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Messages - Darman

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1
That sounds awesome, your effort here is much appreciated by everyone!

One more thing, it might have been pointed out before: Near the Department Store CP there are some areas without static Houses or OOB statics where you can leave the map area and wander around behind invisible building fronts. Before you regenerate a new Navmesh, you might wanna put down one or two generic houses there to plug the gap.

The lighting also could use some polishing, as direct sunlight oversaturates Tanks/Soldiers/StaticGuns etc (see the static Tiger for instance. This can easily be adjusted in the sky.con file. Additionally, some of the custom buildings seem to be not properly lightmapped, but of course you can't do much about that. 

2
Hey Ivan, once again fantastic work!

Just played the 64p layer of Berlin and had a ton of fun.

Here are some issues I noticed:

For balance, I would consider replacing the MG-42 with something less powerful. The map is full of open and narrow lanes and playing as defender it is very easy to lock those down even when greatly outnumbered. I had the same issue on Seelow and found the static MGs already placed around the map bad enough, so I chose to hand out MG-34s instead.

The strategic areas need to be looked after to adjust spawn behaviour. Early on, German AI will never spawn near the Tiger tank while as the game progresses into the center stage, Soviet AI will completely ignore its own tanks in the base and instead spawn near the frontline.

Edit: Is the Tiger supposed to be static? Will AI ever spawn into it because so far I have't witnessed it.

As usual, I would suggest to bring the UI experience in line with FH2 vanilla by changing map names, load screens and so on, also remove bright blue ammo stash markings on the minimap.

And finally, cloning the map is always a better option than overwriting an original as it keeps things smooth and compatible ;)

Keep up the great work!




3
Ivan, once again wonderful work on the navmeshing. Played them all and I am thoroughly impressed.

These maps were all designed without AI in mind, and you may have no interest in changing any of the dynamics, but if you are open for it, here are a couple gameplay design suggestions.


Wake Island:

This map easily plays best of all, and is great fun. To play as the defender however can become quite stale:

A: The Japanese will not really man the cargo spaces of the the landing crafts and arrive in small numbers at a time, also leaving their boats in the open and slowly (very slowly) moving a long way to the shore. The MG emplacements make it far too easy to mow them down, so removing some of them could be a way forward.

B: The Japanese will throw all their forces at the CP at the tip of the island, and end up fighting the rest of the round for the bridge-chokepoint. I adjusted the the Japanese to have twice as many men as the US side, and they still didn't stand a chance. If they would perform landings at other objectives from the start of the mission, a more dynamic flow could be established.


Tarawa:

I would love to see how a beach landing plays out here one day with fixed behaviour templates or whatever is needed. The 16p layer unfortunately is not very exciting, since it will always develop into a slugging match on a thing strip of beach. Adding an Airfield CP and opening some of the barriers, assigning neutral CPs to the Japanese side and creating a push-mode where the base can be captured would go a long way to make this map worthwile.


Tulagi:

This map plays fine, but could benefit from one or two more CPs, a push-layout and a capturable base CP. Moreover, from an aesthetic point of view, the map either needs a fixed watershader or a different skybox and sky variables. Water and lighting clash quite a bit, and the oversaturation is irritating at times. Great for screen-archery, not so much for fighting.

General:

Wake Island does not have a loadscreen-soundtrack. Some of the UI doesn't fit in well with the FH2 quality standards. If the CMP guys allow you to change this, it might be a good change to have your work blend in, if you care about such things, that is.

That being said, keep up your good work as a doctor first and foremost and thank you for making these available as they are right now. 

4
Fantastic work Ivan, I am delighted to see a continuous community effort to bring Bot support to the great Eastern Front maps!

A couple things I noticed: The navmesh on Ihantala needs adjustments for the vehicle pathing. Russian armor will almost inevitably get stuck after the first objective - maybe you will have to modify the map and remove the trenches that cut through the roads or get rid of a couple trees to fix this. I also noticed little to no effort by the soviet vehicles to move towards the second objective (they were stuck of course, but still), which might indicate the AI is not even seeing a possible way to get into the capture zone with tanks.

