SEAL Team campaign manuscript

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Snake_Man

SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Snake_Man » 2005-10-28 00:07:02

SEAL Team campaign manuscript is the topic here. I'd like to do nice campaign in the theme of original SEAL Team (c) Electronic Arts game.

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That was one legendary game indeed.

My campaigns idea would be that you lead the SEAL Team in Vietnam War (VTE, gee whiz), you basically are located in the base HQ from where you get briefed and sent into a mission. Each missions outcome would always have direct results to the next mission. For example, you are sent to a "Recon" mission, you go out and find a juicy NVA base, you go back to base quietly and for the next mission you get "Assault" mission where the target is this NVA base.

The campaign would have freedom for the player, for example if he feels that the mission is going haywire, he could call in extraction to home base at any time without completing any objectives. This would just result in the next mission like the same mission again or something perhaps more easier, etc. The missions would be rotated and repeated until this goal was met. The missions would have the .. uhm "dynamic" design that if you capture "LZ-Xray" in mission one, then its on friendly hands on mission two etc. The campaign would remember what has happened before and it would task next mission accordingly.

The whole campaign goal would be to kill X amount of enemies, or to neutralize/capture X amount of objectives... or pretty much anything we can think of.

Now I would like to hear all kinds of mission ideas, especially how the stuff would work like first going to recon mission and next one would be the assault, how would that play out. All ideas, suggestions and comments are very welcome. Lets make this one kick ass campaign before editing has even started.

Youtube links: Let's Play SealTeam (old PC game), SealTeam (old PC game).

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-10-30 09:39:50

This is something upon which I've been working off and on since the very first Nam Pack. The 'Aha!' was when I was switching back and forth between playing X-Com: UFO Defense and Seal Team on an old 486 late at night, and realied that the two could be combined rather well. Of course, creating an X-Com scale game with FPS detail has proven to be a bit tough, so I'm all for making a campaign mainly inspired by Seal Team, with a few notable differences:

In Seal Team, the player was the point man of a platoon, and had to embark on missions given by his commander. The amount of planning he could do was limited to the armament and selection of team members. I would like to see the player as the platoon leader, with the ability to execute missions based on intelligence and world events.

In Seal Team, you were fed linear, canned missions. Since the game was made from an open ended engine, we got lots of missions in different environments, leading to a good amount of replayability. Still, with OFP's power and flexibility, I'd like to see semi randomized missions.

Seal Team spanned four six month tours with a number of missions each. I'd like a shorter, focused campaign.


I've been heavily into SEAL history for the last three years, having amassed a good amount of books and even going so far as to collect replicas of most of the SEAL weapons from the war. There are some really interesting bits of info about the SEALs which made them different from any of the US forces during the war, which I think should be exploited in any campaign:

-SEALs could pretty much do whatever they wanted in their area of operations. The platoon leader didn't have to answer to anyone except the naval special warfare commanders, and then usually just to give info on how well his platoon was doing. The navy didn't care exactly what was happening on land as long as someone was keeping the peace and making things safe for their PBR's.
-SEALs could plan and execute a mission on the same night, with whatever support they needed, whenever they could arrange it. Other forces had to submit everything through the chain of command which could take a long time and expose operations to leaks. Seals didn't have red tape.
-SEALs had a crazy amount of firepower and experimental weapons. Other special forces units also got to scrounge weaponry, but the SEALs had special made experimental weapons from the China lake facility, and lots of other weaponry that they were lent. Notables: Door gunner M60's with the ammo can on a rucksack frame, silenced shotgun shells, fully automatic shotguns, 4 shot pump action 40mm grenade launchers, the classic M63a stoner light machine gun, .50 cal sniper rifles, silenced M21's, 9mm silenced 'hush puppy' pistols.
-SEALs had a lot of friends. While army special forces and lurps usually had to go through a slow chain of command to get their help, SEALs could just ask navy seawolf gunship teams, army Mike forces, river rats, and even navy jets for a favor here or there and they'd get it. Everyone knew the SEALs would help them out if they were in trouble, so they were willing to give a little back.
-SEALs could often operate wherever they wanted in country, as long as it was approved. SEALs were known to spend a month here and there all over IV corps in pursuit of VC. On one occasion a detachment operated from a remote Army SF base up in the 7 mountains region, pulled off some good operations, and got to test out their .50 cal sniper rifle.
-SEALs fought heavily during the Tet offensive, especially in the city of Chau Doc (featured in the 7 mountains map). Urban fighting is fun, especially when you're packing SEAL firepower. SEALs were usually on the winning side, rather than the losing side during Tet.
-SEALs came out on top in pretty much every engagement they were a part of during Vietnam. Even if they didn't complete their objective, they almost always returned home and shot up a lot of bad guys in the process.
-SEALs had a mainly offensive role during the war. While other forces were out gathering intelligence for larger forces, defending sectors, and conducting fruitless sweeps, the SEALs struck at the infrastructure of the VC in the delta, hitting them at their bases, on their supply trails, and in their homes.
-SEALs often tried to capture their foes rather than kill, for living prisoners often give up valuable information. Capturing enemies in games in challenging, but in this case, could be very rewarding.

