Alexander SquidLord Williams

From Thur night to Tuesday morning, there will be no posts on the boards from me. [general uproar, disturbed shouting] I know, I know, please ... sit down. Yes, you too, sir. Out of the chair. It's convention season again, and as usual I'm committed to hitting at least Dragon*coN and AWA. That means I'll be off to D*C for five glorious days, this week. Computer gaming had a bit of a ... delay ... in getting formed this year at D*C, so there wasn't really time to get them talked into featuring DT in any context. It might be worthwhile to give all of the Battlefront big-wigs a talk-up before this coming year and just have them do a booth for the whole slate they publish. It's hard to find a captive audience of 40,000 geeks to run your products by. Regardless, if there are other geeks of high-caliber in the Atlanta area this week at Con, drop me a line before Thur morning, 10a Eastern, and we'll try to get you into one of the nice dining I tend to schedule when I'm out. Because, by Hell, if I can't blow stuff up, I want to eat finely aged red meat and sip the best in liquid refreshments. (If, on the other hand, you plan on being at Anime Weekend Atlanta ... well, we'll work something out. Comparitive relaxing miseries, maybe.)

I've spent decades murdering electrons and scraping their hoary old bones across cathode-ray cave walls, just to ready myself for this moment. [sniffle] Its like the Emmy's. I'm so proud. (Be careful, I grew up reading Lovecraft and Knuth. I'll describe something as "squammus" and then write my own mini-language to go further, if you're not careful.)

Hey, I feel excluded from the hate!

Time to put out a new Schema that understands DeploymentZone, gentlemen.

On rough terrain, you're going to get high-sided alotwith that gap in the rear wheels. That'll seriously bite on a ridge line but on some maps, the terrain is broken enough it'll happen just coming up after a tactical move through a gully. Even if the full surface is plated with DU, between the surface area of the hind third of the vehicle plus the surface area of the turret (which should be more heavily armoured than the chassis), I don't see what you could be cramming into the front two thirds that'd be as heavy. Note that, volumetrically, you have less volume by far in the front, too. Let's not even ask where the drive train for the front wheels nestles. I like the idea of a low-profile high-punch low-ammo scout vehicle; get in, hit hard, get out, extract, repeat ... I like the turret design of this and the general profile, but I think it'll need to be both shorter front-to-back and slightly thicker in the chassis to be reasonable. You might even want to consider flipping it around and putting the turret in the front, designed to peek right over ridges and keep hull-down in a big way, with the back end basically there to keep back-shots from taking you down fast. Keep working on it; I think there are good ideas in here.

Thank you, Hub, for being forthright and professional about things. I actually find the fact the attacker can deploy in the same area in that scenario kind of interesting, but its not what you intended. Nicely designed map, nicely conceived scenario in general, and you deserve kudos for getting it out there.

Mainly because drop pods in general are pretty much johnny-on-the-spot accuracy and there's little in-game reason for mine dispersal to be less accurate than an infantry drop. The dropships have a reasonable need to balance their entry profile with finding a smooth place to drop, so that deviation makes sense, but drop pods come screaming down pretty straight with only slight attitude adjustmen, probably from small attitude thrusters. They need very little space to deploy their stuff, and turrets are the only thing they actually have to set down for; infanry can jump cushion and it doesn't matter if mines end up dropped above the ground, they're getting scattered over a 500m area from a 4m pod, anyway. They're getting flung, regardless. So, in that sense, they're being deployed by a pretty accurate delivery agent in the first place. Is that an argument for adding deviation to drop pod deployments? Possibly. Applied to infy, mines and turrets, it might be reasonable to throw off the target area by some amount, though that'll keep anyone from deployed in a prepared position not dropped during the deployment phase. That might be a worthwhile trade-off; I'm not sure it is, but opinions differ. As adzling suggested, a 30m deployment deviance in a minefield deployment really doesn't matter in dropping them on folks' heads. Its a 500m diameter (corrected from a previous phrasing of 500m radius; we know its not a klik in diameter). That's under a 10% chance of a targeted area not being covered, which doesn't go to the issue. Its probably worth noting that in effective communication, a reason you don't share with the audience is one that might as well not exist. If you can't communicate your ideas, persuasively, clearly, and with coherence, unless the audience is composed of mind-readers, you've murdered electrons to produce your message needlessly. That applies to all of us, myself included, and in the main reasons for dissent and the process of debate have been great around here. That's the way to sway people, that's the way to engage others productively, and that's the way to, if you don't get your way, at least get recognized as a luminary voice in the crowd so you might get the next thing you want. I'm very honoured to bat around ideas with the likes of adzling, yurch, and the great majority of others on this forum. The quality of discussion is extremely refined, and its a pleasure to be part of it.

