How long have you been working (obsessing) on your current mission?

[ColeMinor 0]

Hi guys

I just wondered how normal it is to be putting in dozens maybe hundreds of hours over months on a single mission.. am I nuts?? haha

I have a feeling Im not the only one who does this though.

How long have you been working on your current mission? Or do you have a few on the go at once etc.

[kylania 567]

All weekend mostly, but I've given up and accepted the fact that I suck. :)

Never have completed a mission come to think about, always end up helping others with little parts of theirs instead.

[Big Dawg KS 6]

Good missions take lots of time and patience. In my experience, even if I spend all day working on them I usually only end up with a couple hours' worth of progress. It's too easy to get distracted... :rolleyes:

[Murklor 10]

Good missions take lots of time and patience

So does poor missions :rolleyes:

[JDog 11]

Lol Murklor.

I think I spent Sunday through Friday making my Gatekeeper mission. Not all day each day, but many many hours. Then again it's my first and probably spent 20% time building the mission, 20% scripting, 20% viewing these boards and other sources learning how to do things and 40% debugging the mission and wondering why things didnt work as I wanted them to.

Just some rants:

1) The AI are frickin stupid and can't follow a road even if I placed waypoints every 5 meters.

2) How does an AI plane fly over a target multiple times, flying at the same speed, same altitude, same vector, releasing the bombs at the exact same moment... yet they land in different spots >.> GRRRRR!

[Murklor 10]

2) How does an AI plane fly over a target multiple times, flying at the same speed, same altitude, same vector, releasing the bombs at the exact same moment... yet they land in different spots

Because they're clever :p

Anyway, I have been working on my (admittedly poor) mission for weeks, lol. Keep getting interrupted. Keep getting new ideas. Keep hitting brick walls the size of carriers :(

Now I am almost done with my grand frontline-war-respawning-ai-big-booms, I just need to figure out when the hell the frontline is supposed to move based on what type of superiority. Its so much damn thinking.

[arthur666 10]

I can make a fun skirmish in 10min...

But my most loved missions are always being played, tweaked, polished, -repeat-. I don't think I ever really finish them. That's ok. For me, creating is as fun as playing.

Definitely have 3 or 4 on the burners at once, and a couple more warming in the oven.

My final act is always to write the briefing and notes. I got Arma2 June 25th. I have written exactly zero briefings as of now.

Edited July 28, 2009 by arthur666

[Apocal 10]

Hi guys

I just wondered how normal it is to be putting in dozens maybe hundreds of hours over months on a single mission.. am I nuts?? haha

Not nuts, just more detail-obsessed. That isn't necessarily a bad quality though.

I have a feeling Im not the only one who does this though.

How long have you been working on your current mission? Or do you have a few on the go at once etc.

My current (clan internal) mission, about eight hours, split between background research for an insurgent organization and an idea of their tactics, techniques and procedures (Lester Grau's work regarding Chechnya is excellent in that regard BTW), laying out a plausible defense, finally playtesting and tweaking various aspects. I'm currently taking pics to throw into the briefing.

Admittedly though, they've been "low-tech" to support 50+ players with minimal lag. And the release of F2 helped quite a bit. All told it'll probably be 12 manhours total from start to finish. Having started as a clan mission designer was helpful in that objective triggers can be screwed up or non-functional without destroying anyone's fun, that I can dictate a particular AO with reasonable expectation that players will follow it, that the key elements of the mission won't be driven off a cliff or flown into a mountain, etc.

For a public release mission, I'll need two or three times that. I've publically released about sixteen missions total, mostly for OFP, but about five for ArmA. Overriding time sinks were play-balancing and preventing people from being asshats. Play-balancing was difficult because back in OFP and ArmA days I wound up having to maintain a "clean" final version and a test version where I'd scripted in waypoints for the friendly groups that approximated likely player courses of action. Then I had to do unlikely player courses of action. Any changes necessary to mission I'd put to the "clean" version and (if they were relatively major) start the process back over again. For minor play-balancing tweaks (such as swapping out regular RPGs for tandem-warhead), I'd let it slide without testing, although twice that's come back to bite me in the ass. Obviously, I've become a HUGE fan of the High Command module since the release of ArmA2.

Player's being asshats I've not found a systematic way of solving, but I never gave up trying. And never will. Generally though, I find out that about two-thirds of the public missions I'm working on just aren't fun, balanced or asshat resistant and I scrap them.

Edited July 28, 2009 by Apocal

[Junker 0]

Most of the time the most simple missions are the better missions, But i must admit - I have been obsessed with a single mission for over 3 weeks and still scrapped it cus it wouldnt work on MP :)

[galzohar 31]

Simple missions aren't necessarily simple to make, I mean all I wanted is randomly placed objective with attacking and defending team spawning in appropriate distances, but I can't even get variables to work.