Most games portray the Vietnam war in a negative light. While there's often a lot of fighting going on, the player's forces are usually on the crappy side of events, getting harassed and attacked by the enemy and barely saving their skin each time. With the SEALs, we can create a game that gives the player a more positive experience: Fighting the enemy and being successful while causing him great hardship and living to tell about it. The player could plan and execute his own operations rather than being fed the "Perform this difficult mission for our greater good" drivel in most vietnam games. The player would have access to an exciting variety of weapons and a bewildering array of support.

I've also developed a neat set of scripts which merge Toadlife's handsignal command system that he used in Combat Patrol with the Fwatch utility, which makes giving commands to your seals much more silent and more like Seal Team than ofp's jarring command system.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by charon » 2005-10-30 13:45:19

The random mission factor and the direct influence of previous mission results
on future missions is something that i think is really exciting as it gives you
a more coherent gameplay experience between those individual missions.
These experimental weapons thecaptain_ps is talking about could be fun
to implement. If you need a little help with custom scripts for the missions let me know ;-)
I have been working on improved chopper landing scripts (the standard ofp chopper landing behaviour sucks) and customizable extraction scripts.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Polish_GI » 2005-10-30 15:31:14

SEAL Team campaign manuscript is the topic here. I'd like to do nice campaign in the theme of original SEAL Team (c) Electronic Arts game.

That was one legendary game indeed.
Wow, I have not seen this game in some time...  Such a cool game back then...

I am surprised that the .50 Cal Sniper Rifle made it out in the Vietnam War, this could get interesting... Is there any info on it, is it similar to the Barret .50 Cal.?
Last edited by Polish_GI on 1970-01-01 00:00:00, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-10-30 21:56:21

The china lake naval weapons facility website has some pictures of some of the weapons they cooked up for the seals. My favorite is the silenced pistol with the scope. ;)

http://web.archive.org/web/199706200634 ... cial1.html

Top to bottom: the .50 cal sniper rifle, hush puppy w/ scope, M16A1 w/ M203, XM177E2, ithaca 37 with duckbill (spreads shot horizontally), Remington 7188? (automatic), remington 1100 OR 7188 (unsure), High Standard shotgun. Left: EX-41 pump action 40mm, right: Car-15 w/ Xm148 launcher.

http://web.archive.org/web/200301181211 ... cial2.html

Top to bottom: M60D System 23 "Death machine", unsure, M63a stoner lmg, XM177E2, AR-15 with grappling hook attachment, smoke grenades

The .50 cal looks quite unique, and as I don't know the model number or manufacturer, I haven't been able to find it in any other pictures. As far as I know, the rifle was bolt action. Not too useful in jungle combat where iron sights were king, but over long ranges or in mountainous regions, it gave some good long range firepower. :)

Snake_Man

Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Snake_Man » 2005-10-31 03:03:46

Excellent feedback everyone.

And now about the missions itself. I had in mind that first the campaign has a cutscene, after that it would be automatically thrown into the first specific mission, after this first mission it would go according to the players actions what ever those might be.

So what would this first mission be to open up the campaign?

I was thinking that in the missions return to base you have a chance to select return to FARP or similar temporary HQ on the field, this would be closer to the action and that way ... more dangerous. There would have to be some sort of "point" of doing this, perhaps to cut the "boring" helo insertion or similar, perhaps to get more intel from the locals or something when you hang around in the neighborhood, dunno. Post your ideas.

Missions list, so what kind of missions we want to include, at least I can think of:
Recon
Assault
Ambush
Search & Destroy
Defend?
Assassination
Snatch/Capture

Anything else coming to mind?

In the campaign structure we have 7 possible endings which can be rotated through different missions, if we slam there cutscene in between (transparent or not) we can add as many more 7 endings as we want. Only bad thing about this system is that one mission types briefings TEXT would always be the same, sure markers and stuff on the map would always move according to the campaign proceedings, but text is always generic. We could of course add variations of the missions with only edits to briefings, but I frankly think its not worth the effort might just cause too much problems in the mission structure. But we'll see.
If you need a little help with custom scripts for the missions let me know
Defintely all help is welcome. Do you happen to have done anykind of scripts to include group movement and contact reporting back to the HQ so to speak?

I would like to have a script that spawns and/or sends a NVA recon team into the field to look for US forces, when they find, they kind of lay low and report back to HQ to request full infantry squad assault force to the position. Perhaps the recon team would track the enemy contact on distance or so. But basically just to look for contact and then report back to HQ.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Polish_GI » 2005-10-31 04:05:38

Here are some ideas...

