Toby Haynes

Glad to hear you are mostly unscathed - cars and houses can be repaired but people are trickier... Good luck with the clean up work - it's a hard task and I hope it goes smoothly.

Of course, a URL might be nice... TA Spring

Maybe I shouldn't post this distraction but hey, since we're on the topic of TA... The best of the TA engines out there in my experience is the amazing Spring engine - version 0.74b is just out. If that screenshot doesn't make you want rippling reflective water for DropTeam, nothing will

The idea of a Crystal map appeals enormously - I assume you mean something like this: I think I can work out some sort of landscape filter that would give that style of heightmap. I might have to reach into my raytracing knowledge to come up with a reasonable colourmap to match to it though. I'll have to think on that one. Both the jungle map and urban/heavy industrial maps are already on my list of ideas as well. Both really require some modelling resources that aren't yet in the game. I'm playing around with Blender at the moment, trying to improve my modelling abilities and generate some decent objects to add to the game. Such maps would require some care to avoid reducing the performance in game to a crawl. For the jungle map, a lot of the foliage would be best generated as new vegetation textures, maybe larger than most of the standard sets. A mixture of new palm trees and other such trees would then go a long way to completing the presentation.

Thanks for all the kind comments. I have fun putting these scenarios together so I hope that you folks get a kick out of blowing stuff up in them I'm always open to suggestions for scenarios. This one started off life as something a little more Martian than Earth-like but I decided I liked the idea of the Mesa plateaus and fleshed it out to be something more like the Arizona desert. In case people haven't guessed, I also have designs on making all my levels into a single player campaign. I'd like to have another two or three scenarios before I work out a suitable campaign order though so there are more landscapes to produce yet.

Ideally, Clay picks up the tarballs and rolls them into the next release In the meantime, you can grab the tarball from the webpage. Change directory to the DropTeam "data" directory (on my linux box, that's /usr/local/games/DropTeam/data but given I moved it there after the initial install, that's probably not much help). Unpack all the files in the tarball into that directory and you should be able to play the scenario using the "Standalone" Tab in the game browser. It will appear as the last entry in the list - you should be able to choose between Objective, CTF and Territory game modes from the menu on the right. You won't be able to play the map online until a) the server has the map and the ScenarioList.dat file has the level and gameplay type added to the current map rotation. One note: upgrading a level will have "interesting" effects if you play against a server with the old version. Tanks will sink into the ground, etc. Don't do it unless you are into such things I've tried to play Volcanic Deposits online briefly using version 1.5 on the client and version 1.1 on the server. Not really recommended.

Here's another scenario which came together fairly easily. This one is set amongst the Mesa plateaus in the desert, features Objective, CTF and Territory game types. Desert Mesa at Nexus6 Drop Team Resources Here are some images:

Road signs I can probably do. Signs for "beware of falling rocks" and "tanks crossing" might be appropriate Markings on the roads would require some sort of Decal support. It's not a bad idea - maybe I should add it to the wishlist. I know that Demeter supports texture splatting: whether those textures can be rotated is another matter.

Having learned several lessons about scenario design since I released the original Volcanic Deposits, I've gone back and tidied up the original. The roads have all been reworked, the landscape has been slightly grooved and more buildings have been added to the key areas of the map to add interest and provide some cover for the defending teams. You can get the new version from Nexus6 DropTeam resources Here are some pictures to show the changes:

Glad you got it working. I look forward to seeing you online You are right - the 32bit libraries may need other 32bit libraries to run. Ubuntu comes with some 32bit compatability libraries in standard paths so you don't need to collect too many specific libraries for DropTeam to work. I actually have a 32bit chroot set up on my AMD64 Ubuntu box which, while expensive on disk space, allows me to run pretty much anything a 32bit Ubuntu system can run.

Right up front I'm going to say that any ranking system people come up with will be flawed. Now I had better explain myself before I'm thrown out of the airlock ... The first step in any ranking system is built on statistics. There are obvious figures to collect: </font> number of kills</font>number of deaths</font>shots fired</font>shots hit</font>objective points scored</font> There are probably more that I have missed but that will do for starters. Now - you can come up with interesting statistics based on these. Hit percentage is an obvious one. Shots fired per kill and Hits per Kill are interesting but flawed unless you break them down by ammo type. A skilled player firing the 120mm HEAT/AP can get a lot of one shot kills. The same skilled player firing the 14mmAP won't achieve quite the same dizzying figures, at least against the Thor. That doesn't make the statistics "bad" - but it does make them a little harder to interpret. Maybe a better system for ranking than simply assigning scores based on the statistics is to look at who each player has killed and been killed by. That would allow a ladder-style ranking where your position was improved more by knocking out tanks belonging to players/bots with higher ranking than you. Vice-versa, being killed by the poorest player in the fleet would hurt your own ranking and improve theirs. Now the ladder system does not do anything to measure the abilities of the player for good strategy or good team work, but hopefully the result would be reasonable. I'd still like to see all the statistics collected too - while they might not apply to the ranking, it would be interesting to compare the figures for different players.