I was suggesting something simpler, actually, that no foliage is drawn in gunner's view under 500m. Everything after is according to graphics settings. Less processing necessary, so its a fast impliment.

Noooo, villainy usually comes with the ability to carefully and at length expouse its point of view, the better to give the hero a speech in the inevitable death-trap. What you've been doing is more akin to my henchman, Scarface, who says "Master no like" and brings me pretty girls from the village below my chateau. I'd like to note "you idiots" isn't likely to be condusive discourse when you're trying to convince people either of your innate superiority in the tactical realm, as a discoursive sally against a perceived wrong, or on a kindergarten playground. Do try, and I say this with all sincerity, to invest at least a modicum of effort in communicating. Moreover, try to have a coherent point. For example, "all the other **** you idiots pull to avoid dealing with the tactical situation." I'd say mine drops are currently a part of the tactical situation. Do they occur? Yes. Are they short-range in both the physical and temporal spaces? Yes. Do they affect the battlespace? Yes. One can only conclude that this is the very definition of a tactical situation introduced by "you idiots." In fact, its obvious its a portion of the tactical battlespace you, pointedly, do not want to deal with. N'est pas? Obviously, then, we must re-evaluate the context if the communication makes no sense as presented. So ... how are tactical mine drop effects not at least similar to modern FASCAM artillery mine drops coupled with the in-game-justified speed of low orbit tactical drops already established? What you're doing is very much akin to going into the Steel Beasts community, stomping your feet and protesting because they had the termidity to have introduced anti-tank artillery and FASCAM, you're going to stop playing and anyone that uses them are idiots. You do see how silly that is, yes? You mean the difficulty in seeing through foliage when its turned on, and you try to hull-down? The funny thing being that not only do most folks involved in the forum actually think that's a problem, they've gone out of their way on multiple occasions to provide reasonable discussion and even potential solutions, interim and long-term for it. They don't sit around whinging about "unrealistic tactical play," they either turn off foliage or they suck it up and play through while doing so. They are, in short, constructive, which you haven't been being on too much, lately. That's a shame, but acceptible. It does not, however, earn you brownie points, social credit, or egoboo. And it doesn't do anything to further the things you supposedly want.

If they're winning consistently, then it'd appear their grasp of tactics is significantly more in tune with the tactical situation than yours. They're either out-maneuvering you on the battlefield, out shooting you, or taking advantage of local conditions (which includes technological manifestations) to destroy first your expectations, then your plans. That, by definition, is good tactics, as Rommel would support. If they're not winning and you are, then its clear that your execution of traditional tactics is being wildly successful, and you are simply engaging in curmudgeony, borderline-whinging behaviour without actually trying to point, in particular, to the folks in question and improve their tactics. Since you've repeatedly gone out of your way to bad-mouth the game, with little supporting argument (beyond "well, its this way now," which is no argument at all when I'm in a setting where I can drop a force of 3 sixty tonne tanks anywhere within over a 100 square kilometres within 2min of those exact same tanks and drivers being on the other side of the battlefield), I can only assume if it were the second, we'd have heard more "Ha ha! I kicked you whippersnapper's butts with good ol' Patton's Pattented Fake-and-Flank! Here's how I've been doing it!" We haven't. What does that leave us to believe save you're a disgruntled buggy-whip maker? Really, I'm not concerned, in the sense that I don't look forward to playing with the Bacchus. I want to see how it affects overall gameplay. My main concern is two-fold: </font> It requires the human touch. You don't want to send your Bacchus out driven by a bot, 9 out of 10 times. They're not so good at using terrain masking and turret-down positions to stay hidden, which is what a Bacchus needs to do to survive long. If you have a bot in it, you'll need a human nearby to take out the definite in-bound threats unless you're truly confident in your bot-wrangling.</font>Infantry drop-pods are going to be really screwed by this thing. Unless I'm mis-cuing and the missile rack ignores drop pods, in which case ... well, ignore this point. If it does ignore pods, its the perfect reason to keep a Hermes nearby enough to interdict ... which means the moment a 76mm or so rolls in, that force'll have lost two very important, irreplacable units. Which is a good thing to have to worry about.</font>The third worry wasn't important enough to make the two-fold, but its out there, mainly that, especially on the larger maps, its going to cut the pace of combat way back, as it'll take time to get to the Objectives over-land. Get your DZ drop-turreted heavily and you'll be hard locked out and might as well call for a scenario ender. I think the Bacchus'll need to be watched for a bit. I'm not big on putting it into all the inventories right out of the gate in 1.1.4, but in, say, 33% to 50%, just to introduce it. At least the rotation'll keep the scenarios turning, so if it turns out the Bac needs tweaking or is overpowered or simply overwhelming, there'll be missions not containing it. If, after a couple weeks, you see folks reporting, "Man, I really wish I'd had a Bacchus!" on both sides of a given battle, you know you're hitting close to the sweet spot.

