(Review Completed) [SP] Maelstrom of Goodwill

[Tarados Qeng]

Okay, here's the beta of my (yes, it's mine, not F.B.I.'s) new mission, Maelstrom of Goodwill. (What a name... Any suggestions for better names?)

This should need no unofficial addons (since it's made for Mission Making Competition SP no addons category. Okay, I'm not seriously thinking I could win... :-\ ). V. 1.91 required, 1.96 recommended.

Here's the deal:
You are a Corporal of the Red Army, currently serving in Nogova. The isle is nearly completely under Soviet control, but there are still some traitors, rebels and other capitalist scum who try to prevent the Red Army from helping their comrades in Nogova. You are to neutralize those traitors' main camp on a small isle South from the coast of Nogova.
   So, this begins as a simple kill all rebels -mission. But there may be surprises...

Any feedback would be welcome, since the competition closes in two weeks.

625 kb

http://koti.mbnet.fi/tarados/downloads/goodwill.zip

Note: there's no outro yet. There'll be. Voice actors wouldn't do bad for this either.


Edit: This mission has been reviewed and is available from the Missions Depot.

[Dubieman]

I will download it and give it a go...

I haven't much else to do. I still havea few mystries plaguing my mission and the only thing to work on is the briefing. I've had my fill of HTML for today. ;D

[DarkAngel]

hey tarados, I'll try to check this one out, pretty busy working on a 'nam campaign at the moment with cj525, but why not, huh? something to get me through those insomniac nights i guess...

[ocnick]

Overview
Nice pic, with shadow and everything.  Try to fit the description into a few sentences, you can get into more detail in the briefing.  Also might wanna try a Designer's Notes link rather than putting your details on the main page.

Intro
Voice Acting!  Yes!  Don't get to hear that much anymore.   Did you use camsetrelpos for this part?  If you use camera.sqs you could offcenter him to the left some so he looks centered on TV.  What's the angle change for while he's talking?  It just goes up a little higher, and I think the angle looks weird.  If your gonna leave it, make it go a little quicker, too long of a pause here.

Smooth action, yet try some ground level shots once the TV goes away.  Think of how they film TV and movies.  Some nice up close shots of him getting shot would be cool.

Briefing
Try breaking up the writing into paragraphs, it's easier to read it that way.  I'm assuming you meant to write Cpt. What's-his-name in handwriting here.  I'd suggest making it left-justified, it looks kinda weird hanging out over there.

Mission
There's one part at the beginning when the caption begins with a lowercase rather than a capitalized letter, looks more professional when the grammar is right .  We annihilated the enemies at the barn with ease, then after I checked the barn, the leader stood there for about a minute then moved on.  If this is left in, I'd suggest explaining why, like "We gotta wait for Alpha" or something.

Then when we got to the beach, both squads ran in circles for a minute then went to the water.  This might be because of WP placement, try playing around with it or making more direct WP's.  Nice visual with 2 squads treading through the water, a good place for music .

When our mid-day splash got rudely interrupted, all hell broke lose.  Dudes were falling all around us.  This took out most of my squad.  As I made it towards the hill, I kept getting mowed down by the guys on top.

It took me probably 10 or 15 tries to clear the hill (I finally cheated and ran around to the back), by then it's only me left.  The chopper comes down and as I run to it, I got shot by a lonely Black Op who was laying in the field.

I got kind of frustrated here, so I haven't finished the mission yet.

Conclusion
Overall, good mission.  I would even out the difficulty somewhat to the first objective, it was way easy, while the rest was hard (maybe that's how you want it).  I'd make those guys on the hill a little dumber, they were hitting me through bushes, over hills, all within their 1st or 2nd shot.  Overall, a fun play, and a few small corrections would take it a long way.

[Dubieman]

Err okay I got a mission end before any action started.

Anyways:

overview:pretty good. nice custom pic, it looks like Montignac which has nothing to do with the mission area (I'm probably wrong) but its a good pic. text is fine

intro: I liked the TV deal, the voice acting was hard to hear at times and somtimes rather fuzzy but hey you got it in there. I don't get why the officer isn't ordering everyone around, instead some soldier is....

