(Review Completed) [SP] Abandoned Armies

[prodetar2]

are there any more quests i missed in the mission? or missing civilians or so?

btw what are those civies running from chapoi? i just let them run and i think some of them survived dont know but why are they there? i assume they are from sainte marie??

[THobson]

Scattered around the island are assorted atrocities to give atmosphere to the place. There is noting much to them often just a voiceover.  I do not recall you reporting finding a second resistance medic.  If you did find him then you found most of what there is on the island. 

The civis running from Chapoi:  They were the residents of Sainte Marie being held prisoner in Chapoi, but they escaped.  Remember the conversation you had with someone in a loft.  They told you about the civis there being rounded up.  Often they are wiped out by the soldiers in Chapoi but sometimes some of them do manage to escape from the town.  They run off home to Sainte Marie, unfortunately they do not understand what the signs around their village means.

[prodetar2]

hehe thats nasty that minefield i didnt know either when i first played boom truckd amaged... whoops! anyhow yes i had the other medic aswell so if thats all then ok cool thx for reply

[Mikero]

   There's also the case of Thobson's non-existent 3rd set of civilians 'somewhere near Trinite'.

2) a truck of dead civvies and some resistance fighters on the southern road to Chapoi

3) a nasty scene of 3 or four dead women in a barn 'somewhere'  used as an intro cutscene

4) (at least) two 'mad women' that you can encounter just about anywhere

5) literally 'peeping civilians' in Larche (and perhaps St Louis)

6) A dead or at least missing husband to account for

7) a pregnant woman.

a batch of dead civvies and soldiers in a hut near the 1st civilians which are 'useful' if you've run out of ammo early in the game

9) bad news with the brother if you take him to Vigny

[Tyger]

  There's also the case of Thobson's non-existent 3rd set of civilians 'somewhere near Trinite'.

Ah but they exsist. They are dead though. And the medic is dead as well.

[OAM]

Heh, I'm back.  Decided to take my jeep and a gunner North and raid some stuff from St.Louis.  Crashed parralell from the lodge.  Will give you a new mission summary after I have finished this "operation".

[andersson]

Someone should port this mission over to arma...

[Cheetah]

You might want to take a look at this one by Lee.

[THobson]

Wierd.  I just had someone else ask me by e-mail if I would mind is they did port it over to ArmA.  Here is my reply:

Porting the mission to ArmA will not be easy.  There will be little quirks
in the scripts that would need to be changed, for example event handlers in
OFP could have the syntax [{killed},....] but in ArmA thatr is not allowed
(or at least it wasn't when I was beta testing it) and this would need to be
changed to: ["killed",...].  Who knows what other changes have been made. 
Also all the destroyed buildings are killed by knowing their object ID,
these would all need to be changed.  Also to reduce the number of triggers I
made a lot of use of object IDs on the Malden map, again these would need to
be changed.  But the really big killer is likely to be the road convoys,
jeep patrols and overflying helicopters.  It took me several months just to
get these so they would continue working forever if left alone.  Of course
you can see how I did that by looking at the scripts but it will still take
a lot of time.  When I was beta testing ArmA before its release I tried to
get a convoy route working.  Not successfully, some of the bridges proved
pretty much impossible to get an ai vehicle to go over.  They may have fixed
this in the final release, but all this would need to be extensively
tested.  The next big killer will be lag.  Sahrani is a large island, that
creates lag on its own, but to give the mission the 'whole island' feel you
would need to have units all over the island.  Also I understand there are
no female civilians in ArmA.  That was an important part of my mission.

My suggestion is to use the ideas of Abandoned Armies (giving credit of
course ) and use the ideas to make a different mission, as Lee is doing
with Punishment Battalion:
http://www.ofpec.com/forum/index.php?topic=29984.0

If you want to know more about the workings of Abandoned Armies then have a
look at the download on the first post of this thread:
http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard311/ikonboard.cgi?s=76559db0e8588dafd0d5eb1f62c88d8b;act=ST;f=55;t=52120

Another thing I just remembered.  I made extensive use of a bug in OFP where name setPos[x,y,z] if used on a trigger will place the trigger z above sea level not z above gound.  In ArmA this bug has been fixed so that part of the code would also need to be modified. Simple, but a pain.