I agree, though, overly-complicated missions are also overly-complicated to design (read: design, that is, before you even start making them in the editor), and that usually ends up with the mission not being fun or ends up with the best way to win the mission being much different than intended, in a bad way.

How have you been enjoying high command? It had been giving me nothing but trouble :( Even a direct high command subordinate seems to mess things up way too often.

[d3nn16 3]

It took me 2 years before I could edit the mission I dreamed of playing since OFP : http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=61954.

And here is the result : http://zdrob.neuf.fr/maps/ch120z_battlefields_t2c.chernarus.zip

Some time before ArmA 1 came out I had already edited a very simple C&H map (without respawn) in OFP. Nobody liked it because it didn't have respawn.

After ArmA 1 came out I started learning to script with CTF maps. Took me around 1 year to master the language. And now I finished the mission in a total of roughly 1 month.

Now I started converting the ctf template (I learned scripting language with it) and will make a DM template too.

Edited July 29, 2009 by d3nn16

[Impavido 0]

Two and a half weeks....probably 100+ hours total at this point.

[xeno 230]

Depends on the mission.

For example, I made co50 The Longest Day and co50 Air Cav A2 both in one day/a few hours, with minor fixes after the first release.

With Domination I've started about two years ago, but that's another kind of project.

Specially for MP mission making everything that counts is experience. I don't waste much time anymore with testing nor do I waste much time with locality issues or JIP or the new shiny tasks system ;)

Xeno

[galzohar 31]

Depends on the mission.

I don't waste much time anymore with testing nor do I waste much time with locality issues or JIP or the new shiny tasks system ;)

That pretty much sums 99.9% of the time I spend trying to make missions. That is, if you class proper variable usage as locality issues (which it kinda is).

[eddyaod 10]

Simple missions aren't necessarily simple to make, I mean all I wanted is randomly placed objective with attacking and defending team spawning in appropriate distances, but I can't even get variables to work.

I agree, though, overly-complicated missions are also overly-complicated to design (read: design, that is, before you even start making them in the editor), and that usually ends up with the mission not being fun or ends up with the best way to win the mission being much different than intended, in a bad way.

galzohar, I'm currently working on something a little similar. It's my first attempt at scripting for arma. I've put in at least around 150 hours in the last three weeks (recently finished university, no life commitments FTW :D ), hasn't even got any objectives yet (just started working on an "objectivesManager.sqf").

Locality issues are the most tricky thing and every day I think I've finally got it sussed only to spend a few hours tracing a bug to discover another "feature" of locality. Anyway, I'm pleased with the progress I'm making just in terms of knowledge, despite not having much of a mission to show.

As I get better at the coding I can actually put more effort into the gameplay design, but as you said, a lot of the ideas I have end up being unbalanced or boring. But hopefully I'll get some basic framework out into the community in the next couple of weeks and then get some user feedback and suggestions.

[Rancmeat 10]

I'm new to Arma and am still blown away by its scope.

To me Arma is a battle editor that happens to come with a game as its player. I've spent many more hours in the editor than the game, and that's saying a lot.

My pet project hasn't been so much a mission as a living environment for one to take place. Using this airbase as inspiration, I'm building an base that can by used as the setting for attacks, or staging attacks. My idea of a perfect mission is one where the player can insert himself into many roles from private to commander, and have the whole thing make sense. The mission should have a story to tell, and the story should hold up. As a result I'm getting bogged down in details I think.

The hard part is documentation. It's really horrible. It's more geared towards those who already know what they are doing and just need the new info. I think I'm over that hump though, and scripting is starting to make sense.

[galzohar 31]

The problem with creating a realistic large-scale mission where you can jump in on any role, is that the AI simply wouldn't be able to perform every role naturally, so he'll need to get help from scripts, but that also means that he can't take commands from you and you replacing him can really mess things up.

Even trying to make a regiment with no actual mission (just units with proper structure) failed misrably unless you have every platoon leader be a human player, which would result in minimum of 10 human players per side and even that is only if you're willing to accept the flaws of the high command system - if not you'd need 4 times as many players (4 IFVs or tanks per platoon). That's not even counting company commanders or the regiment's commander, nor any kind of attachments/support (such as light AT vehicles, artillery, recon). And that's only 1 side. If you do plan such a mission to only be playable by a large amount of human players then I suppose it's fine, but if you want something that's also playable with a few players per side then this is not going to work. AI not being able to be a high commander and not even performing well at all as a high command subordinate made me scrap this idea.

