I'm diving back into mission editing now that work has FINALLY settled back into some semblance of normalcy. Hopefully I'll have something interesting to play in a month or two. It may take longer just because I'm getting my feet wet again after having to lay off for almost a year.
I also haven't decided what exactly I want to build. More to come as I figure that out.
I'm still leaning towards developing an Antistasi/KP Liberation style scenario. It's likely to be heavily influenced by the evolving tactics, strategy, and geopolitical implications of the current Ukraine/Russian war.
That said, though, there's another option that I've thought about off and on for a long time. If I can ever figure out how, I would LOVE to build a campaign based upon a series of scenarios in which the history of completed missions informs what happens next. The capability would appear to be baked into Arma's DNA going all the way back to the OpFlash SP campaign.
Although that campaign was pretty linear because it was mostly meant as a teaching tool, it actually had a couple of points where there were different impacts depending upon the outcome of previous missions.
One I remember in particular was a mission where the SpecOps character, James Gastovski, had to take out some attack helos sitting in an improvised forward air base that was hidden in a forest clearing. Your very next mission in the campaign was as the tank commander, Robert Hammer. If you didn't succeed in finding and destroying the helos, you had to face them in that mission. That sure made it a lot harder to complete! :o
Anyway, the notion of that sort of persistence between missions really appeals to me. I think there are some interesting options that could be introduced. I would love to stretch the model out if I can figure out how to do it. For example:
- Maybe make a mini-mission where players vote on which scenario to play next?
- Build a high level map display so players can influence the operational tempo by picking different objectives?
- Force campaign progression down certain paths by limiting resource availability?
Not typically the kind of thing one finds on an Arma server, so maybe it's not doable. Either that, or nobody bothered to figure it out because it's a silly notion in the first place. ;)
I spoke too soon! Work became all consuming again and I have had very little time and energy to do any mission creation until very recently. :-\
For the past three weeks or so I've been spending my time with Drongo's collection of tools for mission creation in Arma 3. It's amazing what he's managed to put together.
At the moment I have a long running test mission that I'm playing around with on Altis. Similar in concept to KP Liberation or Antistasi although I'm heavily influenced by the war in Urkaine. I have the main population and weather modules set up the way that I like. I have barebones versions of the missions, CAS, and arty modules set up. I have a few others of Drongo's that I'm interested in that I want to play around with.
There's also an AI "High Command" mod called "NR6 PACK - HAL Evolved" or "Hetman Artificial Leader NR6 Edition." It gets high marks for creating an aggressive opposing AI and/or an overall friendly commander. I'm looking forward to playing with both of them to so see if it can fill the capabilities that ALiVE used to do back in the day. :)
Next steps are to:
- Finish playing around with the mods.
- Get an alpha or beta build to play around with and troubleshoot on my portable laptop server.
- Set up a play test on Llama.
Hopefully I'll be able to control my work environment enough to actually get something done over the next several weeks. Seriously, I could have an alpha build of something playable in a week or two if work wasn't sucking up so much time. :(
More to come!