Rts 1.0 build and conquer is out

[KaRRiLLioN 0]

All of the addons in use have been tested and in use since beta 5, so I'm not sure how one of them could develop dependency problems unless the author came out with new versions and some of the players have different versions.

For that reason it is highly advisable to use the addon packs that I provide and place them into mod folders named something like so:

@RTSModern

@RTSWW2

@RTSNam

that way they can be easily disabled should any conflicts arise.

Let me know if that helps.

[BBSmith 0]

1. Will you be incorperating squads back into RTS? Or does it lag too much for some people?

2. Was the OLD RTS addon the cause of miscarrage of bought units? (I.e. Buying a Small bomber and receiving a B61).

3. Would it be possible to have a small counter until one of your units is done. I know that it is in mission control, but i mean from the games stand point. (Be able to see a little counter in the bottem Right side of the screen,possibly transparent and light in color). This may be unnessesary, but WTH im just throwing ideas out.

4. Could the Outro maybe circle the enemy's HQ ( Base in general), so the winner can see the damage that they involked? Or a new camera in general for the ending, instead of the water scean.

5. Allow all people on your team to see how much time is left in research.

6. Maybe a BASE Cam, if you are away from base and you want ether survalence, or just to see if the enemy attacking your base is really worth killing yourself to get back.

7. 2 Crewmen on a bike, isnt that a bit pointless? No one uses the other guy, other than to make him disembark.

8. If your AI runs out of gas, maybe give an ACTION to the AI to refuel, or some type of givin command to allow the ai get to his destination.

9. Upgraded tanks possible? Instead of combining teams money to help rush the enemy into artillery assult. ( I know the Artillery has been increased to 4000+, but people still are able to afford a quick ride).

10. Could Radar possibly give you a Satelite cam of the Radar's Range, this could fall into the Survalence category.

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Dont know if any of these are good, probably not, but theres a few for you to Ponder on.

L8er, c u In Teh Server

Veeechhttoor

[KaRRiLLioN 0]

There are squads in RTS, but only the commander can use them. The AI squads are the extra AI that you enable before starting the game. If someone drops, then their AI can be used as well. By using command and control on the commander's Mission Status screen, he can control groups, and make indivual soldiers in other squads get into specific vehicles, cap territories, or use the waypoint mode to move them to specific places, i.e. the enemy base.

Each player has a soldier cam they can use to watch their own soldiers. The commander can watch any squad leader by using the Squad cam, or he can cycle thru individual soldiers in anyone's squad to watch them. You can zoom in and out, etc. and get a good bird's eye view of the action. This takes the place of a satellite cam that you could use to see everything, so he has to have an AI there to home in on.

Insofar as a small counter goes, you canno have a dialog (menu) screen up and still retain control of your character, so there's no way to have a small counter for that stuff. That's why it's all incorporated into mission control where you can see what's building in the tank fac, air fac, or the time to research left. The reason you can't see a timer for what the commander is researching on a global level is because the public vars get kinda messed up in MP and it becomes inacurrate, so I just put it up that a Global Upgrade is in process so you'd know the commander was upgrading.

When you build a manned vehicle you get two soldiers with it. Yes, it's pointless to have two on a bike, but normally ppl build one manned bike, then build another unmanned and put the extra man on the other bike. When you build tanks, then the two crew become more important as gunner and driver.

You can already have AI refuel if there's a fuel truck nearby. If they're out of gas, then there's not much you can do since they can't get out and push. Most vehicle will not run out of gas, but will be destroyed long before they even use half a tank.

I thought of doing tank upgrades, but it starts getting really complicated for the players to keep up with all of that stuff. I know some people build an arty pretty soon if they have $4,000, but more than likely they're going to lose it as well because they're just going out on their own. Basic Air can be researched fairly quickly, and there's a couple of choppers with TOW's on them to take out any pesky Arty's. Arty's are usually best when paired with a Chinook or Mi17 that can cart them and paradrop them deeper into enemy territory. So far it's worked out to be very balanced, so long as the teams are actually playing as a TEAM, not a lot of ppl running around on their own.

