ok guys times are hard.

**Quarath** · 03-09-2004 12:07 PM

I personally prefer to jump into TvT games more than coop but it depends. I mostly just have not had as much time for it as I used to.

**fr1j0l3** · 03-09-2004 12:25 PM

Hey now, you plucked me on sunday too santa!

**HSantal** · 03-09-2004 12:45 PM

Originally Posted by fr1j0l3

Hey now, you plucked me on sunday too santa!

I did? Was that you on the first map? Bellycrawling towards the shack?

I couldn't remember who that was, I was so excited......

**H-Hour** · 03-09-2004 03:56 PM

Sarc, Revan's missions were definitely a pleasent surprise and I've enjoyed playing some first-time insertions again after so long.

Rose brought up an interesting point a while ago and that was that there are so many missions on our servers, that even a large influx of new missions, like Revan's, doesn't make much of a dent in the monotony. I'd love to see some of the more stale missions removed from the server. Even if it was just a list of about 10 or so that were either broken or very boring, I think it might help.

**DigitalFX** · 03-18-2004 04:24 PM

Greetings, Gents.

An observation, from the Brand New Guy to TG.

Seems to me the biggest problem with missions was as covered earlier:

Not really new Terrain, but new missions on that Terrain. A sub pier is a sub pier is a sub pier, and forest is trees, and jungle is foggy, sure. But how it is defended, and set up, and the objectives make it all diferent.

I think a lot of the mod scripters out there are very good, with some Stellar. However, it's hard work, as we all know.

I heard last night from Luna that TG is having some kind of scripting class going on. I think that's a really good thing, and will greatly help the TG community.

WHAT I HAVE SEEN in Online COOP in general:

The problem with a lot of missions is that the objectives are simple, in story-style. Meaning Kill six tanks, and you are done. Raid the fort, get the POWs, and blow up a tank. So that there is no real kind of climax to the action of the story. It is just three sort of moderate peaks in the action.

Or, even worse, the action does not make sense. If you go to the big L shaped fort, to rescue POWs, and blow out a light, all hell should break loose, with snipers in the towers, and tanks running around. But often times, this does not happen. Instead, light goes out, and BG on the other side of the fort are walking around, like nothing happened. If you break stealth, an unsupressed gunshot can be heard a long ways off in the quiet night.
The better missions make this a reality.

If you have no effect on the game world, or scenario, sniping out 2 walkers in a patrol at long range becomes a firing range exercise. Make it so that the targets have to be shot Simultaneously, IN THE HEAD, or one of them screams, raising the alarm in the fort. Thus you got real skill going on, not "Okay, let's take em!", pop pop, ho hum, move on. I am not saying that current teams are unskilled, just that missions need to be more dependent on teamwork, covering arcs, and decision making by the LT, or Chief.

If you decide to bag a few guards, it should be a hard decision, "Will this one action to get these two targets blow the mission?"

Not: "ok, we walk the walls, popping every pair as we go", la la la. That stuff goes on, on Ubi.com, and it seems like TG has a higher standard of excellence.

For real, we are simulating 5 or 6 Operators, taking out a fortress of 50, or more. Make it so that ANY Mistakes will cost, in time, people, or the entire mission.

Missions should be scripted so that a team should be able to create a diversion, summoning a good portion of the forces on the map to thier location, so that the Main assault team can have a lot less guys to deal with on entry point to whatever facility is being raided. But the diversion team has to be good, accurate, and fast, or all three combined, or they will get toasted, before pulling out.

Some of the best Missions by far that I have played in are Apha Squad missions, I found those to be really, really good. But I have not played a lot of the TG missions yet. I noly got here a few days ago. So I can't really say. But what I have seen so far are really tough, and I like it that way.

But again, something like those mission designs takes time, dedication, and attention to detail.,,but it is worth it.

I recall on an Alpha Squad designed mission i recently played on ubi.com when =MS2=Grey Ghost says, "Here.. this is what a land mine looks like, step on it, and you are dead." But it's only a tuft of grass, surrounded by black, and it looks almost exactly like EVERY OTHER TUFT OF GRASS, surrounded by black spots on the deck. Jesus God. "Ok, Guy you take point, I walk in your steps." But he knew what he was doing, and we made it in, made some mistakes, got the POWs, and made it out. Till the new guy woke up a ZSU, at the extract site. Mission failure, 100 yds from extraction.

Seems to me, that if scripters put in more to the scenario/mission than go here.. blow up this, it's better. Have some missions with new objectives as you go...and script it so that there are multiple things going on, from the base mission, like the enemy is reinforced by either Tanks, or Infantry, or both. Not always the same path, or units, or from the same direction.

