wuschel

The Story so far It is the year 1992. The cold war has become hot, and soviet tanks roll through Europe. Berlin is in ruins, and the forces of communism roam the Schwarzwald forest and knock at the gates of Hamburg. Meanwhile, in the North African theater, the red army has increased their presence in Ghaddafis Libya, strenghtening its foothold on the African continent and threatening U.S. operations throughout the region. In this dire moment of the war, the USEUCOM has decided to send the U.S.S. Nimitz Battle Group with a hastely assembled quick reaction task force into meditareanian ocean to deal with that pesky situation in the land of camels and oil and push the soviets back to Egypt. Can the cowboys wrestle the libyan soil from commie hands? YOU find out! General Information The scenario features a Battalion scale battle near the shores of Libya. The order of battle includes one company of marines, one mechanized infantry company, base support assets, CAS, Artillery, recon operatives and arial reconnaicance. The Scenario is in late Alpha stage and has been released for public testing. Download Links The download package contains the mission file and manual, including a link list with all necessary addons at this updated link. Thanks to Zulu for archiving. After Action Reports and Reviews I would be happy to see mission reports! Cheers! :)

Hi, while I wanted to give some feedback on the enitre package, I am going to withhold it for now. There are some issues that need urgent attention - or it is me who is not able to run the demo mission properly. 1.) First, onmapclick does not work properly. I could not pin-point down the error - but shortly after the arrival of the first reinforcements the unit marker selection does not work (click, shift-click and alt-click). 2.) Secondly, russian 'ghost' voices and english commands can be heard all the time. This is very unnerving feature. All in all, the script is a great idea and has great potential, so keep up the good work (: ps Does WGL show errors with 1.99? Does Drongos Toolkit work with 1.99?

Hi, I wonder if it is possible to use Drongo's Toolkit to implement a mission with the following characteristics: multiplayer with: BLUEFOR and OPFOR are partly human controlled Multiple human players per side. Optionally OPFOR has one commander, while BLUEFOR has a commander and other human officers. WGL/CoC Artillery/Airsupport Squads/Platoons on each side, accepting orders from respective BLUEFOR/OPFOR commander Cheers!

Due to a request of a player I updated the link of the mission. Thanks to Zulu for storing the file :) Note that Drongo's Toolkit makes this kind of script combinations - UA, DAC and CE - like I used in this mission obsolete now.. I still wonder how many players and units DT can take. Battalion scale with 15 players? (:

Nice one ('; I am just wondering - what is Fwatch used for anyway? The satellite view? Because all the addons like COC-UA and COC-CE as well as Mapfact's DAC were not using it. It would be quite sad if the latest 1.99 would not be supported by Drongo's Toolkit.

A small point, but: Any chance You could provide these two files within Your addon? 131 MB download for two files might be quite a lot.. but I just realized that ECP_DSAI.pbo is 84 MB large.. what is hidden in that file? 700 dpi scans of the soviet attack plan on Europe? (: Cheers, wuschel

Single player and multi player, works with any mod. This looks very, very promising. The questions I have here: 1) Does the AI also call artillery strikes on BLUEFOR units? 2) How is the Automated map population different from DAC? How many BLUEFOR units does it support? DAC had a limit of 256, as far I remember, which limited You to battallion or brigade (tanks) level. IN DAC, every BLUEFOR unit/group leader needed a "DAC-hook", limiting a mission designer to 256 units. 3) Is it possible to save and resume missions? (Back then, this was my main reason to ditch my creation large scale missions.) 5) The 150 MB jukebox music tracks are (hopefully) optional, right? 6) Are any statistic functions implemented e.g. losses on each side, etc.? OPF 1.99 - now all I need is to get a functional Cold War Crisis CD key to check these scripts out. It is the classic: Move from A to B, and discarded my OPFs stuff while throwing useless stuff away. But of course I had to keep my BF2 CD for Project Reality's sake.. bah!