The radar thing I think I answered further up with the soldier cam.

Whew, wrote a book now it seems. =)

[benu 1]

All of the addons in use have been tested and in use since beta 5, so I'm not sure how one of them could develop dependency problems unless the author came out with new versions and some of the players have different versions.

For that reason it is highly advisable to use the addon packs that I provide and place them into mod folders named something like so:

@RTSModern

@RTSWW2

@RTSNam

that way they can be easily disabled should any conflicts arise.

Let me know if that helps.

I use the addons i downloaded from your site (except the editoripdate102.pbo, i use kegetys one). And i have your addons in a modfolder.

The problem is not with rts3 missions. I can play rts3 misssions fine on my server. But some other missions will not start anymore since i installed the rts3 addons.

This always happens when you put an addon with missing dependencencies into a modfolder on a dedicated server (i have the addons in a modfolder called rts on my server). Broken addons actually cause problems in missions that do not use them.

When i move the 2s19 from the rts modfolder to the normal addons folder those missions work again. Also adding bradley to the requiredAddons[] section of the 2s19 mission.sqm seemed to fix the problem. It's now back in the rts modfolder and everything seems to work fine again.

It's nice that you put effort into testing those addons, but as i said those dependency problems are hard to spot as they appear only in missions not depending on those addons. So i can't even say for sure if any other of those addons might have problems too, as i haven't been able to test all combinations of addons and missions. It's not your fault anyway, but if you have contact to the author please tell him to check his dependencies.

I can't restart my server all the time to enable/disable rts servers, so i had to find a solution for this and i thought other server admins may be interested too (if they run other missions in parallel on their server).

I hope this is helpful to someone else...

[Gudulas 0]

really good work karrillion, Im downloading it now, it would be possible to disable that option "research enemy technology", I think it is not good, couse west and east have different vehicles, differen tactics, when u are west, and u see enemy ah1, u can think, that it is an allied chopper, it woud be possible to release a small addon or something like that, I think there are a lot of players, that are agree with, that, how do u think ?

[KaRRiLLioN 0]

@Benu - So the 2s19 is the addon causing the dependencies issues?

@Gudulas - I understand about the enemy tech, but remember that the enemy can also repair crashed vehicles from the other team. Several times after an assault on the enemy base with choppers failed, we'd be assaulted by the same choppers because the other team had repaired them. Also, the enemy tech is very expensive, so I doubt that most teams will even research it. Out of all the times we've played it lately, I think it's only been researched once.

[BBSmith 0]

koo

[havocsquad 0]

I love this effort done to improve OFP gameplay, I've played this for quite a bit, but I got some serious problems I gotta complain about this newer version.

Things that really need to be changed back:

MOST IMPORTANT:

1.  Make the AI have to deal with cash concerns, friendly and enemy.  I'm getting really pissed off with the AI is manufacturing constantly armored units when they should be dirt poor through the massive spending they've done.

2.  Make the enemy have to research instead of deploying turf helos, even before helo research is completed.

Other wants and concerns:

1.  Script in a condition or a set of conditions that forces the enemy AI to play defensively when he is losing the overall war.

2.  Multiply pay rate for each terrority captured.  ($25 x number of areas held.)  Or reduce the cost of certain units being able to purchase, except for nuke delivering aircraft.

3.  Option to reduce the scale of the game played so computers 1 Ghz and lower can play it without having a 9 to 15 FPS framerate.

[Silver Falcon 0]

Please, can you write the amount of MB after each pack (even the default RTS) an the RTS site?

My only chance to get such a big addon is to ask friend to download it and burn it on CD, so I 'd like to plan how many other big addons I can burn with this one.

[KaRRiLLioN 0]

@Silver Falcon - I changed the webpage to show the size of the files.

@havocsquad - You earn $25 for each territory every 60 seconds that you hold that territory, which is roughly the same as earning $25x the number you hold.