Direct Action - short duration attacks
Direct Action - Seize/Capture/Recover or destroy enemy weapons & information
Direct Action - Recover designated personnel / material
Foreign Internal Defense - used to organize, assist and train military/national forces of foreign governments
Special Recon - activities to monitor as much of the enemy's movement/operations as possible
Sabotage - communication centers
Training / advising military forces
Combat Patrol
Demolition
Destroy NVA armor
Intelligence Gathering - locate enemy bases/monitor movement
Knock out radar / AA unit
Locate / Clear Landing Zone
Rescue Air America Unit
Bodyguard
Rescue POWs
Search & Rescue
Setup Radio Fire Control

Thing to remember is that with Special Ops Teams, there was a 90% chance of locating the enemy target whereas with a general Army patrol, there is a 90% chance that the enemy will not even be encountered.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-11-03 06:12:49

Nice mission ideas, Polish.

Here's how I would set up the game:

The player would be a SEAL Lt. sending his platoon to the 7 Mountains region for the month of January, 1967 to take down a VC warlord who's terrorizing the locals. (or, some other uber-objective that could be completed by doing a single action, such as taking out a base or killing/capturing a single person). The player would plan and execute a month's worth of missions, moving his platoon to different bases in the region and taking on lots of VC. While the ultimate goal would be to track down and neutralize the warlord, the player could also play the campaign for a full 30 days (up until the tet offensive), or have it ended early due to a poor score.

We'd cycle the game between a 'base' mission and the actual game missions. During the base missions, the player can move around the base and interact with the people and objects there. Each building would have a special function, such as planning & starting missions at the TOC, 'resting' for 6+ hours at your quarters, checking on the status of seals at the barracks, testing weapons and equipment at the general stores and shooting range, reoutfitting choppers at the chopper pad, talk to characters at the bar, etc. The player could also choose to move his platoon to a new base if the opportunitypresents itself (IE, move to a small SF base closer to the action, etc).

When planning a mission at the TOC, the player selects a piece of intel on the map and chooses insertion & extraction method and locations. All of the enemy base locations, caches, bunkers, etc as well as mission locations and insert/extract points would have to be preplaced by the campaign designers beforehand.

The enemies and objectives would be dependent on the state of the 'war', and set according to the bases and enemy strength in each region. We don't need to model the actual movement of enemies and friendlies from spot to spot, just plop down invisible objects and move them around in the background to keep track of what is where. In a heavily trafficked region near the cambodian border, for example, there would be a heck of a lot of VC and NVA, while some areas of the swamp might just have local VC militia and squads of VC moving through.

When the mission moves from the base mission to the actual missions, we could use the campaign branching trick outlined by snakeman. Dividing the map into five sectors with preplaced villagers, enemy bases, etc, and then into seven main 'objectives'. The extra two Example: Player sets up a mission to do a patrol in the mountain region. The game loads an invisible cutscene for the mountain region, then picks the patrol objective. We can have a patrol mission briefing with some basic objectives listed. The briefings could be fairly simple, as seal briefings usually were, and we can limit them to just the first page. We would need to set up a lot of mission locations (various forests, rice paddies, swamp bits, islands, villages) each with some options for inserting and extracting and support.

-The outro to the base mission would show the SEALs leaving the base in their insertion vehicle.
-The intro to each mission would show the players en route to the mission location in their vehicle.
-The briefing would show objectives.
-Each mission would start with the SEALs in their vehicle, inserting into the mission.
-Once the seals make it to their extraction vehicle, an outro cutscene would be played showing the SEALs leaving.
-The debrief would show the mission score, objectives.
-The intro to the base mission would show the seals arriving after their mission in their vehicle.
-Each of these cutscenes would be 3-5 seconds long.

We could limit the game to seven main objectives, while still having a lot of freedom in individual missions:

Patrol - Look for signs of enemy, engage enemies in area, gather intel
Destroy - Take out a specific item, such as an enemy weapons cache, factory, .50 cal gun or bunker
Snatch - Capture a specific enemy (tax collector, vc cadre, etc)
Ambush - Go to a location and wait for enemies, then neutralize as many as possible
Assault - Attack an enemy held location and inflict maximum damage and casualties
Defend - VC in the wire! Hold out for as long as possible...
Recover (POW's, downed crews, documents)

For support, the seals would have a Mobile Support Team with LSSC's, PBR's, landing craft, etc, and a detachment of huey Seawolf gunships.

Each day, the score of all missions and events would be totaled up. Each event in the game would rate a different score, such as capturing or killing enemy (positive!), or having team members wounded or killed (negative :(). New weapons or equipment, money for bribes and intel, and extra support options and the like can be requested by asking command, but requests will be granted if the player doesn't ask for too much, too often and if their score is high. This would basically be a simple, hidden economy. Positive scores would result in medals, citations and the like, while too many negative scores could result in the player being transferred and the game ending.

