Thursday, August 25, 2005

What's a lazy blogger to do?

Vulch off other blogs that's what! I'm feeling rather guilty that I had no news about open beta etc. so I thought I better put something up. Thanks Sres and Comstar.:D

Also haven't been in game much, studying for my Series 65 (Register Investment Advisor Representative) and have a part in a community theatre play (computer geek and theatre geek, did I mentioned I was in the band in High school?).

Anyways:

Open beta for Battleground Europe

Click here to get open beta started

Welcome back soldier program

New Sounds for 1.20

Friday, August 19, 2005

How to have a bad night in ww2ol.

I'm due for some seriously good karma after last night. Now, let us begin my tale of woe.

First off was the Para mission from Brussels to attack the NAB at Antwerp. This was actually the best of the night , its all downhill afterwards. We made it to the DZ where the jumpmaster lagged/went idle/spaced out. So we ended up dropping all over the place everywhere from right on the AB to 2k north of it. Nevertheless we were picked off fairly quickly.

So then I get to thinking that a surprise glider attack would be a better idea. Paras give to much warning (Oh look at the big silk thing floating in the sky!). We mount up some infantry at a rear town and start to glide in on the JU. Luckily for us we found the only panzer guarding the NAB. Oh happy times! Everyones dead before the JU even comes to a stop.

Ok, ok one more try. Load up infantry again, got about 15 this time, we were going to land outside of the town this time. Coming in for landing and the pilot lags into the ground. All passengers dead. woohoo.

The moral of this story is to never, ever get into a JU with troop. Not to mention the fact I got shot down the night before ferrying sappers to Tienen, and then when we tried to do it by truck I got strafed (probably by the same plane) with everyone getting killed.

To add insult to injury while we were waiting for our JU on the 3rd trip I decided to shoot a small movie at the AB. After doing 3-4 takes and boarding the plane I realised I had closed out fraps earlier in the night and therefore had shot nothing.

Oh and my headset mic stopped working.

BLAH!

I'll be back tonight.:D

Rats perform emergency server maintenance.


Courtesy of the Rat Cam.

That there is some hi tech servers...

Monday, August 15, 2005

Redux

Here.

And I'll keep saying it.

Fun with VD!

That's visual damage you gutter thinkers.

Blew my first tail off yesterday. Stupid newbies who go on autopilot out of a combat zone.....(Click here to see what Im talking about).

My other expierence was on the receiving end unfortunately...

Here's a brief transcription of my radio lag from the incident.

'Haha that 110 sucked, the worst BNZ ever'
'Now Im going to line him up for a sweet kill'
'HOLY MOTHER OF GOD WHO JUST SET OFF A BOMB BEHIND ME' (Actually that's what a 190 sounds like when it unloads on you)
'Flat spin, this isn't good'
'Stick forward...this aint working, lets check the plane'
'Tail is there'
'Left wing is there'
'Right wing is th...nope ...missing one right wing'
'uh oh'
-end transmission-

Friday, August 12, 2005

1.19.5 first impressions.

1.19.5 is , as far as I can tell, the gold candidate for BE release. (Sept 13th, per EB Games). Almost certainly there will be a patch to download on release day, but that is pretty standard amongst the MMOLG industry nowadays (and consider it will be a month between gold and release).

There's not a lot new in this release but there certainly are some pleasant suprises:

- Desktop icon to launch game. Thank god. I know there was a way to do it beforehand but that involved, you know, effort. 3 woots.

- New trees and bushes. Sweet looking, mmmmmm berries (though they look like red 6 sided dice to me) and cool spruces?. 4 woots.

- Improved performance. Definately FPS is better, less chugging over towns and the like (still rough but much more playable). Made 2 110s go boom over Aarschott last night. 5 woots.

Thats about it boys and girls. We anxiously await 1.20 news today from CRS.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Ramblings on ToEs.

Preface: ToE = Table of Equipment. The term assigned to the game mechanic where brigades will be tied to a specific location with a specific list of equipment.

Just sitting here at work throwing some random thoughts about ToE's in my head. I still don't know exactly how they will be implemented and to be perfectly honest I dont think CRS is 100% sure either.

But that doesn't stop me thinking about some of the variations...let's take the following situation for example:

I was thinking of 2 ID , BEF. We have 3 brigades and typically our AO is the southern half of the BEF front. (Stop yelling at me about security, if the Axis haven't figured this out after 3 years of it being this way then we have nothing to fear.). This front is usually 3 towns - Aarschott, Tienan and Eghezee. 1 brigade per town, brilliant! But thats kind of boring no? What if I want to attack an Axis town, do I have no chance to double up my brigades to create numerical superiority? Well I probably will have the ability to do that but that then leaves one of my towns empty.

Well that kind of sucks doesn't it?

So what if CRS gave us the ability to create 'demi-brigades' where the ToE of a brigade could be placed in an adjacent town (must be adjacent no?) and would comprimise half or a 1/3 of the listed brigade strength.

So for instance 2ID would be laid out as following , 5 BDGE (inf) in Aarschott, 4 BDGE (inf) is in Eghezee, 2AB (armour) is in Tienan. I split 4 BDGE into two parts leaving the weaker in Eghezee and moving the rest into Tienan for an attack on St. Truiden alongside 2AB.

