LFA

Hi Strango, a few years ago we tried a simplified version of this with four players (one crashed pilot, three enemy rangers). Pilot had to try and stay alive for x minutes, e.g. 15 min. Enemy rangers started at a nearby base, and could choose from a M2 jeep or a UH-60 chopper. As a twist, the crashed pilot had to try and prevent the enemy from accessing secret equipment from the crashed chopper (i.e. no running away into the hills). A broad valley with plenty of rocks and bushes was chosen for the (slightly random) crash site to help funnel the action. Good points: - a very enjoyable tense mission type. - hunting for the crashed pilot while in a UH-60 with the door gunner shooting up every bush in sight was pretty fun - so was being the crashed pilot wetting yourself as the chopper flew overhead trying to hunt you down - or the unseen sniper taking up position on the ridge... - pilot having inferior weapon, limited ammo, no binos, etc. Bad points: - pilot shooting down the enemy chopper - pilot having to stay too close to the crashed chopper (I like your idea much better). So best of luck with your mission design - I would love to play it when you get it working.

I'm not familiar with Stargate, but this sounds like a great MOD, with a totally new style of CTI. The chance to add an RPG element with the gate location/access codes/different worlds is more than a little mind-blowing. I guess the important thing is to get the basics working solidly like you've said. Looking forward to playing it when it's up and running!

John C., when you move a firebase team, choose the "FB Alpha" or "FB Bravo" command once they are in place, and the position of the firebase will be shifted to the new location. You can check this by then selecting the firebase for mortar support.

Great mission, Bagel! Â Good to see a happy confluence of ideas from all involved. Â I suffered a severe fps hit the first time after I called in the supply train. Â Got another fps hit the second time calling in the pink team. Â Played a third game (without calling in either) that ran fine. Also, I extracted the tourofduty...folder into the Missions folder and ran it under single missions. Â It comes up as "Command Engine 2, Template" and runs ok. Few quick questions: 1. Â How long before units are replenished at the Workshop and Barracks? 2. Â If a VC cadre is reduced, eg. only 1 soldier, will it still continue to act as a threat? Â In other words, do you have to kill every member of a cadre? 3. Â Did the issue of saving games get resolved? Â Should I use the CE2 options-menu save or the OFP "Esc" save? PS: For people testing this out, as an extra treat, try lining up some pumpin' Hendrix or Doors tracks to play in the background

Wow, finally got together a 10-player LAN of this Mod over the weekend and what a blast it was! It took 3.5 hours to complete but the number of mini-missions during that time was staggering. From capturing the towns off the Resistance initially, to building defensive positions and mining likely approaches, to sending out recon elements to locate each other's "hidden" base, to special ops missions by clandestine insertion methods, to the final struggle and ultimate victory - this was OFP on the grand-scale we always knew it capable of! We were running the public server version on a solid machine (1.6 GHz, 384 Mb RAM) but nothing special, and it was able to run fine with 10 players and no AI squads. I had previously tested this Mod extensively with 3 human players (total) and the rest AI, and found the server actually performed worse. I guess this makes sense if the server has to perform extra calculations for scripts to command each AI squad. So if you don't need those extra squads, turn them off. Happy to report that no obvious bugs were found and many of the old bugs were clearly fixed (eg. repair truck). There did seem to be a problem with losing some control of your squad over time, eg. they would not return to formation, instead they would "follow group". Probably overloaded-server related, and nothing to do with the Mod tho. Once again, tremendous work Mike!

