Buehgler_AS

Great job Wombat. Those are great maps, but the issue with the vegetation was always a killer for playing against the AI on them. It would be truly great (IMO) if you could release your mod to reduce/eliminate the vegetation. I know we had tried a number of things to retag the plants in question, but were never able to find a workable solution.

FF200 always had problems near the end, too many graphical elements for the engine would cause things to be incorrectly drawn or just not drawn. As a result of that and some features in the AS mod, I was always biased toward the FF110. The AlphaSquad mod should still work fine, just be sure you have the proper dependencies activated (DTD Team mod v1.1 and Standard Upgrade).

I switched from an IBM 8820 to a daskeyboard pro s a few years ago and have been very happy with the change. I spent a lot of time on IBM M's and found the 8820 an acceptable alternative, but going back to a true mechanical keyboard with nice action (which has been very stable under use) was a real joy. At this point I think I actually prefer the slightly lighter action of the das over the model M.

Well I am biased, but I strongly recomend The AlphaSquad Mod (this includes most of the AS tourney missions), note this requires the DTD Team Mod. For a mission pack the only addition I would make to H-Hour's suggestions is SBTO. These are all great coop missions. The only other thing to add would be some of the "more recent" (now quite dated) AS tourney missions that may not be in the full MOD -- those can be found in our forums (I think registyration is required to download files). The AS mod plays reasonably well with both CENTCOM and Frostbite and adds quite a bit of coop intensity to both. Remember, no respawns, no TI, and dead people do not talk -- it really does help get/keep you on the edge of your seat. Good luck and enjoy.

Everyone is welcome. The only really important rules are to keep the language clean/civil on TS and to make an honest effort to play with the group.

Wombat (or anyone that is interested) is more than welcome to stop by the Alpha Squad teamspeak and servers. We have been having a good time in the Alpha the past few days. Many good things, a few not so good things, some familiar aspects, but plenty of promising signs. As usual, if you want to play with us, visit our forums (my sig is a link) and read the server rules to find the passwords.

Wow, that brings back memories Great job Biro. Glad to hear you are still at it and the shoulder is better!!

You have total control of the spotting distane in the script (via the "Change the maximum spotting distance" response) a RussiaGhost ponted out. However that spotting distan ce will apply to all AI (both friendly and enemy) in the mission. Hopwever, "spotting distance" has no impact on the players, you need to change the fog settings (color and ranges) to limit what the players can see. Again, this is fully accessable in both the script and top level mission/map settinmgs.

What Giampi sent is the "best" way to do this, IMO. You can use tools like this to vary the fog density and range quite smoothly so that things close in and open up as the mission progresses, it does however take a bit of scripting/math to reliably get the effects you want. The most complex/effective version I was involved in was used in the 2006 Community Coop mission "A Cold Welcome". This started with relatively open fog/sight-lines, and progressively closed them in over time, ending with fog that was quite close and fluctuating slightly as the mission played out. This was somewhat confusing to some players/teams that had grown used to fixed sight distances. To avoid problems with the lighting/shadows we intentionally chose to do this on a map with "flat" lighting and a "simple" sky-box. There are plenty of maps that will support this, and you can produce a custom sky-box if necessary. If done well the effect can appear quite subtle, but have a very significant impact on how a team must play. Good luck. As with all things Igor, you may not be able to do exactly what you think you need to do, but there is almost always a way to elicit the effect you need/want.

No Skis or mortars in any AS tourney missions that I recall. I think Rocky is thinking of the rapel insert on a the Frostbite map FB04 (Chiseled Edges) that was used in http://www.alphasquad.net/home/forum/index.php?f=70&t=2420&rb_v=viewtopic]"A Cold Welcome" from the 2006 Community Co-op Tournament. Insert there was central North, extract NW, two demo objectives and an intel objective. Plenty of penalties/challenges if you did not maintain stealth.

There are a few strategies you can use to encourage more stealth than firefight. One simple strategy is to trigger reinforcements (preferable initially placed in a hidden map area) in response to excessive/non-stealthy killing of tangos. It is really not hard to send in a wave of skilled well armed reinforcements that will encourage people to not just go Rambo on a mission. One word of advice, be sure to spell this risk out in your briefing, players should be able to succeed at a mission on their first try if they read the briefing and think about the implications. In my opinion, this is the best strategy to encourage this type of play since it is somewhat realistic and does not impose artificial limits on play. The second set of strategies revolve around artificial restrictions. The simplest (and least appealing IMO), is to simple count enemy casualties and end the mission if there are too many kills -- again you will want to spell this out in the briefing. Finally, if you add a scoring mechanism to your mission (e.g. award points for objectives and the like), then you can also deduct points for killing enemies (or losing teamates). This is still somewhat artificial, but provides a finer grained measure of how well a player team is performing on the mission. If you look back through the history of GR tournament missions you will find implementations for most of these techniques. Good luck.

I/we (over at Alpha Squad) have played a bit of DayZ (and lots-and-lots of ArmA II:CO). Keep in mind the game/mod is still in Alpha test, so things get broken, reset, unbalanced with some regularity. It is an online only experience -- again, from what I have read, the developers explicitly want that and are not interested in supporting a SP version. You will need ArmA II:CO -- that's ArmA II plus Operation Arrowhead -- in order to play. The mod itself is freely available and as Wombat mentioned you can get it from the dayz site. The very cool thing about this mod is that the game is truly global and persistent. Whatever state you leave your character (and other stuff) in on one server will be exactly that way when you join a different server two days later. Just be ready, you will spend a fair bit of time learning to navigate and find your friends (you really want to play with friends). Sadly, me being a fan of cooperative online play, from what I have seen the style of play has degenerated into a massive death-match, since the easiest/best way to find equipment is probably to find and kill another player rather than sneak around zombies while searching for loot.

What Operative said.... While it may be possible, I can not imagine why you would want to do this. There are great models available within the multitude of Arma 2 mods that are out there. Is there some specific feature of the GR character models you are having trouble finding?

Yup.. I agree. Although ArmA III will also get some of my attention along with the Nevada terrain for DCS A-10C, but that is a completely different issue.

Ditto that!!