bvark

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/battlefield.html It seems using IRC for CPX communications might be the future of the army, rather than a bad approximation

I played through till 07:27 game time, when Pi and a few others dropped out (02:00CET or so..). Did the game progress any further? Will someone host at some point in the future to finish the scenario off - it was really interesting, and I was enjoying it a lot...

Hi Folks, Thought I would lob my 2c worth in. Definitely felt a lot of time pressures, but I suspect the real thing is no less hectic One of the problems with the 60 second 'waiting for exchange' phase was that if I was in IRC, I couldn't alt-tab back while sounds were playing - a resolution change to fit the windows side-by-side fixed that. Something that would be really useful is a 'replay last combat phase' button, so if I was very busy trying to get artillery fires on target (and I was), I could ignore the combat phase going on in the background and come back to it. One of the other problems was a lack of unit graphics - I tried to get my planned axis of advance posted onto the web (http://www.atdot.at/bvark-intent.bmp), but we really needed a proper overlay (possibly an easily editable & shareable one from within the game tool, but I'm not getting greedy - none of us were really all that great at grid references, and we made a number of mistakes as a result (the worst of which was the 'charge of the engineering brigade' across 010 northing ;( Both of them together, coupled with the fact I stupidly assumed blue were attacking east from 21 easting (thus making my terrain analysis useless) and I didn't know red would have ATGMs on its T55s meant we rushed in where, as Oz pointed out, a brigade probably would have feared to tread Still, had a good time, and hopefully I'll be around for the next blue moon where my schedule synchs up with a CPX!

I have the microsoft gamevoice. There's a free version of the gamevoice client/server available on the website (gamevoice share- http://www.gamevoice.com/Download/gamevoiceshare.asp?Page=148) As mentioned before, I think http://www.teamspeak.org is a better program (client/server, multiple channels, ability to whisper between channels, good security), but for a good quality microphone/headphone combo with a speaker/headphone switch, the gamevoice is a sound piece of hardware (apologies for the pun). If you want to try out a teamspeak session, there's a permanent one on bvark-server.atdot.at (password ohhi) - it's in a colocation center in Munich, Germany, so YMMV for performance (and create your own channel so my battlefield 1942 clan don't get confused with all the talk of modern hardware [ November 24, 2002, 05:25 PM: Message edited by: bvark ]

Hi! I figured it was time to decloak and look at the forums since my copy of Tacops4 has just been ordered. I run a battlefield 1942 clan (2nd world war combined arms shooter), which regularly has 12-16 players per team, and after MUCH argument we've found teamspeak (http://www.teamspeak.org) to be the superior voice comms solution for audio quality, price (free), and features. It allows keyboard shortcuts to hop between different channels, and creating your own (passworded) channels on the fly, as well as 'whispering' to people or channels. It supports a Unix based server for client-server comms (which scales _far_ better than the peer-to-peer comms of rogerwilco), and works acceptably on a 56K modem (although most of the clan have DSL). Voice discipline is a pretty important part of it, and I agree that we need text based comms as well, but for discussion rather than detailed orders (and for a healthy bit of banter!), we find voice comms to be an invaluable bonus, particularly as you don't need to take your focus off the game (which of course is more of an issue in an FPS). If I get time to attend a future CPX (and my copy of tacops 4 shows up , I'll host the Unix server on my colocated box (in Germany, but reasonable connection to the US), and that can be included in people's testing of solutions. cheers, bvark / phil sykes (3rd rate tacops v1 player, 1996/7