Striker
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Posts posted by Striker
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Hey Thorn,
Yeah, I actually took the time to go over the manual (I owned the console and the original game) from the Genesis game and tried to use terrains that reflected the map areas as best as possible. I also recreated the original M1 bases and modeled the repair/refuel ability along with tow vehicles so you can bring back damaged tanks to repair them. It's not perfect by any means but it should give you at least as close to the same experience. I was planning on putting them together in campaign format but kind of dropped the ball while I was working on the Hannover map. When the new version comes out I might go back and do some minor changes and then do the campaign. They should work fine but feel free to send me a message if you find issues or your feedback on the missions after you try them out.4 -
Thanks Gladiator. I just submitted the map today along with the notes on the revisions. I gave it to Sean earlier and he has it but I don't think he's had time to put it up on the server and give me the actual code keys for it. I'll post it as soon as it's available.
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Just wanted to update you guys on the progress. I know it might seem like it's taking a long time but I've actually been putting in quite a few hours every day on this with a day or two break in between. It's really time consuming to place stuff correctly. I'm actually almost done now. The last few items are to add a couple industrial areas and then I'm going to spend the next couple weeks finishing up the fixes. I finished the three Eastern cities so I'm including some images here. They start with Hildesheim, then Sehnde and then Lehrte with the map view of each first. I'm hoping that I can get this wrapped up in the next couple weeks. The hard part is essentially done with the adding of buildings. The rest is fairly easy and that's just doing the final road and building placement cleanup.
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On 5/24/2022 at 12:34 AM, Ssnake said:
"I shudder at the thought what this will do to the framerate, though. The Steel Beasts engine was made for sparsely populated (rural) terrain, not cities the size of Hildesheim, let alone Hannover.
I personally don't think it will have that much of an impact overall. There are plenty of areas that actually have a lot more density than East Hannover and Hildesheim. If you look at the areas around Garbsen and Seelze they're close in density and Hamlen is even more so. I'm actually being pretty conservative with the number of buildings in comparison. I've been monitoring the performance as I go along and I haven't noticed any difference compared to those areas. I'll also adjust as necessary. A great example is when I worked on the Saisbury map for my campaign. The city was densely packed with the same models all jammed together and when I tried to drive through it I had terrible stuttering. When I spread them out and used varying models the problem went away or was reduced to a non-problematic state anyhow. So having reasonable gaps between models appears to reduce the frame rate issues. A good example of this issue is when you're map editing. If you start stacking a lot of building models in one place so a lot of them are overlapping each other, the engine slows down badly. If you go to the F1 3D view and try to fly around them you can see the problem. Spread them out and it smooths out significantly.
Frankly, I don't see people using the entire area as an ops area anyhow, so it will be more for visual reference hopefully. So someone making a scenario might use a section of the city as a reference point but would not put units inside the dense part of the city. It makes navigation too difficult anyhow and you're more likely to get bogged down with just doing that rather than actual fighting. But it will be nice for setting up defensive positions in reference to the location and having it reflect the actual location on the map rather than a blank area. I'll make sure that I monitor any comments that people have about it after I get it done and I'll be able to adjust as necessary. This will just be an initial version but hopefully there won't be too many of them. I'm trying my best to nail it on the first iteration.
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Will be testing as I go and so far it doesn't seem to have that big of impact. I can also thin it out a little as necessary. I'm not certain that people will be using the high density areas but you never know.
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Hi Gladiator,
As Gibsonm pointed out, the map is being worked on. It's actually a massive update that includes adding roads and buildings to Hannover Mitte and the surrounding areas. I'm trying to make it as close to realistic as possible within the constraints of the limited building models but it will look a lot more like the actual cities. I've also been connecting roads, adding some cities to the Northwest and East, fixing railroads, moving buildings off of roads, fixing bridges, cleaning up strange artifacts, and so on. I'm trying to get it done by the end of this month or middle of June at the latest, but it's been a huge amount of work. I've been spending about 4 hours a day of and on working on it since the beginning of December. It's just a lot of picky tedious work so hang in there as it is coming.By the way, there will still be some areas of the map that will be incomplete. There are just way too many actual map object and areas in real life and it would take a lifetime to fill all that in. I'm focusing on the most important populated areas and some of the smaller towns. The map can always be added to in the future but it will be a much better starting point. The reason the map is so goofed up currently is that it's been converted many times and some of the original objects were substituted in those conversions. So I've had to splice roads in a lot of cases and then use the bridge tool to make the proper one. There are many rivers so it's time consuming. I'm about 80% to 90% done I think.
