Cooperative Campaign

[wamingo 1]

You like the idea more than its practical usage I think.

Resistance/coldwar campaign, would, for a number of reasons, definately not work in one long stretch.

By the time you aquire a tank, missions afterwards, where you obviously were not meant to have one, become rollover. Until it's destroyed of course. Balanced challenges makes for the most fun missions.

Respawn required so the feeling of "scary" and having to run away from time to time is not possible.

Long distance respawns are quite boring. Someone always ends up being the helicopter transporter and you spend oceans of time traveling and broken up.

And such.

What I'm saying here is, to make a campaign like res/cwc you'll need to make your missions episodic.

So what is it want so sorely that an episodic campaign cannot give you?

I agree a massive and complex CTI style thing - destroy a convoy and their camp will be underequipped and such, that kind of thing could be hard to complete in just a couple of hours. The question is just, if this couldn't be put into episodes as well. And if the whole thing is much more than just a feeling of consistency and if that consistency wouldn't be lost the moment you save and exit the game.

Am not going to sit here and say we shouldn't have such a feature. It wouldn't hurt me if we did. Just trying to put things in perspective is all.

[Rune 0]

wamingo

Quote[/b] ]Why can't you break down the "campaign" into those "few hour" episodes? What kind of "persistant" world would you make that couldn't be made into episodes that picked up where you left off last?

Well for one, dynamic missions like CTI have no 'episodes', and just as an example of one thing I'd like to make is a guerilla warfare coop CTI campaign, one that goes on over the whole island and evolves over a playing timespan of maybe 10 to 30 hours. But already now a CTI is so big that it can take longer than many people are able to play. Campaigning is all about the baggage of past events, remembering what happened before and how it relates to what is happening now. If you leave the game for several days, while the game goes on in real time, you no longer have a feel for what is going on, you have lost the overview and with it the immersion in the campaign. If, on the other, hand you start over from scratch you have lost the evolutionary baggage of the game world, it's personality if you like, and it is now no longer your world, but rather just a world and the campaign-immersion is gone. So any kind of mission where campaigning is the core feature is impossible, in my opinion, unless you can play the required 14+ hours straight. I also consider the old OFP campaigns that were made with simple numbered missions as more collections of similar missions than actual campaigns, precisely because of this lack of campaign-immersion. I personally believe that the main reason why people dont really see the need for campaigning is beause they mistakenly believe they have tried it, without being overly impressed, when really they have never tried it at all...

Even in the case of a sequential story there are lots and lots of things you can never do properly with simple numbered missions, I will address a few of the major ones below in response to Heatseekers post.

Heatseeker:

Quote[/b] ]The obvious major diference betwean a campaign and a bunch of missions is unlocking the next mission after you beat the previous but you can still make a series of missions based on the same events.

What Sanctuary is talking about is possible in OFP, Nubbin from the same mod I am with, Sinews of War, made a campaign like this. It is a sequential campaign with missions being played one after the other, but there are sub-objectives in some missions that give it a very dynamic quality, like blowing up a bridge, which can happen in a differently numbered, missions from one playthrough to the other...you cannot emulate dynamic properties like that without saving some data or you will end up with a bridge that stands when it should be destroyed and vice versa. And that is without mentioning the harsh limitation it puts on the believability of the story that there has to be a specific mission with the objective to destroy the bridge and you cannot blow it up while you happen to be in the neighbourhood if you are not playing the right mission. So basically the whole flow of a campaign is forced into the boring linear style of many first person shooters, where the player is basically playing the part of a lab rat stuck in a tube with doors opening in front and closing behind and only one way to go. So saving some data opens up a great number of options for non-linear gameplay which is already one of the key features of OFP/ArmA when we are talking smaller timescales.

Quote[/b] ]If you think a coop campaign is so important you can make it with individual, numbered, related missions and give yourselves the discipline of only playing #2 after beating #1. Saves alot of work.

It may save work, but it also does not accomplish even a small fraction of what I need as a mission maker or a player for that matter. If you dont need it that is fine, but some form of saving will give all mission makers more freedom wether you care or not, I just happen to need it to the point where I am suffering from 'creative claustrophobia' at the moment because of this SOW2.x has individual personalities, people with specific names, faces, voices that can die and be injured and will start the next mission in that state. It has money that carries over, that can be used when buying or selling equipment. When you start the next mission you are carrying the same kit and in the same group as you were when you finished playing the last time. Don't you hate how, in simple numbered-mission-campaigns, you get a full load of ammo for the next mission when you spent it all already, or when you have less ammo even though you were very careful to conserve it, or when you are suddenly carrying the wrong weapon and so on and so on? - wouldn't make much sense if the campaign is a week long escape and evasion marathon with multiple firefights now would it...