Or a primary goal will now have secondary goals attached to it:
Like Capture the officer in the Barracks becomes... on arrival, he has been moved, go to a new location. The Intel data file is now on a jeep, racing out of the fort, stop it. You didn't cover the fortress exits? Too damn bad, you lose, go home, and explain it to the Admiral.

Always make it so that the team runs out of time, or options. If you have 6 hours to snipe out every Badguy on the map with a SOCOM, or SSD type weapons, some teams will take that time. And it's realistic, in a real world sense. but as for gameplay.. way too long.

I suggest make many missions like an action half hour or hour TV show, Doesn't have to be a half hour long gunfight, but have the most excitement at the end.

The team has to be stealthy, and silent, but on their toes, and not napping. And if it breaks loose, they have to be A COORDINATED TEAM, or they all get whacked.

This is why, a year later, Stone Bell is such a good, fun mission for me. You got 5 guys to hold off an army, and a short as hell time to get it together, and get set up, and go. With a mix of AT for the tanks on the road, Long range sniping, Guys holding the top, and the flanks of the base, plus the new guy banging away with a .50 in the general area of the rail bridge next to his NATO brethren, Everyone is praying to god, but trusting their weapons that the rest of the team can hold then tanks at the Railbridge E-W line or the NATO HQ is basically gonna get wasted. That's an action movie, right there.

And to me, that's what these games are all about. I can play that mission 6 times in a night, and not get bored, because it is always different, depending on where you engage, who goes down, what was not covered, and who hits what BG units where. Lots of action, excitement, the team wasting tanks, tanks wasting you, and over it all a .50 going to town, backed up by small arms fire from a reinfoced company.

Sure you can do a mission, entirely silent. And the best teams do. But it is more of a suspense/thriller genre experience that way. So while the quiet sniper is sniping, everyone else is going "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."

In addition, I see the need for:
Give the bad guys better AI, or patrol routes, or coordination.

Along with this, the eye and ear candy of sound effects, helos, tanks, jets, etc. being used on maps.

I think of each mission I design as a TV show, with the players as the stars, not just "kill the guy in the cave, then kill the guys in the camp, then get out of dodge." 1,2,3.

But again, It's best if the same mission, once played, could be done all kinds of ways. If the mission has time pressure, you got to choose carefully. Maybe sometimes, if you delay, they finish the interrogation of POWS, and shoot them in the head. Oh well. Or you might have the full half hour or hour.

Or you might normally have the half hour but you break stealth, and goodbye captives, and the whole town is alert, plus tanks. Or you have an hour to do the deed, but if you take longer than a half hour, it gets harder, when the place is reinforced by Tanks, or a company of infantry.

Or the guy gets moved in half an hour, and if you smoke the jeep in the convoy he is in, you fail.

Or objectives get changed. What was blow up a few tanks, becomes stop the tank army from crossing by super accurate one shot one kill AT fire, or blowing the bridge with demo. Make multiple ways for the team to do the dirty deed...I think HX5, has done that, somewhat so you can use different weapons, charges or demo to do different things.

To quote my youngest team member "It really sucks when both the demo guys get shot 5 minutes into the mission."

Sadly, you can't have everything.

If TG ever serves BHD/TFG, I am there, and will be actively supporting it, because I know it's scripting. Still just in the baby steps stage of GR scripting, at this point...but I am learning.

Anyway, that's my .02 Credits

**|SOG| Vir2L** · 03-18-2004 05:17 PM

*golf clap*

I second that motion. =)

A ton of great ideas in your post. I also think that those Alpha Mission have to be some of the most realistic feeling missions I have played. Teams are forced to use teamwork, and thats what i think is missing from most games these days (TacGamers exempt :P).

I'll quote Chavez on this... "We must bring an end to scripting that allows you to hammer down a couple of tangos with everything from SD to OICW nades, while their teammates 300 meters away still keep on playing cards." - Chavez_AS

I wish more scriptors had this in mind when creating their missions. I have grown sick of missions (and players) that have no strategy involved. A lot of people play missions as if it were on firefight, so whats the point of even playing missions, I ask? Sometimes I wonder about people. If thats your style of play, go play Counterstrike or Desert Combat, I'm sure you'll get more kills there!

Anyway..... I encourage all scriptors to push the limits of normal, not just throw some tangos on a map and call it a mission.

Great thread.

**H-Hour** · 03-18-2004 06:05 PM

You've got a lot of great ideas there and I'd love to see them implemented, but in my opinion most of them can't be done realistically in GR and probably won't even be done well in GR2.

