KaRRiLLioN

This is where the F18 Nuke comes in handy =) The M109 Paladin and 2s19 Howitzer are also great for breaking stalemates.

Thanks, but I just hijacked someone else's mission, made some changes, and then made a sequel for it. D.murphy man is the originator of the OFP "Evil Dead" zombie, and Homer Johnston took it along a linear route. Thank them for bringing this alternate OFP universe to life. Right now I'm working on the third chapter, and trying to do a small tutorial for how to work it. The Dogs look pretty cool in it thus far. It's kind of scary seeing a non-humanoid rush at you from out of the darkness. Perfecting the cut scenes is what seems to take the longest time. I'd like it to be more cinematic, whereas most people just want to hop in and blow stuff up. Anyway, I hope to have something soon.

OFP Watch is definitely the way to go. Â Although it just watches one server, it can download and manage all of your addons, especially if the server you play on has the auto-addon server running. There's a link on my webpage: http://www.aggression.org/karr.html

You'd probably get pretty good performance running a 32b OS on the Opterons, maybe even better than the Xeon. I've seen a lot of benchmarks for games, etc. running on the Athlon64's and the Opterons, but I haven't seen many for 32b server OS's running on them yet. That might be the best thing to check out. I purchased a Dell Xeon 3gz, 2MB cache, 1.5GB ram 1ru server for OFP, and that's worked pretty well for the most part. Some missions really eat the CPU cycles, however, so maybe when OFP 2 comes out BIS will consider a 64-bit multi-threaded dedicated server. Then I'll get an 8-way Opteron box. ;)

Hmm, yes my wife and I have had numerous fights about what she considers to be my obsession of playing OFP. Really, though, I probably spend more time scripting than I do playing. On my dedicated server, we all use Teamspeak. There are a lot of regulars and we've gotten to know each other pretty well. My wife calls them my VFF's, Virtual F*cking Friends. OFP already took up a lot of time, but once I finished RTS-1 back in 2001, then the MP missions got considerably longer, so I started staying up later, 2am or so. Luckily I have a good job (I'm the IT director) so I can sort of stroll in whenever. I suppose that I'll have to figure out how to make these RTS games a tad shorter.... My regular email is now constantly full of virus emails because so many ppl have that email address, and obviously many of them don't have a virus scanner. Some of that is from my former mod work with Action Quake 2, Action Half-Life, and Counter-strike. I guess it's time to use a new address since nobody can get thru to me at that one anymore. Also, someone keeps impersonating me on Gamespy Arcade, which I haven't even used for years, but I keep getting these mystery emails from ppl who are wanting in on the RTS-4 beta, which I've never even mentioned. So, OFP has gotten me into a bit of trouble, and of course has affected my daily life quite a bit. I still keep myself on a schedule, and don't start playing until 9pm or so, which is after I've taken my Russian lessons from my wife and played cards with her. That sometimes keeps her from getting ticked that I'm "indisposed" for the rest of the evening.

All units in a players group are local, but when you leave a group in MP, it is no longer local, thus, you need that group's name if you wish to make use of it later. You COULD use the nearestObject command if you want to walk up to any group and take control of it, but that's not what he's after. Also note, that this limits the number of groups you can do this with intentionally. Otherwise, you might have a commander who creates a ton of groups and leaves them all over the place which would lead to a lot of lag in MP. My example is quite specific to what he's trying to do. Yours merely grabs all groups for his side which would be more than he needs. If you're playing with 5 other Players, why would you want to spend the cpu cycles grabbing all of their AI group members as well? That's like throwing all of the hay in one stack and then resorting it, when you already have the specific units you're manipulating in a subset. KISS - just use the single group local to the commander, break it up, give it a Global Var you can use later to grab it again, and presto, you're done. The PublicVar is in case there's some server-side scripts running so it's not entirely necessary, but from the hours of experience I've had with MP scripting, you never know. OFP is funny that way.

Crew is an array, so you can do a count of the array like so: ?Count Crew _helo <= 0 If it's true,then there's no crew in the helo.

Crew _helo (whatever your variable name is) will give you an array with the soldiers in the chopper Driver _helo is the pilot Gunner _helo is the gunner Crew will include the gunner and pilot Crew _helo - Driver _helo - Gunner _helo will give you the crew without the driver and gunner, i.e. those in as cargo

I've thought of that, letting the Commander be the only one who can control it. I haven't looked at UA in depth so I'm not sure how it determines who can control it. I would assume there's some way to plug that in. Even so, I'd make the UA feature pretty expensive.

Thanky!

