Hey, if anyone wants to run through my mod with me and provide feedback, send me a Private Message with your AIM and we'll get something going.

Unfortunately, J, my AIM is not what it once was - I only shot 89% with Astra and her SVD last night when I was playing my monster firefight mod... Oh the shame...

j/k

If your mod is single player, I'll be happy to test it and give you some feedback - just email it to me. You've got the address from when I sent you that mission I wrote you, right? If not, I'll email it to you - I've still got your address. If it's multiplayer though (I can't remember, but I think you were doing an MP mod?), I unfortunately can't. My home computer ain't on the internet at the moment.

But Gav, you could Create a MP game, pick AI backup, and play (the game) by yourself anyways...

Uhhh... There's probably a great excuse coming, but I can't think of one jsut at the moment. So I'll have to agree with you I guess...

Hey Gav, I emailed you my mod. I await feedback from one of the great ones.

Got your email. I'll give it a look when I get home tonight. You "await feedback from one of the great ones"?? Am I supposed to forward it on to someone else then?? Lol...

Okay. The good news is, I've played and am ready to give feedback. The bad news is, this is gonna be a long post - don't get disheartened though, I'm not about to slate your work!

I quite enjoyed it really. I found it tough, but not to the point of being impossible. I played it through properly, then ran through it as though I was testing it (ie, with a few cheats on like "shadow" and "run" etc), and then I opened it up in Igor to pull apart the scripting and see exactly what you'd done.

Anyway. The feedback. First up, at the pre-action stage, I noticed there's no briefing. You can enter some text for a briefing by typing it into the box in the Edit>Briefing menu in Igor. That really helps people know what's happening, and makes the mission less of a mystery. Helps them choose what kits etc to take with them too. I also noted at this stage that there's no area map, and that (on the command map), the objectives images are from GR mission 1, not mission 5 (ie, the Caves map, not the Embassy map). All these images are set in the Edit>Mission, Edit>Map and Edit>Briefing menus in Igor. I also noticed that the location of the objectives wasn't marked. I don't know whether that was deliberate or not, but if you don't know how to do it, in Igor, choose the "Misc" tab on the bottom left panel (the one where you create companies, platoons, plans etc) and select "Waypoint". Click and place it on the map wherever you want to mark the objective (eg for objective one, put it over the hostage). Then, in the properties box for the waypoint (bottom right panel), set the "Action" to be "Objective 0" (or 1, or 2 or whatever). This tells the game the location of the objective, so that the images on the briefing page in the game are in the right places. Incidently, you can also put a waypoint down and set the "Action" to "Label". Then enter some text in the text box. This will mark the point (as one of those yellow triangles) on the command map, and whatever text you enter will appear when you put the mouse pointer over it in the game. This can be used to mark places of interest, eg where the hostage is, the embassy compund etc. If you find that your objectives are in different places to the default locations for the map (and hence, the objectives images are showing different parts of the map), you can create your own objectives images. Take screenshots of what you want to see, and then use the Photoshop plugin to convert the pics to RSBs. Then, follow the naming convention (see what's already in the game) and set the Objectives Images (in the briefing menu in Igor) to your filename, and hey presto, you got yourself some pics of the objectives!

Once I'd progressed past the briefing to the platoon selection, I found that M136 is required. This is something that you should mention in the briefing text, but more to the point, when I played the mission, I didn't see why they were required. There's a few BMPs to shoot, but you don't have to kill them - wiping out the enemy only makes Igor check for enemy actors, not vehicles. So you can win the mission by killing all the troops but leaving all the vehicles "alive". I would set it to M136 recommended, rather than required. When I pulled the scripting apart, I also noticed there's nothing to check whether the player has sufficient AT rockets to complete the mission. As I said, I don't believe it's necessary in this case, but on a mission where they truly were required, you should really set up a script block to check to make sure that the player still has them - eg they can fire their rockets and miss, and therefore run out, leaving them unable to complete the mission, or the demo guy with the rockets could be killed. The way to check for this is to have a TimeElapsed trigger with BlockPreserve to make the script continuously check (I know you understand that, coz I saw you've already got one in the scripting!), and use a ContinueIf to check the number of rockets available. I think I've got this sort of setup in the scripting for Sigma Claw, so take a look at that if you want to see it in more detail.