Unless it is intentional to prevent bot-blobbing at flags, the strategic zones should be set up in a way that will not allow the AI commander to issue attack orders onto non-capturable base flags. On Ihantala, the Finnish AI will in the beginning try to assault the Russian base (impossible to accomplish), instead of digging in around the objective.

In general, it is a good idea to create _coop clones of the maps and vehicle files instead of overwriting the original FH2 files and folders. This will ensure multiplayer compatibility for those who care.

That being said, impressive work so far! I look forward to your work on the Pacific Maps, something I was never able to tackle.

5
Darman - would you be interested in doing SP for Peleliu and other pacific maps?

Afraid not. I tried my luck with a few of them a couple years ago and gave up at some point. The AI and water don't work well together.

6
Singleplayer and Coop / Re: Bot don't move vehicles
« on: 01-04-2020, 01:04:07 »
I haven't navmeshed anything in years, but if you have a valid navmesh for both infantry and vehicles, make sure that you also have the StrategicAreas.ai set up correctly - if the AI commander does not issue attack orders due to missing Neighbour CPs, vehicles will not go anywhere (infantry will stumble around a bit hesitantly still).

Also make sure that the capture zones of the CPs are accessible to vehicles (not blocked on the navmesh by tank traps, narrow paths, indoor zones, that sort of thing). Bots will sometimes stop moving vehicles if they can't find a way to enter the cap zones with them.

7
You can work with the original navmesh, as long as the navmesh covers the area you define within your 16 and 32 size layers.

8
1. Random CTD - these maps are fine about lightmapping etc., but for some reason, all of them crash after some time of gameplay: sometimes after a few seconds, other times after a couple of minutes. But they aren't playable at all. Beda Fomm, Bloody Gulch, Carentan, Juin 1944.

2. Minimap flag bug - on Operation Nordwind, the gameplay is just fine; no lightmapping issues and no crashes at all. On the other hand, when the map is loaded my minimap flags got bugged, as they don't appear at all. It somehow affects my whole install, as when I load any other map, including the official ones, the flags keep bugging, sometimes just some appear, other times no one at all. To correct it, I must run the repair tool on the launcher so everything come back to normal.

Thank you for the testing and gathering these results! I don't know when or if I will be able to fix the CTDs - I ran into the same issues when I tested over the last weeks and was not able to find a definitive reason so far. But maybe I'll get around to invest some more time to look at them again. The minimap error happened to me once, but was fixed after a restart of the game. I'll look at nordwinds python, but so far I didn't get any python error log for it, tbh with you I have no idea what else could cause it.

About Kasserine Pass: Yes it is indeed very crude. And very old, too. I don't know if it was ever intended for FH2, as it was spread among various other BF2 mods at some point. It's overall design is definitly not en par with other maps of this project and generally rather 1942ish. The reason I still added it was because it provides some mindless fun with ground and air vehicles and gave me an opportunity to add more US Army in North Afrika content. I am not a map designer. Currently I do not have any ambitions to overhaul the environment (cover,...) and flag layout on Kasserine Pass. I usually make it fun by bot-distribution among teams (45vs30 or sth like this). I can however take a look at bleed-conditions, vehicle respawn timers, FlaK 88 distribution and such.

9
Any chance that Seelow will get the ISU-152 and the Luftfaust B added?  I really want to destroy some bots with the Luftfaust.

While I agree it would be some fun, I do not know whether either the Luftfaust or the ISU are configured for AI use. If they aren't, they will cause CTDs. I will not risk adding them in blindly and I do not have the time right now to test or if needed fix them for AI. Feel free to replace existing vehicles or pickup kits with those two, remember to update the tmp.con file and let me know if they work, then I will consider adding them in permanently.