Hi mfcti, I've had three or four fun games playing your mission with two other players. With all the units, we've had to use a spare computer as a dedicated server, though it slows down substantially as the game progresses. I think this lag leads to a lot of the trouble we have controlling the AI squads after playing for a couple of hours. Would this make sense? They just seem to ignore commands after a while. I read earlier you have fixed the repair truck, and I can confirm I was unable to get the "Repair truck options" with the repair truck in the current patch as either a commander or a squad leader (though I swear I saw it once as commander I couldn't repeat it). The ability to respawn your squad leader as a remaining member of its squad would be welcome. Too many times I have helplessly watched a squad attack a town with the squad leader blindly leading round a corner into waiting resistance troops. Bang, down goes the squad leader, then it respawns all the way back at base and you have to spend the next ten minutes relinking up the leader with what's left of his squad. I really enjoy playing as commander, but tried being squad leader yesterday and found that enjoyable as well. When you're commander, you just send hapless squads off to cap a town with little afterthought , but when you are squad leader, every town is an tense battle. All the changes you reported in your upcoming patch sound great, looking forward to it!

Hi mfcti, I've had three or four fun games playing your mission with two other players. With all the units, we've had to use a spare computer as a dedicated server, though it slows down substantially as the game progresses. I think this lag leads to a lot of the trouble we have controlling the AI squads after playing for a couple of hours. Would this make sense? They just seem to ignore commands after a while. I read earlier you have fixed the repair truck, and I can confirm I was unable to get the "Repair truck options" with the repair truck in the current patch as either a commander or a squad leader (though I swear I saw it once as commander I couldn't repeat it). The ability to respawn your squad leader as a remaining member of its squad would be welcome. Too many times I have helplessly watched a squad attack a town with the squad leader blindly leading round a corner into waiting resistance troops. Bang, down goes the squad leader, then it respawns all the way back at base and you have to spend the next ten minutes relinking up the leader with what's left of his squad. I really enjoy playing as commander, but tried being squad leader yesterday and found that enjoyable as well. When you're commander, you just send hapless squads off to cap a town with little afterthought , but when you are squad leader, every town is an tense battle. All the changes you reported in your upcoming patch sound great, looking forward to it!

mfcti - thx for a great mod - I think it will revolutionise how most people play this game. The plans to add fuel trucks and ambulances sound like a good idea. Â Miners are potentially trouble though, as the AI won't know to look for them, and I don't think there is any way for AI to remove them. One thing I have found helpful as a commander is to send an AI soldier to each town I have captured. Â Then I tell him to take cover, engage at will, go prone and scan horizon. Â That way I can free up squads for other operations while still earning income, plus it acts as an early warning system when any enemy units approach. Â Also, if as commander you place one of your AI soldiers in a truck driven by one of your squads, you need to tell the squad to diembark vehicles before your soldier will disembark too. Â Then you can tell the transporting squad to command nearby vehicles again (need to click this more than once if there are multiple trucks). Â This isn't necessary when one squad transports another squad, just with your AI soldiers. An addition I would love to see is the ability to send a squad to a waypoint, and then say defend current position. Â This way, you could have squads defend road junctions or hillsides without having to build a control centre at that position first. All in all, thanks again for reinvigorating OFP MP madness!

mfcti - thx for a great mod - I think it will revolutionise how most people play this game. The plans to add fuel trucks and ambulances sound like a good idea. Â Miners are potentially trouble though, as the AI won't know to look for them, and I don't think there is any way for AI to remove them. One thing I have found helpful as a commander is to send an AI soldier to each town I have captured. Â Then I tell him to take cover, engage at will, go prone and scan horizon. Â That way I can free up squads for other operations while still earning income, plus it acts as an early warning system when any enemy units approach. Â Also, if as commander you place one of your AI soldiers in a truck driven by one of your squads, you need to tell the squad to diembark vehicles before your soldier will disembark too. Â Then you can tell the transporting squad to command nearby vehicles again (need to click this more than once if there are multiple trucks). Â This isn't necessary when one squad transports another squad, just with your AI soldiers. An addition I would love to see is the ability to send a squad to a waypoint, and then say defend current position. Â This way, you could have squads defend road junctions or hillsides without having to build a control centre at that position first. All in all, thanks again for reinvigorating OFP MP madness!