Before you panic, you have the same setup I have so this is possible. From http://tjwhaynes.googlepages.com/dropteamreview-part5 As I'm running a 64bit set-up and this is a 32bit release, I expected a few issues. For both the installation and the actual game, I had to make sure that I had 32bit versions of the following libraries: libaa.so.1, libgpm.so.1, libncurses.so.5 and libslang.so.2 available. For the install, unpack the provided zip file into a directory, copy the above libraries into the DropTeamSetup directory and then cd DropTeamSetup export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH} ./runLinuxInstall Similarly, for the actual game, copy the 32bit libraries into the DropTeam/lib directory and then run: ./runClient.sh

I'm not a hardened tank sim player (maybe partly because this is the only one available for Linux ) but I've played this one enough to be able to blabber on for a few paragraphs. Success in DropTeam requires coordination and communication. Coordination between units is key - most tanks have strengths and weaknesses. To have a powerful and well defended battle group requires more than one unit type. For example, a pair of heavy Thor's are slow but can handle most attacks from the front without trouble, but as soon as someone whizzes past the back of that Thor with a 20mmAP, it's all over. So you add a Paladin SAM unit to cut out Dropships landing nearby. But the SAM unit is vulnerable to artillery, so you add a Paladin EWV. Now you've cut out nearby landings to the battle group but you are hardly invulnerable - you need scouts out there to find ambushers and stop them before they get critically close to your Thors. So maybe you add an Apollo H and a Paladin L to the group to scout around and ahead. Now if your battlegroup is comprised of humans, you'd better be using voice comms. Typing is fine up to a point but it means you are a sitting duck while you give instructions. That usually means that that incoming 120mm HEAT round is going to be the last thing your tank experiences. If you are using bots, consider using them in ESCORT mode so that the light bots don't charge off ahead and leave your Thors in the dust. I'm sure others have more to add

Maybe this is more in line with the Wish list: do we want an online Statistics system? It might be interesting to see who has the highest hit/miss ratio or the smallest average number of hits per kill. Such a statistics system could lead to a ranking (either numeric or title-based, such as Corporal/Lieutenant/etc.). Then teams could be balanced based on the relative ranking of the players.

Nice parking job! Indeed, the defenders were quite inventive with turret placement on this level. I hadn't realised that this extended to Paladins-on-the-roof I did feel a little cheated though - we waltzed in and crushed the central towers with HE but still didn't get the Objective score to tick in our favour. Still a great time though

I haven't used the Tempest for months. It's too fragile to engage any serious enemy (i.e. anything with a 20mmAP machine gun!) and doesn't have enough punch to strike hard and move on (which is the Hurricane's main strength). Sticking a 76mm on it is an interesting idea. Maybe even a 90mm turret so that it would really be able to kick tank butt. Restrict the ammo to AP and HEAT (i.e. no HE, since the Hurricane already supplies that option). I find I rarely use the Paladin ICs either (although they can be useful in small bot groups for turret busting). Firing the IC manually for any extended period makes my ears bleed unless I turn the sound right down.

It would be good to clean this up - so far I've been attempting to name all the files needed for a single scenario in a consistent way but ideally each scenario should be in it's own subdirectory. I could ultimately see a tree-structure along the lines of: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">data/ scenarios/ haven/ volcanic/ volcanic.raw volcanic-colourmap.jpg volcanic-shadowmap.png volcanic-mask.png volcanicDeposits.scenario slugfest/ ... vehicles/ shrike/ thor/ MBTA.physicalobjectgroup MBTTurret.cob MBTAPanel.png ... apollo/ paladin/ ... objects/ hospital/ officecomplex/ rock1/ ... facilities/ SensorStation/ AntimatterStorage/ .../ audio/ wind/ fire/ ...</pre>

Looking at this, I think you need to be careful about using the Smooth feature in your editor. Tanks are sharp, angular beasts - so most of the mesh should be (at least in Blender) set to Solid, not Smooth all over to reflect that. Areas which are deliberately curved (like the barrel) can be set to Smooth. How can I tell? The gouraud shading on the tank makes it look wrong - that front armour plate should be receiving the same amount of light at all points and yet it's darker at the near corner than the far one.

I've put the model (in blender format, plus several other attempts at exporting to Wavefront, 3D Studio, etc.) up at http://tjwhaynes.googlepages.com/dropteamobjects The scale may need some quick adjusting to get it right - I've not checked it to see whether this is tiny or huge next to a Thor. I'm tempted to suggest that this object should be capable of being destroyed by three or four direct hit artillery strikes. Too fragile and it wouldn't pose a problem to an advancing army. Too strong and it might choke gameplay totally.

In search of something else to add to scenarios, I dredged my memory of tactical war games for ideas. One thing that did spring to recall was the concept of Dragon's Teeth and other passive tank defences. I've been teaching myself some better Blender technique and came up with this: This is a reworking of the Czech Hedgehog. The shading is all baked in, so as soon as I can work out how to get this into DropTeam, I'll think about getting this into a scenario. The concept here is to provide a non-explosive way to channel the tanks through certain routes. In the second world war, these were placed so that tanks would be forced into areas where they could be more easily destroyed. Obviously other sorts of barriers could be useful and once I get a little more comfortable with Blender, I'll churn out some more.

You think we sleep in those Liveships? Ha! Last night we raised our glasses to Thor and drank deeply. Let the storm come and the valkyries carry the less worthy from the field of battle. (I'll be there unless Real Life intrudes )

Some speedy research has found some monster modern day tanks. The Germans had 100 ton Panzer tanks and actually designed and built a 188 ton Maus tank, which never saw active service. There may be other examples. I suspect that more recent tanks are lighter as maneouverability now trumps super-heavy armour.

The Apollo's are almost half the width of the Thors and have a smaller turret so those volumes look odd. However, those weights look quite reasonable to me although that makes the Thor heavier than most (all?) modern day tanks. Modern day tanks are 40-80 metric tons (the Abrahms M1A2 is 63 metric tons, which sports a 120mm turret). </font>

The Apollo's are almost half the width of the Thors and have a smaller turret. Those weights look quite reasonable to me although that makes the Thor heavier than most (all?) modern day tanks. Modern day tanks are 40-80 metric tons (the Abrahms M1A2 is 63 metric tons, which sports a 120mm turret).

Thank you.