Dukla/64

"CP_64_dukla_pass_germanmain_t34" not spawning bug is imminent

Can you consider revising Arads Pickup Kit and static AmmoBoxes/AmmoBlitz Wrecks?
layout to expand CPs and outside MainBases. Re-Supply change  is really tough in Heat of battle.
The Map is fine, but would be lovely to get a bit support there. I know this Map is resource heavy...

Kind Regards

Thank you for pointing that out. Could you elaborate on how the t34 bug appears? Does it show up as a python error or does it cause a CTD with a message in windowed mode? The t34 is supposed to spawn only after the German team loses the whole of Kruzlova and the Valley of Death CPs. I never properly tested Dukla Pass 64 since I find the experience to be rather lackluster against AI and prefer the 32 push layer in general.

As for additional pick up kits and supply stations, this requires actual map editing which I currently won't be able to do. Sorry for that.

10
Yes, that would indeed do the trick. When talking about incompatible maps, that should only be those with outdated lightmaps. I did not test any of the Forgotten Maps on the new patch, but if some crash upon, like, python errors but do appear to have proper lightmapping, please let me know and I see to fixing them soon.

11
Hey, unfortunatly I do not have the time to work on full scale projects and conversions anymore. I remember taking a look at almost all the Italian front maps out there and experimenting with AI support for those about two years ago but decided against working on them for good reasons.

12
Hey community,

didn't want to necro an old thread about this but I just fired up FH2 for the first time in a while to test out the new stuff and noticed that I could not see the good old wounded shader anymore.

I am running a Zotac GTX770 with 4GB VRAM newest driver 416.34 installed of course.

With FH2/BF2 AA enabled, usually none of the gameplay-relevant shaders of FH2 ever worked for me. That is: Suppression and Wounded. Without AA, they do work. But the game looks very bad without AA.

So usually I just disabled the ingame video options' AA and forced an external 8x MSAA with my Nvidia control panel. That did let me see the wounded shader, but still not the suppression mechanic.

Now, forcing MSAA with the control panel doesn't work anymore. No AA will be applied ingame anymore. FXAA works, but looks bad of course. A clean reinstall of the driver did not help. Nvidia Inspector did not help, I tried a bunch of options but to no avail. nHancer doesn't work on Win10 anymore. External SMAA with third party tools such as ReShade offers no real alternative.

Can someone confirm that behaviour? Did someone find a solution maybe? Any help or advice is appreciated.

13
Great job, a lovely addition to the game, looking forward to more! Some feedback:

I can confirm that there are some areas where tanks love to get jammed. At the North-Western CP on the Studienka Map for example.

One issue you should take a look at that is easily fixable within a minute are the python errors on coop mode due to uncapturable base CPs having strategic neighbors (the ai will try to issue attack orders).

Also, to improve the experience in push modes, try to assign priority values to frontline CPs in the StrategicAreas.ai file, so that at the start of a round the AI will prefer to spawn at the frontline and not leave the first CPs on a road uncontested (Studienka 32 layer for instance).

14
Sorry for the stupid question but I'm new. I don't suppose it is possible to download older versions so as to play the older SP maps is it? Usually the servers are empty when I'm online. Thanks.

You do not have to. I did take a look at the project and found it to be easily fixable so that is what I just did. Check out the opening post and download the current version for FH2 2.54.

Lightmapping was fixed for the most part. Some issues like weird lighting in certain places and shadows where none belong will remain, since the maps I uploaded are no longer the same versions as those from the base mod which I exported the lightmaps from.

Occasional CTDs due to updated assets may occur. I did not have time to extensively test this patch. Please report major issues and I see to fixing them when I find the time.

15
As the author of this mappack, let me give a quick statement to avoid any confusion.

It is unfortunate (but was to be expected) that many aspects of this are now broken with the (excellent) recent patch to FH2.

This was created several years ago and I hope it was some fun to the people that enjoyed FH2 in singleplayer. Unfortunatly, due to my private life taking different directions, I can currently and in the forseeable future not work on any patch or update, or conversions for new maps. If anyone else wants to - please go ahead.

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