Intel would be gathered by spending a budget on the Naval Intelligence Liason Officer (NILO) to bribe contacts, gathering intel in the field, or capturing and interrogating enemies. Intel would show up as markers on the map.


I caa make a test mission of how this all would work and upload it for you guys to check out. :)

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-11-03 06:35:50

Oh, something I forgot:

The campaign would be ended when the player tracks down the final location of the warlord and then sets up a mission to take him out. The player would be able to choose when to undertake the mission, but once he decided to do it, it would be the end of the campaign, win or lose. IE, if they capture or kill the warlord, it's game over in a good way, and the enemy activity is severely hampered. If they fumble the mission, the warlord retreats into hiding and they lose the chance to get him, and are rotated out. A lot of non-linear games lack a good, solid 'ending', and I think this would add a lot ot the game instead of the normal "play until the time limit or play until you get bored."

Also, I didn't mention a few things:
-Team member and vehicle status would be persistent between missions. If a vehicle is shot up or destroyed, or a team member killed or wounded, it would take time to get a replacement (if at all), or repair/heal the original.
-The player could easily just keep "resting" at his quarters until whatever it is is fixed.
-Multiple missions could be undertaken per day, team member fatigue nonwithstanding.
-Once a player starts a mission from the TOC, the time would be "zapped" to the time of the mission.
-Enemies and NPC's could be changed slightly for each part of the day (Morning, middle of the day, evening, middle of the night) and activated with the AI on Demand system
-The player would need to be the Officer In Charge (but not necessarily pointman) on each mission.
-The player can extract at any time during the missions, in case he gets cold feet or if things go bad in a hurry.
-The campaign would take place entirely on the 7 Mountains map. We can make other campaigns on other maps if we'd like.
-If the map is divided into only 5 "sectors" for missions, each day can have up to two "special" missions that only take place on that day, making a total of seven links from the base mission. Even though we'd have a lot, only a few would be activated during each campaign.

Each base mission would turn over to the next mission every day, so the as-completed campaign list would show "January 7, 1967"; "January 8, 1967"; "Patrol Mission"; "January 9, 1967"; "Patrol Mission"; "Ambush Mission"; and so on.

Script suggestions:
Grouplink for enemy AI and communication within missions
AI on Demand for activating/deactivating NPC's
General barron/The Captain's Crazy Fwatch Handsignal System for controlling your squad members during the missions.

The whole reason for this semi-dynamic system is to let the player feel like they actual are a commander making meaningful decisions, instead of just playing someone else's too easy or too hard missions. This way, a player who feels like they can take on an entire base singlehandedly can if they'd like. Difficulty issues, instead of being an issue with the campaign, are now choices that the player has to make. If they screw up, it's their own fault for choosing to do a certain mission instead of the campaign designer's fault for making an impossible mission. Of course, the reason to end the campaign with a grand finale mission is to end the campaign on an exciting note, rather than just letting the player get bored and stop playing.

As to length of the campaign, I'd say a player could make it as long or as short as they'd like, playing missions very often or only when something important happened. We could also make a test campaign only 7 or 14 days in length, to get our feet wet.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Hawkins » 2005-11-03 12:38:19

Very nice information here. Cap, I've been dying to try out your SEAL campaign for years now. I would be very happy if you made that test mission you talked about to see how it all would work in-game. :) So I say go for it.

I was once making a similiar thing for SF/SOG troops. It didn't get far, as I didn't have the required knowloedge or time needed to make it then. Now, I just might have the time, and I have the skills. Also, I've been away from the mission making scene for too long, so making something like this might be a good idea. But, the time issue might kick me in the ass once again because of RL job and stuff, but it's worth a shot.

I'm gonna try and get that SEAL/UDT ops book that was mentioned in the BIS forums thread started by Dr. Strangelove. It sounds like an interesting book to read.
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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by DrStrangelove » 2005-11-04 15:23:54

Hi there.

The captain was so kind as to lead me here, to take part in this pretty interesting discussion (my seal missions thread on the bis forums is pretty much dead i think).

1.) So, this is about a campaign then ? How about using that 'dynamic' misson concept , where you can start all kinds of missions in 1 session ? I think that would be better for multiplayer, since a campagin can't be played online. (is it possible in ArmA ?)

2.) Once ArmA is out, i plan to write an AI which works with VC/NVA groups and civilians to create a living environment for seal missions. Villages, hidden caches and VC bases are connected like an info / supply network and are frequented by their appropiate groups - villagers, local vc and regular vc/nva groups.

The typical supply chain would be:

(villagers --> are recruited/ join --> local vc --> build up food caches for --> VC /NVA group --> defend their base & search for west side targets)

It`ll be up to the player(s) to strike at a certain point of the network (identify a vc villager, find a hidden cache or find vc tunnel exits) and then to gain info on other 'network knots' (positions of other caches/bases). Striking at these targets again reveals more and more info on more targets. That goes on until the AI either gives up or is completely destroyed.