In game, there was nothing to complain about at all. The gameplay is good, but I'm guessing you already knew that from your own testing. Just a few things though. What's the purpose of the friendly vehicle (the pickup truck) by the insertion zone? It didn't seem to have any purpose in the game, and I couldn't find any references to it in the scripting afterwards either... When I was clearing the bank, there's the "bomb". It came as a big surprise (perhaps it's something else to mention - or hint at - in the briefing), and I didn't know quite what I had to do. I'm guessing you just put it in there to play with some effects? I notice that the whole set of effects looked very familiar when I checked it out in Igor - even down to using my preferred sound (the T72 main gun firing) for the explosion! They say imitation is the highest form of compliment, so thank you! The only thing I did notice about the bomb was that the pop up box says 5 secs to detonation, but in your scripting, you've set the timer to 6 seconds! It's not a problem at all, but it made me smile as I was looking last night...

When I approached the hostage, I noticed that the IFF shows his name as "Refugee" rather than "Hostage". This is because of the actor you've chosen to represent the hostage. To alter this, use the Actor Editor (from the Tools menu in Igor), and open the actor file you used for the hostage (youngman_refugee_1.atr, in the "Actor" folder of the "Origmiss" mod). Then the actor editor can change the character's Name - just type in Hostage instead of Refugee. Then save it as a different filename to avoid overwriting original game files, and then use this new ATR file for the hostage. Note though that if you send the mission to anyone else to play, you'll have to give them this new ATR file too, otherwise the game will crash when they try to play it - just like I had to give you the modified jeep VCL file for that Stronghold mission I sent you.

I also noticed that, if the hostage dies, the mission is failed - which is fine. But when you go to the AAR screen, the Rescue Hostage objective still shows "incomplete", rather than "failed". To fix this, in the script block that registers the mission failure, add another response that says "OjectiveFailed" - make sure this response comes before the DeclareMissionFailed response, or else it won't work.

The final thing I noticed in game (I played on vet and elite), and then confirmed when I checked your scripting, was that there are no differences between the three difficulty settings. There's 9 vehicles and 95 actors right across the board. Since the whole point of the different skill settings is to make things easier or harder for the less- or more-experienced player, this is something you really should vary. To do this, when you place actors and vehicles, look at the bottom right panel (where you set their kits etc). There's three tick-boxes there for Easy, Medium and Hard. Ticking them all means they appear in all three difficulty settings, but if you (for example) uncheck the Easy box, it means that the actor won't be present if the mission is played on Recruit setting. It's exactly the same for vehicles. Taking this into account will allow you to make you mission more playable to more people, as you can alter the difficulty of it. It's difficult to assess how hard to make things - it's always a bit of a judgement call - but I would make recruit easier than what you have now. I would say that (IMHO at least), your misison as it stands represents an easy-ish elite, or a hard veteran. So, perhaps make it harder, and then tone it down for vet and then further still for recruit, or, if you want to make hard missions, keep what you've got as veteran, make it a bit easier for recruit, but harder for elite. Also, in addition to just varying the number of tangoes for the skill settings, you can use a ContinueIf response in the scripting, together with a check on the difficulty, to assign trigger plans to teams to make them smarter on elite (or dumber on recruit). As a final note on this, note that, when you start playing around with placing things only on certain difficulties, you may see them disappear in Igor. This is because you view a particular difficulty setting in Igor, which by default i Veteran. To alter it (to elite or recruit), just go to the View menu, and alter which setting is ticked.

Right. That's all the in-game stuff. Now for the few things I noticed in the scripting. Firstly, your trigger for killing all the enemies was "DeathCompany". Which is fine, but sometimes (very rarely, but I have seen it happen), the enemy surrenders (their Alertness goes to "Panic")- meaning you shouldn't really kill them any more! But it means that you would have to to meet the DeathCompany trigger. I always prefer to use the RoutCompany trigger. This fires when all members of the company are dead or have surrendered. It very rarely comes up, but I have seen it once or twice, and it's just better practice, really.

Finally, other gametypes. You've set up all the modes by ticking the various boxes in the Mission properties box, but you also have to tick the "Available to Custom Gametypes" box in the Map properties box, otherwise it won't work. I've made this mistake many times! Also in the map properties, I noticed that there's no map size set and there's no recommended gametypes etc. Just copy the settings for these things straight from the M05 - Embassy map. I also noticed that your map is very short on zones. There are no map points, recon insertion/extractions, map central areas etc. All of which are required for various different gametypes. There's tutorials to tell you what's needed for these and how to do it (try www.ghostrecon.net - or I can send you the two I have if you want), but they should have already been there when you got the map. I'm guessing when you created the mission you did one of two things. You either opened up the M05 - Embassy mission, deleted everything (including the zones) out of it to leave you with just the map, and then built everything up yourself; or you chose File>New, but then clicked Cancel when asked to set a mission template. If you'd gone File>New, and then set M05 Embasssy as a template, you would have got the map, with all the MP zones, but no actors or scripting etc. For future reference, that's the way to go about scripting new missions on existing maps, so that you don't have to mess aorund adding the zones in afterwards.