[d3nn16 3]

Even trying to make a regiment

Why do people (in general beginners) want to put such a big structure in a tiny mission and the game engine can't hold so many players/AI anyway (or it can but goodbye performance) ? (I'm not saying that that's what you are trying to do galzohar)

The best IMO would be to make multiple (MP) missions that would follow a story involving small parts of an army where only a few of the soldiers (a reasonable number that the game can handle properly) would take part in the small missions each time.

Or another idea (I don't know exactly how MP campaign works), you have one single mission similar to Domination but you have 2 "player controlled" sides (or not). And you script the missions of each side so they match : for instance west company charlie attacks hill position in a confined area held by east company kilo, or depending on how many soldiers are present on each side you change the objectives accordingly. First objective of east players will be to position themselves in the area they have to defend. Then you trigger west objective they have to move in the area they have to attack. What I mean is that you control the flow of the operations on each side by script.

Continuing with the example : when west players die attacking hill position they respawn at base leaving the rest of the team fight until a certain condition is met (only 3 soldiers left -> mission cancelled, or player commanding the operation cancles mission for example). Or another possibility they respawn in a reinforcements squad, once enough of them are inside it, maybe add some AI to get a full squad, you set them an objective to help the attacking company etc.

And so the mission could be a persistent one where west and east fronts advance and withdraw as more and more operations are going on, one at a time. Each campaign would be unique going on forever (saving capability for MP missions).

Would be a cool scenario what do all you think ? If anyone is interested in this mission idea I'm willing to help with scripts, and others could help with scenario or ideas.

[galzohar 31]

The regiment idea wasn't my main effort, was just trying to see if the game is even structured to handle such a large force of mostly AI, and it's most certainly not, and that's even before you bring CPU limitations into line. If the game could handle the structure and CPU issues, though, making the actual mission would've been simple. People keep saying this should be used as the awesome war simulator that it can be - but the fact is it can't be a war simulator. A small combat simulator is more within the scopes here, though again with just a bit more effort put into game design and better efficiency of CPU usage (or future better CPUs) this game could work great with huge missions. But not at its current state.

Then again the kind of mission(s) you're describing is WAY more complicated. Not in player count, sure, but in tweaking and balancing and coming up with ideas they would be an insane amount of work, and still won't be guaranteed to be playable, and all those issues come up before you even stepped into the editor.

[Alliexx 10]

hi all,

Its not that strange, it can take a very long time to create a mission, but.....

i once made 10 missions in 3 hours, of these 10, 3 of them we played over and over again, they just were perfect.

So what i really want to say is, that a GOOD mission is NOT automatically take a shhht long time, sometimes u will be lucky.

In OFP and ARMA1 we had templates of seize missions and hostage missions, ( i havent been looking into arma 2 that much yet.) Rippp them open and learn and use parts of that, i'm not saying steal somebody else his stuff, but the templates are there to educate you.

Same for briefings, scripts and editor placed object can be used over and over. And then slowly, you develop your own style, scripts and way of working.

Editing in Arma/OFP takes time to learn, and trust me it is addictive as helll, you want to know everything of this game and very soon you will discover you need your own buildings, textures and islands :)

Later,

Alphons

The editor manual that tells you the basics would be this one, its from OFP but it still learns you the basics

http://kronzky.info/docs/index.htm

Edited July 29, 2009 by Alliexx
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[nullsystems 0]

Generally I see "mission creating" and "mission editing" as two seperate entities.

Creating is very easy, but only available to you once you have sucessfully completed one mission with non-buggy, working scripts.

Currently my Pathway mission has taken around a month. Probably several hours a week.

But thats resolving tiny issues, fixing bugs, changing units around etc.

However now all the scripting works I can reuse the template and quickly develop missions with a nice copy n paste feature ;)

[mr_centipede 31]

I have been working on my mission for about a month, some accident later I lost it and had to restart from scratch. Very frustrating. Next time, I need to remember to backup my works...

Wonder if system restore would restore deleted files?

[Apocal 10]

All my deleted stuff goes into the Recycle Bin first. Saved me much frustration and anguish, that simple bin.

[Lokai 10]

I've been working on a beach one a long time, which was fun and difficult to make but not horribly fun to play and a little hard on peoples FPS. SO I think ill give up on it and make a better one.

[Snakelet 10]

I've spent about 12-15 hours on a multiplayer mission. But due to loss of internet for past few weeks I've been learning scripting and making some cool custom things for adding into my mission once I can get back online to test some more.

On the other hand, I have spent past 15 months or so working on a COD4 multiplayer mod, Obscurity. Putting in a lot of time and effort definately pays off in the long run.

So I say take your time, and always aim to make it the best you possibly can :)