3.) I'm not sure if this system would work for good missions or if it gets boring after a while. maybe somethng is missing ?

The main question is: will the player realize such an AI system is working in the background at all ? Or is it not worth calculating & simulating everything from villages to bases ? Can a player have a good fight just by spawning random targets ?

I'm still thinking. :o

4.) Some ideas/notes i made recently:

Mission types
Patrol (seals need to check some coords)
Recon (seals need more info on reported activities)
Observe (seals need to find a known target and report its position for a fire mission)
Check (seals need to return to a target that was hit to find out real amount of damage)
Snatch (seals go out on a body snatch mission)
Ambush (seals try to catch bad guys in an ambush position)
Recover (seals are to search a target area for enemy codebooks,documents,equipment, maps)
Search&Destroy (seals need to find a target & do as much damage as possible)

Random mission interrupts (seals get new orders from HQ during mission)
Rescue (seal need to get to the pos of a downed pilot / lost marines to secure the perimeter while he's recovered)
Hunt (seals get info on an escaped vc agent in their vicinity. if that guy gets away important info is given to the enemy)
Defend (seals need to get back to base and defend it against a large enemy force. every man is important there)
Escape (seal vehicle was spotted & damaged during insertion/extraction. advantage of surprise is gone, now they need to get back to base alive)

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-11-04 21:51:54

To Dr Strangelove:

1) This would be structured like a campaign with separated missions to help get around OFP's clunky save system and practical object counts. The mission will not be linear or branching linear, however, but allow an almost unlimited number of mission setups to be played. I'm focusing on single player at the moment, but MP is always an option for later. We're planning to get the campaign done before AA is released, and any planning for ARMA would be for a separate project at a later date.

2) This AI could easily be written in normal OFP. ;)

3) The "will players notice?" is always a big gamble. If the systems are too transparent, then players won't see any rhyme or reason to what's going on, and events will just seem random anyway. Originally I planned a massive transparent enemy system, but in the end I've settled on one which just "supposes" what the enemy are doing in the background and gives player intel updates as they are discovered.

4) Nice mission types. I limited it to seven main missions, as that's the maximum number of hooks from one campaign mission to another however...

To Hawkins: You're welcome to help in any way you'd like. This is going to be quite a production to finish...

What Snake and I are doing now is this: I'm going to work on the scripting systems controlling the game, while Snake will set up all the mission locations, enemies, objects, waypoints, special objects and the like. We'll end up with a simple 5 day campaign which will show off the main ideas of the campaign. After that, we'll work on the full campaign.
Last edited by thecaptain_ps on 1970-01-01 00:00:00, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by DrStrangelove » 2005-11-05 07:59:19

1.) Lemme see if i get this right. The campaign will consist of 5 missions, but you'll never know what mission types you'll play in each one ? (because the next mission is chosen randomly / because certain player actions lead there)

2.) Yep. I did some tests lately and it seems to work, in SP at least. Now i'm collecting ideas what to add to the network system. When ArmA is out i'll rewrite the prototype version, using the new script commands BIS will provide for us. After that is done, i'll write the VC/NVA AI.

3.) So your AI works with 'spawn zones' ? The zone area is supposed to be hostile, but there won't be any enemies if there's no player around to witness it ? Kinda AI on demand ?

That also means, once a stationary target is discovered (any building) it stays there until destroyed, right ?

What about enemy groups reacting to combat ? Is there a random chance that another group will show up to help their comrades out after they discovered the player group ?

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-11-06 00:39:24

1.) Not quite, since I didn't really elaborate. The campaign would consist of hopping between fighting missions and "sitting at the base" missions. When you're at the base, you can do misc tasks, run a mission, or 'rest' and wait for a certain number of hours. When you finish a mission, you come back to base at the time your mission ended. At this point you could go out and run another mission right away, or rest and refit. The test mission I would whip up would consist of a few days of total time, at which point it would end. You wouldn't be limited to five missions, instead, you could run as many as you wanted. When all of the coding would be in place, it would take time for assets to recover between missions and return to max efficency. (helicopter refueling, crews changing, troops resting, etc). When you'd move from the base to an actual mission, it would end the base mission and load the new mission consiting of the general mission AO. The objective & locations of important objects would be transferred from the base mission using saved objects.

2) I actually bought VBS just so I could play with the included scripting commands. It's really refreshing to make waypoints, triggers and markers on the fly.

