Jump to content

Heaven & Earth: Project discussion thread


Recommended Posts

59 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

BTW I recently found your sound mod (also included in H&E I think?) and really enjoying it! It's now my default soundmod for CMSF2. Other soudmods are often much too loud on my 5.1 and or don't scale for larger battles.  

Its certainly not the only sound mod with a more subtle dynamic range* (although the ME soundscape's non-combat sounds are probably the quietest) though I agree that there are real world advantages to such a soundscape.

The updated 'ME soundscape 1.5' is probably nearly done at this point and will come with the "People's Beta"... I did put up a beta of that inside the download package for this video (see video description).

 

* For instance, I found those 'Wikkheiser' video's with AKDSM, & its distant sound options, interesting.

Edited by 37mm
Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, 37mm said:

Its certainly not the only sound mod with a more subtle dynamic range* (although the ME soundscape's non-combat sounds are probably the quietest) though I agree that there are real world advantages to such a soundscape.

The updated 'ME soundscape 1.5' is probably nearly done at this point and will come with the "People's Beta"... I did put up a beta of that inside the download package for this video (see video description).

 

* For instance, I found those 'Wikkheiser' video's with AKDSM, & its distant sound options, interesting.

Thanks!

That beta is indeed the one I have installed. I did like the H&E sounds and recently stumbled on you mentioning the separate standalone sounscape mod somewhere. 

AKDSM is indeed also a nice mod, that was the one I used with CMSF1 iirc and still have it installed for some WW2 games (the Z_BASE_AKDSM variant). 

I did a quick compare recently between some soundmods recently and thought the Soundscape one is the best overall. The HQS sounds are nice, but mainly / only when zoomed in on my system. There seems to be little difference between sounds depending on the range. Plus in a firefight with a couple of platoons exchanging shots, there is not much to distinguish anymore at all.

While imo the dyanmic range, bullet snaps, etc, gives a lot of immersion. Perhaps even more with a 5.1 system. The sound in the youtube link of Wikkheiser are great too indeed! I'll have another look at AKDSM with all the options.

One thing that I'll have to compromise is that I really enjoy Mords vehicle chatter mod, but those are based off the vanilla vehicle sounds. So either I'll lose the vehicle chatter, or the modded vehicle sounds.

Anyway, thanks for the great effort!  :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Am still a bit burned out on testing.  Especially early stage versions as testing completely destroys any desire to play the completed scenario.  If you have something that you consider just about fully completed and ready for release I'd be happy to do a final playthru for you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Sgt.Squarehead - as I've said before I think, stop noodling around with your stuff.  There comes a point where chasing the 1% is counter-productive.  Tidy them all up, write the briefings and square the maps away and kick them out of the door.  One released and 'good enough for release' product is better than 200 sat on your hard drive.

Taking Ap Bac or more correctly, 'A Miserable Damn Performance' as an example - it's done ... is it absolutely perfect - probably not, I don't know yet because it will bundle with the next H&E build so people haven't had a chance to play it and give their feedback.  However, despite the fact I felt that it needed a couple more play throughs and there were a couple of things that I felt could be changed, those changes and tests would only be marginal improvements.

The important thing is that the scenario fits the vision (which is why I banged on about vision in my Neptune Spear scenario tutorial) that I had in terms of its look, feel and outcomes.  Whether AI Group 1 plan could be tinkered with so that it moves between order 3 and 4 at 4:30 instead of 4:15 because it would be slightly more realistic or not is something I'm over.  The player generally won't notice the nuance if the overall experience is good.

It was gruelling getting to that point - as I recall, you said something like - 'flip - how did you knock the map out so quickly?'  The answer was simple - real world map, focus on getting it done and again I wasn't going to worry too much about whether a bump in the ground here or a tree there looked better or would create some sort of challenge or not.  The joy of real maps is that you don't need to think about the ground - you just trace the map.  

The graft was testing the thing because each test was about a week's worth of effort.  I reached out to our mutual friend @MOS:96B2P only when I had a pretty good idea that the thing worked and had a checklist of things that I wanted an opinion on.  He graciously spent about a week going through it and gave me some helpful suggestions.  From there, I incorporated most of those suggestions and tested again.  Then I had to deal with a couple of changes in the mod build and tested again.  By then, although not totally happy, I figured that it was good enough and I am confident that it is. 

I say the above, which is why I reached out to MOS, was because my vision was to replicate the frustrations and frictions of that day and I wanted to confirm that I'd got that right.  I'm pretty sure that some people will hate the scenario for this reason but I know that I've delivered the vision and I explain this in the designer notes.  I am happy enough that, despite some imperfections, I can explain to anyone who plays it - that:

  • I put a bit of thought and effort into it
  • I know how the thing works
  • I know how it is meant to work
  • I know why it is meant to work that way.

