Toby Haynes

Fabulous battles! I've been trying to work out better tactics for defending that bridge objective on Dead Gulch for a while. It's a good example of a level which is really tough to secure for the defenders, mainly because it can be attacked from all directions simultaneously. Putting AA all the way across the southern side of the bridge suddenly meant that the attackers could only come from the north and now defense is possible.

Digging has been discussed in depth before. One of the better ideas was the idea of shaped charges for creating trenches and similar emplacements quickly. Having infantry being able to place such explosives and then detonate them remotely, either as booby traps or for emplacements.

I sent a concrete Czech Hedgehog to Clay some time ago for precisely this reason. I don't know where that has got to. I still have the model knocking around.

I'd certainly like to have CZ up at the weekend. As for an update, I'd wait until you have a reasonable number of changes. Since there is no versioning for mods, having fewer, larger changes is better to avoid version inflation!

Not there either. I'm sure that Ive checked all folders. nothing with .log in it. </font>

Limited range on the infantry is important. For me, infantry is all about sneaking up on the enemy tank and either dropping an ATG down the tail pipe without being noticed or rushing a vehicle with Jets aflame and attempting to drop a couple of incendiaries down the turret top. Long range kills with infantry == not so much fun.

Oops. Fixed it now.

Okay folks, here's the experimental Desert Mesa and The Dam changes. They have been briefly playtested and may have things that are busted or straight out wrong. Just let me know politely Experimental Desert Mesa and The Dam scenario files These will not damage any existing scenarios - these are two new scenario files which will appear as "The Dam Experiment" and "Desert Mesa Experiment" in the Scenario Lists. New for The Dam Experiment: CTFTightrope gametype - two flags either side of the Dam. Oh so very close, but oh so far away! The Dam facilities are now split into two groups and the Dam defences are now Missile towers, not Laser towers. Laser defence towers have been added to the eastern and western bases to provide some defences. New for Desert Mesa Experiment: CTF2 gametype - the two closer central bases are used for this CTF2 gametype, for more frenetic play. [ February 24, 2007, 08:54 AM: Message edited by: Toby Haynes ]

No promises but I'll try to send at least an updated Desert Mesa to you Thursday.

One thing I should add is that we can easily run an experimental scenario alongside the original one. I can just create TheDamExperiment.scenario, everyone downloads this small file and we play around with the possibilities and see how they work out. Once we hit on something that everyone likes, it can become TheDam version 1.2. Creature Zoo is a perfect location for such testing

Actually, I'm delighted to get constructive feedback. It's difficult to gauge how human players will attack a particular map - the bots are fairly predictable and don't really stretch the possibilities for attacks. Only once a map has been played against human opponents do I get a good feel for better layouts. The original thinking for this level goes as follows: The dam is the best defended part. It's the key strategic objective in the scenario and it is worth the most points for holding it. The dual laser zones were deliberately chosen - because capturing either end of the dam captures all of it, the defending team needs a bit more help. To balance that, I opted to make the sum of all the other facilities greater than the Dam itself. So a team which takes everything except the Dam will win by 200 points or so. That sounds easy - except that team must now defend THREE separate facilities from incursion. So - no picnic there either. I chose not to put defenses on the Eastern and Western bases to encourage players to set up their own defence rather than relying on the pre-existing ones. Okay - so that deals with the original theory. Now the "in-practice" part. The Dam is hard to hold onto as it stands, at least against a well coordinated opponent who uses SAM paladins to restrict the arrival of reinforcements. My main worry with making the Dam defences into Cobra missile towers is that it will make a very tough for the opponent to recapture the Dam. I'd almost be tempted to give the Eastern and Western bases SAM coverage and the Dam nothing automatic. Adding a new base to the peninsular at the northern end of the lake is an interesting idea. That can certainly be done - I might experiment a little.

I'll play Devil's Advocate here. The most flag captures I've ever achieved on Desert Mesa is four in 30 minutes, so it is possible to strike fast and hard and rack up the points. My most flag captures on any scenario in 30 minutes is seven against bot opponents. Granted that human players do up the ante on attacks. My usual strategy is to destroy (or capture) the enemy laser tower - that opens more paths allowing faster captures. I personally think that the SW base is easier to defend, but that's only my preference. That said, changing the flag positions is really easy. The two central bases are far enough apart to allow some strategies - there are several choke points to channel defences/attacks. It would be trivial to either add a different CTF mode for this map (say CTF2) for a short-run CTF set up or entirely replace the existing positions in the CTF mode.

