[sp_camp] Dark Tides

[AZCoder 902]

Campaign #3 in the Gates of ARMAGeddon series

 

 

 

Released v1.00: Saturday March 27 2021.

 

Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?edit=true&id=2437763589

AZCoder.com: http://www.azcoder.com/arma3/DarkTidesCamp.7z

 

I want to give special thanks to the following:

@jakerod for allowing me to include Moschnyi and Miroslavl'

@DNDSTUDIOS for extensive playtesting, voice overs, and encouragement

@johnnyboy for his excellent voice work, immersive scripts, and feedback

@aliascartoons for the fantastic water, fire, and nuclear scripts

@EO

for allowing me to include those awesome immersion mods for the weather and animals

Many others contributed directly and indirectly and as always, the campaign will finish with a complete list of credits.

 

Dark Tides is massive, divided into 3 parts (all included in one pbo). While the campaign mostly focuses on Lt "Knight" of SEAL Team 6 (introduced at the end of Gambit Royale), several missions follow Russian VDV Sgt Artyom Gerasimov, and also a few for the main antagonist Pytor 'Denmark' Tsarev. Dark Tides consists of 18 regular missions, plus 2 distinctly different possible endings, for a total of 20 missions.

 

Dark Tides was written as a cautionary tale of the breakdown of political discourse been the US and Russia. The CIA and GRU have different objectives and the player will have to decide who's playing whom when making critical decisions late in the campaign. There are two possible primary outcomes that take place on different maps, what I call the good and bad endings. There are also a couple variants to the resolution of the bad ending: bad and really bad.

 

Over two years was put into making this campaign. I missed my original release date of December. You will find numerous small details that are easy to miss. There are several special effects that exist thanks to the work of AliasCartoons, such as fire breathing statues, trickling water, gas release, a volcano, and so on. Quite a few scripts from JohnnyBoy made there way into the campaign which of course includes controlling the dog, schools of fish, exploding barrels, and much more. There is a lot of complexity and probably a few bugs that I and my playtesters have not found. If you have performance problems, make sure you are not running any AI mods (one is already included), and try running without Blastcore (I know, that's crazy talk).

 

All required and optional addons with URLs are provided on my website:  http://www.azcoder.com/#/campaign/DarkTides. I decided to remove the links here due to the forum spam protection.

 

Required DLCs:

 

Contact DLC (Livonia and chemical warfare items)
Apex (Tanoa)
Not required, but recommend Laws of War due to numerous assets used

 

Required Addons:

 

CBA 3
CUP Terrains - Core, Maps, & CWA
RHS AFRF, USAF, & GREF
3CB Factions
PLP All In One
MLO All-in-One Uniforms and Gear
Namalsk
Pecher

 

Optional but highly recommended:

 

L3-GPNVG18 (SEALs will use these if addon is loaded, would be crazy not to use this mod)
Pook Soviet AF Pack (used to enhance airports in certain missions and scenes)
Max Women (will appear in randomly generated civilian zones)

 

Dark Tides has been optimized to work with Lambs Danger AI mod. I cloned the mod from GitHub, compiled it and included the pbos in the campaign. Do not use any other AI mods, they will break the campaign. What does Lambs do? They react better to gunfire and explosions, they will lob grenades, they will go into buildings on their own, they will flank you and chase you down if given the opportunity.

 

Be cautious about using Blastcore. There are several variants out now. The latest version does not play well with a few of the heavy battle missions (severe lag).

If you use JSRS Sounds, please know that there are RHS patches and I do recommend using them (links are on my website linked above).

If you want a gory experience, BloodLust works really well. I have not had any issues running it.

 

Changelog

 

v1.043
- fixed black screen bug caused by wrong version of loadouts mod (thanks Strayer for reporting this critical bug)

 

v1.042

- added Chinese translations (thanks Strayer)

 

v1.041
- made mistake disabling lambs on player team, fixed it
M306: removed 3 out of 4 firefly spawn points
M306: full refactoring of scripts
M306: fixed outfits of soldiers doing their kata routine
M306: disabled random civs, they don't add much to this mission
M306: bodyguards will no longer wander off

v1.04
- removed loud bug noise at pond near Lopotev Jr
- F22 will no longer try to land on Altis and explode
- cleaned up fnc_Fadein (trying to resolve sound issue that I never experience)

v1.03
- Disabled LAMBs on player team due to members sometimes wandering off and being intransigent toward their leader.
- The wrong UAV was assigned in most missions, preventing link up.

v1.02
- invalid variable name prevented honor guard from loading uniforms and M24 rifles in first scene
- Added Sullen Skies for Moschnyi by EO
 

 

[GEORGE FLOROS GR 4197]

As they say , a picture is worth a thousand words !