3) During the base missions, the AI will just be stationary objects moved between grid squares by the game scripts, and act as proxies for if a mission does end up taking place in their area. When a mission takes place, the AI will be activated and act appropriately. Most objects would be created at the start of the campaign and keep their status for the duration of the campaign. During missions, AI will communicate with each other and act according to their own agendas and the player's actions. Pretty much what you'd expect. :) My original system was to have AI moving around the maps of their own volition, carrying out actions, and having a continuous accelerated time clock running in the background a la UFO defense, but this proved to be a real pain in the ass on a map with a lot of waterways, as well as with overall time scaling. Thus, I'm just approximating it now. :)

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by .pablo. » 2005-11-07 18:21:04

the captain!!
i tried to find you a couple months ago, but failed and assumed that you had given up ofp; i have had your ofpec posts on your sebnam ai experiments saved on my HD for years, as inspiration for what could be done in an ofp mission. :)

the reason i was trying to contact you was because i had suddenly decided to try to pick up where (i assumed) you left off in your posts. i did my own sebnam ai experiments, and discovered a problem with your findings on using snYpir's toughunit.sqs script to simulate improved skill (ai don't shoot at opponents brought back from the dead, which makes toughunit.sqs much less useful and also skews any results gathered from its use); i was also curious about how far you had gotten with your seal campaign, hoping that i might be allowed to continue work on it if you had given up ofp, or get together with you to further work on it if you were still playing.

now that i've found that you're still here, and still interested in the idea, i would love to join you in bringing this idea to life!







I have been working on improved chopper landing scripts (the standard ofp chopper landing behaviour sucks)
have you checked out snYpir's landing scripts? they were pretty famous when they came out, as they pretty much perfected heli landings in ofp.
customizable extraction scripts
sounds interesting; any more details?
How about using that 'dynamic' misson concept , where you can start all kinds of missions in 1 session ?
i like the concept, i just don't think the CoIn engine is very immersive (it feels too arcadey, and not realistic). i would definitely be willing to help create a more realistic way of doing it, though...
since a campagin can't be played online.
believe it or not, they can; the "Sinews of War" team created some very complicated methods of saving data in mp games, so it is now possible to simulate a campaign in mp...
Once ArmA is out, i plan to write an AI which works with VC/NVA groups and civilians to create a living environment for seal missions. Villages, hidden caches and VC bases are connected like an info / supply network and are frequented by their appropiate groups - villagers, local vc and regular vc/nva groups.
that is such an awesome idea, and something that i too have been dreaming about for the past few years, but i've always been too intimidated to even attempt to start to create such a system. i do think it is possible (one way or another) in ofp, i'm just not sure how it would turn out...reading the captain's posts, it looks like he has already done some experiments with it; i'd love to hear more about them, and any results from them!
I'm not sure if this system would work for good missions or if it gets boring after a while. maybe somethng is missing ?

The main question is: will the player realize such an AI system is working in the background at all ? Or is it not worth calculating & simulating everything from villages to bases ? Can a player have a good fight just by spawning random targets ?
another excellent point, and one that i have also struggled with; the solution, i think, is not to just create random battles (as the CoIn engine basically does), but to create as sophisticated and realistic an ai system as possible, and explain how it works to the player, so that they will understand that they will be up against an intelligent force, and not just mindless robots. that is why mp games are so much fun; it is always more exciting when you are playing against humans, because you never know what to expect, and yet you always know they are planning and plotting to the best of their ability to destroy you. that kind of feeling can only be generated in sp if the ai is sufficiently adaptive and sophisticated, and if the player knows it.
Some ideas/notes i made recently:

Mission types
Patrol (seals need to check some coords)
Recon (seals need more info on reported activities)
etc...
i see a lot of people posting mission ideas, but i think that this is missing the bigger objective, which i outlined above (and which Dr.Strangelove also talked about). that is, that these mission types should not just be random outings; there should be a _reason_ the player has to go assassinate some VC leader; the guy should have a name, a position; it should make a real difference whether the player succeeds or fails. In other words, objectives shouldn't just be pulled out of thin air, but should be created based on the situation of the battlefield as a whole; they should be alluded to and directly connected with previous events. in that way the player will be able to feel that their success on one mission will have some real effect on the enemy force as a whole, and will help them in the future, rather than just being another random mission in some random location.
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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by .pablo. » 2005-11-07 18:23:05

continued...
To Hawkins: You're welcome to help in any way you'd like. This is going to be quite a production to finish...

What Snake and I are doing now is this: I'm going to work on the scripting systems controlling the game, while Snake will set up all the mission locations, enemies, objects, waypoints, special objects and the like. We'll end up with a simple 5 day campaign which will show off the main ideas of the campaign. After that, we'll work on the full campaign.
as i explained above, i also want to join; this concept you're working on has been one of the major ones to tickle my imagination since i've been playing ofp, but i've never been able to find anyone who had some kind of similar conception of how it should play out (until now).
During the base missions, the AI will just be stationary objects moved between grid squares by the game scripts, and act as proxies for if a mission does end up taking place in their area. When a mission takes place, the AI will be activated and act appropriately. Most objects would be created at the start of the campaign and keep their status for the duration of the campaign. During missions, AI will communicate with each other and act according to their own agendas and the player's actions. Pretty much what you'd expect. My original system was to have AI moving around the maps of their own volition, carrying out actions, and having a continuous accelerated time clock running in the background a la UFO defense, but this proved to be a real pain in the ass on a map with a lot of waterways, as well as with overall time scaling. Thus, I'm just approximating it now.
as i said above, i would love to hear more about your attempts to get this kind of system working in ofp (i.e. what you tried, how well it worked, what you learned, etc.).


btw, i just d/led the two Jagged Alliance games, X-Com 1, and i'm going to try to d/l Seal Team later today; i'm really excited about being able to play them!
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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by charon » 2005-11-07 19:38:50

I have been working on improved chopper landing scripts (the standard ofp chopper landing behaviour sucks)

have you checked out snYpir's landing scripts? they were pretty famous when they came out, as they pretty much perfected heli landings in ofp.