Quote[/b] ]Then comes the development itself, a good coop mission might take some time to make, a good SP campaign alot more (very few were actually made for OPF in all these years), a good coop campaign would problably be a pain in the *** and not worth the effort since in MP you have to take things into acount that you dont in SP editing.

I just happen to be the closest thing there is to an expert on that issue - having worked on the dynamic mission that was part of the tutorial/demo for SOW 2.1+, having helped Nubbin with his The New Resistance numbered-mission-coop-campaign at SoW, having worked on my own numbered-mission-coop-campaign, and having developed, along with it, a tool for coop campaigning to enhance the sequential mission campaigning experience way beyond the numbered missions 'campaign' concept(development was halted because ArmA was expected soon)...And it really is no different than making single missions, or multiplayer missions in that once you know what to do it is not a pain in the ass at all, but rather enjoyable actually, the hard part is not getting too ambitious and letting go at 95% done, realising that you will otherwise never finish, and that is the same whether making a single player mission or a full blown dynamic multiplayer campaign...Besides it is fairly easy to add a saving feature to an existing coop mission, so there is also the option that that saving feature can be added later to an existing dynamic mission or old numbered-mission-campaign to make it more of a campaign, this has happened in OFP to CTI and also, if I remember correctly, CCE. And I have personally seriously considered converting some of the well known numbered-mission-campaigns to use saving in multiplayer. So don't think for a second that it would be wasted on this community and that it would be too much work to become reality, the thing that held saving in multiplyer back in OFP was the fact that it was using an undocumented feature/bug as oposed to a streamlined system set up by BIS.

wamingo:

Quote[/b] ]Resistance/coldwar campaign, would, for a number of reasons, definately not work in one long stretch.

Well I am pretty sure I could get it working quite well

Quote[/b] ]By the time you aquire a tank, missions afterwards, where you obviously were not meant to have one, become rollover. Until it's destroyed of course. Balanced challenges makes for the most fun missions.

Did it never bother you how in the cold war crisis campaign tanks seemed to appear out of nowhere every time you went on to the next mission? - I mean sometimes I knew for sure that I had taken out the last enemy vehicle on the island, but surely enough there were 2 BMPs and a T-72 there at the start of the next mission, each located very near to the, now missing, wrecks I left playing the previous missions. I originally started looking into saving in multiplayer because I wanted a simple counter that would allow me to make sure I didn't have to destroy the same tank twice or kill the same solider over and over in my campaign. Balance is not the job of the game makers, it is the job of the mission maker. And quite frankly I generally loathe 'balance', it is fundamentally unrealistic, especially the ways it is usually done. And lack of balance is actually a source of great fun for me, having that tank you were not supposed to have, in one playthrough but not the other, will dramatically increases the replay value of a campaign since experience will be totally different. Play the same campaign twice, and maybe the first time you are managing well and have easy fighting. The next time you may be struggeling all the way and will be getting a completely different experience out of it. A lot of balancing that is done consists of evening out the numbers so nothing is ever easy or too hard, it just stays in the same boring luck-dominated region of difficulty...

Quote[/b] ]Respawn required so the feeling of "scary" and having to run away from time to time is not possible.

Long distance respawns are quite boring. Someone always ends up being the helicopter transporter and you spend oceans of time traveling and broken up. What I'm saying here is, to make a campaign like res/cwc you'll need to make your missions episodic.

So what is it want so sorely that an episodic campaign cannot give you?

I think you are confusing the issue here, or you are using the term 'episodic' to mean only the simple form of numbered-mission-campaigns. This is not about sequential or not, it is about storing enough information about the game-world that you can break up a potentially very long campaign into managable gaming sessions without losing the immersion. Whether the campaign is planned out ahead of time and is a sequence of missions played one after the other or it is a single mission that resumes it's prior state is irrelevant, both could be campaigns in my opinion, but it requires more information to carry over then a mission number.

Quote[/b] ]I agree a massive and complex CTI style thing - destroy a convoy and their camp will be underequipped and such, that kind of thing could be hard to complete in just a couple of hours. The question is just, if this couldn't be put into episodes as well.

