Snake Man

Excellent choice. VTE is using JAM 3 now so you can safely use the latest one with the few new added magazines etc.

Yes thats the way to go, SEB NP2 is old by now and VTE is the present day NAM stuff for OFP. There you can find the many new objects like houses, bases, vegetation and such with the many new islands, not to mention the new units, vehicles, animals and music, etc etc. The beauty of VTE is that you do not need any addons to use it, like you have to use the phantom with this current version of the mission for example. We are slowly closing in for the v0.3 release (next month), there is going to be great stuff in there for you to use, you'll be amazed. Until that, play around with the current v0.2 to learn about all the new things that are available for you to use.

The downed helo makes a huge smokestack, its easy to see, as long as you get close enough...

Yes there is new version of SEB NAM Pack 2 out now, its called Vietnam: The Experience and it includes all the islands you could ever need.

How is the slowdowns/stutter/lag ie too many units running around... is everything running smoothly or not? How is your artillery calling skills, can you kill lot of enemy forces with the arty strikes? Of course I'll be updating it. Just like PMC Fury, its going to be edited/tweaked long time as long as there will be bug reports coming in. That is a double edged sword though, if I keep updating the missions everytime some JAM3/Bn880 tracers are invented... the campaign will never ever be complete, heh sucks I know. But anyways hopefully what you see in the campaign right now will be the final OFP version of it, plus of course the additional bug fixing tweaks.

WrpTool can edit terrain cell heights, one cell is 50m x 50m.

Yes, the classical error of no cutscenes... meaning you did the installation incorrectly. Sorry, but go back and re-read the installation help page or learn elsewhere how to install addons with MOD directories. It'll work fine after you install it according to instructions. This means nothing, its you who installed VTE incorrectly.

Thanks for letting me know, I'll fix this on next version. There is no substitute for extraction under enemy machine gun fire. Just a technical note, there is no such scripting/editing in my missions, if under fire extractions occur they are just pure OFP (random) magic, not mine. Glad you guys like it, I'll fix the reported stuff and see if there is anything I can tweak to work more better.

There sure is several cutscenes on most islands. Try to follow the installation instructions more carefully.

No problemos, I take all bumps I can get No seriously, I thought to post something about the developments. I have been making the missions, which feel pretty good to me (just so nice to have clean JAM/Bn880 tracer setup), hopefully they have ok playbalance. Action_man was kind enough to post some campaign name suggestions which are here <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">"retribution" "hell hath no fury" "lightning war" "rumble in the islands" "shatterd peace" "invasion force" "the task force" "codename sweepout" "island salvation" "the liberators" "codname liberation" "peace makers" "codename peacemaker" "fight the good fight" "uncle sam does the island's" "a war worth fighting" "the 10 day war" "salvation" "codename salvation" Strangely these are the only ones I've seen so far. Apparently it is not so easy to design a campaign which clearly shows on the forums, for example my old "PMC Euro" topic in which very little name suggestions came about etc. I definitely think that hardest part of making a campaign is the storyline/name planning. Anyways, I hope someone posts more good campaign name suggestions and still those mission ideas. In the campaign design doc there is no special missions at the moment. They can be added without problems lateron too, but perhaps some of that could be related directly to storyline somehow. At the moment all I can think of is the already mentioned clishe helicopter goes down type of stuff. I think good ones is where the mission goes haywire and not according to plan, ie on the way to the target helo gets shot down or truck gets ambushed, something along those lines. Or even perhaps some nastiness that after a successfull mission, you return to base in helo and its crawling with enemy forces on sneak attack. Something that really surprises player.

Well there will be change for this in next VTE release, I assume you have seen the Ebud's work for new units which is just awesome. Unless of course... you dont like them either hehe. So does this mean... they use some additional addons besides VTE? If I'm correct, the mapfact ai creator at least uses some marker pack or something like that(?). So officially asking, you have no objections and give "permissions" if these missions get (tweaked and) put into VTE missions list for the next release? Anyways, I appreciate your work for OFP NAM scene, it really needs something like this. Especially if these missions are purely using VTE (like said, not sure about the ai creators needs), if I recall, these are then the first public "independent" missions released (there was the one mission, but it had additional/crazy addon requirements). So good work overall, and VTE thanks you for the support!