That's all I found. Everything else appeared to be working nicely - the fixed guns were all manned, the vehicles were fine. The only other thing I would say is that the threat of a vehicle is vastly improved by making them mobile, rather than stationary. There were a few jeeps that didn't move, and that cuts down the threat that they pose to the player in game.

As I said, he gameplay is fine, and just about all the points I've made are related to "polishing" the mission really, rather than fundamental problems - with the exception of the lack of zones for MP, and (IMO) mission briefing. Don't feel discouraged because I've had so much to say about it - it's a good mission, particularly for a first attempt at scripting one - and I wouldn't have bothered spending hours testing and pulling apart the scripting last night, and typing this massive post today if I didn't think you had promise with it. It's intended to be constructive criticism, to help you make your future work better still. I liked the fixed weapons, the patrol paths for the vehicles, the trigger plans... All good stuff. A lot of work goes into scripting a good mission, and if you scrimp a little bit here and there, it shows in the mission. But I can tell you've put a lot of time into this, and not just because of all the questions you've posted here - it really does show when you play the mission. Take the points above on board, and I'm sure your next one will really be a kick-*** piece of work...

Hey, man, I just now saw this post! I think when something happened with the boards, it got pushed off the main page or something.

Anyway, GREAT SUGGESTIONS! Honestly, I'm not sure how to do some of the things you recommended, but if I get to that point in my next mod, I'll post specific questions here.

Since I sent this mod to you, I have made more changes as a friend and I played it more often.

My main intent for this mod was co-op play, so I didn't put much time into single-player aspects. I'm already focusing more on single-player for my next mod.

Again, thanks for the great feedback! I appreciate every bit of it - now it print off this bad boy....

Glad to be of help. Like I said, it's good...

Post any questions you like when writing your next one, and I'll try to explain how to do some of my suggestions in a bit more detail...

Gav, I emailed you one of my work-in-progress mods - I'm trying to get the waypoints to show up on the briefing map. I have no clue how to get a World Map set up. I don't have any 3rd-party software and don't plan on buying any. Now free software is another thing altogether.

You might want to be careful not to imply that you use pirated software.

If you need help creating a briefing map with legally licensed software, then someone around here might be happy to assist you

I got your email - I'll take a look when I get home and let you know on Monday.

Just so I'm clear, what exactly are you trying to achieve? You mentioned a world map at the briefing screen - do you mean the geography one that you click on during the briefing to bring up the command map and have the objectives images cycle through?

And when you say you're trying to get the waypoints to "show up" on the briefing map, what exactly do you mean? Label waypoints show up on the command map only in game, not on the command map in the briefing. Setting objective waypoints just marks the position of the objective where it scrolls through the briefing images.

Your email implied you wanted to create some new images for the objectives (to display in the images that are scrolled through during the briefing) - is that right?

To do all of the above, all you need is Igor and Adobe Photoshop (with the RSB plugin that's on the IT disc). You mentioned you didn't have any 3rd party software, but I don't quite know what you mean - 3dsm or something? If you meant Photoshop, then you need it to be able to create the new RSB (Red Storm Bitmap - the picture file format that GR uses) images. Without Photoshop, you can still set the locations for the objectives, but the images shown will the objectives images that correspond with that map in the orginal game - you won't be able to create your own objectives images, or create a new geographical map of the region.

I have Photoshop and the plugin however, so if there's particular images you want (eg a geographical pic of southern Asia or something to show where your campaign is set), let me know and I'll dig out the atlas bit of Encarta, find the region you want and then convert a pic of it to RSB format in Photoshop for you. I can then send you the RSB file(-s), and you can use Igor to call them up in your missions.

Did you follow that?!? Lol...

Basically, if possible, I wanted to have the Briefing Map show the objective points that I put in (as waypoints). When you click on each objective, if possible, I'd like for the cursor to focus on that point, like the regular missions do. I got the impression from your feedback that it can be done, or am I crazy?

