nyles

well gimbal, i can tell from those vbs1 screenshots that the huey looks pretty finished for me. I doubt there would be much work needed to port it over to standard flashpoint.

nevermind.

hehe, then pack 2-3 new mixed russian units in the same patch with the huey, add some of the long mentioned bugfixes (you should know which ones by now) and release this with either a new patch asap or that resistance addon in summer.

Ammo management keeps bugging me, too. I would really love to see BIS implementing the right or at least close ammo values for all units. This should not only be upping the total bullet count but also consider seperate boxes of ammo like in the case of the bradley with his 300 main gun ammo box and 2 spare ammo boxes stowed in the back, basically making the maingun be a "300/2" in favour of a "900" shot weapon. Another thing is that if you reload a clip-fed assault rifle which still has ammo left in the clip/chamber, you should get the full clip size plus one additional still loaded bullet from the chamber when reloading. So after such an reload you would normally have 31 and not 30 bullets in your weapon. I hope there is a way for BIS to implement this without having to recompile every single unit. In that case its rather unlikely that BIS will do this considering that they would have to ship every unit they changed with the next patch. Maybe there is a way to hack this into the existing .pbo files instead.

/me joins in. PLEEEEEEEEEASE!!!!

hi andy, what do you think about the other suggestions i made like removing some ammo boxes for balance issues; maybe if possible allowing the use of m16 clips; and adding that grip from atop the barrel to blend in the iron sight template? Another thing I noted when playing with some AI SAW gunners was, that they rarely used full automatic fire. Most of the time they fired quick single shots at enemies that were far away. Maybe I'm wrong but I think this weapon is mainly used for suppressive fire and should therefore use way more full automatic instead of more precise single shots. I could live with 5-10 bullets bursts tho, if you don't want to make them shoot full auto all the time. If BIS ever makes an official patch including a SAW they should base their SAW as close as possible to this one. It's simply great. As mentioned above, I really really love that firing sound.

no, i don't. Another thing about targeting: It happens quiet often, when you engage enemy forces and some of your team ignore them. This includes badly crippled but still intact tanks. They simply refuse to fire on such targets. Normally I don't have a problem with this, as both the target and my units ignore each other so no-one fights, but in case of this specific targerts destruction being a mission objective this can be really annoying. Sometimes they fire on the target on a later time  but mostly this won't happen before another 10-20 minutes have pasted. If you are stuck in a non-combat postion like the driver in Heavy Metal you have no chance to kill this unit apart from maybe get out and pick some missile launcher from a dead soldier. One time a damaged t72 followed us from the middle of the map until we arrived at the last town. Neither my ai teammates nor the ai t72 fired, even though they often targeted each other. My suspicion is that this might be related to that fleeing feature, where hurt units flee the battle. When they rally sometime later and come back, they are not beind considered targets. Not sure if this is the reason, but it might be interesting to look this up in the code. Anyways, I would like to see some improvement in the subject of targeting and target handling. Movement: When you are moving around in column formation (which once again refers to the Heavy Metal single mission) and pass from one waypoint to another, your units mostly stop when reaching a new waypoint and randomly turn around a bit. In case of the lead tank turning even by a small degree only, the whole formation is nullified as the following tanks try to maintain formation and move accordingly so the end up behind the lead tank. When the unit moved along a road and the next waypoint being on that same road again, they still don't stay in formation along that road but loose formation ignoring the road. For me, this doen's really look very good even though its only a minor thing. Looking into pathfinding again, could really bring up some nice tweaks in this sector. One quick fix could be to simply disallow tanks to turn on the spot after they reached a waypoint as long as they don't want to face enemy units. This would also improve mission where players want to simulate a front line with some units pointing at a specific direction. In standard missions without the use of scripting, this is made impossible as most units turn on the spot randomly when idling around. Again not very important points, but still I want to post them as they might be easy to adjust and come along in an upcomming patch as well.

Some more things related to tanks: -Moving down trees: I kinda like to be able to crush any huge tree in my way, but I would love to see some small resistance from the trees. Basically they should slow you down a bit, depending on your own speed. At full speed it should be a tad easier to crush multiple trees before comming to a halt than when slowly bumping a tree. Currently you only have to gently touch a tree/sign/power line for it to collapse. There should be some more resistance which should also consider the size and type of whatever fauna you want to overrun. A hedge would simply be mowed down while a huge tree could in fact stop you if you are slow enough. Might be too much work for the cause, though, but still an idea. -Friendly fire: the last days if have seen a huge amount of friendly fire from the AI. I always thought FF had been taken care of due to that fireline check before engaging. Doesn't happen that often but still way too often for my taste. -Update on that improvement suggestions for radio usage: When I recently played that single mission Heavy Metal again, I noticed that the AI interferes on each others radio commands. For example a tank commander orders fire missions to its gunner while in the same time the platoon commander issues new cooridnates to move to. If this vary same thing would be allowed to human players the radio system might already be improved by ten times compared to the current handling. Just remove that delay for humans which restricts to interfere with already given radio commands by other players or AI. I have to say that while playing this mission as driver with the rest being AI, it was kinda hectical from time to time as there were tons of overlapping radio orders, but the whole atmosphere was more exiting because of that very chaos.

