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Okay, so I wanted to install a blog again and since Heart Internet have it as an easy install option I figured what the heck. I hadn’t been tracking WordPress for a while and didn’t notice the big new 2.0. The last version I tried was 1.0.3 or something and that left me open to comment spamming.

Anyhow, hopefully I’ll discover all of it’s wonderful features and plugins this time around, aswell as find time to do some serious bloggin.

Bambrugh Castle

Me & Jof walked for about 3 hours up and down the beach over by bambrugh castle. Took many closeups but this is one of the better “full frame” shots. Pity the sky was not a perfect blue.

Did I mention we forgot to use sun lotion? It was a beautiful day and was absolutely schorching. We took our new tripod out and managed to use our zoom lens more so than normal. We even took some panoramic style shots so I’ll have to do a Google for any open source photo-stich apps.
To see more pictures visit our flickr pages:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/gavjof
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/jofgav

Okay, so we finally decide we’re going to get another session of Supreme Commander in this Sunday - after all, it’s generally only on a Sunday that we can all get together with enough hours to play a game! The teams were already decided from our last battle - this time it was me and jof against Simon and Ridgway - the only snag was that AmathusUKX decided that he would join us. Great. The more the merrier I say, and I can’t wait until Mr.Unhappy gets his copy as then we’ll finally get to try some 3v3 like we once did back in the BETA.

Anyhow, Chris goes with Simon and Alex - seeing how Alex generally always wins ;0\ This means the sides are as follow: gav (EUF), jof (Aeon) vs Si (UEF), Alex (Cybran) and Chris (Aeon). After looking through the available maps we finally settled on the classic “Sechon’s Clutch” for it’s nice balance of land and water. It’s spawn point placement also allowed both teams to expand in a safe area with most of the action taking place in the narrow bottle neck or the sea/air.

Anyway numerous skirmishes were had between the regular players. I had some major sea battles with Simon while jof went to-to-toe with Alex’s spiders. I used a heavily upgraded SCU to build a heavy torpeedo/SAM firebase in the southern waters while the Atlantis was being constructed. This proved to be quite useful later when the torpeedo bombers came in after my naval fleet.

About 1 hour 30 minutes into the game jof said t me in team chat:

I have a teleportable SCU, should I hit Ridge?

I thought, yeah why not? Alex is always a strong opponent. It’s been our plan to finsh Simon and Alex off first, leaving Chris until last. Chris was not in the BETA and thus missed all of our “play tests” where we would see what worked and what didn’t. For intance - how many T3 Strategic Bombers does it take to fall a Monkey Lord? Anyway, you get the idea.

I think in this game someone had been sending Nukes our way, and we’d tried to spot it using T3 Scout Planes, but had failed. Jof wanted to send in his “telefrag” SCU to do some serious damage to Alex’s economy, but upon setting the SCU going, he went off to queue more stuff up while the clock ticked.

A minute later all we heard was a nuclear explosion and a message popped up on all of our screens:-

The_Ridg has been defeated.

Opps, that was a tad cold. Jof’s SCU had teleported in right next to Alex’s ACU and when it died had obviously taken him with it. I’m not sure if it was really an accident or whether in fact that jof had indeed spotted Alex and went for a quick kill. Either way, with Alex dead we began to concentrate our efforts on Simon. It was already late when we started this game and time was getting on. Chris decided it was time for bed (work in the morning) and promptly disconnected. Simon now had a 2v1 situation. To make things fun me & jof decided to upgrade our ACU’s for combat and to stroll them into Simons base with the intention on finding his ACU and bitch-slapping him.

Remind me never to upgrade me commander for battle ever again. At least not after 1 hour into the game. They are so vulnerable to artillery etc it really is annoying. In total annihilation you could always rely on your big boy to take down any real trouble. In Sup Com the ACU is a real wuss. Sure he’ll kill most units, but he’s best left hidden, somewhere safe with all of his engineering suites used to build more useful units!

Looking forward to next week.

I was reading up on the Gas Powered Games forums about the current BETA testers and their comments on the upcoming expansion Forged Alliance, when I noticed someones signature had a link in to some kind of Sup Com Mod:-

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=4142

The “4th Dimension” is a modification for Supreme Commander which adds new content like (completely) new designed units, explosions and other effects. The goal of this mod is to make SC feel more realistic (as long as it is better for the gameplay) and to improve the balancing and optics of the game. Nearly all muzzle velocities have been increased a lot, and a few units move much slower now.
Another big aspect of this mod is the fact, that in 4th Dimension nearly all units have their right to exist, even in later tech levels.
Beside a new veteran system, which lets stronger units count more than weaker units and which gives units bigger buffs, the mod changes also the tarmac sizes and explosion effects.

