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Last night, I got the dialogue sorted for Missions 12 and 13 -- essentially, as I go through and add the lines, it forces me to finalize almost all aspects of the mission. So, all I have left to do this for are Missions 10 and 14 (which still needs to be written), along with a few minor adjustments to Missions 1, 5, 9 and 10. Then all I need to finish off is the intros/outros. Things will be ready for a round of closed testing with only partial voice acting pretty soon. I'll try to address any obvious or easy fixes before public release. Early December is still looking like a good ETA. Now, why don't you get acquainted with some of the main characters of the story: Rusty - Team Leader, Talon 31 - The author of the book, much of the story is told through his perspective. He is a humble but effective leader who cares for his men more than anything else, even his own well-being. Jared - Company Commander, Talon 30 - The commander of ODA 331, Jared acts as Command & Control element throughout the campaign. Bill - Team Sgt, Talon 31 - A supporting character, basically Rusty's assistant TL, you play as Bill in Mission 5 and the Epilogue. Dave - Engineer, Talon 31 - Dave is responsible for the team's vehicles, but he goes above and beyond any chance he gets. You play as Dave in Missions 7, 11, and 12. Brian - Sr. Comms Sgt, Talon 31 - Brian is the communications tech responsible for keeping all the radio equipment in working order. Riley - Sr. Medical Sgt, Talon 31 - Riley plays a dual role as both medic and machine gunner. His courage and calmness under fire is legendary. Zack - Weapons Sgt, Talon 31 - Zack is the team's weapons sergeant, ensuring you have access to any weapons available during the briefing (each mission allows you to customize your loadout during the briefing with various weapons depending on the mission) Smitty - Intel Sgt, Talon 31 - Smitty is the team's intelligence analyst, you don't interact with him much, but he's there in the end.

Thanks a lot Dibbz! Glad you enjoyed, and 5hrs - whew! Talk about getting the experience of a real op, taking your time to check it out. This is exactly how the mission was designed, but since I myself had played through it hundreds of times as I built it, I never had the opportunity to really take my time. I actually sort of got motion sickness after playing too long, something about all that uneven terrain. As for avoiding detection-- ASR_AI most likely will affect things, as I did not factor these kinds of mods into the experience. However, team size plays a role (you can play with as few as 1 other squadmate), or really just who is actually going into the village to accomplish the objective. For the first village, there is an explosives cache with IEDs, a large IED is more than enough to get the party started. ;)

Sent a second round of PMs to Wiki, domokun, Savage CDN, and Laqueesha (who already sent the recordings back, the man is a MACHINE). This coming week should see a lot of progress, stay tuned! Anyone have a good video screen capture program I could check into by the way? Would love to be able to share some vids of the intros/outros. EDIT for UPDATE: Intro/Outro mostly completed for Missions 4, 5, and part of 6 yesterday. I'm sure today will see even more progress. EDIT for UPDATE 2: Yesterday saw a lot of progress-- thanks once again to AZCoder, Wiki, Kommiekat and Laqueesha for getting me a large portion of the voice acting needed. Added all the new dialogue to Missions 2, 5, 9, and 11, still have to do 10, 12, 13, and figure out 14. Voice acting gets dropped in easily once the dialogue is in-place, but I try to master each sample so this takes time. And then there's the endeavor of intros/outros. I'm really pleased with what I came up with earlier in the weekend, this is almost half way done now.

Haven't forgotten mate, not to worry-- I'll get 'em to you tonight most likely. Only a few lines for now (unless you want to try and help me do some Afghan accents, I have yet to get in touch with my buddy who is from Afghanistan to help with the Afghan voice roles). I spent about 2.5-3 hrs last night chopping up the master script and PM'ing the more involved voice roles to Kommiekat, Laqueesha and AZCoder, as well as checking in with SavageCDN. In all, there will be something around 500+ different lines for the voice actors.