Quote:
customizable extraction scripts

sounds interesting; any more details?
I have picked up on snYpir's excellent approach,
it just didn't consider landing in a river/sea as well as not dealing
with the chopper lifting up again, if the pilot's AI didn't like the landing spot.
Many little things basically, like if a machinegunner/tank or whatever damages the chopper
too much it will fly away, which would pretty much happen in real life too.
The customization of the extraction was for a VTE mission i have been making,
which needed communication with the pilot, throwing smokeshells as landing markers etc.

Everybody has some pretty nice ideas for that campaign, if we can come up
with a naming convention for script arguments/variables/arrays we can split the work.
I have experimented with AI-General-stuff a lot as well, but i had so many ideas that it would just
not be implementable. The fact that the player could end a mission any time poses a problem.
What if the enemy AI just attacks a base and the battle isn't won? It would mean
that all unit's statuses need to be saved and replaced once the player starts the new mission.
Too many "little battles" will happen, taking CPU power (scripts) from the actual main SEAL mission.
The captain might find a way to have this all go on "hidden", but the big danger os script
overload is always there. In some of my tests, my OFP CTDed, when i replaced the AI units
with VTE units, so the tracers and smoke/explosion FX and Eventhandlers might take already
quite some CPU power, just keep that in mind.
It's always good to test addons by creating 100+ units and see how the engine can handle them at all.

I am currently working on a tank commander script,ground reconnaissance and plane reconnaissance scripts with
intelligent waypoint selection/water avoidance and anti-air fly-around measures.
Recon is important for the general AI, cuz we don't want the general AI to know everything that's inside the trigger for example.
To adapt the scripts to the campaign's i need to know which arguments will the general main AI script pass over to the recon script?
What comes to my mind is:
The center coordinates of the recon missions area
The spawn coordinates of the recon team
The type of recon maybe even(like a string "Air Recon","Ground Recon")
The name of the arrays that hold all west and all east units for comparison/identification
What information does the recon script return to the main script by global variable?
VTE_EReconArr = [ReconTeamID,TimeofDetection,TypeofSpottedEnemy,PositionOfSpottedEnemy,StrengthOfSpottedEnemy]

Feel free to come up with name convention suggestions.

Charon

Snake_Man

Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Snake_Man » 2005-11-07 21:14:34

i like the concept, i just don't think the CoIn engine is very immersive (it feels too arcadey, and not realistic).  i would definitely be willing to help create a more realistic way of doing it, though...
CoIn? Whats that gotta do with DYNAMIC / CAMPAIGN stuff? (you didn't exactly say that but coin is referred as such in BIS forums, this is more of generic reply to the subject).

I mean surely the guys have done great effort for the DMA coin/etc stuff and its cool. But please please do not call it dynamic as its just random stuff and especially as these guys advertise it as campaign. One mission campaign, the name itself is condradicting itself. Smallest campaign is two missions, period. It just drives me nuts that people call missions with names like this.

Same goes with the mapfact DAC thingy, but at least mapfact guys were cool enough to admit that its bunch of random waypoints.
is not to just create random battles (as the CoIn engine basically does)
Indeed.

Btw one more time I have to say that I dont have anything against the dma guys or such, but lets call the stuff what it is and not live in a dream world where everything is dynamic and campaign.

This post was made to keep it clear that our SEAL CAMPAIGN will not be affiliated with dma and other stuff, we do our own scripts and as far as I understand what dynamic means... this campaign (see, two or more missions) will be dynamic (events on mission 1 are passed to mission 2 and the OFP AI will react to those accordingly. Thats dynamic in my understanding).

Snake_Man

Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Snake_Man » 2005-11-07 21:31:49

as i explained above, i also want to join;
Yeah the original intention when I made this post was that I'll create the campaign by editing the missions from the ideas/feedback posted on this forum. I was not really looking for help in actual editing terms since I do not live in a illusion that anyone would help me, I just thought that posting ideas or comments like "that sucks" is very easy and people would more likely to do that than to join up on some big editing task.

But as things goes, The Captain woke up and is enthusiastic as ever and other guys stepped in too like Charon which comes out as wizard with scripts... I think this campaign rockets off with many people contributing to the editing which is all fine to me.