I think you just need the same confidence to accept that 'good enough is good enough'.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cheers.....I think!  ;)

TBH, part of the issue with the H&E scenario stuff is that the idea started on a whim, seemed to work OK so I decided to expand it, without much though as to what that would involve.

Winging it is definitely not the way forward and that's a fact....I'm on the third or fourth iteration of most of the maps, some have nearly doubled in area, I'm sure you get the picture.  :rolleyes:

Edited by Sgt.Squarehead
Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Cheers.....I think!  ;)

TBH, part of the issue with the H&E scenario stuff is that the idea started on a whim, seemed to work OK so I decided to expand it, without much though as to what that would involve.

Winging it is definitely not the way forward and that's a fact....I'm on the third or fourth iteration of most of the maps, some have nearly doubled in area, I'm sure you get the picture.  :rolleyes:

Exactly mate - start with a clear idea of what you want to do and stick to it - mission creep always ends in tears.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you look back at the first few pages of this thread you'll see how it all started.....It was just a quick test of modded units & terrain in a playable format.

But then it started to grow on me.

You know the rest.

PS - All but one of the maps are pretty much done now (foliage is always ongoing).....Once I'm happy with them, I'll ping you a PM explaining my concept as it now stands.  The final map is urban, so it's taking a while to make.

Edited by Sgt.Squarehead
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just realised that I made that shot in 'editing mode', with the clock set to mid-day.....Which would end very badly indeed for the Imperials as they are both attacking and outnumbered!  :o

Here's how it should look:

6KLr9Ky.jpg

A lot less visually pleasing as a teaser.....But a hell of a lot safer for your (NVG equipped) pixeltruppen!  ;)

 

Edited by Sgt.Squarehead
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

Well no Halloween release but, as any viewers of my channel are likely aware, the People's Militia campaign is ticking along well now.

Indeed I'm hopefully not too far from entering the (dreaded) briefing writing stage.

One of the scenarios was slated to be a simplistic conversion of the Will'o'Wisps scenario however I've dropped that conversion now (I'll probably just stick that in the single scenario content for 0.97) as I needed a more "brutal" scenario.

As such I've decided to use a heavily cropped & (eventually) edited experimental map by @Combatintman...

OKqhcuS.jpg

...  the original was massive but this portion will load much more easily.

 

The modpack itself has, for the most part, only seen rather subtle changes. An example of this is tailoring the geometric floating icons by @Vinnart for red vs red warfare during the Bong-Hai Civil War era & beyond...

tgpyOUt.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is how Kham Duc looked in the editor when I finished with it - CTD every time I tried to put it into 3D view and even after two crops

660998047_KhamDucOverlayCombo.thumb.jpg.678ab20335899bec7e8328f448e8a49f.jpg

What you can see here is a combined Google Earth and Map image as the special editor overlay.  Pity I couldn't get the thing to load because it would have been an awesome scenario - a sort of mini Khe Sanh.  And to answer @Erwin this map took about three weeks of my life.  Ap Bac was the equivalent of about a month's work and my also canned (thanks to the elimination of the troop bugging out behaviour in recent patches which made it unviable) Son Tay scenario about a week of my life.

Anybody who hasn't heard of Kham Duc can fill their boots here:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, 37mm said:

Originally it was intended to be Kham Duc (what I've now turned into the beginnings of a village was originally the northern part of an airfield).

It was actually the village of Kham Duc - although there was a military compound where a lot of the tribesmen and their families were hanging out along presumably with some US Special Forces types.,

The purely military bits on the map in my previous post were the airfield of which the buildings to the south of it formed part and one of the clusters of those buildings was an SF compound.  There were also about half a dozen outpost positions scattered across the various high features surrounding the airfield.  This is why it would have been a great mini Khe Sanh type battle as you have the fight for the outposts plus the battle for the airfield itself.  When I first looked at it, I could see that theoretically I could do it at one to one scale (the original map area was 4km x 2.7km).  Unfortunately the combination of elevation changes and number of trees were what caused it to CTD even after I'd cropped it to 3.9km x 2.2km, stripped a bunch of trees out and dropped the elevations.  I could probably eventually have got it to load with a bit more tree stripping but there was still a bunch of work to be done with all of the buildings (facades, roof and door/window layouts) and of course I hadn't even started purchasing units.  To make it representative of the action that would involve at least a battalion of US and irregulars, about a company's worth of spies to represent the tribesmen's families, a sh1t tin of fortifications to plonk around the airfield perimeter and to build the outpost positions and then at least a regiment's worth of VC.

I might try another crop at some point just to do the assault on the airfield but we'll see.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...