[pmartin]

Since 2003 ghost recon has always been installed in every single computer I had. It's one of my favorite games of all times, and maybe the best Single Player military simulator. (I won't say multiplayer too, because I haven't played it a lot online, and I don't want to start a ARMA vs GR discussion). We all know its flaws. For me, the greatest flaw is it's enemy accuracy.

I've been using droopy's enemy realism for a long time now, and it always made things a lot better. But then, Heroes Unleashed came out, and I couldn't use it if I wanted to use some of the several kits HU gave us. So I decided to change HU Equips stats myself. In my dreams... Too much guns to edit manually, too much work. I started playing HU unedited, and it's supposed to reduce the deadly accuracy of the enemy, and it does. But it does a lot less than droopy's, and I still thought they still were superhuman Russians. Poor ghosts. Half my squad went down and I didn't even find the enemy.

But then I thought of something. I took out my binoculars, took cover and started looking for the ###### who shot me. He was standing on the open, 100m away. And I finally understood everything. They aren't too accurate, it's just that I always had small monitors! Every AI entity in the game didn't think we were too far, but 100m for me, in my computer screen, looked like 1kilometer! Just take a look at these screenshots:


Do you see the bunker? Can you see someone inside of it? How far would you guess it is?


Now with the weapon zoom.


And now with the binoculars. Now you can see who you're supposed to shoot.

What happened in this situation: I took my gun, went for cover and started shooting, they started shooting back, my squad mates spreading fire, they went into cover, and as my bravo team started firing at then from a different position, they fell, one by one. (taking with them one of my guys who wasn't into good cover). It was a great firefight, except that I could barely see who was I shooting at, when everybody else was having no trouble killing each other.

A M16 is supposed to have a 500m effective range, isn't it? That is, you can shoot people at 500 meters if you can see them. I don't know if there's a map in GR where you can see 500m without any obstruction, and I think most of GR's maps aren't this big.100 meters is engaging distance, and it's a 'safe' distance for a strategic assault. But think about it... Most of the time in GR you only engage the enemy when you're about 50m from him. Think about most of your firefights, most of the time they're like mexican standoffs. The man who drops to the ground, aims and shoots first wins. Moving a fireteam to one cover to another is almost impossible! Flanking is already hard because during a firefight you have to babysit all your teams, see if they're in good cover, and hope they're not just firing at the immediate enemy without watching your back. You don't even have the courage to move to your enemy's flank, because you're not just too close from the enemy, you're also depending on some rather egocentric AI.

So, what's the point of the thread? I don't know. Maybe I giving other GR players a tip: To play GR right, buy a big screen, turn off the fog, and avoid engaging the enemy from too close. And use droopy's realism, to compensate the AI, and make flanking possible.

Another thing is maybe someone could do a realism mod like droopy's for Heroes Unleashed, and modders, in the future, when you're scripting missions, try to think about how far the player is supposed to engage the enemy's you place on the map.

[RileyFletcher_01]

Sorry, but I disagree with your point. They're way too realistic. You rush into a room with three unprepared, unaware tangos, and whoa, they flash their rifles up and one shot you with a heavy caliber, 10kg sniper rifle without any aiming. They can nail you anywhere anyhow, but I've fixed it by messing around with the .gun files. Put their accuracy up to 'bout 10, 15, and 20 for prone, crouched, and standing, respectively, and they have a harder time hitting you, especially far away. Also, giving them full-auto only helps a ton because they tend to do inaccurate sprays more often.

[ApexMods]

Wow, very nice post, pmartin!

It is indeed a complex process to balance enemy accuracy just right, and I've been experimenting with a myriad of options and settings for the next version of Heroes Unleashed. I am aiming for the ultimate realism possible in GR, so I definitely hope there won't be any need for a realism mod on top of HU.

Anyhow, as you have noted there is a correlation between situational awareness (in this case spotting distance limited by screen resolution) and how "real" contact with the enemy feels. Long range encounters (well, "long range" within the scope of GR maps and engine limitations) should on the one hand offer a chance for prolonged firefights without everyone dropping like flies within a second, but on the other hand there ought to be a fair chance of the enemy ultimately hitting the target. And once an enemy is in your face it would look kind of silly if he couldn't manage to hit you from just a couple of feet away.

Shot accuracy in Ghost Recon is determined by an accuracy cone system with randomized bullet spread, meaning that while you can adjust the exit diameter of the cone through a weapon's accuracy values, there is still a random element that influences spread within the cone you cannot influence directly. Character stats have additional impact on accuracy and bullet spread. While GR's external ballistics system goes further than simple raytracing with instant shot impact, and it even accounts for things like target penetration with deflection angles, there are limits to what you can do to emulate realistic external ballistics in accuracy terms.

In the original (unmodded) game, the developers managed to hide GR's shortcomings in this regard by severely limiting the range of enemy encounters through fog and resulting short spotting distances. Once you open up the game to longer ranges by limiting fog and extending the view, a boatload of adjustments becomes necessary to maintain a realistic situation overall. Due to the aforementioned problems there probably won't ever be a perfectly realistic solution, but there are still plenty of ways to get a little closer to reality and I am working on all of them for future updates of Heroes Unleashed.