[LeeHunt]

Though I obviously loved Abandoned Armies, I don't recommend trying to port it over either.  It would be incredibly frustrating because of the numerous tweaks and adjustments to make it fit ArmA, and half the time you wouldn't know which line of hundreds needs to be changed.  Just about every script needs to be modified (i think only weather.sqs worked completely verbatim, and then you have to adjust that for your loon size) and ArmA seems to take a step back with its use of Object ID's.  Despite help from kind folks on the forums i still could not quite re-create THobson's moving bird/animal sound sources using ID's scattered around the map.  I ended up placing tons of cow/bird sounds in likely places instead.   Maybe through a function that array problem could be solved, but i'm not that skilled in designing yet...  So anyway understanding the game "engine" theories behind Abandoned Armies is probably the most important thing and then using the new syntax of ArmA to implement them. 

A truly enterprising designer might try to rewrite much of the Abandoned Armies "engine" in terms of functions; that would probably be useful as a resource for the  tutorial sections of Ofpec  .

[THobson]

There you go.  That's another workaround I had forgotten about.  The only reason I moved the sounds around was because ofp would not allow me to create and then destroy sound objects.  I really hated having to add more triggers just for this.

Some for the things I created for the mission I did put in the Editor's Dept.  Things like the script to join up small groups of soldiers into fewer larger groups (useful for the end of a mission); a mission to demonstrate all the faces, mimics and voices available etc.  Other stuff like music in vehicles, reorganising the team, controlling the weather, mixing up east and west weapons, removing ammo from dead soldiers, AP and AV mines etc. I left as an "exercise for the reader"  .  Frankly I was just too knackered to do any more, and anyway I reckoned that if anyone was really interested they would de-PBO it and figure it out themselves - I was pretty generous with the comments in all the scripts explaining how they work.

Edit:
Incidentally the reason why you might have been having problems replicating my moving sounds could be because in ofp if you setPos a trigger to [x,y,0] it will be placed at sea level.  I worked around this bug in the mission but the bug is fixed in ArmA.  So if you replicated my code then your sound source may be being placed x meters in the air (I can't remember exactly how I fixed this one), where x is the height of the ground above sealevel where the trigger is placed.  That is likely to put it too far away for it to be heard.  If that is the problem then check out the getPosASL and setPosASL commands in ArmA.  Life would have been so much easier with these commands in ofp.

[LeeHunt]

Yes, you were generous with the comments in the AA scripts!!  Saved me many hours of frustration  . 

Those setposASL commands could be interesting, I am going to experiment with those and see if i can find a way around.  I'm very desparate to reduce lag-- so far the betatesters for Punishment Battalion seem to be having minimal problems there but I still am with a 4 year old PC.  Hopefully some breakthroughs will occur to make future megamissions in Armed Assault easier for the next designer to create... So far creating triggers intragame and then deleting them has been very helpful..

[LeeHunt]

Return to Abandoned Armies

Ok, i took a break from FPS games like OFP and AA for a while, but decided recently to come back and play an oldie but a goodie, Abandoned Armies. Still awesome, even with OFP's less stunning 2001 graphics.  I really recommend for all the veterans out there pulling out your serial numbers and discs and reloading this mission.  Its still great fun and great to try in new ways.  Its like watching Star Wars again after years and years.  Really enjoying it 

[savedbygrace]

I agree, THobson did an exceptional work here and if anyone needs ideas, this is among those to pull them from.
BTW, Great to see you return Lee.

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

[GW]

i have kill all enemy but mission is not ending.i killed stamenov,but did not find andrepov.