Eww, haha. Huge thanks go out to Laqueesha, he has completed two hefty rounds of voice acting for LoK, getting the lines turned around and to me in less than 24 hrs in both cases, and with excellent quality too! Seriously, hats-off to him, and to the others who are helping me out. With the voice stuff squared away, I'll be able to focus on tightening up the final mission details and then the intros/outros... a final audit, maybe some pre-release testing for those who have helped, and then release time! The ETA is still late this month, or early/mid December!

I agree, to an extent: I am doing everything I can to make sure the Campaign will be stable, bc it's true people will play it for the first time and likely call it a day whether they finish it or not. You should see the checklist I have of all the things that must be in-place for the initial release. The other thing I've found is that even if the voice acting isn't studio-quality, it helps immerse the player, much more so than without. I get distracted and miss the story when I can't divert my eyes to read the chat, and story is important in this Camp especially. Thankfully, I've got some great backup on the voice front! I will take a bit of time tomorrow to split the script up into the individual characters and start sending them out. I've thought about releasing the first mission, but for some reason there is an issue that irks me with the taste of action you get in it, plus I have some last-minute additions to make. Testing, however, may be an option pretty soon. I dunno, there are just all these loose ends I'm tying up I feel like once they're addressed it'll be release time. I did get some valuable feedback much earlier in the project from Wiki. We could see how things go once I get voice stuff underway.

Potentially, perhaps. But if I still have work to do before the camp is ready to go, and I can get a decent portion of the voice stuff in there from helpful and responsive community members like you, then it won't necessarily hold up the release too much. There may be a couple of empty lines without voice in there, but I figure it's worth a try to get this done while I'm working on other stuff like intros/outros, and ensuring all the essential elements are in the missions like task hints, modules, weapon selection in Descriptions, etc. I initially planned to do this project without voice stuff, but thanks to those who have already participated, they proved that it's not that big an obstacle when you delegate properly and stay on top of people.

Cool, a sizable flurry of PMs have been sent out to a bunch of people. If I didn't reach out to you this week or this morning, and you want in, just post here or send me a PM! The campaign's release will really depend on how long it takes for me to get the voice acting done and included, first-iteration intros/outros are taking less time than I thought, it won't be hard to have something together for the beta release, but the full-voice work will make this a much stronger experience, so time is of the essence! Thanks to everyone who has been following, the project is nearly ready for you guys to jump into. Of course, once its out, the work will continue on updates and bug fixes, as well as the bonus SP scenarios I promised! Stay tuned.

All loading screens are complete and in-game. Need to address the Overview images and descriptions too. Also, I've rounded out MOST of the remainder of the script and transferred it to the individual missions, just need to script the radio messages now - and get voice acting underway for round 2. This is an official "public" request for volunteers for voice acting, there are a bunch of cameos I would like to give people the opportunity to be a part of the campaign. I will be reaching out to Laqueesha, KommieKat, and Krytosss and SavageCDN as well as the people KommieKat suggested earlier in this thread. New voice "cameos" (just a couple of lines max, should be very easy to record) include: Canadian Infantry (3 different soldiers), US 10th Mtn Division, US Artillery Pit, 2 NATO Apache Pilots (can be euro accent!), Ben (a sharpshooter on Bruce's US SOF team), Smitty (Rusty's intel sgt), and a couple others. Also have a couple main character voice scripts (substantial amount of lines) which still need to get done. I may do these myself, we'll see. Anyway, we are getting closer! At this rate, the Camp will be out in Early/Mid Dec.

You mean like Movie Day/Movie Night? I was wondering, do they affect performance at all? I have them in all of my LoK missions to add depth and texture that I think makes it look much better.

Hey Blackadder, I have not heard of other players having this experience -- it definitely sounds like an AI bug. Are you running only the mods in the required addons list for this mission when you play it? Sometimes other mods, especially stuff like ACE which I have never tested this Scenario in can have unexpected effects. Still, I'll be sure to look into this when I revisit the mission for updates. I have a new version in-place, and almost switched focus from my Campaign to doing an update, but I have switched back to full-speed ahead on the Campaign and will likely revisit this at a later date. Still, I haven't forgotten about this mission and will update it soon. Most of the issues I've read from players are things that are not necessarily bugs I can fix-- more engine/AI related gripes. Anyway, make sure only the specified addons are activated, try restarting, and if nothing works you could always un-PBO and move the unit outside of the TOC. Like I said, I haven't seen this myself, so it's tough to know what the cause may be. Perhaps an older version of the ToraBora island? Thanks for playing and posting, hopefully you can get this sorted out so you can enjoy the rest of the mission!