Waiting for this AZCoder !

[AZCoder 902]

GRU van

 

Mi-24 over Miroslavl'

 

 

 

[jonstyle 49]

Cool! Will I hunt this guy or play this guy?

[AZCoder 902]

A bit of both actually.

[AZCoder 902]

[jonstyle 49]

Really stoked! Looking forward to this.  Are you using RHS or CUP?

[AZCoder 902]

It's RHS, makes it consistent with the first two campaigns.

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

Ah nice. Haven’t played Arma in a bit but you’ll always draw me back, baby. 🙂

[AZCoder 902]

Some progress pics.

 

Edited January 20, 2021 by AZCoder
fixing broken images

[AZCoder 902]

Hey guys, I'm looking for a female voice actor that can do a Russian accent. Could someone help me on this, point me in the right direction maybe? I had one friend do it years ago but she's not really into recording stuff these days so I stopped asking her, haha. Thanks.

[corporal_lib[br] 396]

8 hours ago, AZCoder said:

Hey guys, I'm looking for a female voice actor that can do a Russian accent. Could someone help me on this, point me in the right direction maybe? I had one friend do it years ago but she's not really into recording stuff these days so I stopped asking her, haha. Thanks.

Friend or EX-girlfriend.... either way, we totally understand the hardship

 

The Female radio protocol on RHS was recorded by Zeelex, wasn´t it? I guess she can do a FPFRussian kinda russian accent for the Dark Tides means 😃

 

Cheers

[AZCoder 902]

31 minutes ago, corporal_lib[br] said:

Friend or EX-girlfriend.... either way, we totally understand the hardship

 

The Female radio protocol on RHS was recorded by Zeelex, wasn´t it? I guess she can do a FPFRussian kinda russian accent for the Dark Tides means 😃

 

Cheers

Hah, no, she's a long time online friend, outside of gaming circles.

[AZCoder 902]

Hey everyone, I'm taking a break over the summer. I have a lot of things going on, nothing bad, just keeping me busy is all. I need a break anyway, but I'll still be around on the forums during this time.

 

[jonstyle 49]

I'm keeping an eye on this! Have a good summer!

[AZCoder 902]

4 months flew by. Guess I needed the break 😁

I'm starting to ease back into the campaign. Had to rebuild PC several weeks ago and just got Arma reconfigured. It seems Arma reads controllers by GUID and windows randomly assigns that so the saved configs are useless, and you have to manually bind custom keys and controllers again. I have a ton of custom bindings and now Arma is pestering me because my bindings don't match what it wants me to have. Sheesh.

[johnnyboy 3546]

Welcome back dude!  Arma is punishing you for leaving, she can be a vengeful mistress.  Now that you are hailing from Bigfoot Country, I expect to see Bigfoot appear in one  of your campaign missions.  Now get to work sir!

[AZCoder 902]

3 hours ago, johnnyboy said:

Welcome back dude!  Arma is punishing you for leaving, she can be a vengeful mistress.  Now that you are hailing from Bigfoot Country, I expect to see Bigfoot appear in one  of your campaign missions.  Now get to work sir!

Weird, I was thinking about Bigfoot Easter egg 2 nights ago.

[AZCoder 902]

An informal survey for you cool players out there. Do you have the Contact DLC? I really like the Livonia map and have debated using it, but I don't know how popular that DLC is. I have no interest in using aliens in my campaign, don't worry about that, just debating on the map. Please let me know. I don't want to require a DLC that will alienate my player base. Get it? 😄

 

[johnnyboy 3546]

I've got Contact, FWIW.

[corporal_lib[br] 396]

Me too, it seems Contact DLC, for the massive content it added, and the unique gameplay of the aliens comms etc, was kinda good sales hit for Bohemia, I vote for adding Contact as it is top notch 😃 

 

I mean, Contact´s content (pun intended) as Livonia is a great map, kinda updated Cherno 😃

[HBAOplus 11]

Maybe the missions set in Livonia can be released independently  as sp mission, like  Red Vengeance?

[EO 10947]

I wouldn't be disappointed if it was set on Livonia. 

[AZCoder 902]

1 hour ago, HBAOplus said:

Maybe the missions set in Livonia can be released independently  as sp mission, like  Red Vengeance?

 

Does that mean you don't have Contact?

[AZCoder 902]

I am updating old posts where the image links are now broken in my browser. New pics don't necessarily match original pics.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 20, 2021 by AZCoder
fixing broken images