One spelling error from what I could see...

mean soviets :'( :'( :'(

briefing : alright with only one or two spelling errors. Gave good info for the op and I got the idea we were going to do something more...

mission: Started in the boats and I'm getting sick ofthe word "scum" now, can't we use something else? All I hear is capitalist scum, rebel scum, dumb frigging scum.....

I liked the little voice overs in the boat. "They're murders, they will kill you" no crap you're assualting them with a big invasion force what else are they gonna do? ;D

Got near shore and then a black out thing went and said I stopped the NATO guys and you're great whoopee and mission end? Huh?

Ok I guess something went wrong...
New version plz.

EDIT: By the way I restarted several times to try and get through it so I could do the mission but it ended the mission every time.  

I depboed it and destroyed your end trigger to play it. I still got the black screen but it kept going and my squad got wiped out by some stupid MGer on the hill and everyone of those res guys had laser accurate weapons, my guys go over the ridge and one is down, damn two is down, right through the ranks. I get a lucky grenade on top of those suckers and shoot a few others. The other squad that is supposed to attack the hill comes like five minutes later and miss all the action.

I savegame and grab a res sniper rifle and pick off the ppl in the town and a hunter nails me with a kozlice shell. WTF? Laser accurate shotguns? From 350m out? wow...
I think I deleted to much stuff trying to find that end trigger and nothing happened after that, but I probably deleted the triggers for it. ;D

A new version would be appreciated.

[ocnick]

Dunno what happened GRK.  It worked fine for me.  Maybe try to delete it and re-install?

[Dubieman]

Its probably the end trigger or something. I restarted like 15 times and it ended prematurely every time.

I don't see what redownloading would do cause the units and triggers and activation fields and variables would be the same...

I'm not sure.

[ocnick]

Maybe he updated, I just dl'ed it an hour or two ago.  

[Dubieman]

He woulda said so.

I'll wait for his reply until then.

[KoniaX]

GuiltyRoachKiller, mine started up just fine. I had no problems whatsoever starting the mission.

Since I don't care too much about the briefing, overview or intro ( although that intro was kickass!!!!), I won't say anything about them. The one suggestion I have for you is to either give the Soviets more troops, or take some Resistance away. Within the first 45 seconds of landing on the island, my entire squad was killed and I was left alone. I also De-PBOed your mission to check a few things out when I noticed...

***SPOILER***

theres more NATO guys to kill! If all my men in my squad die within 45 seconds of landing, how am I supposed to fight off an invasion force?

But all in all, I can see that you spent a lot of time and effort on this map, and so far, it actually looks pretty damn awesome. I'll be waiting for you to finish Shatterpoint also  ;D

[DarkAngel]

I'd agree with a lot of what you guys have said, there's a bit of a force balancing issue here. We're assaulting their main stronghold with, what, two squads? Of more or less regular infantry? If I was the general in charge of the occupation I'd probably be sending in a company or two at least, complete with air support and maybe artillery. I know that might make the mission less fun but at the moment it feels a bit Rambo. Maybe make us all SpetzNatz or something and give a reason why the Briefing must remain covert? Hmm. Anyway:

Overview was good, solid stuff.

Intro - some OnLoadIntro text would be cool. Using the TV is nice, a good propaganda feel, but although the shooting of the journalist is well scripted it's not the most original plotline in the world. Evil Russians. Good Americans. Hmm.

Briefing - pretty decent. Does what it needs to do but maybe more background. Some intelligence about enemy assets would be nice. BTW the enemy base is in the West not East of the island.

Mission - We run up the beach, a couple of men down already from people we can't see. It'd be lovely to have an artillery script here to support our landing. As we move towards the farm I think, hmm, a handy barn, I might just take some cover in here and find the ammo cache. Nice touch. A bit of waiting around after here - maybe cover with some radio chatter.

