Artillery and realistic radios

[Harnu 0]

Artillery is always an important aspect. OFP2 needs some way to call it in into designated coordinates. (W/O like it is now)

And Acutally artillery piece controllable by human and AI. And I'm sure a lot of people including myself (and avon ) would write an intrsctional something to show how to effectively aim on proper coordinates.

Radios would be nice too. And option for a radio operator to contact other people/squads. And even possible an option for a veteranmode on MP that you owuld need a radio to contact others.

A WHOLE HELL OF A LOT MORE CARRYING ROOM! lol, can't stress that one enough. Atleast 15-20 mags. Since this is about vietnam (or atleast close to that era) I asked my dad. He say's they'd carry anything they could with them. Often 15-20 mags of ammo. Some guys basically JUST carried ammo to support the squad.

So some sort of useable backbacks/bags of some sort for extra capacity would also be nice.

Along with ammo, is dispersion of it. It needs to be made easier to drop, carry, pickup, give ammo.

Sight!!! I need more than a squint like in OFP1! A larger Line Of Sight is a must in the jungles of NAM.

Crush, Crumble, destroy! If I put 3 satchels on the bottom of a wooden bridge. It's really not gonna be there anymore. Things must be able to crack, shatter, explode. Fall, and if nesscesary, sink. Enough of the bent cardboard box effect with pollys shooting out 20 meters blocking your shots even tho there's really nothing there.

What else what else...

[-TU--33ker 0]

yeah a button in the editor that allows you to use scripted artillery in the missions without having to script everything yourself! with some functions like how often you can order an artillery strike, or how precise the strikes should be. and then you should be able to command the ari with only one simple click on the map.

[iNeo 0]

With artillary on the feature list, I hope you'll be able to dig/build temporary stuff into the ground for protection for artillary.

[quakergamer 0]

Well im 100% sure there WILL BE artillery for OFP2. It is already made for VBS1, how do I know ? They [OFP-Zone] asked BIS some months ago and they said tehy also implemented artillery .

[Harnu 0]

Can't forget about Thermite and Napalm

[Assault (CAN) 1]

We definately need artillery, and I have a few ideas regarding it.

1. At the beginning of a mission you will find out if you have arty support available, with a limited amount of fire missions. You give a grid-ref over the radio and in comes the arty!

2. Artillery can drop anything from H.E., to smoke, to illumination rounds (para flares). It would be cool if you had a choice to choose which one you wanted. Since we wont have any NVG's in the Vietnam era, flares will be neccessary. Maybe we could have the same effects with company support mortars?

How about trip flares too? Maybe even Claymores?

3. Since we would have the ability to call in fire missions, maybe a mission or two in the game could involve sneaking through the jungle undetected and calling in fire on an enemy base or supply/ammo dump. That would be cool.

Tyler

[bn880 5]

Ha, this is a FUTILE request. Because artillery will be added anyway. And the new FADE ? will cause the rounds to backfire every time on pirated copies of OFP2. And your weapon will jam 666% more often.

[hellfish6 7]

I personally love CoC's artillery simulator. I'd like to see something like that used when playing veteran level. Or make a difficulty option called "Realistic Artillery" or "Realistic Fire Support". Point and click artillery is great for games when you just wanna blow stuff up, but a lot of the time I want to play a SIMULATOR, where I have to find my position, find the position of my target, call for fire manually and adjust. CoC created as good an artillery call-for-fire simulation as I ever saw in the Army and I think it can add greatly to many missions.

[ZIKAN 0]

I would like to see Fire Missions made using: grid references, altitude, direction (compass bearing from observer to target) implemented.

I used to do this for a living, and it would be so realistic to see it implemented this way. The ability to adjust 1 round , onto target using 'add 100' or 'drop 100', 'left 100' or 'right 100' then calling for 5 rounds fire for effect and obliterate the target

[Tamme 0]

What about pre-set artillery bombartments? You could set the grid position in the briefing, and everything would be calculated so you would'nt need to do any spotting. Just call the bombartment by radio and it will land on target.

[iNeo 0]

It should also take 5-10 minutes from calling in the artillery until it strikes.