That posted image as nothing to do with VTE, except that it uses as an example the old SEB soldier. BeErZyMoTiC and that new unit on the left at the image has nothing to do with VTE and it will not appear on any of the upcoming VTE updates. Phefw, hope that clears it up somewhat. BeErZyMoTiC: I appreciate your enthusiasm, but perhaps you should not post irrelevant images to VTE topic, the guys here at BIS forums get confused quickly nowadays as it seems. Thank you very much.

It was brought to our attention that in Mapfact Workshop the Mapfact guys leaked these three titles: ODOL Explorer v2.45 PanTool v1.4.0.0 WrpTool v1.01 Release Candidate 2 These releases are unauthorized by WrpTool Development Team and were not meant to be released. Mapfact was specificly informed NOT to release these titles, yet they did. Its really sad to see Mapfact conducting themselves in such manner May 22nd, 2006. WrpTool Dev Team Dschulle, Snake Man.

Well great to hear that you enjoy the missions, thats the one reason I made them. I dont know if you've seen my other mission work, but there is alot of that long walk type of thing, ie all my helicopter insertion missions always start at the airbase/base and will ferry you completely to the objective/lz and back, there is no mid-air starts in my missions which would get player faster to the action where firing starts. I definitely believe that the "anticipation of action" creates the atmosphere for good action then. Also I have to mention that in PMC Hero's Path the early SEAL missions are really trying to achieve the mood of being deep behind enemy lines. You just cannot go about there shooting your way through. These SEAL missions may seem like there is no enemy in sight, but trust me, if you're having a bad luck, you'll have bunch of enemy patrols and reaction forces coming down on you. Of course dunno how many people appreciate the fact of "hours of boredom and few seconds of terror" which I think the SEAL missions produce quite nicely, although with careful stealth tactics you can pass few of them without firing a shot. Also the PMC Rugen terrain causes a new tactical situation/dilemma for player, such an open spaces there, dare he cross it when there is distant vehicle sound to be heard etc. The Bradley missions are the same, but there is the help of boarding the vehicle and speeding away. But that way someone has to keep a lookout for enemy RPG soldiers and dangers like that. Personally I only travelled short distances onboard the bradley, then when there were soldiers/danger, I dismounted and hunkered behind the bradley advancing short distances at time coordinating my squad. So massive to see the Bradley fire to the identified enemy units, great fun.

On that timetable, are you still using Visitor to make islands?

In your humble opinion you are wrong which is weird as this has been covered many times already... big islands dont cause any slowdowns. Yes of course they are loading more slowly as there are usually more objects than smaller islands, but they will not cause slowdowns. Slowdowns/stutter or "lag" as you call it, is caused by having lot of CPU heavy objects on the screen at one time. Oh and you're wrong about the island sizes too... its 12.8km and not 12.5km. Not to pick on you or anything, but... I private messaged kubi asking if he wants some tips to improve the island release. He told me to post in the topic so here we go. First of kubi, you should have read the WrpTool's manual page 118 which is labeled "How to Release", it contains basic yet vital information for a good release. So read that first so you know what you should change on the update. But just to recap whats to fix in Pilis, in few lines: - Add island menu cutscene. - Add readme to the packet. - Use WinRAR with maximum compression for the packet. Now the new information you cannot find from the WrpTool manual: Your zip file is 6.38mb in size, so if you pack the pilis.pbo without PBO compression (use tool like PboX to do it) the pbo itself is bigger and OFP loads as faster people claim, and finally when you pack the uncompressed PBO with latest WinRAR with maximum compression... the download size comes down to a total of 3.84mb, wow a nicely smaller dont you think. Oh while you pack the pbo, remove the pilis.rrp file which is the WrpTool roads file, its 211kb in size and OFP will not use it so its just wasted space on the pbo. Hey dont worry about the distances, they are great. Its a big island, its a big world out there so just keep the stuff as is now, distances between towns/cities are just OK. Ouch! Dont do that! About the forest objects, you should delete all the existing forests and re-place them using the forest placing feature of WrpTool. Simple as that. Right now the forests look terrible from air and in mapview they have the edges all mixed up (random direction). I'm not so sure about this... I guess you could use just individual trees then, but I have no hard knowledge of forest objects causing frame rate drop. I'd say go with the traditional forest object placement. You already have different textures under the forests, so I'm kind of assuming you did the initial forest placement indeed with the forest placer feature of Region Tool. If you have any problems with texturing the island, just ask a specific question and I'll try to help. But basically its very easy: - open the Texture Browser - click on Add Textures button - choose the b1, t1 etc textures from O\ directory (since you're using Resistance, right). Then you are free to use the textures on terrain, just use Texture Mode button on the top of WrpTool, and Home key to "pick" texture from ground, then ALT+LMB to place texture, or you can use the powerful feature of Cell Selector to select cells like according to elevation and then use SHIFT+LMB to place textures on all of these cells. Its great feature to place more greener texture for lowlands and more dry or even rock texture to the high mountains. You dont need to choose the transition textures with long filenames like b1s1s1b1.paa etc, just use the terrain type texture like b1.paa, pt.paa etc. Then you can use the Create Transitions feature of WrpTool to place the transition textures. Pilis is a good island, I like it. I have pointed out few shortcomings here but it doesn't mean its a bad island or anything, I just want to help you to create better/best release for next update. Trust me on this, when you do the stuff I mentioned here, then it really rocks as you have the basics done correctly. Feel free to ask any questions you have, I'm willing to help to the best of my ability. I like Pilis and your approach, good work so far.

