The Fighting TTLGers present: Arma 3 (a TTLG Coop Saturdays spin-off) - by Thirith
Thirith on 22/7/2020 at 07:03
Concerning my earlier question: I didn't remember this while playing, but as long as there are slots taken by AI, it should be possible to exit and re-enter a mission once you've died, taking up one of the AI slots. (With some missions this works automatically - because it didn't happen here, I didn't think you could still reslot after dying.) This would mean that in any mission that we play that doesn't have respawn as such but it does have playable units taken by AI, we have something along the lines of spare lives. Perhaps one of the next times we play, we can retry that Takistan mission (approaching the second compound more carefully, spreading out more to avoid a grenade killing everyone and making sure that this Thirith guy doesn't open fire too soon) and see how it works if people can respawn into remaining AI.
Though I'd totally agree that we shouldn't play long missions that don't allow for some form of respawning. That may work for the big
Arma groups, where you'll always have a lot of action to watch and other people hanging out in limbo to talk to, but when we're half a dozen people, it sucks if you're the person who dies five minutes into a hour-long mission with no possibility to join the battle again.
Anyway, talking about the next session:
Quote:
The next Arma 3 coop session is happening on:
Date: Sat, 1 August 2020
Time: 3-6pm UK timeAs always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's online.
demagogue on 22/7/2020 at 09:58
Of course there's also the old school route of literally editing the relevant script file to set it to respawn. It sounds like the kind of thing that's covered in a single line of code somewhere that wouldn't be too hard to find, although there might be other complications involved with it.
Thirith on 22/7/2020 at 12:21
That's a good suggestion, I'll look into it. Chances are it won't always be easy, or it might be too easy to screw something up, but what might be relatively feasible would be to change a variable so that players who get shot always go into wounded mode rather than dying outright if, say, they are shot in the head.
Tony_Tarantula on 23/7/2020 at 20:53
Quote Posted by Jeshibu
Personally, the first warning of enemies I have is often bullets whizzing by. I think we might have to rethink our play style in missions with no respawn, and they'd better be on the short side.
You should be doing a "leader's recon".
[video=youtube;_nUR6XEm_Ls]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nUR6XEm_Ls[/video]
Anarchic Fox on 27/7/2020 at 12:41
Popping in to say: this is very much not my type of game, since I'm allergic to teamwork. However, I greatly enjoy the Youtube highlights. Keep it up! :D
Thirith on 28/7/2020 at 05:47
Thanks, will do! It's fun recording the videos and putting them together. As long as we do the sessions and I have time to do the editing, I will be posting vids.
Thirith on 31/7/2020 at 21:26
Change of plans:
Quote:
The next Arma 3 coop session is happening on:
Date: Sat, 8 August 2020
Time: 3-6pm UK timeAs always, I'll be online a bit before 3pm to set up the server and check who's online.
Though if anyone is around tomorrow, I may run an escape mission to test the setup. If anyone's on Steam at the usual time, I'll send a PM to ask if they want to join.
Thirith on 2/8/2020 at 13:53
Henke joined me for a test run with Escape Lythium (which also served as a test of the Lythium map, which I suspect we'll return to next Saturday). I want to run a couple of tests with the Escape mission with smaller groups in between our regular session until we've got more of a feel for it, since when these missions go wrong they can be massively frustrating. Anyway, here's an uncut video of our second attempt at escaping the clutches of the Takistani militia. We got reasonably far, but then henke's lack of ammo and my apparent inability to switch to automatic fire when it would make a lot of sense messed up our plans. I might keep uploading unedited footage of our escape attempts, also so I can check afterwards what we should've done better - such as the aforementioned switch to full automatic, because then that dude at the end would probably not have managed to kill me.
[video=youtube;D1GpuFqXRZM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1GpuFqXRZM[/video]
henke on 2/8/2020 at 15:30
That was a fun session, and more successful than most of our Escape attempts. :)
Thirith on 3/8/2020 at 06:50
Yeah, it was fun! I played the mission once or twice more on my own on Sunday and got further yet again - it helps to get a feel for how things are set up, and it also helps to use different factions than the vanilla Arma 3 ones, since those need to be shot 3-4 times before they go down, which makes the start more difficult. The mod factions are more vulnerable, i.e. you tend to go down after 1-2 hits but so do the enemy units. In any case, I think that with three players things will look different yet again: with the two of us, it happens quite quickly that one of us goes down, the other begins to patch them up, and already we're sitting ducks. With three or four players, one or two can keep guard while one of us patches up the wounded guy.
One thing that isn't ideal on the Lythium map is the distances: there are relatively few villages and towns, so especially at the beginning you can walk for a relatively long time before you get somewhere - though I don't know how much of this is randomised. For another time, perhaps we'll find a vehicle that doesn't later turn out to be a bush. :p It's a very nice map to look at, though, and pretty atmospheric. I think that with longer games it'll also be neat to have time passing and the light changing, as time passes six times as fast as in real life on default settings, i.e. we might start the mission in the morning and (ideally) make it out of there as the sun is setting.