frederf

I'm mostly going to talk about JIP for coop. 90% of players can't even play versus bots well enough, and of those 10% of decent players only a few are good enough to play versus human behings. Besides a 5 v 5 TDM sucks while a 10 man coop is a blast. The biggest problem with most games today is the players themselves. Anyway, JIP for coop should be handled very carefully. A proper coop has one top orchestrating commander that is trying his very best to keep everyone on mission and alive. Throwing a new player straight into the fray without the leader's influence is a quick way to spoil a mission. The best way to avoid headache is to have human intervention from the leader or admin to direct this new player. Designated reinforcement points coded by the mission with ammo nearby could be one destination, the new player unable to move beyond the area until someone releases him, he meets up with the CO, more joiners fill out a squad, ect. The most obvious way is for an AI to be taken over but that isn't always the best or possible. Ideally JIP players should join the existing force in a plausible manner in keeping with design of the mission and map. Maybe the designer wants the JIP to come in a blackhawk next to the squad, hop out and join the only squad in fighting. Maybe the designer wants the JIP to be some sneaky resistence fighter that pops up in an abandoned farm near the objective. The most borning and least realistic solution is a basic soldier poping into existence at some static spawn zone where the existing forces started 20 min ago. Care should be taken that the JIP is properly briefed and equiped to suit a reinforcement role and situated inside the command structure at the leader's effort (he opens up a menu, clicks what the new guy has, who's with him, where he spawns, ect from a list of possibilities built into the map by the mission maker) without the temptation to immedately go rambo or be clueless. It's entirely possible to group up a few JIPs and make a new squad out of them to help out the existing forces. **radio crackles in** "Sir, HQ is on the horn, we got though." "Bravo six this is Fisher one, we recieved your call and have dispatched a reinforcement squad to your location, callsign Charlie two on freq 215 point 6. Best of luck. Out."

I played BF2 a decent amount. I like that it had potential but that potential was not achieved or was rarely in day to day play. OFP is annoying to play because of the huge hurdle in getting into a game. BF2 you could connect and play any time of day within 5 minutes. OFP is commonly complicated by the addon nightmare, finding the type of mission you want to play, keeping people together long enough to play a mission, ect. I would suggest Forgotten Hope 0.7 which is a mod for Battelfield 1942. They are about a few months from releasing FH2 for BF2. If OFP was on the left, BF2 on the right, FH would be in the middle somewhere.

The only reason they made them "one man" often is they were too complicated for the simple friendly AI to assist on. I did love the sneaky Black Ops missions in OFP was often due to their depth. Navigating by stars, timing with your watch, thinking critically if you wanted to engage a patrol or not, and not to mention all the cool gear you could use.

I got my 3dlens.com 550 in the mail and I do love it. The screen appears much larger and kinda curved. Also I get a sense that I'm not watching pixels but more like a projected image. I think I'm going to make a lense holder for my LCD that's a disused bardboard box. Anyone have any recommends on cleaning the thing? The grooved side is a pain to keep clean.

Every server should have to register their mods they run to a server that keeps track of all registered mods by a unique number and a database of name, size, description, date, author, version,ect. That way you connect to a server and it says "Running mods: 004535, 006740, 019295." And you can go look them up as opposed to chasing down broken links through some god-awful czechslovakian pornad site.

The best feature of the Ofp/VBS/ArmA/Game2 series is SCOPE. The sheer depth and breadth of the simulation. This is what really sets it apart from other games. The fact you can get in a helo in someplace ride for 5 minutes, walk for an hour, then drive for 20 more and get 1/2 across the map.. that's what's so cool. Your standard FPS junkie is going to look at it and assume it's closed and linear like all the regular FPS games with worse graphics.

I very much liked the OFP aiming system. It didn't use the cliche cone-of-uncertainty method of firing, allowed you to look independant of your barrel, ect. I even noticed when you have your gun rested over your shoulder in OFP the barrel vector point is pointed up at the sky. Now Dslyecxi is right that such a system is unrealistic that you'd know exactly what your muzzle was aiming at. My question is is are the spacing of the "view bars" indicative of how close your muzzlepoint is to your view point? The muzzlepoint being invisible, but you can tell how much the viewpoint and aiming point agree based on the separation of the viewbars?