Here are some shots of the work in progress. (notes on the map are for my reference only)
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OK, it's fixed Magnum. I also made some minor changes to 3 of the other missions but the others were not anything that affect current scenario play. I was missing the penalty zone and used the warning zone accidentally not realizing it would have to be inverted.
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Did you bring them into the repair zone? You can tow them back to base using the M88 as long as they're not destroyed. There's a delay but they'll be completely repaired. Move over the the Hemmit's to rearm.
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Try my campaign missions. The "Moselle Defense" has 4 Abrams, but all the rest only have 2, very manageable. And they're based on the old Dynamix console game so they're kind of old school. Build primarily for fun and nostalgia rather than training though.
Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier that all the missions have randomization. Not crazy random but you can definitely play through them and some events happen differently giving you some good surprises. They'll take different routes depending on decisions you make or spawn in different places depending on which direction you take.
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Version 3.1 uploaded this morning. I finally was able to resolve the annoying and persistent problem (not esim's fault, my fault for complexity) of the AI convoy not being able to cross the bridge after the obstacles are breached in "The Road To Bonn". No changes on the other missions. Download the zip file to get the latest version of "The Road To Bonn" mission.
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Thank you Sean and Volcano for helping me out with some issues I was having. I was delayed in fixing a lot of the problems because of other obligations and an illness but they're done and back up on the server. Patch notes included in the updated information and text file in the zip folder. Please try them out and report any problems to me in this thread or feel free to DM me.
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I have the missions done and ready to go. Apologies to anyone wanting to try them out. I did the bulk of the work at the end of 2020 and earlier in the year, but I ended up having an illness (not covid) that put me out of the picture for almost 3 months and I couldn't finish them up till now. Thanks to Volcano, I was able to fix the problem I was having with the events on the last two missions and now all is working fine. They're up on the server now. Please PM me if you run any of them and see a problem. I'll be available to fix them when necessary now.
The new missions have a huge amount of updates and fixes, including sound files, and sounds for coming close to penalty zones. I've attached a list detailing some of the fixes but I'll also include it in the mission zip file.
* All of the missions were optimized for path following. I found that there were a lot of routes that were out of alignment so the AI did some weird things, like trying to turn when not necessary, changing speeds, and stopping completely in some cases. Now, all of the AI units will follow the roads smoothly and respect the speeds that were set for them.
* All of the player units and some of the AI units had their ammo updated. I noticed that because of changes to SB, that the ammo selections were set to odd levels. Now, all of the M1's have a good starting ammo setup based on mid 80's and proper fuel. Also, the Mi-24 Hinds have their ammo set to a more realistic setting that limits their Spiral missiles and rockets to what they would have carried at the time.
* All of the scoring has been fixed as best as possible to have it make sense according to the scenario. Also, all of the "Mission Over" parameters have been set so that the mission will conclude properly.
* All penalty zones where set will not result in the destruction of your engine. Instead, the main gun will get degraded slowly and you'll also get one warning that you are approaching the zone so you have time to turn back.
* I split up the routes of the AI enemy on some of the missions because the groups were large enough in some cases for them to get bunched up, they will now come from different directions in some cases but also follow the routes smoothly.
