Out of ideas

[Nikoladis 12]

Hi, I used to do some mission editing, when first A2 first came out, but then stopped.

I would like to start again and make one or more SP missions. But I have no ideas on what to make.

Any of you got some ideas?

[Rustydog 10]

same boat here , started working on missions and then got bored halfway through

[dondaddah 10]

"Hunting the Taliban"

Anything with Mid East fighting with

Special Forces etc.

Helmand Valley

aiaktalik

isladuala

queshkibrul

razoreniya

Avgani

Afghani Village

Ranzani

Razoreniya

Sakakah Al Jawf

preferably SP, but MP with AI enabled is OK too

[katipo66 94]

Ok, if i could script a mission then i would want to make an assassination type mission... this mission would happen in time of war... so random fighting going on etc.. ACM? DAC?

player as Opfor/Ins... for a change

The primary target is on the move with guards anywhere on the map, they will move from place to place and stop for what ever amount of time and then move again, if you make an attempt and fail then these guards will attempt to hunt you down while primary attempts to escape

I picture this on a nice big map with random insertion, you would have a maybe 5 or 6 informants spread evenly around the map that you need to get too, once you have contacted any one of these informants you will get intel on your map on where primary target is and expected next destination etc... just like ambush in secops :)

Now once you get intel you could be anywhere on the map so you need to decide whether you can reach the objective in time, or guess where the next destination will be or make it to another informant etc.

Probably these informants will have vehicle and weapon caches to help out.

It would be nice if you could heal yourself and recruit friendlies... not overly realistic but fun maybe?

Edited June 2, 2010 by Katipo66

[icebreakr 3159]

I would recommend you to get inspiration from real combat books and also movies, maybe even MOUT training scenarios that are popular is US.

I have around 500 pages of material (non digital mostly) ;)

Your imagination is only limitation ;) Currently I'm making a coop scenario where you're having a bachelor party at a cottage and two of the guys must go to a nearby town to go look for a striptease girl that is running late... you have no weapons at start, except two of players are copy with a shotgun and a pistol in a police car... ;)

[Jazzadazza 10]

"Hunting the Taliban"

Anything with Mid East fighting with

Special Forces etc.

Helmand Valley

aiaktalik

isladuala

queshkibrul

razoreniya

Avgani

Afghani Village

Ranzani

Razoreniya

Sakakah Al Jawf

preferably SP, but MP with AI enabled is OK too

Is this a request?? Because if it is ill see what i can wip up.

[VanhA-ICON 11]

Your imagination is only limitation ;) Currently I'm making a coop scenario where you're having a bachelor party at a cottage and two of the guys must go to a nearby town to go look for a striptease girl that is running late... you have no weapons at start, except two of players are copy with a shotgun and a pistol in a police car... ;)

Hehe, reminds me of an MP mission I made for our server after attending to one of our members wedding in Poland.

The mission involved the bride being captured and players as wedding crashers had to convince local arms dealer to give them guns to go out to get her back...

Possibilities are endless.. usually just seeing a map location might give an idea for a mission.

Go take a stroll in a map and see what happens.

:cool:

[santafee 10]

Ah, you must be the guy which requested from my hunting the taliban vid on youtube?;)

To answer, sorry im also one of those *gettinhalftroughtheeditingbored+startingnewallthetimeguys".

But im pretty sure youl see many mid-east missions after 30june;-) and the best is you wount need any addons

"Hunting the Taliban"

Anything with Mid East fighting with

Special Forces etc.

Helmand Valley

aiaktalik

isladuala

queshkibrul

razoreniya

Avgani

Afghani Village

Ranzani

Razoreniya

Sakakah Al Jawf

preferably SP, but MP with AI enabled is OK too

[slay0rwr4th 10]

I've been working on a mission for Utes, basically, despite being horribly simple, you're to infiltrate Utes under the impression things have gone to hell, but it's much worse than first thought, and upon insertion will see guerilla's and insurgents fighting it out, from there I think I'll need to learn alot more scripting to have events trigger when you reach things, but as for ideas, I'm kind of just.. building a sizeable force in a town/area then validating it's reason for existence, then adding a 3rd party in to make things a little more interesting (depending on scenario).

I've developed a bit of an intro sequence, though I hit a wall when turning the draw distance up; all of a sudden the helicopter and a nearby enemy tank could see each other, and responded violently, or, if I ordered the helicopter not to fire on it till a further waypoint it'd take evasive action to try and stay out of the way of fire... (again, extremely basic knowledge of scripting here)

I'll post a video of the intro sequence so far in a minute, if you guys are interested I'd sure like some help/input, hell even some advice, maybe it'll give you guys some inspiration?

[wokstation 0]

I did make a mission, my first... posted it here and everything. It was either so bad that no-one wanted to the one to break it to me, or it was merely "ok" - not a single reply. Simple little half-hour linear mission... blow up a patrol, hit-and-run attack an airfield and get out.