We cross the causeway with one of our squads already having taken care of the Res guys on the other side. I hear the sound of choppers and go "aha, our air support is here. About time". Then realise it's a bunch of Blackhawks. WTF! Shooting those paratroopers down like ducks in a barrel. Neat. My squad is getting decimated though. I save the game here.

By this time I'm in the gully between two high points east of the base. I take an XMS and move up to one of the hills. Get shot. Try again. Get shot. Next time I go right instead of left. Get shot. After about five or six goes of this I'm a tad confused - who's killing me? It seems you've got a whole bunch of guys on ultra-high skill levels, which is fine, but with the lack of dispersion on the normal BIS weapons we're into one-shot, one-kill territory which is a bit harsh.

I'll have another go at finishing it this evening but for now my suggestions are:

- Try and make the player feel like part of a larger operation. Air, artillery, maybe some more squads.
- Take down some of the enemy skill levels a bit, or have more friendly troops.

Overall though, nice work, I'm not usually a fan of squad member missions but this one's more compelling than most.

[Tarados Qeng]

Okay, thanks for testing...

I dunno why it doesn't work, GRK.  It worked fine with me and seems to have worked fine with other people. You have 1.91 or 1.96 or what?

Okay...

1. Intro. Yes. Definitely, I should improve that. It was just the basic idea of it (using setrelpos), I've only been working on this whole mission three or four days.  :-\

2. I thought this should be a larger operation in the first place. On the very first place, I placed there what, 3 boats and 3 BMPs. Then I thought that hey, come on! Three (Yes, three) Soviet squads is more than enough to kill a couple of grunts armed with shotguns. Also, I wanted to make this a bit challenging. Well, probably I could use some artillery script and bombard the place a few times, then halting with radio message "We can't continue bombarding - due to the wind we could easily hit you instead of those scum.

3. Yes. I will remove some 'scums'.

***_SPOILERS_***

4. Fighting off the invasion thingy is not really that hard - there are three Russian squads there and the fourth will soon arrive. I had no trouble in it even without any squadmates since the machine gunners were effective. So I though to harden it up a bit and added two black hawks full of paratroopers and removed some M2s. The most difficult part is to kill the Yankee paratroopers and the rebels at the Western ruins.

***_SPOILERS OUT_***

5. I'm definitely not going to make all the guys Spetz Natz ('Coz it all started with an idea that this time I'll make the player a common soldier - In Shatterpoint you are always a Lieutenant or Major and squad commander) but I think there could be some Spetz Natz leading the operation.

6. Actually, if I made a campaign of this, I'd not use the common bad Russkies good yankees theme, it would be Bad Russians and Bad Americans fighting.

Thanks for the feedback, improving it tomorrow.

Edit; I got frustrated when trying to come up with a good name of the mission. Here's the top 12 of my ideas...

1. A Notch Above
2. Onshore Orchestra
3. Riding Shotgun
4. Island Thunder
5. Refuge of Rebelliousness
6. Serviceman of the Red Army
7. Peace Enforcement
8. Heroes of Shoreline
9. Safe Haven of Rebellion
10. Peace of Mind
11. Nothing Personal
12. Peace-loving Killers

Well, maybe not. :|

[ocnick]

Is rebelliousness a word?

[Dubieman]

I really don't know what went wrong with my version but I'll play it full through with the next beta version.

As for a name, I like Island Thunder.

Yay no more scums or at least, less of them!:thumbsup:


Anyways I was toying around in the editor with your mission and found the cached ammo. By the way I command the squad now, the ppl who took command before me got killed at first... :'( Then some dumb UH60s blow up our boats, BOO! ;D, and I deceided to not waste an RPG on them. The grabbed a ressi sniper rifle and picked off 20 ppl at the main res base and then grabbed my AK and stormed it like nobody's business. ;D

No casulaties. Got helied to that bare piece of land. I don't know why anyone would protect it or land there?

Its a clear killing field and your boats are wiped out before you can do anything....

