ApexMods

Thanks for the feedback, Wombat. 🙂 For me, watching GR gameplay vids sure beats TV (which I never watch, anyhow). There‘s almost always something to learn from them, especially for a modder, as everyone tends to play differently, and you get to see the game from yet another angle, so I often find myself jotting down a few notes for my HU todo list. The same goes for commentary, shining a light on different player perspectives. Sorry to hear about your hardware mishaps. Hope you get the new PC sorted.

Good to hear. 🙂

Honestly, I cannot even see how anything after (maybe) GR2 could be part of a reasonably believable story arc, at least one that would honor Tom Clancy’s iconic fact based and science driven style.

Please don’t. 😖

“The faces of Ubisoft: Ashraf Ismail, accused of extramarital affairs with fans; Maxime Béland, accused of choking a co-worker; Stone Chin, accused of systematically preying on women for over a decade; Andrien Gbinigie, accused of rape.” Source

Geez... Ubisoft Investigation: 100+ Cases From Psychological Harassment To Rape and... Ubisoft stock crashes after top execs resign over toxic company culture all that after... Ubisoft Reports Operating Income Down 93% Guess Karma does exist, after all.

This rabbit hole is getting deeper and deeper.

No DRM, offline single player, built-in local and online peer-to-peer multiplayer and dedicated server, full mod support (for absolutely anything, incl. complete user interface and gameplay mechanics, physics, AI, character and equipment models, level design, mission scripting, etc.) with open source editing tools. There. You’re done. The modding community would take care of the rest. But Ubisoft will never do it. They are just too greedy (and evil) to allow anything but online-only DRM and micro transactions ridden bugfests to leave their doors. Their corporate “culture” doesn’t lend itself to attracting freethinking talent, either - only bootlicking and brown-nosing wage slaves allowed.

There’s also a wiki as a good starting point for upscaling.

Sent the new weapon sounds to Jack. Off to a short vacation with the folks, so I got to run. 🙂

The MP game type overhaul will alleviate camping a bit. And yes, there are AI hostiles in the new MP games. First of all a huge thank you for the feedback! Very much appreciated. 1) The huge difference between enemy and player skill is that the enemy is a computer. The discrepancy in skill value is for weapons control only, which aims to compensate the obvious advantages a computer has over a human e.g. reacting and aiming, and it was the result of lots of in-game testing. Giving AI comparable skill values ends up with the pin point accuracy of vanilla enemies. The new add-on to restore stat progression (see 2) will take player stats back to vanilla. 2) The stat progression / scoring system will be restorable via add-on mod, which is already completed. 3) I had this implemented in the scripts, but had to remove it (and loads of other features) due to script size constraints (64K source limit). 4) Already done. 5) Good point. Will do. 6) I think I looked into this, but IIRC it's hard coded and cannot be changed. 7) Please elaborate. I'm not sure I understand what exactly it is you mean. 😎 Nope. No way. 9) Underway. 10) Dito, but not that high on my list. 11) Underway. 12) Underway. 13) Underway. 14) IIRC Novo uses NV from an old version of HU. Will check. 15) Please elaborate. 16) AT4 is a one-shot disposable launcher, and the Javelin weighs a ton as it is. But I hear you. Will revisit the idea.

My bad, the four team bases are “Base 0” to “Base 3”. With “safe zone” you mean places without enemies nearby? For vanilla game types, enemy actors are spawned at “Point 0” to “Point 35” in Firefight, Recon etc., for Defend they are spawned in points or zones tagged with “Assault Platoon (0-3)”. A good map setup should have little to no enemy spawn locations near SP/COOP Base and Recon Insertion, a very good map setup has all points and zones a fair distance from each other, or at least out of line of sight. Proper balance in placement of map points and zones is a cornerstone of how well a map plays in game types, especially for adversarial multiplayer. But I digress... 🙂

Open a vanilla mission file (*.mis) in Igor and look at the zones tab. You’ll find the team bases and their properties. Play around with the Igor game editor a bit. You’ll learn a lot from just looking around in original missions.

I believe Harntrox implemented random insertion zones for his HX5 game types, although I’m not sure, especially for firefight. In vanilla firefight, the insertion zone is usually one of the four team bases defined in a map’s MIS file, marked as “SP / CO-OP BASE” in Igor. With a mod you can then easily change which base to use, either in Igor or with a text editor, by changing this zone attribute.

No, I don’t think so. What you can do, if you want to spend the time, is to video capture the replay (e.g. with Fraps), so you have it in movie form. The big disadvantage is the lack of character and camera switching options, which obviously are only available for in-game replays.

