The future of operation flashpoint

[BoweryBaker 0]

I'd like to speak on the future. I know one thing, in gamespy the resistance room is pretty much down to like eleven people at most but in the regular ofp room theres like eighty per day. I wish there were more resistance players. The number has gone down alot. I think that has alot to do with why there aren't enough ofp missions out there. I'm a mission editor who uses gamespy to chat with, meet other players, and host games. It's the most sensible option for me. Sometimes i get the craziest and greatest ofp mission ideas but then i lose motivation because i figure, "if i make the mission who's going to play it with me anyhow?" In any case ofp has a great future ahead of it. The community has recently started talking again about standardized addon packages like US-UNITS, US-GROUND VEHICLES, US-AIRCRAFT, stuff like that and other countries and oppositional forces. This is good. Maybe then we will all automatically have the same addons. Gamespy is my favorite way of connecting though. I know I'm probably missing out on some other format but lets talk about ofp's future. Do you see the numbers of ofp players going down? Is there something we can do about it if thats true? What does ofp need? In my honest opinion if resistance expansion pack were free more people could enjoy it. I have resistance so its no thing to me but id like to see more resistance players.

[blackdog~ 0]

no one uses gamespy with resistance because the ingame browser is just so much easier.

[lee_h._oswald 0]

The best part, but the "biggest problem" OFP has, is it's realism.

Everyone who makes missions, wanted to make huge campaign like stuff with tons of addons and so on.

That's fine, but on the other hand, ppl want the quick play without huge downloads, neverending error messages about missing addons.

Sometimes it's very funny playing simple maps like the UT2004 Mod "Red Orchestra" has.

A not so huge area with 3-5 points to capture, changing spawnpoints and pure infantrie fighting.

In those maps, you have stuff burning, destroyed vehicles, destroyed houses, smoke, ambient sounds and so on.

Depending on how many ppl play the map, you need more comrades to capture points and classes like sniper/mg are limited.

I would like to see such "simple"(they aren't simple to make, but simple concept) maps more often for OFP.

To sad there is no ingame join after 3years of OFP, this could boost the number of players joining a game.

MfG Lee

[InqWiper 0]

I just went to the ingame browser now which is a time when there arent so many players playing yet. I sorted the resistane 1.96 servers after players and counted the amount of players. There were 217 players on the resistance server now and most people havent started playing yet. The reason you see so few people when in gamespy is probably because people want as little to do with gamespy as possible and the ingame browser is much smoother (yes i know its powered by gamespy, but what can you do ).

[spm1138 0]

Game-what-now?

ASE is where it's at

Flashpoint needs OFPWatch built in.

It also needs Join-In-Progress.

Whatever happened to that?

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

Nobody is in the gamespy lobby because nobody uses gamespy. Not many people like bloated spy/ adware infested lumps of crap masquerading as server browsers. Hence all the server browsers for OFP; ofpwatch, etc.

[Steel_UK 0]

I do have to agree that there is a major need to in-game joining. Probably a good idea would be to simply set up the game to either have mid-game joins, or only at start joining.

The reason being, is that, lets say, a game of CTF or C&H is going on, people will leave mid-game, and so it would be good for people to join mid-game.

However, if it is a coop mission, then it is most likely best to have people join only at the start, and not ingame. The reason being is to make it more realistic and also allows proper co-ordination instead of a player appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a fire-fight.

OFP does have a long future, that I can be certain of, as it is really the only game which allows so much to be done to it. We have had bikes, cars, tanks, and all sorts made for OFP by the community. This is a plus other things like BF 1942 as it appears to be much much harder to modify or create addons for it. (if I am wrong, please corret me as I do not have BF 1942)

[Rune 0]

In my opinion OFP has two problems that will keep it from getting as big as it deserves to be:

1) THE ADDON MESS

I've had to stop playing on my regular server, which I miss badly, because of this. But I was spending too much time trying to keep up with new addons, new versions of existing addons, incompatible addons and addons that won't work in modfolders and such things. I was frustrated with the degraded performance and crashes caused by these addons.

Imagine how difficult it must be for anyone new to the game...Almost all servers with people on them have tons of addons.

The more useful stuff is in each addon the better - releasing single guns will definetely not help OFP in the long run, but releasing complete sets of units with appropriate equipment as single addons might.