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I'm still working on fixing some of the problems. I've given up on trying t make the notifications repeatable but that's OK. It's only in some of the missions so if you get outside the zone you'll get ample warning. I also changed the conditions of the penalty. If you are in a penalty zone it causes main gun damage but only a percentage at so many seconds, so you have time to get back into the zone. I felt that dealing a death blow was really too much. Also, I'm just finishing up on testing everything carefully this time. I wan to make sure that all scenarios work under all possible conditions, so sorry it's taking awhile. They got really broken compared to how they were supposed to work so pass it on to delete the old ones. I'll try to have the new ones ready soon. Thanks for the support!
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On 5/4/2021 at 3:45 PM, Koen said:
Great to have such a long term fan around, 2000 !And thx for updating your campaign, looking forward to playing it.
SB is a rich and interesting tool to create scenario’s ...
Best !
Yeah, thanks! Not sure what happened to them but a lot of stuff probably got deleted on the events from the patching. They were missing a bunch of important things to make the AI work. I'm going through them with a fine tooth comb this time and testing the snot out of them. I'm almost done and should have them ready by the middle of next week. They include a lot of improvements. I've done a lot of work on the grouping, AI pathing, fixed the loadouts, fixed the repair logic, added sounds. After this I should be ready to put them together into an operation. I also removed some units on a couple because the vehicles had changed and the missions were just way too long. There's still one that's more than 2 hours but they're a hell of a lot more playable now but still challenging and follow the story line like they originally did.
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3 hours ago, Bond_Villian said:
If you are trying to achieve a zone that gives a message every time there is/isnt a unit within it, then you will need to use layered EVENTS for these messages.
Example:
1) CONDITION that checks (continuously) if unit 1/A is in region "AREA" , called "AREA CHECK"
2) EVENT that is watching/waiting for "AREA CHECK" condition to be true. You could call this "AREA CHECK MSG 1". This EVENT can have text and audio message for the players.
3) Another EVENT called "AREA CHECK MSG 2" This event is the same, with the addition of checking that event "AREA CHECK MSG 1" is true.
You can 'que' multiple event messages for zones etc in this way, referencing the previous one as a requirement for the occurance of the next...
Ill do a video later!
I actually like this as a solution. I could do exactly what you say by making them if 1 is true, the 2 can be true, then 3 and so on and so on. No need to do a video for me. I understand the concept. I could do a bunch of them and hopefully the person doing the mission gets the point before they run out of messages.
By the way, I'm really sorry that my communication has been so bad on this. I didn't mean to turn it into a struggle to understand what I was trying to achieve. And I have played around with different options but was running out of patience on it. I've owned every copy of SB since the very original one and I still have the boxed version that I bought from Micro Center in 2000. I found that my M1 Abrams Campaign that I designed has a lot of event and condition problems because there have been a lot of major changes in the simulation so a lot of stuff is broken. I'm trying to fix them so I can post the update. I haven't used the editor for quite awhile so I basically have to learn it all over again.0 -
4 hours ago, Ssnake said:
Nevertheless, a Penalty Zone might indeed be the solution; it would probably require the inverse logic. You wouldn't check for the player leaving an area, but instead detect that he's endtering a region he isn't supposed to go. In which case a message will appear in his 3D view that he is in a penalty zone and should leave it within the next 30 seconds. If not, from then on every 30 seconds a penalty will be applied. That can be a very light penalty with a very low likelihood if it's intended as a very gentle reminder, or insta-death with 100% likelihood after 30 seconds (and a lot in between those extremes).
OK, so on a penalty zone, there's no way to get a message is there? I guess I could play around with that but I don't see any options to do that in the editor.
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2 hours ago, stormrider_sp said:
If you had listen to previous suggestions to describe what you were trying to achieve in the first place, like others had said, you'd already had gotten the response. What you're looking for, apparently, are penalty zones.
OK, there is absolutely no need to be condescending towards me about this. I obviously have some trouble with reading and understanding some things the way they are written and I came here for help and not to be berated about it. And I've been completely respectful towards everyone and a long time SB fan since around 2000. So if you can't keep it positive and respectful then please don't bother to contribute to the conversation. And penalty zones don't do that unless I'm completely missing something. They damage equipment, I already checked that a little while ago. So unless there's some special function that can be edited or modified I don't see that as a solution to the problem I'm trying to solve.