I was using DMA Libya for a large scale military mission, and it proved to be an excellent choice both from the locations and the map performance. Also, You might want to have a look how I made use of base assets, mission briefing layout and mission design to bring a realistic feeling to the mission. While the mission was featuring combined arms on a battalion scale BLUEFOR, the capture of different points of the map with smaller platoon sized units and the use of artillery support to crack open enemy lines gave the player the feeling of many small encounters. Ah.. the horror :) Moreover, if You have the intent to give the player the most realistic combat experience availible in Operation Flashpoint, then You have little other choice then using WGL. The mission was published at this forum - I believe that it was one of the most complex non-linear missions for this game: Operation Matchball

Hey folks! Nice to see You CiAs beeing alive and kicking! (: And great You got that server up, it is a must when You want to keep WGL alive. I am not sure what would be the best way to attract new players to it, though. Currently, I am not able to dedicate much time towards gaming, so it does not look I can get involved in any OPF/WGL activities. I think that a WGL community would be an excellent idea, especially when it comes to the making of realistic PvP missions. My troubles are reinforces by the fact that I am now on backup notebook, with most of my uncritical data, including my old notebook, having received a Viking like burial ceremony. This includes, unfortunatly, many of my CDs and DVDS, including my OPF CD and all my old editing stuff. Quite unbelievable that it happened to me.. would have never expected it! But this is always the case with unexpected things, isnt it? In a way, my hope lies with the Tactical System Command script by Drongo69, that promised to bring multiplayer compatible multi-squad control. Maybe this is still the window of oportunity to mold some PvP multiplayer with larger squad sizes and appriopriate artillery and arial support into a WGL mission. In a way, working on my mission Operation Matchball showed me some of the limits of the OPF engine when it comes to such a scenario, but in a way I have not given up on company sized PvP engagements with 6-10 players. Still, I do find that playing in that battalion size engagement on the Libya cost with having DAC reacting to my movements was quite something. On a sidenote: Project Reality - unfortunatly my notebook has now a weager VGA that can not cope with this - has finally pushed the player numbers to 128 in some tests, producing the milsim dynamics I always wanted to see in a shooter: simulating combined arms in larger tactical group formations with human behaviour. The immersion is really amazing. And as You all know, Project Reality is now coming to ARMA2 as well.. Cheers, wuschel

Hi, has there been any recent developments regarding TSC? Are there any multiplayer human vs human player scenarios availible? Cheers, wuschel

Woa. That sounds nice. If it weren't the fact that I am not into cooperative games but rather prefer human team vs human team scenarious with a broader tactical scope, I were in. WGL all the way! Cheers! Piotr

I think the problems arose when playing around with DAC. It is a long time ago, so I am not sure if this is correct and it wasnt an incompatibily issue with CE/DAC and DAS. :)

Hello Blitzen, I think I know what You are trying to make. I also had the same idea to have bombastic scale battles with somehow realistic order of battle and scenario design. I must say that I succeeded in making a scenario which gives You that feeling. In Operation Matchball, You command a USMC battlain against a soviet occupation force in Libya. There is artillery support, Tomahawks, aerial insertion, mechanized infantry, Cobra CAS, and enemy artillery observers (which does not work due to some script compatibility issues). It is overwhelming fun to experience multiple of platoons beeing engaged in a in a large scale counter attack at the same time. Unfortunatly, my timetable did not allow to finish the mission. I introduced some bugs into the first public testing release which I could not correct because of lack of time. I also had a brigade scale mission in the oven. It did not go too well in terms of game performance, for engine limitations kicked in. In some stages of developement, it was very well playable. Feel free to have a look at my work.

Hello Drongo, is there any chance to remove the connection of TSC to DAS? DAS showed a couple of incompatibilities or other large script packages of importance to large scale battlefield destruction.. >) i.e UA and DAC. I dont know about Enemstack or AI on demand here. Cheers!

Thank You very much! >)

Hello, after a long hiatus it seems that my OPF addon DVD is not readable. Thus, I am still missing a couple of crucial addons, specifically CoC ENEMYSTACK. The WGL website is gone >(

Excellent addon! Once You have touched it, the only thing You want is to get more Western infantry, vehicles and aircraft :-) Thanks a lot, Chops, for mingling with the configs..