2) THE MISSION JUNGLE

This is really stupid, it takes 1 hour to slap a simple mission together(including a briefing), and thousands exist - but still it is very hard work finding the good ones because they're not organized properly and searchable by useful parameters like number of players, likely duration, realism level, difficulty...- and even if you do find a good one it is often using addons that you don't have or even want, or equally bad it has no briefing or one in some strange language. Many mission makers are very very skilled, but they make bad missions because they tend to overcomplicate things - why do most missions have so many objectives? What is wrong with a simple mission - 'Clean Sweep' is one, having a few hundred missions with that setup(and coop) in different towns, different sides, and other variations could keep me busy for years...

And since people might have 500+ missions and maybe even three versions of your mission on their drives then keep the file sizes reasonable(200-300kb) - don't spam, you don't need full tracks, use 10-30s instead if you absolutely must have music.

Releasing missions with addons in them or modifying missions and re-releasing them with addons in them is bad for OFP. Much better to release missions without addons at all... If they absolutely must have addons then make/edit many missions so that all need the same combination of addons to work and name them in a fasion to make this fact obvious. Then release them in a mission pack and write a decent readme file describing what addons are needed.

OFP is very good at keeping it's fans hooked, but it is getting worse and worse at picking up new ones - the future is most likely a slow fade towards 500 crazies still playing it in ten years - who knows, maybe I'm one of them... ;)

[spm1138 0]

Disclaimer:

Not my idea. I forget where I stole it from.

I believe what is needed with regards to the addon situation is standard packs of themed addons.

You choose the single best* addon in a given category and bundle them together into themed mod folders.

You then slap those mod folders on an OFPWatch compatible server somewhere. People download a mission, look at the readme. It says they need the US Infantry pack, the Russian Infantry pack etc.

They then load up OFPWatch and download those particular mod folders.

Next time they downloaded a mission they might only need one or two standard packs or none at all. The more missions they downloaded that used this scheme, the better value downloading those packs would be.

If you choose your addons well, people will already have most of what missions made by people who aren't using the scheme require (unless they've gone out of their way to use ancient or weird addons).

* This is a tricky thing to do but I think you're basically trying to find a balance between an addon that looks cool, is realistic and is already popular.

I could see people complaining that this means their addon is nevar going to get used if they're making something that there is already a good one of. Well, hard cheese. Stop making bloody Delta Force soldiers. Flashpoint is crap at CQB anyway ;)

[spm1138 0]

About the missions - what we need is the editor patching out of the game or the ability to .pbo a mission taking out of the game.

The fact that you can just slap something together in ten minutes from within the game encourages the proliferation of tosh.

I made the mistake of signing up to be a reviewer at opflash.org.

The review archive contained mountains and mountains of crap. There were a few genuinely good missions in there but most of it ...

This one could perhaps be solved by having a better database of missions that allows you to search by the factors you mentioned as well as some sort of user rating feature so you can filter out everything below a certain * rating.

It could have a scanner on the submissions thing that didn't allow anything that hadn't been properly closed up to be submitted.

[BoweryBaker 0]

So there's two things we learned from this chat. OFP needs standard addon packs, themed of course like USinfantry, USboats, USvehicles, Civillians, stuff like that. That way you'd need a few standards and then an island and you can play. Next the sites need more search parameters. I'm going to email all the sites i know and tell them this. Things will change you just got to be the one to try and change them. As far as the standard US infantry pack goes id say wait for the NAVY SEALs to come out.

[Homefry 0]

Quote[/b] ]This one could perhaps be solved by having a better database of missions that allows you to search by the factors you mentioned as well as some sort of user rating feature so you can filter out everything below a certain * rating.

Have you tried looking at OFPEC?

[spm1138 0]

OFPEC is teh good, but it would be nice if you could run complex searches on the missions. Some sort of genre on the missions would be nice.

Assuming there ever were standard upgrade packs that would be something else you could search on.

[BoweryBaker 0]

I think that what we're witnessing is that there is an addon for every scenario thinkable in ofp. Once that is complete i see the trend going from clans more to mission teams. Mission teams will keep ofp alive. When you got creativity coming out in a competitive nature its like breakdancing on the streets or hip hop on the radio people just keep getting more creative and the game more funner. But yeah its all about the mission teams right now I'd say. That is the future of ofp.