No you're not crazy, it can be done. Remember that Red Storm wrote GR using Igor, so anything that they could do (mission and scripting -wise, I mean), you can also do.

To set these points, in Igor you need to place a Waypoint, and set the box at the bottom right of the screen to "Objective 0" to mark the position of the first objective, "Objective 1" for the second and so on.

I didn't get chance to look at your mission file this weekend, but I'll try and get around to it tonight, and I'll place a few objective waypoints and return it to you so that you can see what I mean...

A-ha! I know what I was doing wrong. I was setting the objectives in Igor starting with Objective 1. I remember thinking, how can you have an Objective 0?? That's why when I clicked on an Objective the focus would go to some weird spot. I'll give it another go tonight. Thanks again.

You got it. Objective 0 in Igor corresponds to what we would think of as objective 1 - because computers use zero as the first number. You therefore have objectives numbered zero to three, rather than one to four as you might expect.

Incidently, the two waypoints you tried to set in that farm mission did work - they were just objectives two and three, not one and two as you'd intended. I've had a play and added in a fourth objective (there's always four objective markers on the briefing map). I've also put objective waypoints in for all four, and inserted two "label" waypoints to highlight areas of the command map in-game (the crash site and the safe house).

You've still got the GR mission 1 (Caves) objective shots displaying, and no world map. Both of these I can fix if you'd like, using Photoshop and the RSB plugin. I didn't get around to doing it last night, but I can create the *.rsb images for you to be able to do that if you like. Just tell me where you want the world map shot to be of - your briefing mentions the Russian air force, but the location says somewhere in Ohio...?!?

Anyway, good to see some of my recommendations from your last mod included in this one, such as different numbers of enemies depending on the skill setting. Just a few quick things. In the startup scriptblock, you had the pilot set to captive behaviour, not hostage behaviour. He should be set to hostage behaviour. A hostage is a friendly being held by the enemy that you have to rescue. A captive is an enemy who surrenders to you for you to capture. The behaviour patterns are very similar, but it might explain why you had trouble with the pilot getting shot/not getting shot etc.

I also notice that you've got a mission name, but not a map name (set it in the map properties options box from the edit menu). When you play as a mission gametype, the mission name is quoted, but if you play on any other gametype (eg firefight or defend etc) the map name is used. So you really should give it one - even if it's the same as the mission name.

There was also a bit to do with the mission failed trigger that I didn't understand what you were trying to do... I would have expected the DeclareMissionFailed response to follow the ObjectiveFailed response for the pilot being killed and the SAM being killed, but instead you were messing around with counters...? Anyway, it was getting in the way of the testing I was trying to do last night, so I disabled it. I didn't delete it, coz I didn't know what you were trying to do or whether you actually wanted it in there or not. So I left it, but I've added a ContinueIf that'll never happen (the objective complete counter has to equal 60) at the start of the responses to prevent it from interferring. If you want to reinstate the block, just delete that one ContinueIf repsonse, and the rest of your responses are untouched.

Anyway, quite a neat mission. I've emailed it back to you with the alterations I've described above (I've renamed it, so it won't overwrite your existing one) so that you can take a look and see what I've done to it. Just one question though: how did you change the map to a daylight one? I've played around (albeit only very briefly) with setting the Env file to a daylight mission etc, but that still leaves the ground very dark. How did you get around this, and why didn't I need the new map file as well as the mission scripting file?!?

Hey Gav, that mission I sent you was still in the "coding" phase. I really didn't expect you to critique it just yet, but thanks for the feedback. I have fixed the counters since then.

I wanted to incorporate the Objective failed (but not mission failed) so that my buddy and I could finish the mission even if the SAM was destroyed (since it occurs so early in the mission).

I didn't do anything with the environment files. I just chose DP02 Farm when I created the new mod. I don't want to take credit for something I didn't do!

I'll take a look at what you've done with the waypoints when I get home. Thanks again.

Oh... It's the DP02 Farm map, not the M02 Farm map... That explains it! OMG I'm stupid sometimes!

I know the mission is a "work in progress", which is why I didn't offer any thoughts on gameplay etc. I just thought there were some things that I ought to mention to make sure you included them later when you finished it off...

I wondered if that was what you were trying to do with the objectives... In that case, when you delete the extra response I added to disable it, you'll need to change the second value for your checksum on the ContinueIf that you put in (it's set to three at the moment, but I've added another objective, so you'll have to change it to four instead).

let me know if you want a world map or different objectives images etc...