I think of each mission I design as a TV show, with the players as the stars, not just "kill the guy in the cave, then kill the guys in the camp, then get out of dodge." 1,2,3.

The problem with looking at it this way is the restriction on the player. Back in the good ol' Nintendo days, it was very evident that games were built around puzzles. A big part of gaming was looking at the spinning chain of death and the guy shooting fireballs at even intervals and timing your jump to fall right in the open window so you didn't get killed. There was a singular way to solve the puzzle and move through the level.

As we've seen games develop, we've seen these puzzles evolve, and though they don't seem as present in many games today, they are still the basis for most gaming. Our attempts at realism in games is largely an attempt to place these puzzles in a context from which the player is required to draw on real-life knowledge. When a game can successfully guide the player on a natural series of events without forcing the player to analyze his situation from a gaming perspective, the player begins to feel he is experiencing the game realistically, and he feels more free to respond naturally.

This is called suspension of disbelief and in many ways Ghost Recon succeeds in this. In many ways it doesn't.

This is a tough concept to grasp and it is something I'm learning more about all the time.

Now, back to making my point. When missions are scripted from the standpoint of a TV show, they are scripted to restrict the player's decisions to a chronological series of events.

As mission scripters, we always want the player to play the mission how we intended, but one thing you learn quickly when watching others play your mission is that they will invariably find a way around your setup. If you have set up a path for them, the first thing they will learn is to go around and come at it from a different angle. More often then not, this forces the player out of their suspension of disbelief. They begin playing against the game's systems instead of playing against an OpFor.

To a certain extent, this is unavoidable. In all cases with GR, the player will always be manipulating the weak points of the AI, such as drawing them to obvious chokepoints and watching the bodies pile up. Until we advance our gaming AI systems to appropriately respond to an extremely wide range of actions, we will always run into "exploits" of their stupidity.

As mission scripters, though, we can set up our games to maximize the suspension of disbelief and open up the player's choices in-game. This, of course, leads to its own problems, and we will always have to balance somewhere between providing specific, scripted events to the player and providing the player with enough rope to have fun with.

This is why I tend to prefer missions that don't approach things the way you describe. I prefer to be rewarded for thinking well on my own, as opposed to having to "guess" what the mission scripter wanted me to think.

Some of the best Missions by far that I have played in are Apha Squad missions, I found those to be really, really good.

The Alpha missions are terrific missions, designed specifically for tournament play. They are challenging and do a good job of putting the player into a stealth role.

For two reasons, though, they fail to provide me with much entertainment for very long. The first is because of the singularity of the gameplay. Those missions require you to make specific decisions and require you to play them in a specific way. The second is that they lose their replayability upon defeat. Once you learn how to beat an Alpha mission, you beat it the same way, every time, with no problems.

Those missions are set up with considerably more direct and clear puzzles, and once you learn when to jump through the "fireball and death chain" at the right time, you can do it every time.

As tournament missions, they are great missions because the player inserts with the intention of playing the game functions. On a coop server where the missions will be played several times, however, they tend to get boring quickly once everyone knows how to beat them.

Like Capture the officer in the Barracks becomes... on arrival, he has been moved, go to a new location. The Intel data file is now on a jeep, racing out of the fort, stop it. You didn't cover the fortress exits? Too damn bad, you lose, go home, and explain it to the Admiral.

I'd love to find a good system for relaying this information to the squad in-game, but techniques I have seen so far are difficult to work with. The information on the text displays that come up is gone quickly, with no way for the player to reference it once it's gone. If only there were a message log the player could access, things would be better.

But what usually ends up happening is a text box comes up saying "The officer is leaving in a jeep." Meanwhile, most of the squad is concentrating on not dying. The message is gone and everyone says, "What did that say? Something about an officer and a jeep?" and a few minutes later the game ends. At that point, everyone just curses the mission scripter for being too vague.

It IS a game, and people like to be given a chance to understand the game functions so they can respond adequately. A player inserts into any mission with the collective knowledge of every other mission they play. They come in with a general idea of how the game works, what is possible in it and what is not. In this regard, the scripter has to be wary of adding in new functionalities or reactions the player is not aware of.

When the player fails a mission or dies because of something he did not know on insertion and assumed the game could not do, it is the scripter's fault. This is not to say that scripters should never try to extend what can happen in a game, but to say that the player must be given a chance to learn that this can happen.

The commercial game is given the luxury of being an entirely new game and system, so players come into it expecting to learn what can and can not happen. Most players approach a mod, however, with a body of knowledge about the games functions. This needs to be taken into account.