[SpeedyDonkey 0]

With "free" access to artillery the game would obviously get very unbalanced. First we need some kind of temporary protection against artillery fire. Then the amount of artillery should be set by the mission maker. And enough time, like iNeo said

[hellfish6 7]

Well, the way artillery is currently simulated, it's very easy to get killed. I think that has more to do with the game physics and lack of simulated cover - you're just as vulnerable in the prone position or behind a tree as you are standing up in the open. If you've ever used an artillery script in the game, it's very easy to wipe out an entire squad with a salvo of six or seven 81mm rounds. In real life, mortar rounds do not have nearly that much killing power.

[Harnu 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Since we wont have any NVG's in the Vietnam era<span id='postcolor'>

Actaully I think we will have night vision.  In a documentary on the history channel about snipers it said that when night vision was introduced.  It gave American snipers and advantage to fight back againts enemy snipers. Atleast I thought it was about Vietnam.

[hellfish6 7]

Starlight scopes were introduced during Vietnam. Also, there were IR spotlights, which operated a lot like a regular spotlight, except that you couldn't see the illuminating beam unless you had the right sights. These were usually tank-only devices.

[Schoeler 0]

White phosphorous!

Realistic Napalm!

The ability to keep aircraft on station for airstrikes called in over the radio.

[debug2112 0]

Hellfish, you mean COC is better than a dedicated FDC!

"I can hear the Redlegs screaming blasphemy already".

No donut for you.

I concur though, COC did make a wonderful point and click artillery system.

If you want something a little more in-depth, try the swiss-mod M109, and plot your own ranges to target. It takes awhile to figure out the range using 128x128m squares, but it is vastly more satisfying when you hear that 5km distant secondary.

[walker 0]

Hi debug2112

I get the weirdest feeling your talking about the CoC's old CamCreate artillery in your last post.

Have you have used the CoC's latest version of real indirect fire as well?

You can hear the Artillery being fired in the distance and follow the real shell by cammera from source to target. Heck you can even see the shells in flight. Not to mention the AI knows it is being fired on and the death cam goes right back to the very cannon or mortar that fired it.

The system is fully configurable so if you dont want point and click on map it will do that to

There will be a host of third party Forward Entry Devices comming out in the near future so you can choose the one you think is most satisfying/realistic.

Kind Regards Walker

[TheManWithManyIdeas 0]

I think that radio coordinate relay commands should be a skill that the player must develop. They should be technical yet efficient to carry out. Perhaps only the leader and/or the radio operator should be worried about coordinate relaying?

[dinger 1]

Off topic:

Check the dates of Hellfish's posts. He's talking about the scripted system I wrote last year. That was a CFF system based on field manuals.

The current CoC Unified Artillery system does use a "point and click" method of target location, and certainly could be more sophisticated. As far as capabilities go, we do need to add in different types of projectiles (Shell/Fuze combinations). With regards to the "point and click" interface, UA is designed so that you could slap on a more "realistic" CFF system. And we are working on other interfaces.

The current OFP setup has some pretty serious limitations for indirect fire. If you want player gunners, you're limited to an extremely short range (let's see that swiss m109 hit a target 18km away), and the accuracy of the gunner system is extremely low and rather granular.

---

On topic:

what I'd like to see in OFP2:

A) TTL specifiable in the CPP. 20 seconds for ShotShell is not enough. Even better would be a SetTTL command, such as: MyShell SetTTL 17.321, which would effectively give the shell a TIME fuze.

B) Shell simulations that start a script on termination, and the ability to make shells that are created in that termination "children" of the mother shell (for scoring purposes).

C) OnContact EH, so we can have a VT fuze

D) tubes and launchers controllable by rotating and elevated to an azimuth and elevation setting, with coarse and fine control.

E) an artillery system like the one we've made ;)

[debug2112 0]

I have never tried the Swissmod M109 out to 18km, and honestly do not know what its max range limitation is.

At this time I have only ranged it using 5km shots at a point target in a 128x128 grid with a circular error of 50m(+/-).

The UA system I am still playing with, and the only gripe I have (minor to be sure) is the ammo loadout on their M109. The rounds they provide are short of the actual loadout on every RL 109 I have been on.