Specifically you have to delete "weapon_us.pdo" I fell in love with that fire sound. Could someone please upload the .wav file of this sample, so i can use it in other games, too? Don't get me wrong with reading the below, I really love that model but I think the following improvements and tweaks might make the whole model more attractive. 1. Give the gunner only 2 spare drums. Afaik, SAW gunners carry 600 rounds as basic loadout. Maybe give them 1-2 grenades instead as 3 full boxes should do. 2. Maybe do a second version of the SAW (not replacing this one), which has the PIP (product improvement program) stuff visible. Might be hard to accomplish, tho. 3. Yet another idea is to include an deployed bipod, just for visibilty. 4. Perhaps increase the spread (inaccuracy) of the weapon while standing, moving a bit. Overall I think its pretty balanced but a tad less accuracy could make it perfect. This is my opinion, though, other´s may vary. 5. Make every 5th round a tracer. (dunno if you can even do something like this but if not, just take the values from the m60 for that) 6. The most innovative point: Allow saw gunners to pick up m16 clips from their teammates and use them. The saw is capable of either being belt-fed or using m16 clips. Dunno about handling this via the .cpp but perhaps its possible to either fake a secondary firemode which basically is the same like the primary just with m16 clips. It is a shame, that BIS hasn't made the m16, xms and m4 use the same sort of ammo clip. 7. Rework the scope template (when looking through iron sight) so that the grip for the barrel exchange blends in the view. Perhaps some of these ideas sound a tad nerdy, but most would indeed improve this superb addon even more. original SAW: PIPed SAW:

Nice work, don't know how it will behave in-game, though. Regarding that page: why not consider to deliever a multi-language version? By seeing so much potential its a shame many people are getting scared away cuz there is no english version of it. Keep up that good work!

As I'm only partly into scripting this might be a silly question, but is it possible to fire smoke grens from a cessna? I would love to see some custom airplane which can shoot some colored smoke missiles to mark targets for airstrikes. This would be as alternative to modern laser designating. Even if you can't make the AI aim on these targets or accept them as equivalent to laser targets, I would still love if someone would do such an addon. Humans could still play around with this in MP. Has anyone ever made such a unit, or is anyone planning to do so in the future?

gah...thought I was in the addons forum. sorry. can some mod please move it over there?

gah...thought I was in the addons forum. sorry. can some mod please move it over there?

As I'm only partly into scripting this might be a silly question, but is it possible to fire smoke grens from a cessna? I would love to see some custom airplane which can shoot some colored smoke missiles to mark targets for airstrikes. This would be as alternative to modern laser designating. Even if you can't make the AI aim on these targets or accept them as equivalent to laser targets, I would still love if someone would do such an addon. Humans could still play around with this in MP. Has anyone ever made such a unit, or is anyone planning to do so in the future?

I love you! /me hugs Ether Dragon. Anyways, its Gimbals post, I just added my suggestions.

nice work, indeed. One thing i kinda dislike is the auto reload of the grenade launcher. But otherwise its top-notch.

no..more..armour..value..discussion..in..THIS..thread. kthxnbibi...sigh. Why have you people to ruin every attempt of presenting some issues which could/should/whatever be changed, by loosing yourself in pointless discussions about one specific point which comes up in here? I mean, most of you think that they are right anyways and therefore won't get away from their point of view. Its just pointless to talk about stuff like this in such an environment. I think you already succeeded in making this thread very unattractive for either BIS or those people that actually have some pretty good ideas. This is indeed intended as a flame, so please take it exactly like this. Sorry, but having EVERY thread develop into what we have in here now, is more than frustrating. Its kinda disrespective to the creater of the thread and those that actually gave some feedback.

I love it!

I assume, that there might be a chance of a pistol category to be implemented with Resistance and thus it would be absolutly no big deal for mods to include them as well. The design of shotguns should be no problem either as we already have that given template in form of the Kozilce.. ..time will tell.

that was me. I know it this could be an option and even if I'm not a U.S. Ranger, I kinda disagree about "leaving a man behind" and would still love to see that sparse seat of the loader to be made accessible in the form of a single "ride in back" seat which is empty by default when spawning a tank, but could be manned later on during a mission. This won't screw up any missions as the default crew number would still be the same. I'm with you on most other of your comments though Gimbal.