Maybe we should invert this idea. When in gunner's view, the computer synthesizes a number of local sensor systems to produce a ground-plane mapping. Milimetric radar, LIDAR, etc, all combine to strip the ground clutter within, say, 500m ... or at least the computer feeds you a view unobstructed by it. Beyond that, there's just too much scatter and jamming. This puts infantry near the vehicle which are close enough and not "concealed" enough to be visible as visible, makes it far easier to do shoot-and-scoot over hills and around corners when in gunner, but lets the "environmental view" still show the nearby ground clutter on the high end boxes. It pretty much removes the serious advantage of turning off ground clutter decoration without removing it entirely. (Oh, yes, and the reason the system works for infantry is their HUD doesn't have the bulk and emissions of an enclosing vehicle to deal with, so they cut through it just the same. A prone infantry gunner sees the immediately surrounding foliage pulled back to 500m, which should help a fair chunk.)

Truth is, I'm thinking the marking and field would reduce a lot of the complaints about minefields as they are, currently, with no other changes. (Well, OK, not Dark's issues, but I'm dealing with reasoned objections.) I actually had not even thought for a moment about mines having pipers, which I'm kind of ambivilent on. On the one hand, mines aren't AM-powered, so they shouldn't really have a "signature" as such. On the other, the tac is a kind of sensor synesthesia, combining lots of data flows into one coherent feed, so it makes sense that they'd be at least somewhat visible on the combat interface with some kind of marker. Perhaps a square or x instead of a triangle to mark static threats; an unjammed turret would then have the same kind of pipper over it. Just a little aide to distinguishing threats with a glance; threat differentiation is the main reason you want markers like that, after all. (In that sense, I might one day suggest the different size classes of vehicle get different sized triangle pippers. But not today. ) Mind you, I'm open about not finding the threat of drop pod mines as great as others in this thread. If the attacker has that kind of local air superiority (assuming the pods dropping mines when killed bug is squashed and the addition of the Bacchus), then they're already pretty much in control of the map and you have bigger problems as the defender. If on a map with no organic air defense towers, then the Hermes and Bacchus are going to be vastly important for both sides to have deployed in areas they want to remain free of the threat of drop mining. And perhaps the real threat from drop pods, drop infy. Damned ATGMs. I think this is a perfectly acceptible idea. It should have the visible effect of reducing the minefield intensity on the tac display, which'll give instant feedback to both sides on the progress of events. (If you see your minefields suddenly fading for no discernable reason, someone's either got good range with HE, or has a jammed Cutter in the area.) The issue I see forming on the horizon here is multi-fold: </font> If the arty-delivered mines are as swiftly droppable ... ... we have some of the same objections as now, save that artillery is non-interceptible, so there'll be even less counters than there are now to having mines dropped on your vehicles.</font>If the arty-delivered mines take longer to drop, either because of initial wait or recharge time ... ... the area an arty-called minefield covers will have to be much wider to actually be usable to change the axis of attack of a mobile force, on the size of the current fire mission beaten zone. And that's a lot of minefield.</font>If the arty mines take longer to deliver and don't cover a significantly broader area ... ... then they'll become a purely defensive measure that won't really pay off much even in that sense. It'll be a soley "when not dropping something useful, like a turret" kind of thing. And tactical richness will actually decrease because of it.</font>I find it interesting that there's not as much verbiage over the fact I can drop a 76mm turret directly behind your vehicle on short notice and have it kill anything within 500m, where 76mm cannon are pretty deadly. Not only can it hit the target within 500m and kill it, but it has a good chance of killing out to 1500m in good conditions, which is more deadly than a minefield. A turret is persistant until destroyed like a minefield, so that can't be the difference. The main difference is a turret is pretty highly visible in almost all conditions. The mines definitely are not. Ergo, my analysis suggests the problem is nearly completely solved just by just making minefields have a visible tac radius like an unjammed AA. Its not a perfect solution, the other things you want to do with regards to minefields are also important, but this one change should make them far more useful to pre-deploy, leaving fewer for drop-deployment, and reducing the use thereby. With the deploy-bug squashed and the added Bacchus, I think the problem pretty much just goes away.

I'm not overly thrilled about this, and not just because I've spent an inordinate amount of time perfecting my mine dropping technique. The real reason I'm not hugely thrilled with this one is that there are a lot of mines to drop in 4min without a marked coverage radius during Deployment, and every mine dropped is a mine you'll never have during that scenario again. As is, you can reinforce areas during the enemy advance, pushing them off-axis, but with no combat drop, that's no longer an option and the mines become something you have to drop fast with no visual keys. That gets kind of awkward, there.

Sadly, not right now. I'm sure that's somewhere on the ToDo, though.

