Comrades in Arms Discussion Board - The West Field of Balavu (COOP 08)

Stuck in the middle of a minefield with enemy closing in. Dark stormy setting.

Steam workshop link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi...=765725685

On our way to a routine patrol, our plane was shot down by an enemy AA unit.

We managed to paradrop with our Hunters, however we have crash landed in the middle of a mine field and Hunter was damaged and suffered a fuel leak! We was heading south east, and our plane has crashed further along. We are unsure if there are any survivors.

Search for survivors and await contact from command!

NOTE: If you are an engineer, you will have an action menu item for using your mine detector!

sorry

some units had NVG... have removed and updated pbo

Treendy,

Your file name is not all lowercase.
Did you remove briefingName?

1. file name sorted
2. yes

Thanks Treendy. Uploaded!

Thanks for trying this mission and for the comments/likes : )

I cant really remove the minefield as that is one of the main elements I wanted in this mission, however, I suppose it would make sense to lower the number of mines, so you only have to defuse a few before getting off the field (Also, was thinking about giving another 2 guys a mine detector).

It was tricky getting this to work for both single player and multiplayer, which is why the teamleader was an engineer with the detector (what I should have done, is tweaked this 8 player version for that very reason)

Alwarren, you mention some issues with the mine detector on dedicated server? what issues was you facing, as this seemed to work fine for me on dedicated when I was testing this mission?

I hope to see a nice debrief on this : ) Would like to know where you lost each player and your approach.

(09-23-2016, 03:10 PM)treendy Wrote: [ -> ]Alwarren, you mention some issues with the mine detector on dedicated server? what issues was you facing, as this seemed to work fine for me on dedicated when I was testing this mission?

How is it supposed to work? When the mission started, I got 7 times a message about initialization of the mine detector, but that was it, no one had any sort of action menu entry AFAIK. The briefing didn't describe anything about how that is supposed to work, so we were a bit confused about it.

Oh, and another point, you should lower the volume of your radio transmissions, they clip a lot and that makes them hard to understand sometimes.

Thanks, I'll adjust the volume on future mission (maybe I tried to cover my squeaky voice up too much).

Its only the team leader (engineer) who has the mine detector, so he will have been the only one who could see the option.

I need to find a way to remove the red triangles for mines regardless of the server/player settings. Basically the beeping sound and the display on the mine detector will lead you to the mine locations to defuse, but with the red triangles, you don't really need it, so takes away the importance of it.

I will tweak to give two engineers a mine detector and keep the team leader as a team leader only. Will also see if I can increase the range of the beeps, so other players can hear whats going on.

Will also see if I can remove the red triangles (do you know if that is possible? to override the server/player setting).

The vanilla mine detection needs to have the warning triangles but this mine detection, its better without them, its a shame you didnt see it in action : (

Who was the Team leader engineer?

Another thing that wasn't clear was the three wounded men team. I suppose they are the survivors that need to be found by the main team? I guess this is a result to adapt the mission also for SP, so maybe a "notes for multiplayer" briefing entry is required.

(09-24-2016, 09:36 AM)treendy Wrote: [ -> ]Who was the Team leader engineer?

Well, Manuel was team leader, so he got out of the car, and typical for TFAR, it dropped the backpack. So Manuel couldn't reach the backpack because the long range radio was on top of it. So I got out, took the long range, and Manuel took the backpack. Strangely enough, suddenly I had the mine detector.

The mine detector worked somewhat, but the hint that it shows was constantly flashing on and off (which is a bit bewildering in the darkness), and it's range is severely limited. I would wager that if we would have gone by the sound alone, we'd blown ourselves up several times.

You might reconsider making the team leader the engineer. Not only is this setup totally unrealistic, it's also distracting the team leader from his original job, leading the team. If you want to stay single player compatible, make the team leader an engineer through scripting when isMultiplayer is false.

However, about the whole minefield stuff: Basically, you degrade the first half of the mission to a single player mission where most people are just trodding along behind the team leader or whoever has the mine detector. The rest of the team has nothing to do. I don't think that's appropriate for a multiplayer mission. What you did there is transport a purely single player mechanic to a multiplayer mission. That will result in single player gameplay for one, and boredom for the rest.

I started to like the mission after the mine field.

Also, but that is just nitpicking, we had this joke in the German Army: "It's not a minefield. A minefield is a field for growing mines. It's a mine-restricted area" (doesn't translate very well). The point is, a minefield should protect something, or serve as area denial. This minefield was not protecting anything, and it was easy just to go around it. As such, it felt like a pure plot device, not something that you would really expect in real life. As I said, that's nitpicking, but things like make me realize I'm playing a game.

This was made for multiplayer first, then I tweaked to make it work for single player.

I seemed to have missed the desired effect I was hoping for : ( was kind of hoping it would be one guy working through the mines, while the others are keeping a look out and taking care of any enemy attacks.

I will investigate the mine detector, as the display worked fine for me on dedicated server, and shows how far each mine is with the type of mine, and when used, only takes about 5 to 10 mins to get off the minefield.

I will adjust so teamleader is not engineer, as I agree with your comments above (also, anyone who picks up a mine detector will suddenly have that option to use it).

And for now... I will keep the field for growing mines active (maybe the enemy are hiding something nearby)

Variable: Three wounded men? there are 8 players, 4 wounded players that team Alpha need to move over to and heal. There were no wounded survivors other than our playable units? I will take a look at this (I did have a few dead guys on the field, but I thought I had removed them)

(09-25-2016, 02:21 PM)treendy Wrote: [ -> ]I seemed to have missed the desired effect I was hoping for : ( was kind of hoping it would be one guy working through the mines, while the others are keeping a look out and taking care of any enemy attacks.

There was no enemy attack while we were in the minefield. Once, we heard something that sounded like a GMG or Autocannon and there were impact sounds nearby, but we never found the source nor did the attack do any damage.