Randomization Config for Mission Builders

[No.401_Wolverine]

Here's something that I've always wished was available, speaking from the point of view of a mission builder:

 

When I create missions for my squadron campaigns, I obviously know exactly what's going to happen (how many aircraft, where they are, what their target is, etc.). This makes participating in these squadron campaign a little less interesting for me. Perhaps there are complicated ways to introduce randomization into the mission builders in games previous, but they haven't been obvious ways and as a result prevent less sophisticated mission builders from creating more interesting campaigns for their gaming groups (squadrons).

 

What I'd really like to see is a simple (or as simple as possible) way to introduce random elements to mission building. This would allow mission builders to create interesting and much more re-flyable missions. For example:

 

I'd like to create a mission that randomizes the number of escort aircraft, creating more or less threat to those attacking bombers.

I'd like to create a mission that randomizes the type of aircraft being encountered.

I'd like to create a mission that randomizes the waypoints of a fighter sweep to make the possibility of being bounced a surprise.

I'd like to create a mission that randomizes the target of a bomber group (and adjusts the escort to follow as well).

I'd like to create a mission that randomzes all of the above!

 

The ability to make randomization in missions is also of huge benefit to people who play singleplayer missions, either exclusively or in addition to multipayer. A person playing single-player suddenly has the ability to create interesting and engaging missions that will not play out the way they expect. This would be a great bridge to multiplayer play for someone not too sure about making that jump. It introduces that unexpected element where you can be attacked at any time or you might not see a thing. In short, it makes the ability to make more a realistic singleplayer experience much more possible to the end user without having to go out and find and download someone else's missions and hope that they're good. I doubt that a lot of the people who buy the game will seek out online mission builder forums to download content. They'll just try making their own.

 

Anyway, I think the tool to randomize the above elements makes a lot of sense and adds a great deal of value to the product for all types of users, not just the hardcore.

[slm]

I'm 100% supporting this. And hope that developers can take this goal into account somehow and implement things when their plans allow it.

Not necessary, but it would add so much to re-playability of missions and make them much more interesting every time.

 

There was a person during IL2 days who had made a utility program for this purpose. Since he worked without contact to official IL2 developers AFAIK,

maybe some things were too difficult to solve, so I think this program was never finished.

 

The examples above where randomisation could be applied are fine, but the list could be much longer.

Randomisation of objects placed on ground and water could be included just as well.

But IF this idea will become part of the game engine you have to start from something

[4Shades]

Sounds like DCG, developed by Lowengrin. Very useful tool for many people.

[slm]

Did some searches and it was this project that I had in mind:

 

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/308814-Creating-Random-Weather-and-Positions-Numbers-of-Objects-IL2-Fog-Of-War-Forums

[4Shades]

That type of stuff is pretty trivial to develop, software-wise. What it needs is a set of basic templates, e.g. tank battle, ship battle, bombing raid etc (or allow people to set up their own templates), and just have some  triggers/functions to pseudo-randomly change parameters like locations, speeds, times, force composition etc. This has been done many times before, but certainly a feature like this could be attractive to many players as they get to grips with the game.

 

If BOS has the right architecture, these kinds of tools could be developed easily by the community, and they would probably do a much better job than 777/1C could afford to do themselves.

 

Cheers, and HNY,

4S

[FlatSpinMan]

This all sounds highly fun!

[slm]

That type of stuff is pretty trivial to develop, software-wise. What it needs is a set of basic templates, e.g. tank battle, ship battle, bombing raid etc (or allow people to set up their own templates), and just have some  triggers/functions to pseudo-randomly change parameters like locations, speeds, times, force composition etc. This has been done many times before, but certainly a feature like this could be attractive to many players as they get to grips with the game.

 

If BOS has the right architecture, these kinds of tools could be developed easily by the community, and they would probably do a much better job than 777/1C could afford to do themselves.

 

 

I think *controlled* randomness here is much more interesting than total randomness.

It would be great if mission builder could set some limits, like that he wants some AI planes to fly between 1000 and 1500 meters.

Or some static ship group would be placed to a random position taken from a line on map.

Or some AA gun battery would be placed inside a circle or other similar area placed to map by mission builder.

If such things could be done, this placing of utility shapes to map (would be used only for randomisation, not shown when the mission is played)

would be easier by the official development team IMO than by community if they don't have access to source code somehow.

Edited January 1, 2013 by slm

[FlatSpinMan]

Good points there, sim. They would possibly be hard to build in but they would make the system work better later on.

[slm]

Even if the official support was just

-in Mission Builder being able to add points and lines that do not show while playing, but can be used by third party programs for randomisation

 

everything else could be probably done by third party programs.

But it would help a lot if one could see the map when placing these "helper shapes".

[No.401_Wolverine]

Even something as simple as making every waypoint in the game a 'random' waypoint within a certain radius of the plotted point. That way, a defined waypoint would simply be registered as a 0 radius waypoint (no variation) and a random waypoint would be registered as a X radius waypoint (10miles radius for example) and the waypoint would automatically be randomly placed at any location inside the circle drawn by that radius from the plotted point.

 

If you want a completely random flight path, just put waypoints that have huge radii.

 

The really nice thing would be to assign to different groups a '1 in X' chance of being spawned. For example, there's be a 1 in 3 chance of an armoured column appearing and rolling down a highway towards a city. There'd be a 1 in 5 chance that they'd have close air support. There'd be a 1 in 10 chance that there'd be friendly armour positioned to defend along the road. That sort of thing.

