I've been lucky enough to play one of your earlier missions (was it in ARMA1?) and the "feel" of an ongoing conflict in that one was absolutely great. I'm very curious about this one.
Ya that would have been right toward the end of ArmAI and it was to be ported over to ArmAII but unfortunately the terrain, situation, AI integration, etc., never translated well to the newer title so I was forced to scrap it.
That particular mission took well over 200 hours to put together however was a perfect example of how my missions end up. They always appear small scale initially but so much is done in the way of attack/counter-attack that a conflict can last up to and including 4 hours if I choose to structure it that way.
That mission was also heavily based on enemy AI vehicular combat. There were tanks, BMP's, jeeps with mounted machine guns and transport helicopters paradropping enemy AI on top of the BLUFOR line.
Side suburbs were utilized to dynamically spawn enemy armor based off random conditionals set by BLUFOR. Most were scripted statically but with the triggers being placed in the manner they were, everything appeared dynamic because it never happened in the same manner twice.
I added BLUFOR tank AI to combat some balance issues and the effect was mesmerizing. I remember being pinned down by a BMP only to see it explode from an ally tank shell that flew mere yards above my head, awesome!
Remember the "no mans land" that you had to traverse through dynamic artillery drops? I don't remember one time being forced out there and not having my heart in my throat.
I'll be the first to admit that I use scripting in my missions but it's always set off a number of base conditionals that must be met for the trigger to activate. Since the ArmA Series is an unscripted Sandbox, the triggers never trip in the same manner giving the appearance of variation to a static event. It sounds ridiculous but it works fantastic!
What made that mission so great was you never saw the enemy AI spawn and that is always the focus. I hate seeing AI spawn in front of me so I hide it well in an area that's always out of reach to the player. As the line moves forward the enemy spawn system falls back so they can spawn out of site and reinforce their line.
In this case I could only spawn them for a short while in the city but once BLUFOR was detected within city limits I could do it no longer for fear a player seeing AI suddenly appear out of thin air. This is why helicopters were used to paradrop AI as I could safely spawn them on a remote island into a vehicle that was either landed or already on the move.
I'll always work this way but must admit that Wasteland opened my eyes to some possibilities I hadn't previously considered. The one direction I will be looking toward is dynamic spawn of these scripted triggers. I hope to eventually structure them in a way where they can spawn in one or perhaps, multiple, concurrent locations based off variable percentage of probabilities. This means you may or may not see these triggers activate and the amount you see will always vary.
That's quite far down the road though.
The biggest issue I face in my missions though is testing because I just can't test them alone. I need variable amounts of human soldiers to help me out so I can get scale right from the beginning.
It is exceptionally difficult to scale back a large scale conflict based off player count once all the groundwork has been done. I need to get this right from a very early stage in the build so if you guys are willing, I'd love to try it.
Now the other HUGE issue is building from the end forward. You simply cannot test in any other manner as it represents a huge amount of time that people just don't have.
There are 3 acts in every one of my missions, the end, the conflict and the start. Each needs to work for the mission to feel satisfying so I need to break them up in this regard.
The start and end sound easy but conflict is also very simple to test. I typically test spawn points and reinforce points as well as AI pathfinding and other variables. The AI is often scaled way down to 1 person or unarmed squads and the vehicles usually are stripped of ammo.
My ArmAII Mission Debugging Video on YouTube gives you a very good idea of how the conflict is in fact now debugged.
[video=youtube;wkyEjfkyE1g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkyEjfkyE1g[/video]
I have broken conflict down a bit as I like to test vehicles and infantry separately in the beginning prior to integration. I find it helps me combat the pathfinding issues all that much faster as they are always the most difficult to address.
Lastly, I've given this a lot of thought and want to structure this particular mission as modules within a larger mission as outlined above. This way I can use them in multiple scenarios without a lot of tweaking and create multiple scenarios regardless of geography (which killed me in ArmAI and II).
Imagine a dynamically player scaled version of that ArmAI Mission now fought on a city to city basis across the entire island.
That's where I ultimately want to end up. I want a 24 - 240 hour conflict that once complete sees the island in complete ruin.
What if I kicked it up a notch and one day decided to tackle database integration and a save system that allows you to maintain your character should you reach a safe zone?
The possibilities are endless provided the base modular system works which is what we'll be testing.