If you're reading this, chances are that like myself, you are fairly passionate about OFP. You know how good a game it can be, single player and multiplayer - but tell me, how many have actually managed to get a decent LAN group of more than four people to play the damn thing?! Might be off-topic here, but was just wondering if others had similar experiences trying to organise a larger OFP LAN session? Would an online registry that contained a player's contact email address and town be supported/helpful in setting up such sessions? LFA

Bit of a weird one... I am connecting to 1.75 (Sockets) MP games through my housemate's computer to a cable modem, hence we both have the same IP (confirmed by http://checkip.dyndns.org). Both of us are running XP on recently-formatted systems with OFP recently reinstalled with no firewalls yet, and we use Internet Connection Sharing. The weird part is that either of us can join by ourselves fine, but if both of us join at the same time: (a) we both see our username and non-zero ping in the pool, but not the other person, and only one of us can actually select a role and use chat (usually the person who joined second). The other person is automatically dropped from the server after a couple of minutes. (b) if it is really weird, I get my username replaced by my housemate's (or someone else who just happened to be joining the server at the same time) even though I don't have his username setup on my computer, but when I use chat I see my original username and everyone else sees the replaced username! © if the second person attempts to join a couple of minutes after the first instead, then the second person gets dropped straight away with a connection failed error. This seems to be more of a problem since 1.75, though it happened in 1.46 as well. Also, if a friend hosts a remote game, we can both join no worries - perhaps it is only a problem joining dedicated servers?. I have tried this on ADSL, and it is also not a problem as everyone has different IPs on the same network if you use something like PPP over Ethernet. Any advice appreciated, LFA

Thanks for the confirmation Suma. I would have thought this to be the case as many people would have the set-up described above. Camper, I looked up what forwarding ports meant, and what I saw scared the pants off me! If I ditch ICS like Shortbus suggests, would another program do the forwarding for me?

OK, maybe I should break the problem up: Is it possible for two people with the same IP to join a MP game on a dedicated server?

Guess the title is a bit misleading...I meant "selling" in a popularity sense. Spitfire, I think you're right about the level of skill needed to play OFP, while nowhere near as complicated as a flight sim, is a limiting factor in getting more people to play it. That's why I was suggesting a central registry - all you need to find is one other person in your town that enjoys playing OFP already, and chances are they will know a few friends that play as well. Another option is to organise a session at a local gaming cafe, but try getting the morons there to look up from their game of CS for half a second. If anybody is interested in a registry, let me know, and I'll post back here when it's up?

Had a couple of sessions on BF1942 recently and it was a whole lot of fun. The "ticket" system combined with Conquest mode make for a very interesting game dynamic that has not previously been done. Yeah, aspects of it are cartoony and I had the same frustration with the damn sniper rifle like everyone else, but there is no denying it is fun. Probably the best thing is that you can join a game in progress, play for half an hour, have a good time, then leave. Now, OFP is by far my favourite game ever. I lapped up the first two campaigns, and ever since getting Resistance have been trying to play MP online. With a couple of friends on the same server using Teamspeak it is as good as it gets. What tends to ruin the experience is: (a) waiting for current game to end before joining. Have to agree with a previous poster who suggested TDM and CTF should be able to have join in progress. (b) reliance on Admin to kick players who have lost connection for one reason or another, or who have very high pings (>1000 ms). Or just reliance on Admins altogether. How many times have you guys had the ole "everyone type in #vote Admin [23]_jasper!@!" routine go on for 5 minutes or more? Maybe a GUI-style voting system for maps like BIS improved the Choose Side/Role selection already. © maps that are just too far between objectives with too few players. Guess the individual servers and admins need to address that one at the time. (d) CS-style gamers playing for themselves and not the team. I guess BF1942 should take care of this one :) Maybe some of the bigger servers could arrange for a "lock-in" for a number of hours - with people who join it committed to playing for the arranged length of time. That way the mindset of the players would be appropriate and most of the joining issues would be ...well, avoided.