One thing I did think of wasn't so much ideas for missions, but an idea for setting up enemy defences in your own SP missions. Get someone else to do it. Sure, it's all well-and-good plopping a platoon or defending some castle ruins in the way that you would do it, but what if you gave someone a list of available units and got them to set up their own defences on the location before sending you the mission file...?

[Citizen Society RPG 11]

I have said it before, and will say it again. If you want to go for making a SP mission, then make a great mission based off of the movie "Behind Enemy Lines". You will need to do a bit of scripting to make it realistic, but it would be worth a shot!

-Alec

[slay0rwr4th 10]

Well, so much for making a video, it's nearly done, I'll upload soon, though the fps is horrendous haha.

[THEBLITZ6794 10]

SP mission ideas

a company of us soldiers is scattered throughout a forest and surrounded. u play as a corpral commanding a small fire team. u gotta do a bunch of tasks and stuff like link up with stragglers, fight off patrols, and escape

play as a private in a huge battle like a US company with tank support is attacking a russian 1 with tank support

tanks! tanks! tanks! all in 1 huge battle

dday. us soldiers thinly dug into beach, russian hordes coming. was working on 1 myself but never got it finished.

[Wastelander 10]

I would recommend you to get inspiration from real combat books and also movies, maybe even MOUT training scenarios that are popular is US.

I have around 500 pages of material (non digital mostly) ;)

Your imagination is only limitation ;) Currently I'm making a coop scenario where you're having a bachelor party at a cottage and two of the guys must go to a nearby town to go look for a striptease girl that is running late... you have no weapons at start, except two of players are copy with a shotgun and a pistol in a police car... ;)

Something like 'ZULU' :-)

[rejenorst 18]

Its pretty easy to run out of steam, one of the major problems is maintaining that movie like feel and atmosphere over the monotony while at the same time suspending the feeling of disbelief.

The AI is great but at times it has its short falls when you demand it should behave in a certain way. I am working on ten missions and have been working on them for over half a year now hehe... Takes ages for me to get my missions to play out at least a fraction of the way I intended them to.

Anyway a concept I had playing around in my mind which I may attempt after i finish my missions is a mercenary stle/type mission(s). Your welcome to grab the idea and run with it. I think sometime in the future I'd like to collaborate with other mission makers.

[Wolfrug 0]

Collaboration might indeed be the ticket sometimes, but it's of course hard to find time/space to do so normally. I remember working on the never-actually-seen OFPEC campaign back in OFP times (actually on more than one iteration of it), and I would for instance be given a mission and asked to add certain scripts/scripted situations to it (all the assets, bases and so forth already in place) - I would then do that, and send it on. I think with a small group of mission makers, SP mission-making could be made a lot easier. For instance:

- I'm good with scripts, and wrangling the AI into doing stuff it usually doesn't do, as well as how to use triggers, waypoints and so forth to good effect.

- It takes literally forever for me to build set pieces, and although it's fun, it really takes up too much time (and is sometimes done for no reason): bases, checkpoints, villages; you name it. For-ev-er.

- I -know- how to script cutscenes, but I hate doing it, once again because it takes forever for many different reasons: have to find the appropriate play/switchmoves, have to mess around with camera angles, have to mess around with AI, have to write the whole damned camera script etc etc. I usually prefer to fudge it by keeping cutscenes to just intro/outro, and if in-game, to short fly-bys or static shots of people talking. :(

- I'm prone to tinkering, meaning stuff doesn't get finished because I'm constantly adding new stuff: especially if I start going into the things I'm not so good at (namely camera scripting and set-piece building). A proper plan and set-up might make that a lot better.

- Can't do voice acting (not native speaker), although I can do all the description.ext stuff. Usually haven't the energy to find voice actors, although I know it'd basically make the mission 200% better just through that.

So, the short of the long is, if people would share some of this stuff between them, I'm pretty sure missions could be created a lot quicker and more efficiently and, first and foremost, come out looking shinier and better than ever on the other side. Creating a mission is, to go back to the OP, actually a lot more than just having an idea. It's a whole concept-design-execution process, and it can indeed be very, very daunting for one person alone.

This might have been a tiny off-topic excursion. Sorry!

Regards,

Wolfrug

[slay0rwr4th 10]

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Here's the intro sequence, thanks to

scripting tutorials at youtube, essentially some panning shots of the approach to the island, a helicopter giving you a hand then buggering off, and a small preview of your first obj, I would have loved to crank the graphics to max and recorded it at 1440x900 (my max screen size) but it's just not possible on this box at the moment, I do want to re-record the section zooming on a mass grave with the graphics at highest setting, and maybe the view distance right down to compensate... thing is, when you change the view distance, the AI act differently (don't know enough about scripting etc yet) it took me long enough to make the helicopter act how I wanted with view distance full, it would always start maneuvering, I finally added a cutscene so you'd get a long distance shot of it in action, but miss out on the hit on it's target, A fair trade, considering what happens in this one (view distance around 3000)

I'll upload a bit of mission (playing) footage soon, I tried it out last night (called it Mission Test #1) multiplayer to see if anything bad would happen and had a (Russian I think?) player join who seemed to enjoy it (we got our asses kicked though haha)

[maturin 12]

How about some chopper missions? Search and rescue, supply drops, recon, dropping snipers on rooftops. Force the player to stay low and fast by filling the area with enemies, and script-enabling Shilkas to shoot if a certain altitude is reached. Or have the AI as a pilot and the player manning a Blackhawk's M240.