Anyways the helis flew around a bit and blew up a shilka. A cobra got a tail rotor failure due to ECP and then the para troopers got mowed down by the M2s and the three squads including mine. They land and every single AK, PK, and M2 would nail that guy, one by one.

They all died and the boats came. I waited and the M2s did the dirty work. I launched some RPGs when the boats hit grpund since they were easy targets then...


Anyways, that's it. I'm confused as to what happened to my version but... :-\

[KoniaX]

Hmmmm, don't use Island Thunder, as its a Ghost Recon add-on. It's a highly used name such as Counter-strike.

[Tarados Qeng]

Yep. No Island Thunder although it sounds cool.

Yep. Rebelliousness is a word.

Yep. Here's the Beta 0.55!

-Improved intro, but still uses setrelpos and is uncentered
         -Added artillery script
         -Adjusted group joining
         -Adjusted cutscene
         -Improved overview and briefing
         -Fixed some minor issues
         -Reduced some scum and lowlifes. Words, I mean. There are still too many of them.
         -Reduced skill of the Resistance troops at the Western ruins
         -Added some music

                         *No Spetz Natz guys yet
                         *No outro yet

This does nothing very great, 'coz I had too little time, but still it's far improved from the first version. I'll be out for nearly a week. Hope you'll test it a lot, I'll improve this when I come back.

Hope it'll work with GRK, too.

Btw, sorry, 'coz I've had only a little time I've myself played this only once through.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/downloads/goodwill055.zip

I don't know why anyone would protect it or land there?

There's an airfield nearby, just some clicks to North.

[Dubieman]

The airfield of course but why land at a flat piece of land knowing the enemy is there?

You don't have to move it but what would you do if you're the NATO commander? Land where they expect you to, and have a Omaha beach senario? or land in an unexpected place and maybe take the airport and flank out the beach troops...

Anyways, sorry if I can't get around to beta testing, the mission editing competition is coming to a close soon and my mission still has quite a few things that need to be solved and fixed. So sorry if I can't get around to your mission. :-\

[KoniaX]

Hmmm, you have a great mission going here, I've just noticed a few things...

 - When the NATO forces are paratrooping out of the planes on the island, I noticed that about 1/4 of them landed in the water and promptly drowned.

 - The helicopter that picks you up on the island got shot down once from something, but thats only happened once... bug maybe?  

 - Once NATO is assaulting the beachhead, the men in the M113s unload too early and end up in the water, and again, promptly drown.

 - You may need to put setcaptive or something on the boats, as the squads all around us blew like 4 of them up before they got to the beachhead.

 - Lastly, when the NATO forces storm the beachhead, you should have them move up. At the end, I had eliminated all NATO forces but one guy, who was halfway underwater right on the shoreline. Spent a good 5 minutes finding that guy  ;D

But other than those minor things, I found your mission to be interesting and original. Playable and very fun.

One last thing... finish up Shatterpoint!!!! I need to play more missions!  

[Tarados Qeng]

I know some NATO guys may land in water, I've never seen over three or four men land in water. Well, the NATO chopper pilot just is a rookie... =)

Maybe it somehow flew too near the enemy choppers. I've never had that problem. Well, I should make sure that doesn't happen.

Fixed M113 unload problem.

Some of the boats are supposed to be shot before they get to the beach. There's what, over 70 or 80 men there - if you had to shoot them all after unloading it would be quite difficult. But probably I can put setcaptives to some boats.

The NATO squads moved on except for two squads. Fixed that. You see, if you have extracted this on the editor you'll see there's quite a lot stuff there - it wasn't easy to notice which groups lacked waypoints. Anyway, it's fixed now.

Well, GRK, I can explain that the other beaches are more heavily guarded. I know it's not maybe the best srategical option, but it's a good area for another Omaha beach wannabe. And I understand that you can't test missions much now that the MMC deadline is only a week away. I myself am too busy too to test anything else but my own mission. Sorry.

Ok, I've added artillery scripts to the Omaha beach part, too. You see, Americans fire on the place from their cruisers. New beta soon.

