Overall it is a mixture of:
- stunning use of weather, enemy disposition, etc. and fantastic attention to detail; and
- tongue in cheek humour.
Why thank 'ee koidly maaster.
People not familiar with Red Dwarf might think the dialogue a bit naf - but who cares?
Certainly not me. The smart player will figure out that something that naf has to be a quotation.
This is absolutely perfect, any earlier it would be too dark, any later and you would miss the effect
Lots of trial and error, that was.
A point on timing: does the Intro have the same conditions? The Intro feels lighter than the mission
The Intro is actually few minutes later I think, and the level of fog varies considerably throughout it. This was necessary to enable you to see what was going on, while still keeping the atmosphere. If I really liked doing cutscenes (as opposed to hating it) I would completely redo the intro, using the original timing and fog and shooting everything very very close up to increase the feeling of an oppressive atmostphere.
There are only two things missing from the experience and you can do nothing about them: the cold damp feeling that you get in fog, and the deadening effect fog gives to sounds.
I've felt the damp. The sounds are never dead though, you're right, which is a shame.
The fog lifts very realistically - except that the final bit when the player starts going up The Hill clears perhaps a shade too quickly?
The fog lift is a three stage process - if you just use setFog 0 its too rapid at the start and too slow at the end. Although there is some random element, its all automatic - once the life starts it keeps going till its clear. You can't really see it at the start, but it is possibly too quick as you say: I was aiming for the fastest speed that you wouldn't notice, in the hope that you wouldn't notice that the fog had gone, continue to play as if it was still there and get shot.
I have looked in the editor at how you got the loons to leave their Bradley at always (for me) the wrong time and place, but for them of course it is exactly right. Very neat, and very realistic. Do they get back in if they fail to make contact with you?
There are two Bradley dismount gangs. One (the lot with the Abrams) is in the same group as the wagons. They couldn't get out in your version and in anycase the died on a mine. The other lot, with the dismounts in a seperate group, have a little script to make them dismount when you are detected. They don't have orders to get back in. I might try and fix that.
I agree that the Abrams should stay. It is spooky knowing it is out there in the fog somewhere. Capturing it cannot be made impossible without cheating a bit, but is there anyway the loons can change their tactics once you have it? Like for example going to HOLD STEALTH or something, or maybe another chopper turns up?
It's hard because of the design parameters, which I don't wnat to change now having come so far. Loons changing behaviour or an extra chopper would not be allowed, since it's a scripted reaction to something you've done. What I might do is hold back the second chopper, and make it certain rather than on a prob. The original design focusses too much on making a new attempt fun because I thought it was going to be a much shorter mission - in fact not many people will play it twice.
Talking about loon behaviour, at the end the snipers on the top of The Hill seemed oblivious to the three armoured vehicles that kept running them over
Dumb AI. They are all very high skill.
The openness of the mission is fantastic.
This has been the real find of this process. I made a very open mission because my experiments with difficulty showed that if you create something fixed, it doesn't take long for a human player to figure out how to get round it. So I had to create a mission with nothing fixed, and it turns out the result is really fun.
It is possible to do things that seem like a good idea and don't pay off for several hours
And you can't say that about many missions.
There are a lot of ammo crates that were mostly useless to me. I had HKs and the crates had no HK mags. (I know you have changed this) I used the crates to get mines, satchel charges and the occasional LAW but that was it. The key for me was the ammo truck at the civilian village.
It turned out that the HK was the only major ammo type not spread copiously about the map. This has indeed been changed. Most players will use G36, bizon or HK but I wanted to allow for all playing styles. The ultimate prize goes to whoever completes it with a kozlice. The ammo truck is a present from the mission designer to the player. You have a huge amount of ground to cover and a lot of loons to shoot, so you need some encouragement. You could create your own ammo truck, by loading stuff from crates into a vehicle, but this saves you the trouble.
What I really like are missions where the use of the brain is as important as the use of the trigger finger. This mission certainly has that.
Good!
On the stuck loon at the end .... I suppose I am a bit surprised that a ‘feature' like that has survived so long.
I'm really sorry about that. It has been tested many, many times and it is pretty rare, you have been unlucky again. If you can post the savegame somewhere I'll play it and find him for you. The version I can't post because the bloody website isn't working has a much better script for the ending, and the version I'm working on now will include your setpos trick. You have been playing the latest published version.
Will I play this mission again? I believe so - but not for a while.
I hope you do. Wait for the finished article anyway.
The question is, will you change the mission to prevent or neutralise any of these tactics,
No, I can't. If I have vehicles, somebody will place mines and satchels. I long ago realised that the most perfectly difficult mission has no vehicles at all, but I kept them in for variety and fun. (f you are really clever and lucky you can capture a Cobra: that's partly why there so many AA loons. I'm not trying to stop you flying the Chinook all over the place, that's an unfortunate side effect.)
As for using ground to ambush the enemy, well there really is nothing I can, or would want, to do about that. Except near the Base of course, where I have added extensions and minefields to slow you down. The map as a whole is too big to do taht everywhere, and in any case there is no processing capacity left for more objects.
If I think of anything else I will let you know.
When you get to see it, I would appreciate comments on the Outro.
Oh - almost forgot. This is without doubt the best mission I have ever played.
Thank you! :thumbsup: Glad you enjoyed it.
Many thanks for all your comments. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your reports and they have been extremely helpful. Greatly appreciated. I have been very fortunate in having many excellent beta testers for this mission over the last two years, including people like EX-GRUNT who you haven't even heard of.
Topic: (Review Completed) [SP] Un-Impossible Mission (Read 69760 times)