Campaign Hub Multi Terrain

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Campaign Hub Multi Terrain

Post by Snake Man » 2022-07-04 20:43:13

Multi Terrain Hub Campaign

2019-12-28

This is perfect for mods like Community Upgrade Project (CUP) and Vietnam: The Experience (VTE) which have multiple terrains by default. Obviously you can gather good community made terrains (like PMC real world data ones) and create campaign using all those, but what better choice than modern era CUP and Vietnam era VTE.

Campaign Hub on some terrain, not necessarily only one but to keep it simple lets assume its one terrain like a "Headquarters location" or whatever, maybe choose some small terrain for this which doesn't have use otherwise as you cant have large battles there, for example CUP Desert Island or VTE Intro maybe.

Campaign Hub mission would be the root of all evil, it would be description.ext / scripting hub for the campaign and in the same time act as game-world "HQ" where players go to get new orders or something like this. From the campaign hub the next terrain would be chosen by the player or by script for him. Each terrain would have their own terrain hub which would only handle the missions belonging to that terrain. Imagine campaign hub being like main HQ and terrain hub being the FOB in the boonies. From the terrain hub player would be sent back to main campaign hub for additional terrain selection for example when the current terrain has been cleared of all enemies.

Annoying back and forth jumping from terrain hubs to campaign hub and back should be avoided. The hub needs to be cool experience and not some tedious "aww man another hub visit..." thing players do not like. UNLESS ... it would be some really cool re-arming thing kind of like Camp Maxwell, the HQ should have some relaxing thing for player to do, kind of like relaxing with squad mates and planning your next mission or something (heh imagine HQ having a shooting range with all the CUP / VTE weapons available, that would be cool). But players should not need to go to the HQ for weapons or anything like that, it would have to be that they would WANT to go there to choose new terrain etc, something cool.

Campaign description.ext would not be "scripted" to follow 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 etc missions, but it would be "dynamic" that all missions are launched from the terrain hubs until all missions have been completed or player has failed / lost if that is possibility. This unscripted part I'm not so sure how it would work, kind of like bis east wind campaign camp maxwell as you could actually see list of missions and then you could choose which one to play next. Just imagine what kind of re-playability this would have, even if you have 10 missions it feels totally different if you accomplish those in different order every time. I'm unsure as of today 2019-12-28.

Unscripted order of missions of course is a little bit difficult to achieve if the goal is systematically wipe out enemies on every village / city / area of the terrain, you cant just bunny hop across the terrain, there must be some order for capturing objectives. Of course for guerrillas doing hit & run attacks this would work.

Simplest practical functionality to campaign hub would be player to choose from CfgCommunicationMenu 10 options, that should cover all CUP terrains(?). Or if that is not enough like with VTE then have even some stupid flag pole action menu or hell even like "walk to black hawk to travel to takistan or walk to apache to travel to chernarus" selections. Edit 2022-06-28: CfgCommunicationMenu is 10 options with each option having 10 sub menus, so its all good.

Real World Data Terrains

2022-06-27T16:26:00Z

Real world data terrains, for example russian invasion of poland and later germany. The main headquarters whole campaign hub would be Ramstein air base in germany, while country hub would be Lask in poland (neither of these terrains exist currently).

Moving between hub's should be realistic, UH-60 Black Hawk transport helicopter cannot fly from ramstein into lask, uh-60's range is only 583km and ramstein is 555km from polish border, so transport helo would have to do refuel stop maybe in germany erfurt before continuing to poland. Actually troops would most likely be flown in big C130, C5 or C17 whatever huge transport plane, US to ramstein and ramstein to lask air base.

It has to be taken into consideration that such HQ hub -> erfurt -> poland hub, routing would not become tedius.

Thinking about such hopping hub1 -> base1 -> hub2 it would be actually pretty cool to C130 aircraft takeoff from ramstein, then mission would end, new mission would begin where you fly in erfurt SW corner into some airfield (cant remember it there was one, anyways not important), land, player would get out, stretch his legs heh etc, then mission would continue by boarding the C130 again, taking off and flying off into east side of the terrain where mission ends. Then another mission begins now in poland terrain where you fly in from west side again and land on Lask air base. And if that is not enough, then he would have to do another mission to actually get into fighting.

Heh yep so it sounds kind of complicated, long winded and boring... but I definitely want to design that kind of routing system so there is some real world logistics in the play :)

Moving between terrain hub's in a country should be handled through the country hub, unless it would be so large country that black hawk cannot fly from one edge to another.

So lets say Lask would be polish country hub, when players leave lask they are flown with a big transport plane into hulskie, or krynki or suwalki gap terrains.

To recap the hierarchy would be:

Code: Select all

- Campaign headquarters hub
 - country 1 hub
   - terrain hub 1
   - terrain hub 2
   - etc
 - country 2 hub
   - terrain hub 1
   - terrain hub 2
   - etc
Distances would be written some some script which somehow would contain this routing between hubs, like country 2 terrain hub 1 cannot fly directly to campaign HQ hub, but it had to go through country 2 hub before reaching campaign HQ hub, assuming the real world distance allows it.

This could be even expanded to larger scale, like some middle eastern campaign hub, so how you reach iraq, iran and afghanistan is a long long way of traveling with few if not several routing jumps / missions. First hop ramstein air base in germany, second hop iraq country hub, third hop afghanistan country hub.

Hell you could even do a mother of all campaigns: global campaign where you can travel anywhere in the world, if we assume there would be war across the planet heh.

;)
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