If UA wants to play the AZ game, do we get an aiming circle to go with it?

[dinger 1]

If you've got some good numbers for anything approaching a standard loadout (including ICM family, illum and smoke rounds) for the M109 or any other artillery piece, I'd love to hear from you. Heck, if you've got any unrestricted-use TFTs or GFTs I'll take those for the error values.

The range limitation is because all normally fired shells timeout and fuze after 20 seconds. UA gets around this by making the shells work off of the bomb subsimulation (aka "LGB hack"), and applying a manual vector (which gives us better precision and allows us to set different charges). The limitation is that, since we can't read the barrel elevation manually (oh yeah, something else I'd like for OFP2), if we're not firing the shell via AI control (that is, where we set the elevation ourselves), the only way we can guess at the barrel elevation is by reading the velocity of the shell that plops out. Because we use the LGB hack, the shell plops out going at best 5 m/s. Moreover, our velocity reading is not a set time after firing -- it varies according to FPS. The net result is that we get some serious and not random range error. If the CPU is loaded up, the rounds will all land short. If the load drops, they all go long. That's why, when you hop into the M109 and do some gunning on your own, you can shoot clear across the island, but not with much accuracy.

[debug2112 0]

In the older A3 unit they had 22 in the beehive and another 12+ ready on the floor. That is Open Source, so no worries.

Your loadout would depend on what you expect to encounter in your journeys. Remember you would always have Faasvs, 548s, and ad-hoc carriers with a lot of everything ready to issue and use on a moments notice.

The link below should help you out.

Sill placed this information unrestricted on the net, so it is Open Source.

http://sill-www.army.mil/FAMAG....ons.pdf

[jaenak 0]

First, if OPF2 won't have Night Vision, I'm not buying it.  90% of computer games made these days are so dark that you can't see crap without night vision.  If you're stuck in a mission even around twilight, you need night vision to see anything, especially in the jungle!  I refuse to play a war simulation which won't allow me to see anything regardless if night vision was out in the 70's or not.  After all, this is a computer game, not real life, it needs to be reasonable for the players.

And another thing, the ammo amounts for army rangers for an example in the Vietnam War was a standard 1,000 rounds.  (at least in the auto biography I read it was)  You didn't go out in the field unless you had that otherwise you'd get out there, get into a huge firefight and run clean out of ammo.  But on the other hand, this is a computer game.  The inventory in OPF1 is fine for anyone who makes a habit of aiming properly.  You don't need hundreds of rounds because full auto is pointless because of the inaccuracy.  If you simply aim and squeeze off three rounds on single fire mode, you can complete 3/4ths of the missions without using even two clips. One thing I've found to help though is that I never carry grenades. That frees up 8 slots right there. And who needs hand grenades anyways?  If the enemy is that close, you let them.  Instead of letting them get that close, cap'em when they get in range. Rifle grenades you can lob a long way but I can't aim worth nuthin' with those things.

The death cam on OPF kinda helps the player cheat from time to time in my book.  A person shouldn't be able to look at the death cam to see who is where.  He should be able to do that himself during game play if he's any decent soldier. Although I do confess that I have done it many times.  I do admit it can be hard and quite maddening at times but if a mission is really difficult, that means the game producers did that for a reason. But personally, I don't enjoy tearing my hair out of my head becuase I've been stuck on the same mission for three days. That's when I download a walkthrough.

In real life, it doesn't take 10 minutes to have the artillery actually fire off a round.  If the artillery is standing by, it can be done in a very short time period. Now if you have to drag the artillery operators out of bed, then it could take twenty minutes and a cup of coffee, but I'd hope that's not the case.  Which leads me to another point.  In real life artillery has a virtually unlimited supply of rounds, therefore from a life like point of view, limited fire missions in OPF2 would be rediculous.  But from a practical point of view, all this talk about unlimited fire missions (my idea), air strikes and all this different ammo for the bombs and artillery shells is unreasonable.  You know how pointless the missions would be if all this was implimented?  You could be a friggin unarmed civilian simply casually strolling about acting as an artillery spotter.  If you see an enemy, simply have an air strike get'em or have the artillery come barging in.  Alot of stuff people suggest would be cool, but alot of the "cool" stuff (cheat codes included) simply destroy the point to playing the game. Unless that is if its the savegame cheat code for OPF. I use that thing religeously because I need to save more often than once per mission.

