ericbabe
Posts: 10301
Joined: 3/23/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns So what are the upper limits to map sizes and OOB's you can create in the scenario editor? Can there be more than two nationalities in a scenario? (i.e. Germans and Italians vs. Brits etc.) Is the AI painstakingly scripted for each and every unit by the designer or does the game's AI take over automatically with no player input needed? If it is automatic, can designers script individual units if they want to for special tasks? Can some units be fixed in place by a designer so the AI won’t move them unintentionally? If so can they be set to release on a certain turn? Can reinforcements appear during the course of a battle? If so is it map edge only or anywhere on map (i.e. Russians infantry popping up out of sewers in Stalingrad)? Can their turn of entry be varied? Can scenarios be linked so surviving units carry over from one scenario to the next? Some of my favorite old ASL games were the campaigns that allowed players to purchase reinforcements to add to their surviving force between battles, this system appears perfect for that kind of linked campaign. Thanks for the interest! I don't have the maximum map size in hexes handy, but the biggest map is roughly about 4 or 5 COH board game boards tall and about 3 boards wide. So roughly one could fit the Mzensk Pocket firefight on such a map maybe four or five times over. We only have two nationalities for COH:ATB, German and Russian. If there are additional nationalities introduced in sequels, they can exist side-by-side in a scenario. For COH:ATB, TCP multiplayer only allows for two human players, but we may look at increasing the number of players allowed for sequels. The AI scripting system has a default script it assigns to units if the firefight designer does not assign one. Designers can design scripts for particular units and leave other units to use the default behavior. The scripting system is based on an article I read in "AI Wisdom III" for a game by a AAA studio, and is designed with extension as one of the primary design goals. There are about 50 "script bits" right now (based loosely on the ideas in the aforementioned article), which designers use to make lists of behaviors. It's fairly easy for me to add new script bits to the system, and as we get feedback from a wider circle of firefight designers I hope to increase the number and power of the script bits as we go forward. Reinforcements can appear during a battle. The designer has a great deal of flexibility in controlling where they enter. The entry turns cannot vary in COH:ATB, but this is something we might be able to add down the road. There is no campaign system at the moment, but this is something that Uwe Eickert has asked us to look at developing for sequel type products. I agree it would be a great thing to add.
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