Sadly, I don't, which is something I need to correct, tout suite. I haven't tried using Xfire to grab screenshots; that should be my next step.

That's ... a lot of firepower crammed onto a single chassis. Ammo for the 120'll be hideously limited, and that Chassis positively begs to be hit by shots from above. (ATGM's in particular will eat this thing up with shots to the chassis that penetrate its rather thin vertical profile. Worst of all, though, is that you simply won't be able to go hull-down in this thing. The turret's set too far back and too low to not expose those front tires and flat areas on anything like a reverse slope. My guess is the ATGM is going to make you more of a priority target than this vehicle can survive. The 6mm ion as coax is a great idea for a scout vehicle, but overall this design is pretty much not going to deploy like you want, I think.

Voot!

(Man, we really need a DropTeam IRC or other text comm server. We're talking right by each other.)

Re SSE. Already checked. </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 3 model name : AMD Duron Processor stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 799.740 cache size : 64 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr pni syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 1564.67</pre>

I actually puzzled most of that out myself, already ... but similar issues were in the offing. The Illegal Instruction error seems endemic to one of the libraries, and even pops up after the wget in Update, which is actually what makes me think its a lib issue and not an executable issue, as such.

Er ... [hides tentacles behind back] Actually, the extract worked pretty well. In the sense that it was happy to be pulled out, the directories looked fine, and the scripts looked sane. Mind you, running from the top of the CD with no modification results in: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">./runLinuxInstall: line 3: 31527 Illegal instruction LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:./InstallData/lib/ ./InstallData/bin/LinuxInstall</pre>

I'd have responded minutes after you posted this, but my WoW group wanted to do some killin'. I like killin'. Worse, its one of my three Linux servers, all running different distributions, and none of which with an actual hardwired console attached; I access them all through ssh and X from my Windows box. I'm actually trying to run it from down in InstallData, but its not being very friendly about it. In fact, its downright hostile when it wants a very specific version of the SDL libraries, and then comes back with: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">./runLinuxInstall: line 2: 25207 Illegal instruction LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./InstallData/lib/:/usr/lib ./InstallData/bin/LinuxInstall</pre>

I'm trying to get DT installed from the CD onto one of my Linux boxes, so that I can host a server for experimenting with custom scenarios/configs, but the install itself is being ... challenging. I'm running a 32bit Gentoo box. Cleverly, I copied the CD to a hard dtive to make the install go a wee bit speedier. The current environment contains: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/local2/tmp/cdrom/DropTeamInstall/InstallData/lib:/local2/tmp/cdrom/DropTeamInstall/:/usr/lib</pre>

Eh, I'm thinking that isn't really a solution. I need to put mines on the road because the deployment phase field was destroyed; there's trees on either side so I'm pretty sure you'll prefer the road to the forrest, which'll slow you down enough flanking gets easier. I hit the pod, and it slaps down over in the trees to the side. That's no good. I hit it again, and it goes into the bush on the other side. Grrrr. I whack it a third time, and its taken so long to get out there, it lands on the road behind your force ... useless. Basically, if the deviation is significant enough and frequent enough to make using mines as an offensive drop useful even half the time, it'll make them utterly useless as a drop item. They might as well be only deployed during the prep phase, because that's the only way you get to control where they go. Also note that there are only two cases you can even have drop mining: Someone is dropping from the LS after an extract or death, or they're in a Mercury. </font> If the former, they're not on the battlefield so not only is it one fewer gun for their side, its one fewer target, which makes a huge difference.</font>If the latter, they're in a thinly armoured and lightly armed vehicle and very likely not in any position to deal your real forces a blow except with the mines and other command assets. And again, one fewer target in the zone.</font>Either way, the miner is "paying" for the ability to have short-response small AoE damaging artillery by exchanging it for a greatly reduced presence on the battlefield. Want to counter it? In 1.1.4, you'll have two major choices: </font>Hermes, which'll shoot the pod out of the air with a vengence and the mines won't deploy, or,</font>Bacchus, which has an agressive air-interdiction missile system, which'll shoot the pod out of the air with a vengence.</font>You'll want to be careful with the limited supplies for both, of course, but that's always, always been true.

My squallid and squamus heart swells with the happiness and pleasure of this knowledge. If nothing else, it'll make dropping jammers and AA fields a little faster so I can focus on what I really suck at (no, not shooting ... OK, that too): Creating earthen defenses! If anything deserves some wiki love, its the Cutter and using it to prepare defenses. You laugh, but all my friends have a tendency to call my Squid. To my face, even. A friend of mine modeled a take on a furry version of Otto Octavious for a comic pitch to Marvel on me. A squid with extra mechanical tentacles, of course. If you're going to be a squid, be the Lord of squid, say I. [amused look]