I have no idea what you are talking about here...have you played CTI? - how would you store that data in the episode number? ...say 10 cities would take 3^10 missions to store who owns what and that is only a small bit of what is needed for and old OFP-style CTI...dunno about the built-in ArmA one though, but it seems totally impossible to me without utterly mangling the whole concept.

lwlooz:

Quote[/b] ]How to get BIS to implement that tho,thats the other question.

My personal plan:

Plan A) Hope/faith in BIS attention to detail and history of adding features in patches

BIS releases a patch that has proper saving in multiplayer, preferrably a clikable save/load button like in singleplayer. Or potentially a scripting option, in addition to the one that allows a server to keep real time going with no players connected. But one that instead saves the present state of the world and exits into normal server operation, and resumes the mission again when players select it at a later time.

Plan B) Hope that BIS are reading the Wiki and realising that some 'feature requests' are more important than bugs(i.e. the ones I enter ):

BIS patch expends the operation of a few select scripting commands, normally used in singleplayer campaigning, to also work in multiplayer and the community will do all the magic like with OFP.

Plan C) Hope for a bug, similar to the one exploited to save in OFP, exists in ArmA

Back to work to get the most out of it.

Plan D) Give up hope

I enjoy ArmA as a player, but stay away from anything major in terms of mission making to avoid the creative claustrophobia.

...Erm, I seem to have written a lot, sorry but I am quite passionate about this issue, if anyone hadn't noticed already

[wamingo 1]

...

No, it didn't bother me that there were tanks disappearing. What would have bothered me is if I had 6 tanks and my opponent only had 2 allowing me to roll over them. And it would have bothered me even more if I could've just dropped the infantry missions and rolled over them with excess tanks. And even worse if I could just respawn somewhere killing the atmosphere entirely.

Immersion is an idea. That's why I said what you really like about this is the idea - that you're playing one long rather than 10 broken up. To me immersion is destroyed when you have excessive respawns.

But why do you need 3^10 missions to have the feel of playing an episodic CTI? - or numbered missions as you call it. You capture the island one mission at a time anyhow? What difference does it make whether town A and B are in your control when you're attacking town C?

And then certain things that can be done in episodic missions simply cannot be done in one long mission.

I played a lot of coop CTI in ofp so yeah I know what is meant by lengthy missions. Our longest was just short of 7 hours and we didn't finish it.

Though I see absolutely nothing standing in the way of breaking this up into doing a few parts of the island at a time And it could have several benefits, including (but not limited to) performance benefits, more freedom in scripting and story development, easily repeatable, and potentially far better balanced challenges.

If you think you can do it though, why don't you make some ~2 hour ones, then? I'd play them, and I'd be happy to throw down the hat if you or someone actually manages to pull it off.

You can manage a lot in 2 hours. Heck cti games often (usually?) last less than that.

[Jack-UK 0]

...

No, it didn't bother me that there were tanks disappearing. What would have bothered me is if I had 6 tanks and my opponent only had 2 allowing me to roll over them. And it would have bothered me even more if I could've just dropped the infantry missions and rolled over them with excess tanks. And even worse if I could just respawn somewhere killing the atmosphere entirely.

Immersion is an idea. That's why I said what you really like about this is the idea - that you're playing one long rather than 10 broken up. To me immersion is destroyed when you have excessive respawns.

But why do you need 3^10 missions to have the feel of playing an episodic CTI? - or numbered missions as you call it. You capture the island one mission at a time anyhow? What difference does it make whether town A and B are in your control when you're attacking town C?

And then certain things that can be done in episodic missions simply cannot be done in one long mission.

I played a lot of coop CTI in ofp so yeah I know what is meant by lengthy missions. Our longest was just short of 7 hours and we didn't finish it.

Though I see absolutely nothing standing in the way of breaking this up into doing a few parts of the island at a time And it could have several benefits, including (but not limited to) performance benefits, more freedom in scripting and story development, easily repeatable, and potentially far better balanced challenges.

If you think you can do it though, why don't you make some ~2 hour ones, then? I'd play them, and I'd be happy to throw down the hat if you or someone actually manages to pull it off.

You can manage a lot in 2 hours. Heck cti games often (usually?) last less than that.

Thats what i like about Rainbow 6 Vegas, it all happens within the space of like one day... and ArmA is only spread out within a short amount of time i think...

