Taxi to victory.

The online gaming wiki can be found here .

A particularly infamous irc convo about ww2ol can be found here.

I can laugh about it now..:P

JU-52s.

I must admit I love flying the JU. I look for any oppurtunity to practise my skills with it, usually involving doing infantry resup runs. Finding landing strips next to an AB can certainly be an interesting expierence.
The JU is also ridicolously easy to fly (as mentioned in a previous entry my 4 year old son can fly it) and does so even on two engines. This is something I've had particular exposure too the last two nights..

- Two nights ago we were attempting to rush para's to Grobb to get it contested 20 minutes before the server went down...In my rush to get off the AF I made a rudder turn and dipped my left prop into the ground...took off no problems and while the trip was a bit slow I had no problems flying. Gods I love this plane.

- Last night I wanted to ferry sappers from Leuven to Aarschott...circled Leuven a cpl of times and attempted to land on a fairly open strip of land east of town...whoops berms!, tonk tonk. There goes the left prop again. Taking off wasn't as easy this time. I had a short field with limited maneouver, as I started taking off the plane was dipping to the left, I found myself physically leaning the other way in some sort of attempt to right the plane. Took off at not quite a 45 degree angle while just clearing some trees.

It was at this point I realised I still had my flaps down.

Why I play.

So I just pre-ordered Battleground Europe, 'Troop your a fanboi!' I hear you say.
Well your right and let me tell you why.

First off I realise this game is not perfect and I for one have disagreed with a lot of CRS's decisions but at the end of the day one fact remains:

There is no other game like World War 2 Online.

For sure there are ww2 FPS's, simulators and even games that combine all elements such as Battlefield but they are all lacking.

I've played Battlefield 1942, used to play a lot of Day of Defeat and still some Counterstrike, why do I keep coming back to ww2ol? Because it gives you a point to playing.

The biggest knock, to me at least, for games such as DoD or Battlefield is that there is no POINT to winning the game. Sure the action is fun, the graphics are better than ww2ol but what do you get for winning a round? For winning a map? Nada.

ww2ol players are a different bunch and I'll bet that if you ask them that this is the way they feel. I can play Counterstrike for short periods of time, I still do for a quick action buzz but I get bored quickly. 'Whoopee I killed 3 CTs and planted the bomb, welp lets do it again!'

You might say 'but troop in ww2ol your fighting over the same map as well!'. Your right but the scale is 1000x that of a counterstrike round or a Battlefield map. ww2ol is something I can follow when I'm not playing, I can check the web map and be emotionally invested in whats going on. 'Crap they took Luxembourgh back!', 'woot we got Oostmalle'.
When we fight to get a town tonight we know that our actions are going to matter tommorow. A campaign that lasts 6 weeks is certainly more interesting than a map that lasts 30 minutes.

No one in 4 years has come close to making a meta game such as ww2ol. Maybe one day they will and maybe I'll go play that, but until then CRS has my money.

BRP's aplenty.

Had a personal best with the 2pdr on Sat night. Setup outside the AB at Grobb I got 13 kills and eventually despawned when I ran outa ammo. Never depleted the ammo in a anti tank gun before. 11 of those kills were infantry, any idea how hard it is to snipe infantry running perpendicular to you with AP ammo?

ps If you dont know what a BRP is your a noob..:D

Bringing back mission priorities.

So I had an idea to bring back mission priorities but in a completely different manner than back in pre 1.19.

Here's the situation that brought up this thought :-

4 BDGE is attacking a town and using missions to split the players into 4 teams. Second we also have a mission up in our defensive AO to defend an FB we recently brought up.

We want the bulk of our players joining the 4 offensive missions, our defensive AO is pretty quite but we want a few people there so the Axis don't get an easy FB takedown.

This is where mission priorities and some visual cues in the UI come in.
A mission creator can assign a priority to a mission, maybes its 1, 2 etc like before or offensive/defensive/resup or something like that.Once the mission has been posted it will be highlighted in a different colour in the brigade HQ screen depending on its priority. For example P1 missions are red while P2's are a light blue.