Yes, but can you say that with some certainty? ;)

Question about this time command--does it work in MP? If so, I'm assuming it's a local occurrence? If so, then what happens if only one client is in slow-mo? I know that the time acceleration in SP is based on this command by pressing the +/-, and that doesn't work in MP. I didn't know if the scripted version works in MP.

I think I see what you want to do. OK, first of all you create your original group of 11 AI soldiers for your group. Â You don't need to assign them a name or anything individually, since they are in your group, then you can easily pick them up with a script. Now, in order to make them leave your group and enter another group that you can pick up control of later, do something like this: Your group name is something like W1Group or WGroup1 (I can't remember off the top of my head what I named them) What you need to do is use the group as an array by using the Units command like this: Then your group would look something like so as an array: You would be What you want to have happen is for all the other units in your group to join another group. Â There's a couple of ways to do this. Â You can either leave the group yourself, and then rename the Global Variable name of their group, and reassign your groupname back to WGroup1, or you can drop them all to GrpNull, and then have them join the group of one of the soldiers, and then assign a GlobalVariable name to it. I think it's easier to drop yourself from the group so you don't have to create a looped script for that part. Â So, something like this might work, and remember, this is running on the local client so you can use the Player command for this. Â You can get more specific by using Units WGroup1 as well. OK, so this simply creates a new group using the units in your current group, and leaves you alone in your group. Â Now, let's say that you want to be able to do this up to 4 times, so you can have 4 different groups. Â First of all, if this is only available to commanders (as it should be) then I'd recommend you name the groups something like WGroup1Alpha, WGroup1Bravo, WGroup1Charlie, WGroup1Dog, or you can make it shorter like WG1A, WG1B, etc. Â The East one would of course be EGroup1Alpha, etc. Now things can get complicated from here, and without testing, I'm just going to show you it in a more simple light. Â Also remember, I'm just going from the top of my head, so this stuff probably needs some debugging for sure. Now we've gotten it so you can dump your units into other groups. Â You can refine this even more by using dialogs. Â You can have a dialog that would pull up your group and the other 4 groups in lists. Â Then you could click on a soldier and move him to any of the other groups until you had your lists exactly the way you wanted them. Â If a soldier in a group died, you could train another at the barracks, open the dialog and assign him to the group that needed a person. Â That's a bit too much to go into for this, but there's a lot of possibilites. Â Multiplayer does make things more complicated, but moving to groups should work ok on a local basis. Anyway, to be able to pick up the units in a group and have them rejoin yours would require a slight reversal of the above script, except you'd simply do this: Remember, that you cannot have more than 12 units in your group so you might have to shed current members of your group if the addition of the troops from another group would make you go over that limit. Â I think that in OFP if you tried adding 8 units to your group of 6, then the extra units would either stay in their old group, or just get dropped into GrpNull. Â I'm not sure which. Well, I hope this makes some sort of sense. Â Really it just takes a lot of testing and debugging to make it work properly, and most of that you'll have to do on your own, unfortunately. Â I am intrigued with the dialogs approach to group swapping, so I might mess with something like that for future versions. Â ATM I don't have enough time to add new complicated features. BTW, weren't you on the server last night?

@Bordoy - if you are playing as commander on one team vs. the AI commander on another team, then you won't see the markers for AirT, etc. for the enemy. If you are letting an AI commander build for your team, however, you'll see several markers. Land - land offense squad AirT - Air territory squad AirO - air offense I can't remember the others off the top of my head. I'm not sure why WW2 lags more, but I have noticed in some games that there will be a lot of lag for a while, and then it goes away. I think there might be an addon that has a problem and it causes this lag, but then it goes away when the vehicle is recycled or something. One of the guys who plays on my server regularly is getting permission from the addon authors of the WW2 addons to modify them (mainly tanks) so that they all more accurately represent the true armor values and weapon strengths they should have. Maybe we can find the bug that causes issues. We'll be adding John's new German Artillery and other nice new WW2 addons to RTS soon. @Hellek - I'm thinking of UA, but I'm not sure how it'll be lag-wise. If we get a lot of players controlling assets then it could lag a lot. Also, it kind of takes away from the other battle assets in the game. I would definitely have to make the bases a no-fire zone since otherwise it'd be far too easy to sit back and blast them to hell. More than likely it'd work best as a way to clear out territories for capture, or to defeat a large tank column moving your way.

Nogova is pretty big when you're on foot.