[SilentHunter_764]

Hello . Here's my review of your mission:

Intro: Excellent, but a found that a few of the voices ended before tey could finish the sentence, camera was great, but when the camera changed to above/left there was no actual camera where it was filming from?

Brefing: Great, it really made me think and understand the whole mission

Mission: Ok, now here i am in the boat. Half way to the beach, i get an objective completed and it says NATO forces defeated, mission complete. ?

Outro: was there one? i exited and tried again but same thing

overall a great mission, but i didnt see half of it.

Loosekannon (i have 1.96 incase you were wondering)

[Dubieman]

Finally someone has the same problem I did...

If its any help I'm running 1.96 ECP.

[Tarados Qeng]

Ok, I don't know why it doesn't work, but I don't have ECP.

Intro: Excellent, but a found that a few of the voices ended before tey could finish the sentence, camera was great, but when the camera changed to above/left there was no actual camera where it was filming from?

Yes, I know the voices stop too early but that's a matter of no concern since I've already made completely new voices to it. Hmm... Is there a visual camera object?

I'll put new beta soon here.

[Tarados Qeng]

http://koti.mbnet.fi/tarados/downloads/goodwill06.zip

Okay, the new version (beta 0.6) is here. I guess it now works with GRK and LooseKannon, too, since I've changed the conditions of the end trigger. Outro's there, here's the readme which shows the other changes.


*********************************
OPERATION FLASHPOINT MODIFICATION
*********************************

Title            :Maelstrom of Goodwill
Type            :Single Player Mission
Version         :Beta 0.6
Author         :Tarados Qeng
E-Mail         :tarados@mbnet.fi
Website         :http://koti.mbnet.fi/tarados/

File Name         :goodwill.zip
File Size         :2.26MB
Date Released      :08/04/2004

Un-off. Addons needed   :None
Required OfP version   :1.91
Recommended OfP version   :1.96

Description      :Some may know F.B.I. team's Shatterpoint 1986 campaign. I'm the project leader. But this is my second single mission I've made all by myself. Guess the reason is the Mission Making Competition. Well, I'm not quite sure that I'm gonna win...
   You are a Corporal of the Red Army, currently serving in Nogova. The isle is nearly completely under Soviet control, but there are still some traitors, rebels and other capitalist scum who try to prevent the Red Army from helping their comrades in Nogova. You are to neutralize those traitors' main camp on a small isle South from the coast of Nogova.
   So, this begins as a simple kill all rebels -mission. But there may be surprises...

Installation   :Extract 'goodwill.Noe.pbo'into your .../Missions folder.

Comments      :This is quite a long mission. It's just a beta, there may be serious problems. Any feedback is welcome.

Beta 0.6      :
         -Improved intro (somehow centered - still needs fixing)
         -Added artillery to the second part of the mission
         -Adjusted gameplay and made numerous minor changes
         -Added outro (never seen an outro with Japanese poetry before, eh?)

Beta 0.55      :
         -Improved intro, but still uses setrelpos and is uncentered
         -Added artillery script
         -Adjusted group joining
         -Adjusted cutscene
         -Improved overview and briefing
         -Fixed some minor issues
         -Reduced some scum and lowlifes. Words, I mean.
         -Reduced skill of the Resistance troops at the Western ruins
         -Added some music
         
Beta 0.5      :
         -First public release



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THIS MODIFICATION IS NOT MADE, DISTRIBUTED, OR SUPPORTED BY THE CODEMASTERS SOFTWARE COMPANY LIMITED ("CODEMASTERS") OR BOHEMIA INTERACTIVE STUDIO.

[Tarados Qeng]

Thanks for all who have been helping me. Maelstrom of Goodwill has now been submitted to the MEC 2004. I don't think I will win (or even be in the top 10) but at least I tried. I'm proud if this mission. Hopefully it works with all judges...

Okay, since this is now completed, I'm focusing now on Shatterpoint 1986. Once more, thank you.


Edit: This mission has been reviewed and is available from the Missions Depot.