Also, you can scale down the number of AI. You can even play against only the AI commander if you wish. Even on my P4-3gz with Radeon 9800 I get lagged if I play SP with all AI enabled. Your PC is calculating a lot for each AI that exists. Just disable all AI except the top couple of slots on the opposing team.

Insofar as the AI in SP goes, it actually IS created to play a bit more by the rules than the AI in the betas were.

The main thing to remember about AI is that they're stupid, idiotic, and generally don't know what the hell they're doing. I can script in all sorts of conditions to try and make the AI do things a bit smarter, but it adds more overhead to their processes and when more overhead is there, then the server/host PC can't spend enough time keeping the AI alert, and then you can be surrounded by 50 enemy AI and they won't fire at you. For this reason, I've given the AI some leeway in the rules of the game. If you've ever played C&C, then you know that the AI generally tends to build a bunch of stuff and make a beeline straight for your base in an attempt to bulldoze you to death. I've tried to improve on this somewhat.

First of all, the AI commander uses dedicated squads, as I've described earlier. He builds land and air offense squads. The air one doesn't kick in until later in the game, but the land one starts out immediately searching actively for the enemy base, and once it's found it, then the AI commander knows. He also makes territory squads, consisting of a chopper, but these don't start until Basic Air is upgraded. Once done, then they start taking territories quickly. For Defense the AI commander builds several SAM's or MG's depending upon the era, and also builds several Armored AA units, like ADATS, Tonguskas, Wirbelwinds, etc. After Basic air is done, then the AI commander starts to send out Chinooks/Mi17's/Junkers, whatever the big cargo carriers are with paratroopers.

After Advanced Air is done then the Jets are sent out to harass.

In addition to the AI Commander, each Squad Leader which is left as AI will automatically build their own squad of tanks and begin to take territories and attack any enemies that are also attempting to take territories.

Overall, this creates a lot of overhead. The AI is limited by certain random factors, as well as time. When a squad dies, it takes it a long while to rebuild and go out again. Also, when the base units that are used to create a unit are destroyed, then that squad cannot rebuild.

If I were to create a mechanism to keep track of money and other factors as well, then it would have to be broken down so that each AI squad leader, and the AI commander would have different accounts, etc. This isn't really feasible without a lot of scripting. I think that the AI is powerful, but stupid now, and a competent player in SP should be able to deal with the AI, so long as they survive the first 30 minutes of the game.

There are other issues as well. Sometimes the AI stops responding to commands later in the game. I'm not sure why, but they'll just sort of sit there doing nothing. I have a lot of stuff built into the scripts to stop this behaviour, but it doesn't always work. I guess it's a core OFP issue.

Anyway, I might tweak a few things, like the length of time the AI commander waits before researching (right now it's random), but for now I think it seems to work pretty well.

[Silver Falcon 0]

Thanks

[benu 1]

@Benu - So the 2s19 is the addon causing the dependencies issues?

Seems so. We are not having problems after i changed it. So the rest of the modern addons seem to be ok (until someone else runs into trouble with one of them ). I couldn't test vietnam/ww2 as my little server is really at it's addon limits after i installed the modern rts3 addons But i am considering a server upgrade (partially because of rts3)...

[Bordoy 0]

I've tried this out and it is great. I've put ALL the required add-ons in the same mod folder and dont get any problems which is good. i tried 5 v 5 but still get lagged later in the game so im gonna try 3v3. I noticed that WW2 lags more then modern, is that because of the island?

@Karrillon: if its 1 v 1 (player v AI) does the AI still create them squad what i see on the map called AIR and AirT, etc.

[Hellek 0]

Are you going to add UA (Unified Artillery) stuff to RTS? Preferably requiring research of course and maybe even making the area round the HQs a no-shoot zone (which AFAIK should be no prob to do with UA) so that they are not too powerful.

