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Ghost Recon: Heroes Unleashed


ApexMods

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  • 1 month later...

Apexmods, thanks a million for your efforts for creating this mod. you have made my dream a reality. i have always enjoyed the various GR mods, but i disliked how many of them strayed from vanilla GR. HU keeps the vanilla spirit alive while combining the best from all the excellent mods out there. HU alone will keep my GR installed for another 10 years. i think i speak for everyone by saying your hard work has been worth every second of enjoyment we get from this mod.

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Hi Apex

I like your mod, but I think you should put more work into the missions. They reminds very much of firefights, and there's no storyline. I know you're aiming for realism too, so maybe the ghosts would know what kind of mission they actually we're going into?

I think that if you used time on creating 10-15 good missions instead of 175 (in my opinion) not so good missions.

My 8 cents.

/t

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that's a bit harsh teppe, apexmods has put a lot of work into this mod, more work than I could think of putting in to any of my mods. people are entitled to opinions, i'm not disputing that, but i think that comment could have been put a little nicer.

Yeh, that's why his first post "disappeared".

Teppe, please consider how many hours have gone into that massive mod. Feedback is welcome, but you have to be careful not to give out a "gimmie gimmie gimmie" type attitude.

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Yeah I understand that. Sorry if I sound a bit harsh but that's just my opinion. My opinion would be to make 15 instead of 175. Just me. I like the mod too and understand that great ammount of time he have put into it, but again, just my opinion. Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh.

/t

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@shakealeg: Many thanks for the nice words! Always very much appreciated! :yes:

@teppe: Yes, I am aware that Heroes Unleashed needs more custom missions. In fact, I think the mod still needs loads and loads of stuff, but there's only so much time I am able to spend on modding, and I'm actually following a plan with development (I know, hard to believe, eh?). Please allow me to explain...

Indeed I've always wanted to rescript the campaign missions, expand the campaign with additional missions, and add extra quick missions in Heroes Unleashed, and I definitely will... when I finally get to it. For scripting purposes I have several mission concepts and back stories flying about my hard disks, some just rough ideas, some a lot more detailed. In many cases, those mission plans include assets that are not yet implemented, e.g. a military faction that is not yet present, so there are no actors, no character models and/or skins, and no appropriate weapons, vehicles, or other equipment.

Maybe it isn't too obvious yet, but I absolutely love scripting! If you take a look inside GRHU's SP and COOP game types in Igor, you'll notice that those scripts are actually pretty complex, and they literary took several months to create. From raw draft, over detailed written concept, up to finally scripting these things took a huge amount of time, much much more than would be required to script a simple mission on par with e.g. the (relatively low) script complexity in the original GR/DS/IT campaign mission by Red Storm Entertainment.

I mention this because what I plan to do with GRHU's missions will be a lot more complex than those game types I did. And with such complex plans for scripting I would love to have everything necessary for those missions available and ready in GRHU when I start scripting, so that I don't have to take everything apart in Igor again once something changes in the mod. With the level of complexity I aim for in future missions, code maintenance for loads of different scripts would become a total nightmare if too many things in the mod kept changing, and I can tell from my experience so far that A WHOLE LOT OF STUFF is still changing in GRHU.

When I - rather naively - began rescripting the campaign missions a long time ago (I only ever got to mission 10, IIRC), I didn't expect that all that work was pretty much for nothing, as by now I know that I will have to redo EVERY SINGLE MISSION FROM SCRATCH in the end. There's just far too much that I want to change and almost nothing I want to reuse from those scripts now. I don't want to dive too deep into detailed plans and spoil future surprises, but let me say this much: You ain't seen nothing yet! :)

So that's why I'm still adding maps, characters, equipment etc. for now, as I want all of the required assets to be included and to get all core settings right - whether it's weapon handling and ballistics, kit composition, vehicle characteristics and armament, character stats, etc. Then there are also a couple of fundamental decisions still to be made concerning e.g. threat indication on compass or command map, sensor availability, spotting distances, kill confirmation, and so on and forth - all of which have an influence on missions.

As I mentioned earlier, for the next release I aim to bring GRHU to a level of maturity that allows backwards compatibility for future versions, e.g. so that any potential third-party missions or even campaigns created for the next version should still work in all future versions. Whether it will contain everything needed for the planned GRHU campaign remains to be seen, but at least it should be a solid base to build upon for mission scripting.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Topic cleaned. Next time this usual mess occurs, warnings will be added to accounts. If you have nothing constructive to add to a topic, leave it alone. Next time you are about to post, read it to yourself first and think about it, pls. No harm done. :)

This message will self destruct soon.

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Thanks a lot, Tinker. It really baffles my to see antagonism flaming up in such a closely knit community of GR fans. Shouldn't we all just have the same goal and try to cooperate and support each other as much as possible for the benefit of GR without getting our knickers in a knot?

I'm all for constructive criticism, but everyone should try to remain civilized and supportive. All modders give their work to the community freely and should be able to expect at least some respect for their efforts. If you look around GR.net's history you can find some cases where offensive community response went so far as to drive talented modders away in resignation.