Mission 1 has all of these things, Missions 2 & 3 could be close if I have voice stuff. Patience though, my friends, we are getting close! I really truly appreciate the words of support guys, I think this is going to be a lot of fun for you guys to play when it's ready. In response to Col Stagler's observation -- I definitely didn't know what I was getting myself into with this project, but it's been such an awesome experience revisiting my game-making hankering. Although I love my job these days, my dream job has always been doing stuff like this, so I get the best of both worlds, I just wish there was more time in the day! Anyway, here are some more screens: From Mission 4 - Cat and Mouse - Exiting the Red Desert, as "Taz" an ANA Commando and "a ranger born in an Afghan's body," the 3rd Kandak is sent north to scout out the southern Panjwayi valley From Mission 12 - Today is Not Your Day - as Sgt. Dave, help create "white space" around your defenses atop Sperwan Ghar by doing stuff like raining .50 cal fire on this compound From Mission 13 - The Dragon's Back - the climax of the battle for Sperwan Ghar, one last hurrah with all the guys together on the same team From Mission 13 - Your comrades in Talon 26 got cut off while on patrol, you need to fight your way to them before they get overrun. Fortunately, you have artillery support from 10th Mtn Div's Comanche Co. From Mission 14 - Epilogue - Months later, it is time to rebuild. Explore the former AO and try to help the civilians reclaim their lives. From Mission 14 - I've recreated Firebases Sperwan Ghar and Masum Ghar based on what few photos I could find.

Thanks Wiki, here are some more screens. This time, from my rework of Mission 5 - The Notebook - stealthy recon night patrol.

Well, ask and ye shall receive. I did the final round of screen shot grabbing, the LoK gallery is now filled with shots from the next few missions. I also tried grabbing some movies from the intros I did, but the format from Fraps seems corrupted and is obnoxiously limited anyway suggestions of free alternatives could help see some trailers released. In the meantime, I'm going through each mission and trying to really finalize everything, things are going well and work on the intros/outros is going fast than expected, but still a lot of work ahead. Here are some screens from Mission 2 - Bingo Red One (As a private in the ANA's 3rd Kandak, participate in training exercises at Firebase Maholic and a combat patrol near the site of a deadly ambush on the Canadians)

There was an awesome feature on Operation Medusa and Rusty Bradley and Co.'s involvement in the Battle for Panjwayi on TV! National Geographic's Inside the Afghanistan War has some solid interviews and footage. Really surprised to see how close everything in the campaign has aligned with what is in the documentary - I'm on the right track in terms of fidelity to the story, good to see. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/inside-the-afghanistan-war/ http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/videos/facing-the-enemy/ Anyone else catch this? Pretty well-done documentary overall, but especially recommend this if you want to get pumped for the CAMP! EDIT: More video from Operation Medusa

Did you try doWatch, doTarget or doFire to force him to fire only at a specific spot or is that not working?

Normal mapping adjustments should be very easy for your to smooth out, especially if you're removing the ACR patches (which seem to remain in a lot of other unit addons, like ANA/ANP, for example) - just use the healing or clone tool in Ps ;)

Looks really fantastic, can't wait to give these pups a whirl and split a couple virtual wigs. EDIT: having trouble downloading them from armaholic at the moment, both mirrors are down. Updating a new version perhaps? I'll try again later.

Thanks a lot for the support GreigPil, I can see this is your first post, so the fact that it was to share that you enjoyed BoTB makes me happy! If you liked BoTB, I think you'll really like LoK.