Or have a huge pitched battle where the player has to move around the battlefield without getting shot in order to call in artillery fire, and mark medevac with M203 smoke grenades.

Or a coop mission where a few players stand on Chernogorsk or Berezino (or better yet that city in Namalsk) rooftops to hold off a huge enemy force as long as they can.

Red Army style fighting: the players piles out of a BMP (HQ) with his squad and assaults enemy fortifications a hundred meters away.

Play as a resistance driver evacuating civilians from a warzone. Drive your truck through enemy lines by dodging patrols and sticking to backroads.

The enemy is attacking your position by airlifting in dozens of squads using choppers. You have no AA but plenty of RPGs, so try to hit them as they land.

A siege of a city. Make use of high command and team switching to pick apart and wear down a heavily defended urban area. Spot targets for mortar fire, and use ACE crew-served weapons to knock out armor and suppress infantry. Then order the final attack to mop up.

Large firefights at night where you can only shoot back at the muzzle flashes. Or make use of flares and artillery illumination to light up an enemy squad and wipe them out from darkness. Better yet, used suppressed weapons (maybe scripting away the useless subsonic ammo) so you have no muzzle flashes.

And for god's sake don't make us play as the stupid Americans for the umpteenth time. I'd rather play as a civilian. Like a cop caught in a warzone trying to get his neighbors to safety through mined roads and deadly crossfire, with both sides taking occasional potshots at his car.

Make the player the member of a squad but not its leader whenever possible. Most SP missions put you in that stressful position, where AI incompetency can break immersion and game flow, or make you feel a responsibility to keep them all alive. But don't let your AI leader attack the enemy head on, make it so the player doesn't have them all die around him. Unless that's warranted.

Ambushes, ambushes, ambushes. It's thrilling to order an entire treeline to open up simultaneously on an enemy column. I have wiped out fifty CDF with only sixteen NAPA fighters, and I did not personally fire a shot.

Edited June 3, 2010 by maturin

[slay0rwr4th 10]

Rejenorst, Wolfrug and maturin all have great ideas!

[maturin 12]

Hold on, I keep having new ones. A chopper with vital intelligence is shot down over a forested area, but the pilots survive and make off with the documents. Using several squads, try and head them off and kill them, but watch out for the hostile militia roaming the forest.

I've also tried and failed to cover a map in various military targets such as convoys, infantry columns, camps and supply dumps, then making the player a guerrilla and setting them loose to cause as much havoc as possible. You could make them scavenge for weapons or give them a lot of resources to start out with. The important part would be a script that makes the other side hunt them with helicopters and recon teams, etc.

Edit: Really, any script that gives away the player's position every few minutes would make for some great pursuit gameplay.

Edited June 4, 2010 by maturin

[slay0rwr4th 10]

Hold on, I keep having new ones. A chopper with vital intelligence is shot down over a forested area, but the pilots survive and make off with the documents. Using several squads, try and head them off and kill them, but watch out for the hostile militia roaming the forest.

I've also tried and failed to cover a map in various military targets such as convoys, infantry columns, camps and supply dumps, then making the player a guerrilla and setting them loose to cause as much havoc as possible. You could make them scavenge for weapons or give them a lot of resources to start out with. The important part would be a script that makes the other side hunt them with helicopters and recon teams, etc.

Shame there weren't tunnel systems in the forests.... :)

[B17gunner98th 10]

I started one where I did a P.O.W type of thing. What I did was I set the player and his squad to Opfor and tied them to a blufor group so they were considered Blufor. Then I set them captive. In the prisoner camp I set it so the prisoners were set to captive but as soon as the leave the prison area they are non captive and able to be shot on sight. It was the same way for the disguised "Blufor" unit. It was supposed to involve a chase with enemies following you with vehicles and choppers and such but I ran into to much to do.

[slay0rwr4th 10]

what about building levels off what you know, so for instance, a simple level that shows off the whole briefing.sqf including as many different ways to complete a "task" as one can think of, there's so many different ways things can be executed that you could make an awesome mission, AND tutorial for how to build it at the same time.

[jangles 10]

how about creating new specops missions? , I think the specops scenarios are great but there are only a handful of missions that exist .

Would be great to have more of them, like hunting snipers, vehicle escorts, assasinations etc.

[maturin 12]

You mean secops?

Another possibility would be converting them to work with other factions, or with air units.