Another two units i would like to see are a Ural without the white cover as opposed to the 5t-truck without cover and a MI-17 without the huge rocket systems. Just the plain transporter version, wouldn't even care if its unarmed or has a PK. Both are very easy too make as the basic models do exist already. Maybe Bis already thought about this and will include them in Resistance as Russian units will be featured there a lot and both of them would definetly make a nice addition from both optical and gameplay aspects.

Another thing that happens for me sometimes is that AI dive attacks way to low (as if the a10 would attack with the minigun), drop the bomb, pulls up but gets caught in the explosion. I made a test mission for this and the a10 either droped 1 or 2 bombs in a perfect run or sometimes dived down to maybe 15 metres above ground. The bomb has been released during the dive downwards but the a10 can't manage to pull up high enough to get away from the blast radius. In some attack runs it didnt even threw a bomb at all and got caught by one of the AA-soldiers near target site. This happened very rarely, though.

I doubt that neither US nor Australien armies will accept tank statistics and behaviour like we have in standard Flashpoint. Most likely Bis is already tweaking or even finished to tweak a lot of the units we have in game, to be as realistic as possible for their VBS1 project. With a lot of luck Bis might let some of the gained data flow into either Resistance or some upcomming patches. But for now, please stop talking about if 435830458 or 435830459 LAWs will damage/destroy/whatever a tank from the rear and the like. Concentrate on more vital things which could be improved and let this conversation about armour stand on its own just by generally saying that armour should be made more realistic by Bis. Leave the decision on how to the producers. This topic is about to drown in this (IMHO) useless subject about armour statistics and perhaps has already lost its initial meaning by listing some glitches with tank statistics and/or behaviour. So post some more things you think should be changed to increase our list. kthx.

As I more and more doubt that Bis will manage to pack changes like these mentioned in here in an update which will be released before Resistance, I instead hope that they indeed realized by now, what the communities demands are, and therefore are already implementing a lot of this stuff into the very structure of Resistance. Many of the here mentioned ideas would require a recompile of already released models and rework of existing game code. It lies on the hand, that you could include a lot of this with Resistance, which would significantly increase the quality of the data disc and furthermore would save some megabytes from following updates, in which the recompiled models would have to be included then.

