are you sure you want just the scripts or the mission as well? Some of the scripts might be hard to understand without seeing their role in the editor, and the total mission is only 38KB.

Yeah, Ill just take the whole mission, and if you want try and make it as standalone as possible, so you can just plug it into a mission from a template or something.

Allrighty then, I'll send you an email. 8)

Played this one tonight and I liked it. Not quite finished yet but have no problem to die in here
GJ RK

Thanks OL

I'll need to look into that weird bug that happens when AIs aren't included. It must have something to do with the script that ends the mission when all players died (no other explanation for why that ending would occur).

Any other specific comments? 8)

Maybe don't count AIs as "players" when objectives tick off. Looks like in the current status of themission AIs is able to finish mission alone

I don't know if it's easy (or even doable) to let only humans be triggers.

(04-12-2010, 04:00 PM)Overlord link Wrote:Maybe don't count AIs as "players" when objectives tick off. Looks like in the current status of themission AIs is able to finish mission alone

Ah, good point OL. The probability that AI groups will get all the way to Silex is extremely small, though. However, that reminded me that I've got several triggers which require all alive playables to be present, and what if all players have reached objective but a single AI is stuck shot in the legs several kilometers away? :o This could be annoying.

Quote:I don't know if it's easy (or even doable) to let only humans be triggers.

I don't know of an easy way to do it, but off-hand I can think of a script that will ask each client's computer what unit is "player" relative to it. Then, publicvariable that object, and have the server assemble an array of those publicvariable'd objects.

I'm 99% certain it can be done, but can anyone think of a simpler way? Searching so far has turned up no dice...

At least I fixed the bug which caused the game to end instantly when one of the groups had all "nobody" slots. Also fixed the bug that was causing objectives to tick when everyone died. It's because the necessary trigger had condition of


and I neglected to consider that this will return true if all players are dead.