[KaRRiLLioN 0]

@Bordoy - if you are playing as commander on one team vs. the AI commander on another team, then you won't see the markers for AirT, etc. for the enemy. If you are letting an AI commander build for your team, however, you'll see several markers.

Land - land offense squad

AirT - Air territory squad

AirO - air offense

I can't remember the others off the top of my head.

I'm not sure why WW2 lags more, but I have noticed in some games that there will be a lot of lag for a while, and then it goes away. I think there might be an addon that has a problem and it causes this lag, but then it goes away when the vehicle is recycled or something.

One of the guys who plays on my server regularly is getting permission from the addon authors of the WW2 addons to modify them (mainly tanks) so that they all more accurately represent the true armor values and weapon strengths they should have. Maybe we can find the bug that causes issues. We'll be adding John's new German Artillery and other nice new WW2 addons to RTS soon.

@Hellek - I'm thinking of UA, but I'm not sure how it'll be lag-wise. If we get a lot of players controlling assets then it could lag a lot. Also, it kind of takes away from the other battle assets in the game. I would definitely have to make the bases a no-fire zone since otherwise it'd be far too easy to sit back and blast them to hell. More than likely it'd work best as a way to clear out territories for capture, or to defeat a large tank column moving your way.

[D.murphy man 0]

Maybe you could have the range of the artillary increase as u capture territories so you can only target things inside ur territorie and maybe a little bit out side it too?

[RED 0]

Why not just have 1 unit per side that controlls the artillery? This would cut down on lag and would stop everyone sitting around playing with artillery.

RED

[KaRRiLLioN 0]

I've thought of that, letting the Commander be the only one who can control it. I haven't looked at UA in depth so I'm not sure how it determines who can control it. I would assume there's some way to plug that in.

Even so, I'd make the UA feature pretty expensive.

[Hellek 0]

I think who has the possibility to use the UA radio can do it.

You can:

A: Set that Tank commanders have it (they don't have it by default)

B: Place radios that can be picked up

C: Execute a script on a player to activate the radio for him

So you would just have to execute the script on the commander at startup and at respawn I guess.

If you won't make it commander-only:

I don't know if you can "assign" artillery to a player meaning that only he can command it.

[Guest]

Here's an idea.  Instead of assigning UA abilities to individual units, just use the included UA radio object, and leave it on a table near the base.  That way, only one person can use artillery at a time and he/she is stuck at the base while the rest of the team can call in coords from out in the field.

Then every player has access to artillery support, and its the responsibility of the "artillery commander" to deliver it based on need.  This "artillery commander" can be assigned informally by the team in the briefing, at the game setup menu in a dedicated slot, or to whoever decides to step up and use it.

Eh?

[Hellek 0]

well, it already is the case that each artillery unit can only have one commander. the commander can also release command so that somebody else can use it.

that is far more dynamic than making a single radio available.

I think that it might be a cool thing if the commander could actually "hand out" radios to other players so that the commander can decide who will be able to use the artillery (when he himself is not using it)

[Dr.Death JM 0]

this is what ofp is all about ....rts is good but rts1.0 is the best.....i love it when somone drops a nuke and u dont die (at first) you get to see the flash .....and then....well we all know what happens next.....lets just say the game is over befor your body hits the ground

[paul8agrape 0]

A few of us play RTS on our own server and one problem we've noticed is that we cannot use custom faces. If you use one, you can't even connect to the server. Yet, I know some servers allow you to. Does anyone know of a way to configure the server so that you can use them?

Thx

[benu 1]

A few of us play RTS on our own server and one problem we've noticed is that we cannot use custom faces. If you use one, you can't even connect to the server. Yet, I know some servers allow you to. Does anyone know of a way to configure the server so that you can use them?

That's not really an rts related question... it's an option in the server.cfg that defines the maximum size for user sound and face files in byte, should something like this (or leave it out at all):

MaxCustomFileSize="61440";

[paul8agrape 0]

Thanks for the reply and sorry for posting the question here. I meant to post it in a different topic! Sorry.