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OK, so I read the manual very carefully over the weekend and again this morning and I'm still not getting this to work, or I'm just not understanding how it should be set up. And I was doing it the way that was recommended even though my terminology was all FUBAR. So I need to understand why I can't get this to work or if it's not possible.
The scenario I'm attaching (part of map package) is very simple and has one region with the two tanks as 1/A and some shipping containers to visually ID the corners of the region. When the unit leaves the region they get a notification that they are out of bounds. According to the condition, if they re-enter the region, the condition is reset. Why can't I get this to repeat multiple times? Is it because the "event" can only be triggered one time in the scenario? Is there a way to overcome this limitation? Or should I be using a different method?
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RGRT, I was trying to do it as an event, so my bad.
I'll go over that in the manual and make sure I'm doing it the right way.Thanks!
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4 minutes ago, Ssnake said:
This can only be true if you're not paying attention to the terminology that I defined in the first reply (and the user's manual, which should be the first place to go anyway). What you describe is an EVENT. What you need instead is a (nameable) CONDITION. And a condition will deliver you exactly what you describe. That nameable condition can then be referenced anywhere - in other events, conditions,m the scoring formula, control logic such as embark conditions, even by other parties in your scenario.
OK Ssnake, I misread that first response so my bad. I'll go over it again. Thanks.
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OK, this is actually helpful Gibsonm but my follow up question is this.
Is the condition continuously checked for "yes" or "no"?
I'm finding that it's not.The example I'm using is that I have unit 1-A driving across the terrain and hasn't gone into a square region called for example "empty space".
Before the unit 1-A enters the "empty space" the obvious condition is "no", once 1-A enters "empty space" the condition is "yes".
After unit 1-A exits on the other side does the condition get reset back to "no" again?
I've found that when I create a region to do a condition that tells the human players that they've entered a region it only happens once and won't get reset back to the default condition.
That's what I'm asking, is there a way to make it so that it does?
Or are all conditions checked once and that's it?I'm really sorry about asking stuff like this.
I know most of you are patient and trying to figure out what I mean so it's a little frustrating.
I treat this more like a game than a lot of you do, I know some of you treat it like a hard core realistic training simulation and a lot of you are purists.
I get it so thanks for trying to help!0 -
59 minutes ago, Mirzayev said:
You aren't explaining your endstate. Why do you want the condition to be on when a unit enters a region? What do you want that condition to do?
Explaining that will help us help you.
You are not understanding me! But partly because of my original phrasing of the question. It's super simple. I want to know if it's even possible as a general rule to have a continuous switched condition. "Enter the zone, condition on, exit the zone condition is off". There is no endstate, there is no scenario. This is just a general question regarding the possibility of using the the conditions to be able to make it so it's either on or off as a continuous system rather than having to create the same condition over and over again using a long list of follow up conditions. But it's looking like it's not possible so I'll figure something else out.
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38 minutes ago, Mirzayev said:
@Striker It might help if you give us an example of what you are trying to do. For example:
"I want to spawn an enemy tank platoom within 5 minutes (+ or - up to 10% for randomization) upon BLUE occupying a battle position. I also want to send a message to the player indicating that SIGINT has detected that the enemy will conduct a counterattack within 5 minutes."
We can possibly give you a solution to what you want to do with a description like that above.
Already did give an example: "Unit inside region-condition on; Unit outside of region-condition off". My question is can this be continuous on and off using the same region and condition.
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1 hour ago, Ssnake said:
You can't reference the presence of a human. Just units, occupied or not.
Units are fine, again, I referenced player but I mean "unit enters or exits region".
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Hannover Map needs to be updated!
in Scenario and Maps
Posted
You're welcome Gladiator. It was a lot of work but I tried really hard to make sure it was reasonable for appearance and performance. I'm taking notes from anyone that messages me if you find a problem. I'll probably plan on doing an update to it some time next years and release it at the end of the summer like this one. If you run across a problem please let me know.