Sounds real interesting since not only does it change a lot of units stats, but they’ve also got more units in there too. The only questions I want to know is is it compatible with the latest build of sup com? and if so, can you simply switch to and from this and vanilla as and when you want?

Edit: doh, if I read what was there I’d of seen:

DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.8 here:
http://files.filefront.com/4th+Dimension+18zip/;8708717;/fileinfo.html

Unzip the “4th Dimension.zip”. If the unpacked file is a *.scd file, you must put it into the …\gamedata\ folder.
If the unpacked file is another folder called “4th Dimension”, put it into your mods directory in supreme commander
(if it doesnt exist, create a folder “mods”).

Having messed about installing the must have mods and add-ons that we’ve all been instructed to download and install I must say that I’m starting to really enjoy this Armed Assault. Last night we played two custom missions. Being more experienced now, Simon and Alex’s missions were complete with briefing, way-points and other cool things that made the mission feel right.

The real-time day cycle feature is also really really cool. I mean this must be seen to be appreciated. We began our mission parachuting in near the beach front and had to hike around 600m to our way-point on the top of a hill with a good view of the small outpost. Upon checking the time on our landing it was around 19:10 hours. After clearing the outpost it was more like 19:30 and nightfall was beginning to set in all around us. The flames from the jeep we destroyed; the BMP that I set ablaze with the AT missile were all casting real-time lighting effects and casting long shadows from all the trees in the nearby area. It was around this point where we kept loosing some of our unit as their was generally an officer left hiding somewhere who would pick one of us off when we assumed the outpost was clear.

Moving further on lead us to more units and a need for night vision goggles. The HDR effect when switching to and from the goggles is really quite annoying but very realistic and very much a cool effect.

Setting these missions up takes time, and often you find out that a lot of the enemy actions (like the reinforcements falling to arrive) are not properly set-up. Getting a game going takes an age -possibly as long as setting up a game of Supreme Commander, but it’s well worth it in the end. I think I’ll go off now and start reading through the Armed Assault Mision Editing Tutorial by Rick Rawlings.

Download Title

I’ve used the Artio JoomSEF for a good number of sites, since I moved away from OpenSEF a while ago. It seems to offer better customisations and was easier to manage. Recently I noticed they had sneaked in some sponsored links into the generator tags. Obviously I was not impressed with this so I was all ready to remove the blasted plug-in and go off in search for another SEF component when I noticed a thread by some australian website designers, called Kanga Internet.

If you’d like to read more visit the thread titled Artio JoomSEF 2.0.0 - Patched Version With No Adverts.

You can download the Artio JoomSEF Patched file from the Kanga Internet web site:
http://www.kangainternet.com/remository/joomsef.html

As of late I’ve been trying to teach myself how to use the Official Supreme Commander Map Editor. I spent a few hours messing around with it the other weekend and basically tweaked one of the existing maps that ships with the game.

One thing all this got me thinking about was balance in games today and does symmetry equal balance with regard to actual strategy?

I gave google the two keywords “symmetry” and “balance” and he showed me the following site:
Art 104: Design and Composition class at Palomar College

This mentions the various types of symmetry but the one that interested me most is the Biaxial symmetry. This is the type that occurs in games such as Supreme Commander. It is common that many of the 4+ player maps are using biaxial symmetry.

Biaxial symmetry uses two axes of symmetry — vertical and horizontal. These guarantee balance: top and bottom as well as left and right.

In order to allow all players to start from an unbiased standpoint the maps are mirror on two axes. In other words, the terrain in the upper left quarter is exactly the same as the upper right, lower left and lower right - the only difference is that it has been flipped and mirrored.

Doodles

I’ve been doodling some basic map ideas on loads of scrap pieces of paper. Nothing fancy as you’ll see, just basic geometric shapes with enough detail to define land and water. I cannot believe the small number of maps that exists in the Supreme Commander. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few maps but they do not cater for that many eventualities. You have a handful of maps for the good old 1v1 battles. There are the a ton of maps suited for 4 players (2 on 2 is probably the most common arrangement). There is then 1 map suited for 5 players, a handful of 6 player maps and a good number of 8 player maps. Again this is fine for the most part but in our clan there is usually 5 players on at a time. 2 vs 3 is never a fair battle although me and jof have thrashed the other 3 player on numerous occasions now ;). I just wish there were more 5 player maps out there, as all we have is that starfish-shaped map. I’d like to remake this map without the water. That would be nice for a fre-for-all with 5 players ;)
It’s very easy to come up with some nice looking maps on paper. They look very basic but the problem will lie in making them interesting to play or look at. Building the heightmaps themselves is a long enough process and the you have to build up all the the differing layers (strata). Adding spawn points (teams) and mass points should probably be done as soon as you have a basic heightmap up and textured so you can test the model for any dodgy collision. Once all this is done you can add some more polish by using decals to bring it up to professional standards.