Thank You for Your feedback! Sorry for the late reply, but my time schedule is killing me as of lately. I agree to all posters - clearly, neither the OPF engine was really made for such missions, nor the scripts I used were designed to be compatible to each other. It is really strange that different players report different behaviour of the mission. It might be because of variating hardware configurations, but maybe there is more than one mouse in the cheese. Thank You for the positive feedback. Yes, some time went into the layout of the map. I think this is something every new mission author really underestimates. Judging from Your playtime, You had at least some initial significant encounters with enemy forces. Have there been any key moments in particular You remember? Have You experienced enemy artillery strikes on Your position? As for Your question regarding the CE command structure: The battalion has been structured into company sized teams, namely the Battalion HQ/support team, Able Company (Inf) and Charlie Company (Mech-Inf). While this are the setting of rPlatoonCommandStructure, I left rTeamFormations untouched believing it just holds parameters that can be changed by the player in the formation menu of the CE during the game anyway. If this is wrong, please tell me, and I will make according adjustments to rTeamFormations. About the dummy teams: I do not really know if that is possible, but certainly I could give each SF team an rPlatoonCommandStructure team slot. The player could then fool around with it in the team organization menu. Now You have mentioned this topic, do You think it might be better to use platoon sized team formations i.e. each mechanized infantry platoons containing two sections and four squads in a team? Certainly, it might help the player out in giving an additional layer of unit managment. As for me, I always used the marker managment option, mostly without waypoints, sometimes even micromanaging specific individual troops or vehicles, but I see that commanding entire major units might be handy a handy one. In a much earlier version of the mission, I was able to use formations with helicopters in a rPlatoonCommandStructure team, so maybe the size got something wrong here. As for the savegame bug - I will comment it below. Did You have any savegame problems with Operation Azul or Your other CE missions? I hope the unit names are not too misleading. I tried to keep it simple: a1C means Alpha squad, 1st Platoon, Charlie Company. Of course, this bring problems when dealing with single units of platoon size, in which I simply kept the first letter of the callsign in the unit designation (i.e. n3C, November, 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company). I will look into how he solved that problem. However, I do not think that there is much hope in saving the save game. Instead, one might try to save the mission and take the cheap way out and state that there are no save games in real life anyway ;-) I realize, though, that playing a mission for 2 hours is a hit on the time schedule, and a missing savegame option is a problem. Yes, I can see at least one of those errors. It seems that it comes from combining DAC script with the CE script. One appears when I abort the mission and return to the main menu of OPF. The error You mention might also come from GeneralBarrons artillery script, which is called from multiple units in the game. As mentioned before, it is most likely that the engine is completely overloaded with scripts that are not designed to be compatible with each other. For instance, I have not seen a single artillery call on my units when DAC was implemented into the mission. Can anyone reproduce this? I do not even want to tell You what I experienced when adding Drongos Air Support script into the soup. While it worked partially, it sometimes produced very bad results with the CE. I will try to cut down the number of global variables. The first will most likely be the removal of the enemy artillery script, which holds a big fat array variable. Also, I might cut down opposing forces a little. However, I am very reluctuant to make a cut when it comes to DAC or CoC-UA, since these two elements really define the way and feel how the mission is played. To understand that, You need to have put Your troops into a major engagment at the first line of defense of the soviet forces. Certainly, I might have a look into some alternatives some of You guys pointed out to me at an earlier occasion, but I am not really sure if they can replace DAC in its entire functionality: After all, one of the fun parts is beeing flanked by more than one unit formation and seeing Your troops bite the dust. Enemystack has a quite advanced spawn system, while lacking the unit coordination, while grouplink might give heavy performance problems when working with an opposing force on the scale of Operation Matchball, and needs to be adopted to unified artillery to support enemy artillery. I have no experience in AI-on-demand, so maybe one could comment on its usability and features. As for UA, nothing can give You such a cool experience of artillery pounding.. I still remember the cool moment when I bailed out my SF squad in the hot combat zone with the call of artillery strikes and air support, and seeing an tomahawk explosion in the distance, with bodies of russian soldiers flying all over the place. Priceless. It is a pity that there is no combined, optimized framework with the capabilities of DAC, CE, UA, DAS. DAC, I found out the hard way, for instance does only support 256 friendly units, which is barely enough for battalion sized formations - a pity. Also, CE does not really go beyond battalion sized unit control. Are there any of these scripts in later incarnations of the OPF engine? IMHO, the optimized CPU handling in ARMA2 could really improve the performance of such kind of missions. I will look into these problems and see if I can improve them :) It is weird, though, that we have different bug reports from different players. As if the performance or addon loading could influence these errors? Cheers, wuschel p.s.: For You entertainment, as there were no other reports from the 24 downloads so far, I place an after action report I wrote when playtesting an earlier revision of the mission:

Hello, I am trying to figure out how to bring in enemy artillery (CoC-UA) strikes against friendly troops (not essentially the players squad or the player himself). Does anyone have an idea, or maybe a script from old days that gives the smurfs on Your team hell? Or how one could realize this on the map? Of course, the enemy spotter should not be an uber-spotter who obliterates Your team to ashes and dust. I am already working with counter batteries on the map. The ideal scenario, however, would be sporadic shelling of friendly squads that probe the enemy defenses. I searched the forum (especially the old UA threads), but I could not find anything really interesting beside a trigger instruction for the players unit. Regards, wuschel

Unfortunatly, my time schedule did not allow me to work much on mission editing. A pity, for I have ideas a plenty, and even two more missions in the oven. Release! Yay? However, I decided to make a first public release to have hear some Yays or Nays. Check out the first post in the thread for the download link. Have fun and good luck! Cheers! November Tanks are on the prawl.. Pilots waiting for evac.. Chinooks unloading 1st Platoon Able Company on the front line.

A real nut? I like that. :-) Of course I understand that many players set their priorities for the visual gameplay experience, and that choosing this mod as a basis for missions might reduce the number of players greatly. I just happen to believe in ballistics as one of the most important factors of modern warfare - WGL and UA are one of the few free tools that let one strive to experience an abstracted combat situation including tactical choices, strategic mission goals, realistic assets, logistics and support, and see every projectile having a beginning, an end, and the more or less right way to get from one to the other. Oh, I love explosions too, by the way, I just like them beeing portrayed with the right amount of kinetic energy. That said, I must say that even with this 10 year old engine one can do marvels one had never imagined with those super bulky computers in the 80s .. while playing Pacman 3D on my fathers university mainframe in my childhood. And to consider Starcraft even a wargame is a joke. Enough blathering.. Operation Matchball is still on the horizon.

Hello Relikki, I accepted Your offer and have restructured my post. Although I was not inclined to reveal many details before the release of the mission, I will do so now. As for Your questions, it is not clear whether this crystalizes into a campaign, into a set of missions, or if it will be a single mission only.It will certainly depend on my time, will, and if specific assets become availible for WGL. Note that I may want to ask so people for co-authorship - of course, if some is interested in participate in making such kind of missions. Well, here they come, the juicy screenshots. Note that a lot of blood is dripping from them, as the photographer was in mortal danger when making the shots. The total playing time was about 2 hours, with only secondary objectives beeing completed and 50% of manpower in the battalion lost. "Shit happens" A mechanized infantry platoon had a bad day: Its BFVs are destroyed, and the survivors of the BFV sections are trying to save their lives. The disembarked infantry attachments are fighting behind the hills. "A blast for Ivan" The night knocks on the door, and Special Forces Team X-Ray is on a supporting mission on the front line. In the background there are the remains of a Tomahawk blast. "More meat!" The battle is going bad, and more reinforcements from Able company are beeing scrambled near main base. "Damn those russkie AA!" The only remaing transport helicopter, codename "Romeo", is landing at base to bring more infantry reinforcements to the front. "Xray, Go! Go! Go!" SF Team X-ray - alive by sheer miracle - is still operating near the front lines. In behind You see wrecks of destroyed friendly Bradleys with a fresh Platoon of Abrams moving through the wrecks to attack enemy positions. The coin will flip on the bad side and some of X-Ray Team members will be killed in a mashinegun ambush. That is it, folks! See You on the beach!

Why not bring out an ear-enhancement for WGL then ;-)

Hello STGN, while I am not sure how to implement these weapons into WGL, I would be glad if they would be potientially compatible. Cheers, wuschel

Out of sheer curiosity I wonder, will TSC have any functionality that help with controlling larger groups, for instance Company or Battalion size formations? What I mean is the implementation of two or three level hierarchy structure. Regards , wuschel