You get in the chopper, and you fly to the next area which is under attack, from Casino to casino etc Its pretty cool

[lwlooz 0]

I understand your point wamingo, but I think the mistake you are making is that you assume a Multiplayer Campaign has to be as static as a standard FPS story-bound SinglePlayer one.

The best Campaign would be a dynamic mission that is played,then saved,reloaded and so on. That way if you capture 2 tanks on a submission of the big dynamic ArmA mission , the enemy scripts can easily react to that by sending their tank-reserve your way or calling up a hind.

And even if it's multiple ArmA-missions like in the last SoW campaign, you still can use the data the other missions saved onto the server for adjusting things like enemy strength and so on.

I think you cant dislike the idea of having a "story-campaign"(Capture Sahrani) which is dynamic(as much as the mission designer likes it be) rather that a static campaign which forces you to go the same bloody path every time

[Rune 0]

Immersion is an idea. That's why I said what you really like about this is the idea

What a strange comment....true I suppose...but very strange and ideed true for quite a few things - like realism or fancy looking graphics for instance. We all want something, I happen to belong to a group of people who want better multiplayer campaigning... I am talking about giving mission makers more freedom to make the missions they want, plain and simple, why is that wrong I am wondering...

Quote[/b] ]But why do you need 3^10 missions to have the feel of playing an episodic CTI? - or numbered missions as you call it. You capture the island one mission at a time anyhow? What difference does it make whether town A and B are in your control when you're attacking town C?

...'reasonable level of abstraction to be believable' is the key here. I may be pedantic in this area but I can't replace tank battles with chess and find it realistic, I can't believe in a long campaign of logistics or attrition if the world effectively resets everything every time I turn my back on it. Things can be made extremely open-ended in OFP/ArmA and there should be no reason to settle for less, the great thing about OFP/ArmA is that not being stuck in the tube, not performing a preset story like a lab rat, promotes creative thinking in tactical and strategic terms and also makes the game much less predictable - lots of running away in order not to get killed And if you are having an easy time you have done your tactics well and/or are about to be surprised - is that not the good life we all want

Sorry you lost me with the rest of that post. It seems to me that we have some communication issue...Anyway, I just thought up a 'CTI-like' game-type for you who find dissimlar things to be so ...err...similar :

Divide the island up into some number of possible frontlines, then make each fronline location a mission and 'number' the center one 0 and the others something like W1, W2,... and E1, E2,... and such to indicate how far back one side has pushed the other...each mission is then a meeting engagement with both sides starting a way back from the front but able to reach it in similar time, on average. Each time a mission is won by one side the frontline is moved correspondingly by selection of the next mission. The campaign winner would be the one that forces the other side all the way back over however many missions it takes...each mission could be balanced and all that. I'd play it and enjoy it I am sure, but the center missions could get quite boring after a while if they are not made to be pretty dynamic, and it would still not be a real campaign, without some form of saving, in my mind, because I've had much better already in OFP

[wamingo 1]

lwlooz, I didn't bring up RES/CWC. I know well what you mean by dynamic, and no, I don't dislike the idea, who wouldn't want to fight on a giant dynamic battlefield, but it's just that, an idea. In practice it makes questionable sense over multiple smaller segments - because of its inherent issues.

About the repetitive issue. Linear missions are repetitive if you do them repeatedly, yes. But even the most dynamic campaign that throws you back and forth will be no better.

Open-ended basicly is synonym for repetition. Not that there's anything wrong with that. CTI, which can be fun, is or could be openended, but is also the epitome of repetitiveness. This limit can only be nudged so far, especially when you take away the many possibilities that only episodic and "linear" missions can provide.

Quote[/b] ]"...'reasonable level of abstraction to be believable' is the key here"

Apologies in advance. But I think pedantic is the keyword.

We could argue forever over the worth and value of these semantics so let me just reiterate my issue on the issue, and then leave it at that. "Sorely needed" is a powerful way to ask for something only a handful of people actually would play/use and adding that this is no simple matter to implement, it is, in my opinion, a lot to ask for. Have at it.

[Rune 0]

You are entitled to your opinions, nihilistic and conflicting with common sense as they seem And you can speculate all you want about the numbers of people who would welcome multiplayer saving and the difficulty of implementing it, but in the end I see no reason, having read your posts carefully, to believe you have even the slightest clue about what it would take or indeed what I am even talking about in the first place...like I said 'communication issue'.