time to revive some of my comments i posted before. i'm sorry for posting some things that might have already been replied before in here, but it's just copy&paste from my old replies: -Tank commanding is pretty easy in most tanks but when playing tank commander in the Bradley, I have huge difficulties to even get an small overview of whats happening around me withough switching to third person view. The main problem is that the bradley has no 360° cupola for commander like the t-80 for an example. I'm not suggestion to add an increased field of view for the commander as in real-life this limit might indeed be the case. Instead I'm for adding a completly new feature. When commanding a infantry squad you can command soldiers to watch a specific direction (the mouse cursor transforms when holding another key and you simply have to click to the position where you want them to look at), so why not allow tank commanders to do the same for the turret gunner. In the case of the bradley the commander could order the gunner to turn the turret and would therefore be able to look in the direction he wants. In my oppinion this is a vital feature for all players that mostly play in first person. This should also be possible when the commander is "turned out". -Another issue regarding the bradley is the fact that it originally is an amphibious apc. Currently it sinks like a stone, though. I would really like to see the bradley to be an amphibious unit. -When moving around with an tank platoon there is often the case that one of your tanks gets shot down leaving a few of the crew injured but alive. In such cases the whole movement speed of the platoon is crippled as the infantry moves very slow and if injured mostly can only crawl. I would suggest to give all of the MBTs another spare seat inside. This seat could simply be the position of the loader which most tanks lack as a crew member anyways in op:fp. I'm not suggesting to give the tanks 4 crew members by default as this would most likely screw up a lot of missions where the max. squadlimit would be exceeded. Just allow personal to use this spare seats (1 per tank) as a "ride in back" option. -The generel movement behaviour of all tanks/apcs seems more like a wheeled vehicle than a track unit. I would like to see more direct control about speed decrease and better behaviour when climbing hills (in terms of more horse power). A tank can come to an immediate stop in no-time and I don't really think that those huge speed decrease times in op:fp are needed. What I would suggest is to add another bindable key to the game: breaking. This would let any sort of vehicle or tank come to a full stop asap. Currently the only real way to decrease speed is to hold the "back" key, which is very time consumming at a certain speed. I don't mean to replace the "back" key as the option to simply decrease speed should still be possible, but I would like to see a break key for immediate (at least faster) stops. -Another thing with the tanks that really annoyed me is the way to high viewport of the M113 driver. If you want to drive without the "sight" view (toggled by the same button that lets you aim through scope etc..) you can only see a few meters in front of you and have no superior field of view like in the m60 or abrams. Driving without being "sighted" in is very useful as you can look at the sides while driving but with this limited field of view its almost useless right now. Please lower the viewport so that you can look more horizontal and are not limited to the area directly in front of you. Same goes for the Hummer view port by the way, where looking through the side window is almost impossible. -Staying with the M113s; In my oppinion the capacity of the troops that can "ride in back" is way to low. There is still some space that simply can't be used as a sit right now, but modifying this to allow a few more infantry men to mount the m113 would be great. You did something similar to the Hind in the last patch, if I recall correctly. Furthermore I want to point out that the vulcan still is off centre when swimming, meaning that one part is deeper in the water than the rest, making the vulcan look weird when amphibious. -One thing, which is rather unlikely due to the engine I have to admit, but still an idea I want to bring up, is to give tank commanders an top mounted machine gun to shoot with. I know that there can't be more than one gunner right now, but I'm wondering if its really that difficult to implement a commander controlled, top-mounted weapon. I mean, commanders already control the rotation of the cupola. Adding an mg to that cupola could really be interesting. Tank commanders should only be able to use this machine gun when turned out though, kinda balancing this out. Only exceptions would be the M60 tank which normally has a machine gun mounted directly into the cupola which can be operated from the inside, and the bmp apcs, which should not get top mounted machine guns at all. Of course only tank with commanders will be given an extra machine gun. -Speaking of radio commands, mentioned by gimbal I want to contribute my thoughts about this subject: I would love to see some sort of priority hierachy for the radio. Very often you are commanding a vehicle and want to order your gunner to open fire on a new target, but other incomming transmissions like info about newly spotted targets are delaying your radio command. In combat situations this can be fatal. I suggest some sort of priority system that allows specific radio commands to interrupt running transmissions. For example should all transmissions from the "vehicle" frequency get priority in favour of lets say reports about killed teammates on the "squad" frequency. There should also be a tad more efficient radio operating. Currently there is only the option to name either all members of a squad or seperatly name the numbers of the members you want to perform the action. You can't say: "all except 6, 7, disembark". Let the radio code auto-choose this depending on which way will get the whole radio transmission being send faster. Another example for this could be following situation: 2 and 3 have already mounted a vehicle. Now you want to order the remaining 9 men to mount as well. Currently the radio code would name each squad member's number (4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12, board vehicle) which takes a lot of time. The new system would see that 2 men are already on board and would therefore order the rest of the men in the vehicle by using a faster method. (all except 2,3, board vehicle) Get the idea? -Seat management: Currently the "ride in back" option does not differenciate between seats available. there is this pool of "ride in back" places. If you are mounting a truck from behind, you are still being placed as passenger in the driving cabine, beside the driver place. The same way, if this cabine is already full of other passengers, and you want to mount a vehicle from the side, you are being placed on one of the spare seats on the back. Basically what I'm after is some sort of more realistic seat management. You should be able to only access the spare seats in the cabine from either the right front door, or from the driver door, but then only if there is no driver present (he would block the way to the passenger seat otherwise). Furthermore you should not be able to mount the vehicle from the back and then be transfered to a cabine seat. In this case you should only be placed somewhere on the back. This would differ from vehicle to vehicle, depending on weather a person could access the seats from different doors. I doubt this would lead to much confussion, as you are seeing if a seat is taken by another person. So if you see the driver is sitting in the car already. you shouldn't be wondering why you can't access the passenger seat beside him from the driver side, as he is blocking the way. It would be more logical. The only problem I see with this, is how to tell all this to the AI without getting AI controlled passengers to block the way to each other. I have no doubt however, that it could be done. Taking the whole idea one step ahead, I would also look into options where people could take over the places of crew members. This change of positions should also be able while moving, as long as changing would not require to get out of the vehicle and re-enter somewhere else, like with the isolated driver seat of most tanks. Switching from gunner to commander should be possible though, because they are both in the same place. In the m-113 apc for example, you should also be able to change to the driver position from either the gunner or any of the "ride in back" seats. Of course this has to be defined for every vehicle in detail. In the case of the truck, only passengers in the cabine should be allowed to switch to driver position, while in a standard 4 seat car, only the passengers beside the driver should be able to switch over. In the uh-60, ch-47 and mi-17, the co-pilot should be able to change to the driver position even while in-flight, making it possible to quickly take the rudder in case of the pilot being shot. It still would be hard enough to reinitiate the rotor thrust and get the helicopter back under control, but it would still be a possibility. In the cobra this would not be possible, due to the seats being isolated. (I know that in most aircraft you should be able to pilot from either seat, but for the start, the above mentioned way should do)