 

If you were to add this feature to the old IL-2 mission builder, it would simply be another box in the 'group properties' tab of the Object Viewer labelled 'Chance of Creation - 1 in:' and then a box with 1 as the default setting (always created). Change it to a 2 and you have a 50/50 chance of that group/object appearing when you run the mission.

 

Or make it 'Chance of Creation %' with 100 as the default value. Same thing.

 

For altitude/speed, just add a box for each waypoint that reads 'Alt Variation' and 'Spd Variation' and in those boxes the default would be 0 (no variation from specified alt/speed). Put 1000ft into the 'Alt Variation' and the altitude in game for that group would be specified altitude +/- a random value up to 1000ft. Same with speed. Put in a speed variation and the actual speed in game would be specified speed +/- any value up to the variation speed value max (limited by aircraft achievable speed, of course).

 

I suspect that group type variation would be harder to impliment simply. First you'd have to define what types are possible out of many types, then define probabilities, etc. It's harder to make this option simple in a builder I think, though I suppose it could look a lot like the way the airfield spawn objects work. Put a checkbox labelled 'Random' below the object type. If the checkbox is enabled, the object dropdown is greyed out and a button named 'Types' next to the checkbox is made clickable. Click the button and a second window opens with all available objects on the left side (broken down by aircraft/vehicle/etc.) and a blank area on the right side. Little buttons between the sides for moving the objects back and forth from one side to the other. First you'd have to define if it's an air object or ground object. Then you'd move objects of that type from one side to the other. All of the objects moved to the right side of the window are the ones drawn randomly from to determine the object's type in game. If you want one type to have better odds (for example 3 out of 4 times the aircraft is a JU88, but 1 out of 4 it's a He111) then add more of that object to the right side (JU88, JU88, JU88, He111 for example).

 

Again, group variation is hard because now you have to define possibilities for each aircraft (they carry different fuel loads, bomb loads, etc etc etc). Defining all those options in an easy to use GUI would be tricky. Especially if you're trying to keep the more regular, simple mission designs easy to make. MOST people probably aren't going to use the builder to this level.

[slm]

Yes, possibilities are endless here. You could basically make every part of the mission dynamic.

But what is practical is another thing.

It shouldn't take too much work for developers to implement and if defining those random parts of the mission is too complicated, few people are going to use it.

How many users were able to do those missions which required programming with C# in CoD? 

Probably few limits to what people could do, but how many people can and are willing to write C# code and test it enough to make good missions.

Edited January 3, 2013 by slm

[Ribbs]

slm... your right..the average to lite user of the fmb aren't going to be using c#,but there are plenty of guys out there now in the community that are proficient in writing it. There are already a lot of scripts that have been written and saved so that mission builders can just insert them as needed. It would be a perfect world, if they could incorporate both in the fmb, so like Wolverine said...the original mission designer can have fun.. not knowing"exactly" what and where stuff is going to happen in his missions. One conflict or problem i might see happening would be with flights engaging each other..or using triggers. With the randomness of what's going on, it might be difficult to get something to "trigger ". But hey if its randomness your looking for...sometimes it might trigger..and sometimes it wont I guess....haha S!

Edited January 16, 2013 by 352ndRibbs

[slm]

This is one of my favorite topics in mission building and it will be very interesting to see if something like this will be included in the game.

Sooner or later.

[Ribbs]

Well as long as you have an absolute option in there also.. No randomness.. ( IE these planes will be here at this time and this Altitude to trigger something crucial) This could be an excellent feature for sure. S!

Edited February 1, 2013 by 352ndRibbs

[slm]

Yes, that's a good point. For each randomisable value of mission there should be a default value that would be used if user wants non-randomised detault mission.

[89-]

Randomisation would also work ownders for life on the ground. Eg a counter could be set that watches how many units are processed by the game at particular moment and then it can spawn as many ground units (trucks, civvy cars etc) as the object count will allow. These can follow their template routes without mission makers having to configure everything for this random traffic.

[slm]

I like your idea that when a mission is running, it could adjust itself depending on server load.

Basically the same mission could have different amount of objects depending on how powerful the server HW hosting the mission is.

 

Basically a bit like the idea how web pages can be shown on devices with many kinds of display resolution.

When using a large display, is the whole web page shown using fixed size or are the "extra" pixels used so that some parts of the web page are shown using more pixels?

[FlyingNutcase]

The program that slm referred to is IL2 Fog of War which I spent a good while developing in my IL2 hayday. It can do everything mentioned in this thread except dynamic changes mentioned in the previous two posts, as the flyable mission is generated prior to flying and it runs independent of the game. It doesn't use templates; you make your own missions and incorporate as little or as much randomisation as desired.

 

The big mistake I made back then was to hang on for one more feature (again and again) so it never got publicly released.

 

Now that I'm back with IL2, firstly I hope that 777 incorporates some randomisation into the editor because that's the best  and easiest place for it. But I will pull out the program again. The core of it will work with the new IL2. The main changes needed will be reading and writing mission files, removing functionality and testing for an initial release. The main problem is not having much free time these days.

 

Like you guys above, I find non-randomised missions a bit dull so one way or another I won't be flying without it and if 777 doesn't introduce any, or just limited randomisation, I'll get it out there this time.

 

S!