@Silver Falcon - I changed the webpage to show the size of the files. @havocsquad - You earn $25 for each territory every 60 seconds that you hold that territory, which is roughly the same as earning $25x the number you hold. Also, you can scale down the number of AI. You can even play against only the AI commander if you wish. Even on my P4-3gz with Radeon 9800 I get lagged if I play SP with all AI enabled. Your PC is calculating a lot for each AI that exists. Just disable all AI except the top couple of slots on the opposing team. Insofar as the AI in SP goes, it actually IS created to play a bit more by the rules than the AI in the betas were. The main thing to remember about AI is that they're stupid, idiotic, and generally don't know what the hell they're doing. I can script in all sorts of conditions to try and make the AI do things a bit smarter, but it adds more overhead to their processes and when more overhead is there, then the server/host PC can't spend enough time keeping the AI alert, and then you can be surrounded by 50 enemy AI and they won't fire at you. For this reason, I've given the AI some leeway in the rules of the game. If you've ever played C&C, then you know that the AI generally tends to build a bunch of stuff and make a beeline straight for your base in an attempt to bulldoze you to death. I've tried to improve on this somewhat. First of all, the AI commander uses dedicated squads, as I've described earlier. He builds land and air offense squads. The air one doesn't kick in until later in the game, but the land one starts out immediately searching actively for the enemy base, and once it's found it, then the AI commander knows. He also makes territory squads, consisting of a chopper, but these don't start until Basic Air is upgraded. Once done, then they start taking territories quickly. For Defense the AI commander builds several SAM's or MG's depending upon the era, and also builds several Armored AA units, like ADATS, Tonguskas, Wirbelwinds, etc. After Basic air is done, then the AI commander starts to send out Chinooks/Mi17's/Junkers, whatever the big cargo carriers are with paratroopers. After Advanced Air is done then the Jets are sent out to harass. In addition to the AI Commander, each Squad Leader which is left as AI will automatically build their own squad of tanks and begin to take territories and attack any enemies that are also attempting to take territories. Overall, this creates a lot of overhead. The AI is limited by certain random factors, as well as time. When a squad dies, it takes it a long while to rebuild and go out again. Also, when the base units that are used to create a unit are destroyed, then that squad cannot rebuild. If I were to create a mechanism to keep track of money and other factors as well, then it would have to be broken down so that each AI squad leader, and the AI commander would have different accounts, etc. This isn't really feasible without a lot of scripting. I think that the AI is powerful, but stupid now, and a competent player in SP should be able to deal with the AI, so long as they survive the first 30 minutes of the game. There are other issues as well. Sometimes the AI stops responding to commands later in the game. I'm not sure why, but they'll just sort of sit there doing nothing. I have a lot of stuff built into the scripts to stop this behaviour, but it doesn't always work. I guess it's a core OFP issue. Anyway, I might tweak a few things, like the length of time the AI commander waits before researching (right now it's random), but for now I think it seems to work pretty well.

Dang Dinger, that just ruins the entire addon!! ;) Sweet addon...wonder if that would be overkill for RTS? What might be a cool mission with this is each team has some arty's, and their own assets which are somewhat randomly placed. The goal would be to direct your arty's to wipe out the other team's assets before they do the same to yours. I have only one minor quibble: some of the explosions sound kind of like popcorn rather than big booms. Otherwise, this is a very realistic and very well scripted addon! GJ CoC!

From what I've seen, they do fire on the zombies normally. In fact when I first tested in SP mode, and the AI had grenades, I'd usually end up dead from about 50 'nades hitting me as those idiot AI's threw them at everything. The most fun for this comes with playing in MP with just 3-4 people. It is fun with more, but only because you get to watch the others become cannon fodder. I'm tweaking the versions I have now to make the killed players respawn as zombies so they can still have fun chasing their former teammates. :P

@Benu - So the 2s19 is the addon causing the dependencies issues? @Gudulas - I understand about the enemy tech, but remember that the enemy can also repair crashed vehicles from the other team. Several times after an assault on the enemy base with choppers failed, we'd be assaulted by the same choppers because the other team had repaired them. Also, the enemy tech is very expensive, so I doubt that most teams will even research it. Out of all the times we've played it lately, I think it's only been researched once.