Somebody outside BIS forums told me that the enemy artillery is quite deadly, does anyone have feedback on it, comments? Also for playbalance, are all the missions ok, ie you have ammo and repair trucks etc for the mechanized infantry missions as well as tank missions? How about the SEAL missions, are they too overwhelming, or are you guys (players) and the LSR SEAL units so badass that there is no problems?

Does anyone have any suggestions about CoC Unified Artillery usage for the existing missions. Right now its only used on the one (1) mission which was the new bonus mission, UA should be used on the other missions too. So lets take one example, PMC Ranger Action, that is very very small mission and even adding the M252 mortars to it would ... well be quite devastating as player could just sit behind the hill and shoot the tubes empty and then go and count bodies But also I do not want to re-make all the old missions either to maintain them in the original form... so somesort of balance should be found. All suggestions are highly appreciated.

Again just plain and simply silly addon requirements. Have you ever thought that just because you get few "OMFG woot woot" with dancing banans posts here on BIS forums, you ought not to add such amount of addons into a island? Ask yourself, are the island really not the same without all the pesky addons? I mean sure you can use addons, but have some common sense, please. Ugh, I better add a whole page for this unreasonable addon usage on islands to the upcoming WrpTool v1.0 documentation, perhaps it would sink in better there, or not. At least it would be something.

Well this is somewhat going back to the basics, like said, PMC Fury 2006 so to speak, the missions use same guideline / style / design, only with my current level of mission making knowhow. JAM is transparent and the only addon used beyond that is the tracers, so its very close to the PMC Fury neighborhood. Only fancy new stuff I used is Bn880's nice CoC AI On Demand (AIOD) which helps the larger enemy attack missions greatly. The whole "JAM" for me is the High Dispersion, there are only HD magazines used in this campaign, longer firefights and mayhem. Gotta love that stuff. I mean... I have no interest of making PMC Fury 2 with just BIS values, no point. But for JAM HD stuff... ahh now we're talking! Yes well in these days with high poly gizmos and gadgets, for this campaign I still like the basic stuff that is completely slowdown/stutter/"lag" free, ie the BIS weapons. I have no urge to get myself an supa-dupa M4 with coffee maker attached to it. I rather have a killer cool combat atmosphere than such weapon, and there is always the other campaigns I made which use LSR weapons with coffee makers This campaign is like the topic says a JAM Appreciation Campaign, I just wanted to use JAM3 for it. Easy to install, no need to hunt gazillion addons and few supporting addons for them, then to have slow OFP startup and huge memory requirements... no no, this is pure JAM fun.

Ah indeed that makes sense. Thanks for the description of such events. I'll keep that in mind if I could implement such mission type into the campaign, at the moment the defend missions are just "hold them back until mission ends" player has no idea when the mission ends, ie when the enemy attack has been stopped.

The campaign starts on basic offensive action, but then there will be heavy enemy counter attacks which should be nice to experience. Was that just a random example, or are you saying that it would be ok/realistic to have such objective where you have to hold position for 15 minutes? I dont know personally, quickly to think it sounds a little bit gamey that sort of exact timelimit.

Hi Laser, excellent work, much appreciated. How does old missions play with the upcoming updates then? Maybe you're not aware, but I have several missions/campaigns where the basic backbone is your Rangers and SEALs supported with BIS infantry and vehicles. So I'm concerned that will the updated versions work ok with the existing missions or are edits required.

Vietnam war story on PMC Tactical screenshots page...

I am not going to argue with you about this C130 topic so just drop it okay.