Well - a multi-shot 76mm Aerial would be pretty scary too. The 20mm AP 15 shot bursts can reduce the side armour of most tanks to junk in a few seconds. A three- or five-shot burst of 76mm would disable a lot of vehicles. Talking about scary: Phantom and I were in a Thor-on-Thor battle on Desert Mesa. Except I was in a Thor Hm, rather than a standard Thor. Just as he crested the hill, I switched from 120mmAP to the HE-L mortars and let all five rip in a salvo, resulting in a blown turret for Phantom. Ah - the joys of the unexpected attack - the noise and smoke from that attack are quite impressive!

Thanks for that info - I'll start a FAQ and add that to the list. Okay - you may not have /usr/local/lib in your dynamic linker (ld) configuration. Take a look in </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">/etc/ld.so.conf</pre>

The first time I tried it I almost fell off my chair. That's nothing to what happened when a bot fired one at me! :eek:

If you have the output from the terminal, either post it here (if it's short enough i.e. less than 50 lines) or send it to my email address: tjwhaynes at gmail dot com and I'll take a look. I fully expect to have some fiddling to do to get it working on some platforms. Linux (on all it's architectures) should be the easiest to get going, but Mac OS X shouldn't be too hard if there is a compiler and the PNG development stuff to hand. Sooner or later I'll start a FAQ for this toolkit on the website. That depends on the number of questions of course.

Poesel has verified a new version - so for those of you who will be playing this (once the crashing gets fixed) you'll need this version: The Dam version 1.1.1

I'm a little nervous about this but here goes... I've released the Flow Motion toolkit that I've been using to create the scenarios I've released. It can be downloaded from: Flow Motion toolkit This is version 0.1.0. If that doesn't mean anything to you, I'll put it like this - the code works well enough to be useful but it is almost certainly not perfect and it may not even compile on your system without major brain surgery. That said, if you would like to try these tools out and are having trouble, I will *try* to help. There are no guarantees that I can fix all (or any!) problems. The code has ONLY been tested on a 64bit Linux system so far and may need some tweaking to work on 32bit systems - but I have plenty of experience in writing cross-platform code so I hope that any horrors in those areas can be solved fairly easily. There are no graphic front ends to these utilities - they are all command line. Mac users will have to open a terminal to use them (assuming it compiles). It ONLY requires the PNG development headers and PNG libraries as dependencies, so it shouldn't be too hard to compile if you can already do so. I may consider putting binaries up in the future if compilation is a major stumbling block for many people. Anyway, enough blathering from me. Any feedback is appreciated!

I've put a new version of the Dam together - hopefully this one works out better. edit... The Dam version 1.1 - deleted [ February 17, 2007, 04:58 PM: Message edited by: Toby Haynes ]

I pulled the file off the Google pages and it looked truncated. I've rebuilt the tarball and you can try it out here: [edit - deleted version 1.1] The Dam version 1.1.1 (fixed I hope!) I've tried it in Standalone and Server modes and it works as far as I can tell. [ February 17, 2007, 03:41 PM: Message edited by: Toby Haynes ]

I'd like to see some Industrial models - so Electricity Pylons, Factories, Silos and Piping would all be good. I also spy some walls in there - those would be extremely useful for creating adhoc bases and restricting the paths that tanks can take. Thanks in advance!

Okay - that is odd. I'll try and reproduce that error. I may need Clay's help to diagnose it.

This sounds like it might need help from Clay. It's a shame I don't have the Radeon 7800 system around anymore. I think you could safetly move all the DDS textures out of the data directory to some other location and see if the textures on buildings return.

Some of the voice comms used to be garbled badly. I've not had problems receiving messages recently (although I'm still sporadically hit by the sound at half speed issue). We'll have to run some tests in game at some point and try and get some hard data. One thing desperately needed is a (alterable) reduction in the other sounds when a voice message is playing. The number of times I've been in a fire fight and the conversation goes: </font> Jung: ... incoming ... behind ...</font>Nexus6: Come again?</font>Jung: Quick ... ... ... South</font>Nexus6: Ummm.</font> At which point Nexus 6 explodes. Ditto a control for music levels would be nice (as Nexus 6 pounds into action on the back of "Ride of the Valkyries" and "Another one bites the dust") oblivious to anything anyone is saying to him.

Ah. If you have an Radeon 7500 then you limited to the Open source drivers. ATI does not support the 7500 (having previously owned a 7800 I feel your pain). So - that brings us back to the original problem. My guess is that there is some multitexturing going on on the landscape that is not done on the vehicles. I suspect that the multitex is the issue, Try turning off detail textures.