“MMEditing is an open source image and video editing toolbox based on PyTorch. It is a part of the OpenMMLab project.” This offers e.g. GPU based image upscaling via advanced AI routines, allowing to increase texture detail at the push of a button. Technology like this opens the door to complete visual game remakes through batch processing their entire texture catalog. Amazing stuff. Have a look at their site and search the web for examples of amazing visual overhaul mods done with these tools.

Beautiful. “Ghost Recon (as well its expansions Desert Siege & Island Thunder, and stunning mods like Heroes Unleashed) is and remains the definitive tactical realism game. Ghost Recon not only defined the genre, it has game design and features not offered or surpassed in tactical realism games before or since, and remains the high watermark for 'tactical realism' -- that is game designed and intended to require you to use realistic squad maneuver fire tactics like (but not limited to): bounding, flanking, fire-support, suppression, cover, fall-back, stealth and concealment. Ghost Recon also offers features that confront you with realistically equipping your squad for each mission, gives you high granularity control over real-time squad maneuver, fire control (you can and will run out of ammunition if you exercise some fire discipline), and position -- and that's just the briefest sketch of a few of the high points of some of what this game has on offer. Ghost Recon was a 'big ideas' game, with some of the most detailed and exhaustive research in military science and consultancy rolled into game design, stretched the technology of its time to the limit, remains compelling, playable, and most importantly: FUN to this day. Just one example of the attention given to this game's design; Ghost Recon is the only game that has made any attempts to deal with technology limitations of 2D rendered 3D on pixel displays with features like its 'Ghost Perspective' and has yet be surpassed *. An example of some of what is offered here; one of my favorite game modes (there are also more of these then any TR game has offered since) has has also never appeared in any other game since is COOP squad support where each COOP player has a full squad of AI backup, if you die, you 'ghost in' as one of your AI players and can continue playing in that role till the objective is achieved or your squad is wiped out. What's compelling about this mode is you can perform as two independent, or coordinated infantry squads or what ever emergent combination of coordinated and independent action develops; as one recons and helps the other either deliberately or by just taking that approach, where the other heads more directly for objectives. This often results in spectacular emergent game play where you may need to rescue a pinned down and trapped squad, or hold a position or suppress a path for the other squad. Ghost Recon also has one of the most elegant mod support systems, nearly a petabyte of mod content (which is even more enormous when you consider the relatively low resolution of the assets by today's standards), excellent mod tools and support, and a community of fans and mod developers that is still active nearly twenty years later. Lastly the AI in this game are some of the most realistic you'll encounter, they: bound, flank, suppress, cover, fall-back, snipe, use stealth, prone, lean, use cover and concealment -- and it's not a zombie hoard of AI challenging you, but skilled operators that approach you as a realistic problem, with realistic tactics, and will nail your ♥♥♥ to the map if you don't take the the same approach and do it better. This is a game, back from the day when dressing up your combat Barbie was not 'a thing', when a game wasn't fun if it was easy, and appealing to the widest audience or political correctness was not a concern -- a realistic portrayal of tactics was. * Many may not realize that FPS games even rendered on 4K displays force range of engagement to unrealistically close ranges, and grossly skew or even obviate realistic tactics because you can not see a player model at even a small fraction of real world naked eye distance before he becomes a pixel blob you can't discern from the terrain -- 4k has brought us closer, but we'll need another order of magnitude to get to what Red Storm managed with the Ghost Perspective and the deep zoom feature of Ghost Recon. So if you're still playing at more common resolution, this will be a first for you in more realistic ranged combat.“

I’ll try to get the finished weapon sounds to Jack Wachter as soon as they’re done (hopefully by tomorrow), so he can do a “before and after” comparison video. Skipped on the HUD idea for now, manual almost done (approaching 50,000 words). Back to campaign mission scripting (and retexturing of corresponding maps) soon. I’d really love to see more feedback to get a better sense of what’s most wanted by all of you folks, especially if you’ve encountered any bugs, errors, or other shortcomings. There’s over 100,000 people out there who’ve downloaded Heroes Unleashed. Make your voices heard! 🙂

Hammer, so sorry I completely forgot to express how thrilled (!) I am to see you still frequenting GR.net. Hope you stick around some, Ghost Recon modding needs you, and I sure would like to pick your brain about 3dsm modeling one of these days. 🙂

Nicely done, die7. Especially knowing what a pain those intros are to script.