Great news - this past weekend has been highly productive and I was able to get over the hump with Missions 2 and 5. Two missions I was kind of worried about are now two that I'm excited about. Mission 2 - Bingo Red One You play as a private in the Afghan National Army (ANA) undergoing training and qualification for the 3rd Kandak at Firebase Maholic. Two different training activities outlined in the book have been recreated in this mission - a shooting course involving moving to different points of cover and hitting a series of targets (complete with some badass training music), and a long-distance run, an exercise in patience and taking in the scenery. You'll run in full kit past a bustling marketplace and a few friendly vehicles, there to ensure no one dies of heat stroke. The dialogue still needs to be implemented but it will help set the stage. Mission 5 - The Notebook This one was originally going to be done by Damian, but school and social life got too hectic, so I've sort of picked up where he left off...well, I had to re-do a bunch of things using techniques I'm familiar with, but now the mission has been completely re-done and works from start to finish (with placeholder hints for dialogue), just need to add some more details. You'll get to rock a cool-looking night ops kit as Sgt. Bill (Rusty's 2nd-in-command) as you and medic Greg creep around at dusk. You have the option to pursue more information from a local Kuchi tribesman who was helpful in revealing the three possible enemy locations. Talking to the tribesman or clearing a specific one of these three locations opens up an optional objective to secure an IED in the area. When you have completed the recon mission, the perspective switches to Rusty as he and his team advance on a suspicious compound only to find a valuable piece of intel. At this point, in terms of mission structure, I only have a few details to finalize in a couple of missions. This means that the missions themselves are almost ready for beta release. The other substantial project would be Intros/Outros, which would be next on the list, and then of course, the voice stuff. Screenshots will be on the way fairly soon, maybe in the next day or two. I have a lot of progress to show -- Mission 2, Mission 5, Mission 12, Mission 13, and the Epilogue. My goal is to have this CAMP out as a beta before the end of the year, possibly sooner. It depends on how long it takes me to do these intros/outros and get the voice acting scripted, out, back in, and inserted into the game.

Glad to see you got support for this one in there so quickly! Downloading this addon and the updated Apoc now, can't wait to try. EDIT: WOW. Speechless, SAS-SBS Urban is awesome. This could seriously overtake my current obsession with McNools' Tier One Operators. Great work Massi!

Stunning! Excellent work cant wait to give these a go!

I am trying to back things up semi-regularly on Dropbox from now on, so I could always share those folders with others. I'd rather do my updates by development milestone-- so I'm on track to finally get the meat of all the briefings finished, I'll back er up then. As for giving the password to some faithful stewards, maybe I can advance things just a little bit more, that way the stewards could also serve as pre-beta testers.

Good stuff! You'll get more out of this if you read the book, either before (preferably) or after. Still working on the briefings, it's going to probably end up having taken about 12 hours to get everything in there. I also plan to be adding some extra details to the briefings like photographs. It's a good thing I'm tackling all briefing files at one time to ensure the story is cohesive, and I've read back through the book at least a half-dozen times now (though I'm sure I'll miss things that observant readers like you might end up pointing out). Once briefings are together, I can ensure the mission skeletons and tasks/objectives are working correctly, add and finalize the voice acting and dialogue script once and for all, and then work on my intros/outros. Finally, I will run an audit on the whole thing and it will be ready to go.

Update: I survived Hurricane Sandy, and although I've been working from home and checking on friends and loved ones, I've had time to work on getting together a final checklist of all the elements that need to be present for the beta, so I can rely on that plan. Mission 5 - The Notebook I also received some voice acting from SavageCDN, excited to get that in soon, sounds very convincing as a Canadian CSOR operator on a stealth mission. Finally, I got to spend the most of my time working on LoK focusing on the briefings. For the Epilogue "sandbox" I am trying to build renditions of the real-world firebases, but decent imagery of them is hard to come-by. I'm forced to refer to whatever can be made out in the background of a photo from a press release, but nonetheless, I feel like there will be authenticity throughout. Starting to think about how my modding obsession has come full-circle with this project.