Perhaps if I show jof how to use the editor I can build the heightmaps while he textures them? That will certainly save time…

I wish more developers would build their games using this symmetric map design that Supreme Commander uses. Take DICE for instance. Battlefield 2 is an excellent multiplayer game and has some great maps. It also has some average and down right boring maps too (I’m looking at most of the PLA ones here). Now I’d class BF2 as an arcade/action game. It’s certainly not realistic. If you want realism go and play ArmA (and no Project Reality is a sorry excuse for a mod. I’d rather play any game other than spend half the time in game waiting to spawn.). Anyway, I digress. Of all the maps in BF2 I cannot see any of them having any real symmetry apart from Zatar to some degree. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it means you need to learn the whole map and its little intricacies.

There are some instances where these unique maps make the gameplay seem a little one-sided. Most of these involve one team spawning on an aircraft carrier trying to gain a foothold on the land. I don’t mind some of these maps. In fact Wake is possibly my most played map ever. It’s great fun trying to work as team to capture all of the island. The problem is most people don’t work as a team. They go “John Rambo” or queue for a jet. That’s another flaw in the games design - weapon/unit balance. I don’t care if the J10 is a better machine in real-life than its US counterpart - I want them both to fly the same so that the game is balanced! The fact that the J10 has a smaller collision model or whatever is one of the reasons I don’t fly very often. It’s biased to one side.

I remember the good old days of BF1942. Where both sides would get a fighter & bomber which were roughly equally matched. You had maps such as Battleaxe that were almost symmetric apart from the fact that the Axis had a more raised base unlike the Allies that meant the Brits were constantly spawn camped the keep them from getting airborne.

I’m not saying symmetry makes a good game (although I think this is very true for RTS titles such as Forged Alliance) but what I am saying is that I wish games designers would at least take it into consideration when building their maps.

I wanted to muck around with some of the official maps that ship with Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance so I opened up the Map Editor and browsed the folders. What I found was that all of the maps were in folders named SCMP_001 to SCMP_41. This wasn’t very helpful so I did a quick search to see if there were any sites out there listing which map goes with each name. Nothing came up other than sites hosting 3rd party maps or information on the release of the Official Sup Com Map editor.

This annoyed me as all I wanted to do was open up Sung Island and use it as a base for a new map - there are no other 5 player maps included in Forged Alliance.
What I’ve done is look through all the scenario files (e.g. SCMP_001_scenario.lua) and noted the name of each map against the folder name. You can find the complete list below. I hope some people find it of use :)

SCMP_001    =    Burial Mounds
SCMP_002    =    Concord Lake
SCMP_003    =    Drake’s Ravine
SCMP_004    =    Emerald Crater
SCMP_005    =    Gentleman’s Reef
SCMP_006    =    Ian’s Cross
SCMP_007    =    Open Palms
SCMP_008    =    Seraphim Glaciers
SCMP_009    =    Seton’s Clutch
SCMP_010    =    Sung Island
SCMP_011    =    The Great Void
SCMP_012    =    Theta Passage
SCMP_013    =    Winter Duel
SCMP_014    =    The Bermuda Locket
SCMP_015    =    Fields of Isis
SCMP_016    =    Canis River
SCMP_017    =    Syrtis Major
SCMP_018    =    Sentry Point
SCMP_019    =    Finn’s Revenge
SCMP_020    =    Roanoke Abyss
SCMP_021    =    Alpha 7 Quarantine
SCMP_022    =    Arctic Refuge
SCMP_023    =    Varga Pass
SCMP_024    =    Crossfire Canal
SCMP_025    =    Saltrock Colony
SCMP_026    =    Vya-3 Protectorate
SCMP_027    =    The Scar
SCMP_028    =    Hanna Oasis
SCMP_029    =    Betrayal Ocean
SCMP_030    =    Frostmill Ruins
SCMP_031    =    Four-Leaf Clover
SCMP_032    =    The Wilderness
SCMP_033    =    White Fire
SCMP_034    =    High Noon
SCMP_035    =    Paradise
SCMP_036    =    Blasted Rock
SCMP_037    =    Sludge
SCMP_038    =    Ambush Pass
SCMP_039    =    Four-Corners
SCMP_041    =    The Ditch