But I just want to clear that I'm not here to whine anyone to "work for me" or help me in that manner, if anyone wants to edit, hey excellent, welcome aboard, but I'm prepared to do all the editing by myself like I planned from the start.

So to get back on the track here, I'm currently waiting to start editing the actual stuff we spoke with The Captain about the small/short/5day test version of the campaign. At the moment I can do pretty quickly a campaign structure with the following;

Opening cutscene. Base mission. 7-action missions. Ending cutscene.

But of course these would be somewhat placeholders before more content can be brough in, it would be good testing ground for the basic campaign structure and SEAL action, but most of the fancy features which The Captain listed would not be in. Features like SEAL unit status saving (ie dead guys remain dead) and weaponpool passing to next mission would be included of course.

I just didn't start to make this yet as I was still wanting to get more specific mission manuscript type of information.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by .pablo. » 2005-11-07 23:18:01

What if the enemy AI just attacks a base and the battle isn't won? It would mean
that all unit's statuses need to be saved and replaced once the player starts the new mission.
Too many "little battles" will happen, taking CPU power (scripts) from the actual main SEAL mission.
could you explain that again? i'm not sure i understand what you're saying...
But please please do not call it dynamic as its just random stuff
dynamic - Characterized by continuous change, activity, or progress

now that i read that definition again, i have to agree with you that CoIn isn't fully dynamic, as it is technically seperated into separate missions, so that there are periods with no enemy activity (thus contradicting the definition's requirement of continuous activity). in that sense, though, would the SEAL campaign be fully dynamic? i.e. when you are at base between missions, would the enemy still be moving around (either in person or through placeholders such as gamelogics)?
Yeah the original intention when I made this post was that I'll create the campaign by editing the missions from the ideas/feedback posted on this forum. I was not really looking for help in actual editing terms since I do not live in a illusion that anyone would help me, I just thought that posting ideas or comments like "that sucks" is very easy and people would more likely to do that than to join up on some big editing task.
this is just my opinion, but in my experience with making missions i have found that progress can be made much more quickly if there are multiple people working on it; i actually have a rather lengthy hypothesis/solution that i've worked out on how to most efficiently develop new missions (and prevent the "burn-out" which seems to plague so many projects), i'll post it if anyone is interested. anyway, my point is that i would much prefer to be intimately involved in the campaign's creation than be relegated to the status of a beta-tester.
Last edited by .pablo. on 1970-01-01 00:00:00, edited 1 time in total.
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Snake_Man

Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Snake_Man » 2005-11-13 20:54:31

Today I started to create the small/lite 7 action mission version structure. Meaning it would be the basic first test before we go into finer details and fancier features.

Right now there is the following missions;
Opening Cutscene
Base
Patrol
Destroy
Snatch
Ambush
Assault
Defend
Recover
Transparent cutscene (for technical reasons)
Ending Cutscene


All that stuff is just basic placeholders now but in the Base mission you have the 7 radio commands to choose which mission type you launch next. The 7 action missions are placeholders now, nothing in them except end mission radio trigger. Tomorrow I'll try to add some content to them so we could have something to play on. It will be very limited though.

I made the missions now on Vietnam 12km island just because its a small test, so its nicer to have quicker loading times and such. I'll keep them configured so they are easily "converted" to other islands (7M).

Oh man when we get some content to the missions it will be sweet to play. If we get really dynamic and fancy stuff in them I'll be in heaven. But ok, lets keep our feet to the ground and hope I get some objectives and gooks added to at least few of the action missions.

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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by .pablo. » 2005-11-14 02:49:30

cool, but where's the captain? :( he hasn't posted in a week...
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Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by thecaptain_ps » 2005-11-16 07:50:01

Hi,

SnakeMan gave me his well done stub, and I'm working on putting my scripting functions into it for a test, while he's working on objective coding and enemy/object placement.

Best,
~The Captain

Snake_Man

Re: SEAL Team campaign manuscript

Post by Snake_Man » 2006-04-11 10:30:56

After a short break, the basic backbone is now ready. The seven action missions are ready with objectives which are quite random (except ambush, for now). All the ambient like time of day and weather is missing (static), no enemies are added except single basic enemy squad.

I guess this post is just an update to let people know that the SEAL Team fire is still burning :)

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Post by Snake Man » 2008-09-22 09:03:30

I moved this topic into the ArmA area as OFP is dead and OFP VTE will not be supported anymore, this campaign will continue to be developed on ArmA VTE.

Current update is that nothing has changed campaign mission wise, except that I ported the OFP missions to ArmA standards using SQF scripts. Also I think the whole waypoint system will be upgraded as it uses the OFP way to thinking, now we can create waypoints so why have them on mission editor etc.

Right now I have great interest for this campaign, I have experimented with bunch of stuff in MP already which could be implemented.

I urge everyone to post ideas and suggestions, they are always welcome and most likely would influence this campaigns development.
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