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

First, if OPF2 won't have Night Vision, I'm not buying it.  90% of computer games made these days are so dark that you can't see crap without night vision.

You need to adjust your brightness and gamma settings on your monitor and in game.

Quote[/b] ] If you're stuck in a mission even around twilight, you need night vision to see anything, especially in the jungle! I refuse to play a war simulation which won't allow me to see anything regardless if night vision was out in the 70's or not. After all, this is a computer game, not real life, it needs to be reasonable for the players.

And I refuse to play a game that has stupid things like that in it; it ruins the immersion. IF you have your monitor wrongly set up, thats your fault; you can see fine in the dark (IRL and in OFP) without NVGs unless it is a completely moonless, cloudy night.

Quote[/b] ]

And another thing, the ammo amounts for army rangers for an example in the Vietnam War was a standard 1,000 rounds. (at least in the auto biography I read it was) You didn't go out in the field unless you had that otherwise you'd get out there, get into a huge firefight and run clean out of ammo. But on the other hand, this is a computer game. The inventory in OPF1 is fine for anyone who makes a habit of aiming properly. You don't need hundreds of rounds because full auto is pointless because of the inaccuracy. If you simply aim and squeeze off three rounds on single fire mode, you can complete 3/4ths of the missions without using even two clips.

1) damnit they are magazines not clips. The garand used clips. Modern rifles use magazines.

2) anything other than single shot is useless IRL anyway at ranges greater than 50m - unless its just supressing fire, which is also more effective if it is aimed. Just because the US soldiers liked to hose down the jungle doesn't mean it is actually a good tactic.

Quote[/b] ]

One thing I've found to help though is that I never carry grenades. That frees up 8 slots right there. And who needs hand grenades anyways?

Anyone that uses cover to approach the enemy unseen and decimate them without them being able to fire back? Anyone who is doing FISCH in flashpoint (fighting in towns)? Anyone who wants to damage enemy armour but has no AT weapons (ok, thats mainly Kaspanos' but grenades are used sometimes.)

Quote[/b] ]

If the enemy is that close, you let them. Instead of letting them get that close, cap'em when they get in range. Rifle grenades you can lob a long way but I can't aim worth nuthin' with those things.

Well, some people can.

Quote[/b] ]

The death cam on OPF kinda helps the player cheat from time to time in my book. A person shouldn't be able to look at the death cam to see who is where. He should be able to do that himself during game play if he's any decent soldier. Although I do confess that I have done it many times. I do admit it can be hard and quite maddening at times but if a mission is really difficult, that means the game producers did that for a reason. But personally, I don't enjoy tearing my hair out of my head becuase I've been stuck on the same mission for three days. That's when I download a walkthrough.

You download a walkthrough for a dynamic, different every time game? How does that work? Does it say things like

1) pay attention

2) play the game yourself depending on the circumstances?

Quote[/b] ]

In real life, it doesn't take 10 minutes to have the artillery actually fire off a round. If the artillery is standing by, it can be done in a very short time period. Now if you have to drag the artillery operators out of bed, then it could take twenty minutes and a cup of coffee, but I'd hope that's not the case.

Where the hell did you learn this? Its just.. wrong. IF the artillery is available, which it rarely is, then they still have to compute all the distances, elevations, air pressure, weather conditions, etc etc etc before firing, and then they still usually have to be guided onto target. If you're doing a deliberate attack, then you should have already had them do all this, but the flight time for the rounds themselves can be minutes long.

Quote[/b] ]

Which leads me to another point. In real life artillery has a virtually unlimited supply of rounds, therefore from a life like point of view, limited fire missions in OPF2 would be rediculous.

yet another statement which is just utterly wrong! Where did you 'learn' this? I've NEVER heard of arty with unlimited rounds, or anything like it. They only have so many rounds because there is only so many rounds they can carry and be resupplied with.