Introduction Over the last few months, there's been a significant effort in the overhaul, and modernisation of our beloved insurgency mission. Following the introduction of many significant and minor changes, we felt it would be appropriate to give you a breakdown as opposed to a standard change-log.
Before we start though, we'd like to mention this project was aided by consultation with the most active public players at the time, totalling around 8 members in addition to management. We'd like to again express our gratitude for their feedback, and in some cases work as well, to the following: ChanNy, Stormin, Björn, freez, Crow, Fro, Tooit, and last but by no means least TooTall.
Major Features/Changes Patrol Base A major issue that was raised was the transitional period between small and medium sized player bases. It's been noticed that the player count jumps from tiny to medium, because of the convenience in leaving the main base in numbers. In order to help accommodate the lower player count, and those that want to jump in on the action, we've come up with hopefully an interesting and engaging solution.
A group leader of at least 5 individuals can now go to a spawner in base and spawn the essential patrol base equipment. Once this group has relocated this equipment to a position away from base, interact with the table to form a patrol base. Now when a soldier spawns into the game, or is killed, they can select the patrol base as their spawn location.
Bare in mind though, this is a very limited facility that will be in need of constant logistics. There is no ammo crate, no vehicles, no defences. All of this will need to be brought up from the main base. If there's a helicopter pilot available, he's going to be your best friend. You'll want to place things like statics, concertina wire and other defences as disrupting this facility is an important goal for the insurgents in the region. Vehicles won't de-spawn near this facility either.
This aspect is still in early days, and will be expanded upon greatly if the fundamentals are proven.
Situations One of the most significant changes is the way victory in the region is determined. Previously, as I'm sure most of you are aware, once 3 weapons caches were destroyed, the mission was deemed accomplished - and only that. All other efforts were merely to aid the location and destruction of them.
We've moved away from this system, to what's been coined as the "situations" system. Through-out the campaign in the area, various situations will unfold and their completion/failure will contribute in a meaningful way. Positively and negatively, hopefully always logically. You will be able to accomplish victory in the region without touching a single weapons cache.
There can be numerous situations at once, and cover either a hearts and minds orientated objective or a more aggressive search and destroy scenario. Most are designed for general infantry, but there are situations best suited for the attachments as well.
The system is designed to be easily expanded upon, to allow for us to grow the mission in the future with relative ease. In addition to this, the victory goal is also dynamic, which does expand with the numbers of players and the like. We won't be covering the numerous situations here, as we think their discovery and exploration will be an enjoyable aspect.
Vehicle Respawning Rework A common complaint for many moons now has been that the vehicle re-spawns were more often than not a hindrance. The basic function of vehicle respawn is to ensure that there should always be some vehicles back at base for new guys, and that the map doesn't become littered with discarded ones (not only is that a performance concern, but it's just plain untidy).
With that specification in mind, we've gone back and revised the system. There's three occasions where a vehicle will never re-spawn: it's parked somewhere in the main base, it's parked near a functional patrol base and last, but most importantly, if there are players within a certain radius of it.
Public Config and Framework You've probably seen it already, as it's been on public the last few weeks, but we now have a public config. In addition to this, we also have the same framework we use for operations. The framework is an important inclusion, as it allows us to closely mirror the operations environment on elements such as: UI adjustments, medical adjustments and utilise our own scripts.
The public config is a significant change due to the fact that it'll make loading into the mission a lot faster. Previously without the config, you would load into a unit, then a script would strip you and then load all the gear required. Now, you'll load in with the correct gear to begin with. That also means that alterations to gear is separated from the mission itself. A mod update will have the gear updated across all missions, with relative ease for us. Word of caution: old missions do not benefit from this.
It also allows for some custom items, that you may encounter on your adventures. Good luck.
Civilians We've expanded and improved on feedback from civilians in many different ways. Their dialogue should now be more intuitive on their trust level, and what they know. Injuring civilians and/or their architecture is a lot more significant now, intentional behaviour is now tracked and will be followed up on. You can heal a civilian for some positive affect, but it doesn't outweigh injuring them.
Civilians fleeing a scene have dried their eyes a little, and because of it, are better at seeking cover. Most of the time. After the scene has calmed down, they'll go back and attempt to return to normality. Hopefully this makes questioning them a lot easier after you've secured the location.
IEDs IEDs are meant to provoke fear and careful play, but we found them to be quite predictable and easily avoided. We've revised the IED system, so now they're not always confined to roads, that they will be planted over time, and there's a lot more variety of them.
Additionally, when disarmed you'll now be able to retrieve the explosive material. If you bring that back to be disposed of at base, and thus take it out of the hands of the insurgents, it positively affects the overall effort.
We're still not content on this element, and for the next major update there's a lot of focusing on this aspect.
Adaptability A major reason for the overhaul was to make it a lot easier to transfer to other regions. This means that the core system should be adaptable enough to work in modern Malden, early 2000's Takistan, as well as 90s Northern Ireland or any other reasonable combination you can conjure up for public. As such, it is highly configurable, which allows for pretty painless tweaking, in the very likely case that problems arise as it's played out.
Minor Changes/Fixes - [Added] Diary Entries to explain the new systems, and old ones
- [Added] Advanced Medical on AI
- [Added] Some items are now confiscated upon re-spawn at base
- [Added] Several tools to assist development, including dev environment & static code analysis
- [Added] Strongholds
- [Improved] Mission name now includes last updated date in title
- [Improved] Morale is now percentile based for both Insurgents/Civilians
- [Improved] IED seed is now scaled to worldSize
- [Improved] Billboards should now give clearer feedback
- [Improved] Most images were relocated to the framework, reducing mission size
- [Improved] IEDs are now ACE explosive based
- [Improved] Repo organisation, including Discord feedback
- [Improved] Enemy scalability with player count
- [Improved] IED placement on roads is now better handled to deal with variant road sizes
- [Improved] More variation between towns in terms of populace, based on building numeracy
- [Improved] Vehicle slot restriction should be less annoying/deadly
- [Improved] Vehicle slot restriction to be Zeus friendly
- [Fixed] Paradroping from helicopters is now as successful as real life
- [Fixed] Caching inconsistencies causing AI to flux in and out of existence