As Tinker said, please consider how to voice criticism. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a difference of opinion, but especially in a fan community for a decade old game I think we should all be able to handle discourse about mods without exhibiting any hostility.

On a much lighter note, development for Heroes Unleashed is ongoing, and I am very pleased that ZeeAlex has offered to create some character skins for the next release. I'm still looking for some specific weapon (and vehicle) additions, so if anyone feels up to do some 3dsm modeling, please don't hesitate to PM me. :)

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I will have to agree with everyone on here on everything. Real world missions do infact have quite a lot of preplanning that goes into it before you even go out on patrol. but... its an acceptible loss off realism. Fact is playing simulators based on real world events is often quiet boring. Shoot, even on military simulators you will find soldiers often playing indians over a hill (think of space invaders) instead of using them for actual training purposes. M9 last stand is a pretty suitable name for that.

With that said though, modders have a lot of real world restrictions. Modding is like having a second job and without knowing everything as thoroughly as possible it isn't the quickest process. Especially with a massive compilation like Heroes Unleashed.

We start adding up Apex's hours, my hours, zees, and everyone else who has contributed to this or any other mod. The total number of man hours put into it is staggering. Sometimes its nicer just to appreciate what you have then to beg for more. Subtle suggestions go much farther as well.

PM sent apex.

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Thanks, pz3. :thumbsup:

A little heads-up on development. Among many other new features, once again there will be loads of new weapons and equipment in the next release of Heroes Unleashed, so many in fact that the current structure of equipment kits may become overwhelming if all weapons remain available in the single player campaign and quick missions. While choice is usually a good thing, clicking through several hundred kits can become quite a nuisance, especially when you're just looking for a quick game or want to get to the next campaign mission ASAP while the adrenaline from the last one is still pumping.

While GR multiplayer offers limiting the choice of available equipment through restriction sets, sadly there's no such thing for single player, so the equipment offered there should be a good compromise that provides enough choice while not going overboard with the selection. In earlier versions of GRHU the campaign only offered a limited sub-set of equipment to the player, consisting only of weapons in common use with U.S. Army Special Forces. After repeated user requests, later versions of the mod included all remaining - and less commonly fielded - weapons to the mix, broadening the choice significantly, but at the same time pushing the time required to make a selection.

Due to the steadily growing amount of weapons in GRHU, for the next update and future versions I want to return to the more limited (and more realistic) equipment selection of providing mostly weapons in common use with the military unit represented by the Ghosts to increase the authenticity of the equipment choice as well as limiting the time it takes players to make a selection. This means that you wont find all of the mod's weapons in single player anymore, neither for the campaign nor in quick missions, but rather be limited to a set choice of weaponry much more probable to be used by the Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group of the U.S. Army.

In fact I'd like to implement this in multiplayer too, meaning that instead of providing all weapons to all multiplayer units, every unit gets their own authentic choice of weapons and equipment, so that e.g. generally Russian Spetsnaz have access to weapons not available to U.S. Army Special Forces and vice versa, the USMC has different equipment than Delta Force, and so forth.

I think this would make equipment selection a lot more convenient while also improving overall realism, and I'd love to hear people's thoughts about it, so please post your opinions.

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I know my team would really appreciate that. The seemingly endless kits and the detail-lacking missions are the only two things keeping us from downloading this massive mod. Mods with tons of weapons get annoying because some people enjoy clicking through the entire 200-kit list before deciding on a weapon.

:whistle:

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Yes, access to Ghost Recon's source code would open up a whole new world of possibilities, but alas... I don't see that happening any time soon, especially in view of the way Ubisoft treats good old GR nowadays.

I've also considered writing a little add-on application that - among other features - would allow the use of something like kit restriction sets in single player. It wouldn't be too hard to implement, and I've played around with this idea for a while in the helper tool I am writing for the Mac version. But external applications also add to the complexity of using the game, and I'm not sure if this would be a welcome addition.

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Wasn't sure if this was the right thread but I saw some crash posts here...

A buddy and I are playing GR co-op with Heroes Unleashed with Windows 7. But whomever is not hosting always crashes upon joining the other's server. We have loaded only DS, IT and HU with priorities correct. It crashes every time a few seconds after the client joins the hose.

Any suggestions? We really want to play this mod!

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Thanks for helping out, Wombat! :thumbsup:

Yes, I think you're on the right trail here. For a long time I was working under the assumption that GR would check the modscont.txt files for version conflicts (I mean, it would have made sense), but that turned out to be wishful thinking. The reality is that each player in a multiplayer setup needs to check manually which version of a mod is installed before connecting.

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Related that we had similar troubles playing Blood Oil co-op today.

Couple of guys could join and play some missions even though they did not have the Blood Oil patch and a different ModsCont.txt.

They got dropped for wrong .map file on a couple of maps. One guy downloaded the BO patch and then didn't have that problem.

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IIRC, the GameRanger multiplayer client used to perform compatibility checks down to file checksums back in the Mac-only days, but that feature seems to be gone now. The only thing we could do to fix this is to write our own matchmaker application with version control for GR. I was actually contacted about this a while back by someone who wanted to attempt it, but I haven't heard back from him in a while.

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