Most importantly rank gain/score is NOT affected by the mission priority, it is simply a means to assigning priorities for people's attention within the brigade.

Thoughts?

I'll take 'Improving the game' for $400 Alex.

A. Making parts of it available while spawned in.

Q. How could I make the UI 100x more useful?

I like the new UI, it definately has some cool features. Those include the ability to see how many are spawned in on a mission, who they are and what they are using.

The problem is is that commanders like to play the game to, we like to spawn in and shoot stuff. Most players spend 90% of their game time spawned in, therefore making all those snazzy UI improvements useless for that time.

How damn cool would it be to hit a button and bring up the following:

'Mission comment/objective' - Wow people might actually read it then.
'Mission numbers' - Damn useful for a MSP or a commander needing to know how many bodies are on the field.
'Mission members and equipment' - Now I can actually find who my tanks are and PM them if necessary. Or see if I need more infantry spawning in, or find a sapper for that nasty panzer who's trying to give me a lead buzzcut.
'Mission list' Bring up the current missions available to your brigade.

THEN the UI would be truely useful.

kfs1 are you reading my little blog here?

Campaign 22

Kicks off today. 1200 CST.

I'm going to be running a 4 BDGE Op tonight testing out some ideas on brigades and missions. Hopefully I'll give an AAR tommorow.

Self Propelled Anti Air for ww2ol

Per Doc in the forums the following vehicles will be modelled to fill the SPAA role for the various armys.

The main decider for these particular units was that the chassis's are already modelled in game:

For the Germans - The SdKfz.7 with quad 20mm FlaK.38.
-Nice bloody firepower, 4x20mm? Ouch. On the + side, the sdkfz is fairly slow and doesnt offer much protection. Im wondering is the gun position open? If so then its strafe, rifle, nade bait.

For the British - Vickers with twin Besa 15mm.
- Damn Brits have sucky tanks. Seriously underpowered compared to the other two , however its by far the fastest and best armoured.

For the French - Laffy with 2x25mm Camle.
-Hrrm I'm not sold. Sure its 2x25mm, but the Germans get 4x20..50 vs 80 vs 25(Brit). More vunerable that the sdkfz and just about as slow. Still if you connect your gonna do some damage.

The other thing is these could be very good for infantry suppression. Espcially the Vickers as it has armour.

Still can't wait to suprise some Stuka with twin barrels of 25mm one day.

Another annoying post about Troop's new computer.

You know the trouble with ww2ol's code? Other people.

I get phenomenal fps in unpopulated areas, I'm talking 100+, but put me into a town where there's a lot of fighting going and down she goes. FPS as infantry dips to 30-40 with occasional spikes down to 20 and lower. Planes suck even more.

I must say that the water looks DAMN nice with a decent video card.

I'm considering getting another gig of RAM to see if it makes a difference, but that seems to be a rather expensive option.

Hopefully as 1.19 matures and turns into 1.20 they'll fix some of the performance issues.

Stupid moments in computing.

So setup the new PC last night, almost no problems whatsoever. Those that did occur were user-error.

My two favourite from last night:

1. After installing win2k wondering why the hell I couldnt get my internet connection to work. Helps if you remmeber to install the ethernet card driver Troop!

2. Wondering why the Thief III CD I got with my vid card wouldn't worked. Even swapped out a CD-ROM drive at one stage. Helps if you look at the disc and see the big 'DVD' letters Troop.


Played some ww2ol last night. They better get the new graphics coder up to speed fast. That's all I'll say.


Sitting at work and all I want to do is go home and play with my new baby..:D

Ok so sorry about the firebombs.....

On FedEx vehicle for delivery Jul 13, 2005 8:28 AM


So I was thinking Friday would be good. Then I got the tracking numbers and they said Thursday. Then I checked it this morning and I got the above message.

WOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Stand down, stand down.

firebombs rescinded. neweggs webpage was screwing up and my mobo and cpu are enroute and due a day early on Thursday.

woot.

Waypoints, recon reports etc.

(I'd link to the production notes piece but www.wwiionline.com is blocked by my work. Funnily enough ahc/ghc sites aren't. shhhhh.)

Gophur mentioned some cool features going into 1.20 and frankly I'm kinda excited by them.

What could potenially have a big impact is waypoints. Finally, finally we get some command and control elements for tactical groups on the ground. It's not the be all and end all but its a start.
To be a success I believe they will have to achieve two things: 1. Be easy to use and 2. Be easy to see. If they are I think you will start to see infantry players (tanks to I suppose but I don't care..:)) actually start to group up and perhaps some semi-realistic tactics start to evolve.
One of my biggest frustrations is the tendancy of infantry players to 'go it alone' and rush in to places piece meal. While, yes, it is somewhat human nature to have this 'rambo' approach to gameplay I also believe is that previously there was simply nothing there to facilitate players grouping up.
Now if a commander can lay down a waypoint(s), players would be more likely to actually go to that waypoint knowing that others will follow as well. I'd love to see waypoints setup with people grouping up to provide gun lines, covering fire etc.
Next we need quick easy voice commands, more effective LMGs (for covering fire) and good visual cues for command and control. On the topic of visual cues Gophur mentioned that different coloured tags would be introduced, not sure for who though. Hopefully OiCs, brigade members, mission members maybe (rainbow tags anyone?..:)). Also improvments to chat coming Gophur mentioned hopefully which will involve coloured text and ways to distinguish custom channels (ie 6, 55, etc).
The new tanks I couldn't give a rat's arse about.

Im such a lazy blogger.

Cause I got nothing than a random 'notes' post.

- My son loves flying planes in ww2ol. Actually let me rephrase that, he loves crashing planes in ww2ol. He thinks it's funny, not so good for my stats though. That's why he will one day inherit the second account I'm getting.
My PC is in the basement and he will wander down the stairs and say 'Daddy are you playing the army team game?'. Minitroop does love the 'army team'. He can actually fly a JU-52 level and straight (who cant?), I like to tell my passengers who's piloting the plane about mid-flight. heh.

- Firebombs for newegg if the cpu and mobo aren't here by Friday. Funny how they 'found' the postal order they received on Thursday!?! just on Monday after I called them twice about it and bitched out the last girl who took my call.

- Joint Operations kinda blows. Mortars implementation is nice though.

- Have to figure out if the video out on my new graphics card is helpful. Be nice if I could run that to my second pc to record the output. I still have grand plans for making some kickarse ww2ol movies. ('Group of Mates' is in pre-production..:D)

- In 4 years I've never been on the front page for the ww2ol newspaper. Man I suck.

Back from vacation.

So I haven't posted in a week because I've been vacationing from home. Why don't I post from home? Because I've got better things to do, I only post when Im avoiding doing work. Therefore I only post when I am work. Dont tell my boss ok?

Found a 17 inch monitor in my basement, dont ask me how, I just did. Big improvement over the eye killing 15".

Ordered all the parts for my new computer. newegg is going to get a earful if they don't get the motherboard shipped today. Should all be here by Friday.

Actually just opened the box to my video card. Free copy of Joint Operations and Thief III. Bonus! (Yes I have everything delivered to my work. Two reasons 1: My wife doesnt know what I get and 2: I dont like having boxes sitting around outside my house).

Here's what I ordered:

AMD 64 3000 CPU (socket 939)
Asus AN8-E motherboard (Has SLI, I won't be using it but it was a good asus motherboard with pci-express and the nforce4 chipset.)
Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT vid card.

Will stick the HD, Ram and Power supply from my old PC. Will eventually buy a new PS and setup two pcs and get a second account for ww2ol. yeehah.