There are squads in RTS, but only the commander can use them. The AI squads are the extra AI that you enable before starting the game. If someone drops, then their AI can be used as well. By using command and control on the commander's Mission Status screen, he can control groups, and make indivual soldiers in other squads get into specific vehicles, cap territories, or use the waypoint mode to move them to specific places, i.e. the enemy base. Each player has a soldier cam they can use to watch their own soldiers. The commander can watch any squad leader by using the Squad cam, or he can cycle thru individual soldiers in anyone's squad to watch them. You can zoom in and out, etc. and get a good bird's eye view of the action. This takes the place of a satellite cam that you could use to see everything, so he has to have an AI there to home in on. Insofar as a small counter goes, you canno have a dialog (menu) screen up and still retain control of your character, so there's no way to have a small counter for that stuff. That's why it's all incorporated into mission control where you can see what's building in the tank fac, air fac, or the time to research left. The reason you can't see a timer for what the commander is researching on a global level is because the public vars get kinda messed up in MP and it becomes inacurrate, so I just put it up that a Global Upgrade is in process so you'd know the commander was upgrading. When you build a manned vehicle you get two soldiers with it. Yes, it's pointless to have two on a bike, but normally ppl build one manned bike, then build another unmanned and put the extra man on the other bike. When you build tanks, then the two crew become more important as gunner and driver. You can already have AI refuel if there's a fuel truck nearby. If they're out of gas, then there's not much you can do since they can't get out and push. Most vehicle will not run out of gas, but will be destroyed long before they even use half a tank. I thought of doing tank upgrades, but it starts getting really complicated for the players to keep up with all of that stuff. I know some people build an arty pretty soon if they have $4,000, but more than likely they're going to lose it as well because they're just going out on their own. Basic Air can be researched fairly quickly, and there's a couple of choppers with TOW's on them to take out any pesky Arty's. Arty's are usually best when paired with a Chinook or Mi17 that can cart them and paradrop them deeper into enemy territory. So far it's worked out to be very balanced, so long as the teams are actually playing as a TEAM, not a lot of ppl running around on their own. The radar thing I think I answered further up with the soldier cam. Whew, wrote a book now it seems. =)

All of the addons in use have been tested and in use since beta 5, so I'm not sure how one of them could develop dependency problems unless the author came out with new versions and some of the players have different versions. For that reason it is highly advisable to use the addon packs that I provide and place them into mod folders named something like so: @RTSModern @RTSWW2 @RTSNam that way they can be easily disabled should any conflicts arise. Let me know if that helps.

Skye was perfect for WW2. Â It's not huge so good tank battles happen often. Â The best battles often happen near the long bridge in the north, especially when one team builds near the airport. Most of the time the bases start out pretty close so you'll get some battlefields full of tank husks, and the AI salvagers look like vultures out there. Â Of course they sometimes make the mistake of getting in the way of the battles....:) We played against the AI one night, about 4 of us, and barely pulled out the win. Â The AI typically builds dedicated squads. Â Some for capping and keeping territories, and others for pure offense to chase down our guys who are capping. Â It also builds Junkers with paratroops who are a pain in the rear when they all come Parachuting down in the midst of our base. I'll probably stick a modern RTS on there sometime as well. Â The way that the balance works now, the teams have to really battle to keep territories if they want to have hope of attaining the advanced aircraft. Â We've been having some really good tug-of-wars lately like that. This one time after a big battle some of the AI squad leaders came up in jeeps, repaired some tanks and surprised the hell out of us while we were licking our wounds in our base.

@Benu I'm not sure about the editorupdate102 issue. I don't use any objects from that addon that I'm aware of. The editorupdate102 is that in in one of my other addon packs, the LSR Spec ops? Anyway, you shouldn't have any errors with regard to that, at least we've never seen anything. The most common issues we have are players who are still using the Beta MI-28, or older verisons of the F-18, or old versions of the RTS3Addon. Any older version of the RTS3 Addon will cause issues.

I'll take a look into that. I'm thinking of converting some of my scripts to use CoC Network Svcs to make things like that work better. Since the upgrade stuff is kept in a nested array, it could use the public array to tell exactly which global upgrade is in progress, etc. Since I started the RTS 1.0 thread, please post all questions/comments in that thread from now on. I'm just going to let this thread slowly drift to the bottom of the forum ocean. Thanks!

Heh, yep I made a few AQ2 maps back in the day. Â Highrise 1 and 2, Aggression City, Brickyard Rumble, Vertigo, Docks, and a few others I don't remember off the top of my head. I was also on the Action Half-Life mod team and made a couple of maps, and I had an official map for Counterstrike, de_Railroad. As far as non-addons versions go, yes there will be non-addons versions, but there are some issues to iron out. Â The main problem with the non-addons versions is that some of the buildings that I use have extremely high armor values, and they take on hell of a pounding before blowing up. Â Also, those buildings don't show up as enemy targets. That aside, I have a functioning non-addons version, but I'm just making sure there's no hidden bugs to iron out. I have worked hard to make this version much more easy for other mission-makers to port to other eras/genres as well. Â Going from addon to non-addon is harder than most, however because it means that all of the buildings are reverting to their original OFP state. Man, I just realized that Bill Gates plays RTS! Â I wonder if I can talk him into sending me a year's supply of astroglide....