My aim is to strike a good balance between realistic CQC combat and the firefights over the mid-range settings typical GR maps offer. With most maps being under 400x400 meters (the limit of the command map system - maps can be larger, but won't work properly in the command map interface), the longest 2-dimensional diagonal is around 566 meters, theoretically a little more is possible through height differences adding a little via 3D distance, but there is hardly ever a shooting distance of over 600 meters with the average being a lot less. Within these parameters it should be possible to find a sweet spot for realistic spotting and fire exchange, and although there is much room for improvements, I hope I am at least on the right track with Heroes Unleashed.

PS: I love your signature!

[RileyFletcher_01]

Here's what I did in Texas Militia and it pretty much took care of the enemy aimbotting problem. Feel free to use this method if you would like, I don't care. I really hope modders start using these techniques because it gets really unbearable getting shot from an enemy 1km away with a pistol at the hip held sideways while you are running behind a brick wall.

Method 1
If you have enemy-exclusive weapons, skip the next paragraph.

If your enemies use the same weapons as the players, copy all the enemy-used weapons and rename the copies with a tag on the end like '_enemy', '_opfor', or whatever you like, so you have let's say...txm_ak74.gun and txm_ak74m_enemy.gun.

Edit your enemy guns in any or all of these ways:
Lower the <MaxRange> values.
Increase the <Recoil> values, but be careful with this or they will be too inaccurate.
Set all accuracy values to have a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 3000. So maybe your Stationary Prone value is 20 and your Running Stand value is 2500.
Increase the stabilization time. I take the original value of the weapon (say 0.16) and move the decimal point one place to the left (now 1.6).

Method 2
Give all enemy actors lower stats. Not sure if this helps or not but it is worth a try.

Method 1 is obviously the most effective and proven. I know it works because I set the values so low they couldn't hit me 1m away. It takes a lot of tweaking, so if you need a template, here is my AK74m from Texas Militia for the enemy:
<Recoil>20</Recoil>

<RunStandAccuracy>1680</RunStandAccuracy>
<RunCrouchAccuracy>1540</RunCrouchAccuracy>
<RunProneAccuracy>1420</RunProneAccuracy>
<WalkStandAccuracy>630</WalkStandAccuracy>
<WalkCrouchAccuracy>560</WalkCrouchAccuracy>
<WalkProneAccuracy>490</WalkProneAccuracy>
<ShuffleStandAccuracy>420</ShuffleStandAccuracy>
<ShuffleCrouchAccuracy>350</ShuffleCrouchAccuracy>
<ShuffleProneAccuracy>490</ShuffleProneAccuracy>
<StationaryStandAccuracy>32</StationaryStandAccuracy>
<StationaryCrouchAccuracy>24</StationaryCrouchAccuracy>
<StationaryProneAccuracy>8</StationaryProneAccuracy>
<TurnBandVelocity1>0.5</TurnBandVelocity1>
<TurnBandMultiplier1>1</TurnBandMultiplier1>
<TurnBandVelocity2>1.5</TurnBandVelocity2>
<TurnBandMultiplier2>10</TurnBandMultiplier2>
<TurnBandVelocity3>3</TurnBandVelocity3>
<TurnBandMultiplier3>20</TurnBandMultiplier3>
<TurnBandVelocity4>8</TurnBandVelocity4>
<TurnBandMultiplier4>50</TurnBandMultiplier4>
<TurnBandVelocity5>100000</TurnBandVelocity5>
<TurnBandMultiplier5>100</TurnBandMultiplier5>
<StabilizationTime>1.5</StabilizationTime>

Note that the recoil value is still relatively low, this is because at higher settings they couldn't even aim. You could try a bit higher setting to experiment. The accuracy values are high, and the stabilization time is drastically higher. All of these result in an enemy that misses occasionally at close range and missed frequently at long range, just like an untrained soldier would in real life. If you're facing more elite enemies, you would probably up the values a bit. I still every once in a while get aimbotted by the submachine guns because I left them at a bit higher accuracy values, but they are usually only effective at close range which is realistic. I also put fully auto only on a lot of the enemy weapons; this seems to keep them from doing the dorky one shot aimbotting across the map, and they instead fire in long bursts that are less accurate.

[ApexMods]

Err... you do realize that all this has been done in Heroes Unleashed since the first version, right?

[RileyFletcher_01]

Never played it sorry. Too big of download for my slow internet. At least you know I didn't copy it from you

Edited by RileyFletcher_01, 12 May 2012 - 11:40 PM.

[ApexMods]

[...]Too big of download for my slow internet[...]

In that case I'd highly recommend Rocky's GR mod collection on DVD! Best investment ever!

[pmartin]

Never knew it was so complex! And you guys are right, the more you reduce the accuracy, the more weird the cqc feels like. Sometimes it feels like a 1800's firefight, one standing in front of the other with those guns that can't hit anything.

Let me ask you guys something: when editing gun's stats, do you do it manually on igor or notepad? I just don't have the patience to do it one by one everytime. There are too much guns.


And I can't wait for the next HU release. And Riley, I'm just dowloading texas militia.

[RileyFletcher_01]

I do it in Notepad, and yes, it is quite a chore and requires lots of patience. One time for an adjustment mod for my clan I changed 200 gun files all in a row. Insane. IGOR makes it ten times worse though, but it is easier if you are a beginner.

By just downloading Texas Militia do you mean you definitely will when it comes out, or you are now? Because if you are getting it now, somebody got a pre-release crack version