With the addition of extra maneouver elements I think this would make the ToE game in ww2ol more complex and more fun/challenging for all involved.

Yes/no?

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

There once was a man from Bombay...

'So he lined up a stuka
and thought he would nuke her'

Somehow , someday I will fit those lines into a limerick.

Weth mah car? (Ratings Update.)

Gophur blames Jack Thomspon for his lack of Red Ferrari.

Blinking cursor.

Been staring at a new post window for about half a day now. Inspiration is dodging me.

So ww2ol is to get a Mature 17+ rating. To quote the PS forum post title '.WTF?'. BRP's* are considered blood and violence? Please. Maybe the sight of turrets popping is to much for poor innocent 14 year old eyes. Yeah that must be it.

Cheers to the ESRB and knee-jerk reactions. 'Oh my god! That evil Grand Theft Auto game can have a scene where you have sex with a hooker! Quick call the Whitehouse!'. Because killing cops, running over pedestrians , doing drug deals and pimping weren't reason enough. People suck. And I still think the GTA series went downhill after No. 1.

So the good news is that CRS will probably give us more blood. Hey you might as well get good value out of your rating!

*If you still dont know what a BRP is your still a noob.

And yes I have nothing better to do than steal stuff from Comstar's blog.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Exxxcellent

A new sacrifice monitor for my computer..

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

WW2OL broke my monitor.

My monitor blew up last night while playing ww2ol. Made some very interesting popping sounds when I tried to turn it back on at which point I decided discretion was the better part of valor.

Looks like now I'll have to replace the 19" monitor which broke and was using the 17" that blew up last night to cover. Blah.

(And no ww2ol didnt really break my monitor ok?)

On Patrol!

Head over to Torgen's Rat Patrol Radio for lots of ww2 goodness. Great tunes and material from ww2 including a monthly trivia contest where you can win a free year long subscription to ww2ol! Damn why am I telling you this?

Anyways I've added a link to the sidebar.

Monday, August 01, 2005

An ingame visible hardcoded CoC.

On Friday night Bruner called for someone to take command of the BEF on .hc..

*crickets chirping*

*train in the distance*

So I voluntered. Why? Because I thought I could do a better job than most.

HAH.

The first thing I did was try to get an OiC for each of the 6 BEF brigades. Talk about getting blood from a stone (though thanks to Stalker2, raygunn, quizno and Bigass who did step up). I spent a good 15-20 minutes switching between brigades, yelling on .hc, getting people to join one channel and for that managed to get 4 OiCs. 1 who was from my own brigade (no brainer), another was a non-HC member, one who was a RN officer?!? and one who was an actual brigade OiC.

At this point I organised an attack on Hoog which failed within 30 minutes. I figured it would fail anyway due to our numbers but still it shouldn't have been the cluster that it was.

See I believe in the power of delegation, I do it in my own brigade and wanted to bring that theory to the BEF as a whole. Something which I had accused higher levels of the BEF of failing at previously. My apologies to those who I accused.

The simple fact , as I see it, is that while people want to be led most of them don't want to have to do any leading of their own while being led. People are lazy.

Anyway enough of my rants and back to my particular issue at hand which was finding the 6 BEF Brigade OiCs. CRS has talked about a scalable, in game, chain of command for sometime now but the hell knows when that is coming. I'd like them to add a few / commands to give us something to work with right now.

So here are my ideas:

/coc - In game or out will list OiCs, (either player name or [empty]) in your level of command. IE If you are currently a corp commander you will see Corp OIC, Division OiCs and Brigade OiCs. If you are a divsion OiC you will only see Brigade OiCs for your division. Brigade OiCs can also see OiCs for their division.

Or possibly a div corp brigade option to the command where players can chose what level of the CoC they want to see.

The next part is harder and involves actually getting people into that CoC.

Officers - /coc [yes] will set you as the OiC of your unit (bdge, div, corp, army), unless the spot is already filled. If so then a prompt will appear for that player to relinquish the spot or not.
- /coc [no] will remove you from your current CoC spot.
- /coc [yes] [level] Where level is brigade, div, corp, army.
May also need to be some facility for players of a higher rank to remove other players from a CoC slot. Say for instance if I've been running the BEF for a while and gone idle and Luggs or someone logs on and wants to take over he can remove me.

At the the end of the day its a quick way for commanders to find sub-commanders who are actually willing to lead. Those officers who are in the AHC and don't actually want to lead can simply remove themselves from the CoC for the time being.

Needs some fine tuning but damn it would be a useful tool.

/orders

Well this is one I didn't think of.

CRS introduced the /orders command with 1.19.4 and it rather rocks. Now when you spawn in on a mission you get the mission briefing text. Mission leaders can also change the briefing while in mission and it will be broadcast to all players on that mission.

Very very nice.

Infantry AI has to go.

There is no reason for it to exist. Remove it now.

There are AO's and EWS so people can't waltz into towns undefended. Infantry AI simply serves to annoy the hell out of myself and other infantry players.

Oh yeah I love nothing better than spending 15 minutes working my way into town to be cut down by a computer controlled savant who can see through walls and never misses.

It has NO redeeming qualities.