The team has to be stealthy, and silent, but on their toes, and not napping. And if it breaks loose, they have to be A COORDINATED TEAM, or they all get whacked.

Almost all TG missions are much more difficult then the stock missions. They don't always incorporate the features you talk about, but teamwork is much more integral to a mission's success. Your six is more likely to get shot off and your flanks aren't nearly as safe as in the stock missions.

Make multiple ways for the team to do the dirty deed...

I agree with that completely, and I think we're seeing more and more missions that work that way.

Anyway, great post. A lot of good points you brought up. I tend to fall on a little different side of things, though. Where you are looking for more complete and top-notch missions, I am looking for more just plain good missions. My reasoning behind that is that in the time it takes to make one top-notch mission, you can generally make five good missions. In the long run, I find that the five good missions provide more consistent and fun gameplay then the one top-notch mission.

**luna** · 03-18-2004 11:26 PM

Out of curiosity, have you gotten to play the TG3 missions yet? I remember one point in a mission Karma was quoted as saying "You have to love it when you go to drop a couple of tangos, you miss one, then suddenly alarms are sounding and you KNOW all hell is about to break loose." I know at least some of those are scripted so that if you don't take down the guys you engage, they alert other guys or worse, call in tank support.

**jex** · 03-19-2004 12:07 PM

Going to the point about shooting down patrols is it possible to have each patrol given a certain amount of time (say 5 seconds) for when they are engaged to when they are killed. If the players take more than 5 seconds it is assumed that the enemy have got on the radio and then you can vector in patrols to deal with them?

**en4rcment** · 03-19-2004 12:20 PM

Originally Posted by jex

Going to the point about shooting down patrols is it possible to have each patrol given a certain amount of time (say 5 seconds) for when they are engaged to when they are killed. If the players take more than 5 seconds it is assumed that the enemy have got on the radio and then you can vector in patrols to deal with them?

In Ghost Recon?

Sure it is possible, but it takes ALOT of scripting. Each patrol would need their own timer and probably a counter. Then you would need tons of trigger plans for reaction teams.

Bringing the AI to the precise spot that you need them is the most difficult part of scripting for GR. Lately I have found that longer/varied patrol paths keep the player guessing and are more realistic. However, how will I know where the player is going to encounter the patrol? How do I know where to send the reaction teams?

I would more likely have more forces go to reinforce the objective sites, therefore if a team took too long to drop a patrol, they would have more patrols protecting the hostage/protecting the demo site/safeguarding the intel...etc

**=Sarc=** · 03-19-2004 01:19 PM

There are some cool things that can be done with scripting and it takes a lot of it. Some things can be made better like landmines. It can be done but using a decal (black spot on the ground that looks like a circle of mud) can be frustrating to the player. It's not practical to script in randomly so you play it once and never walk in that area again. I think at this point, the best way to enhance missions is adding in more things the scripters can put into a mission like landmine objects. It makes it easier for the scripter to create more interesting and random missions.

One thing that should be done and we never really do it enough is scripting in cross-patrol communications. I've seen some stock missions do that where if one platoon goes down then the remaining enemies do something. The original missions keep things generalized so there isn't so much scripting required (ie. using platoons to respond instead of individual teams).

**H-Hour** · 03-19-2004 05:02 PM

One thing I would love to see in GR 2 is a tier system of alertness that you could trigger things with. It would be great if you could script in so that if 2 patrols go down the entire enemy force is bumped up one alertness tier, or if a bridge is blown, a position overrun, etc. Then, you could script in things to happen based on various tiers - ie, when they reach tier 2 they bunker down in more defendable positions, tier 3 they call in reinforcements, tier 4 they retreat taking mission critical info with them. This would allow for easier scripting of across the board reactions to player presence.

Another thing I'd really like to see is a PinpointThreat and RespondToThreat response that you could trigger in. The way it'd work is you could script in whether a patrol that has been engaged relays the threat to the rest of the enemy force. Then, with RespondToThreat you could set up reaction forces that would dynamically move to search out the area where the patrol called in the threat. In this way you could script enemy responses realistically, so that you don't have to guess where the player is going to be.

You could also use these PinpointThreat and RespondToThreat triggers to set up counter attacks if the player overruns a significant enemy position or threatens an important installation.

**phyllis** · 03-19-2004 06:30 PM

Originally Posted by eternal

I am almost ready to start playing GR again (just to get phyllis to quite bugging me) so I hope you guys have all kinds of new content for me to die from.

Dude...I'm gonna start tormenting you...have all my quaker buddies call and ask if your mission is done if you don't move along...I'm gettin' impatient man

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