Official SEOW

http://simhq.com/_land3/land_127a.html

Hmmmm...interesting

I´m definetly going to get it.

It looks so nice that I feel the desire to fight SEOW campaigns partially in this game.

Yes I might just have to get it too as it looks like it will really be a good battlefield sim where you really can go from foot to tank, truck, artillery, AAA and aircraft in a high quality environment.
Very nice indeed.

I just hear on our TS from ~North Brigade~ that there is also a Invasion 44 mod for ARMA2 http://www.invasion-1944.com

This mod will enable to play Germans, Brits and Americans.


The stand alone game called Iron Front - Liberation 1944 can be found here:
http://www.deepsilver.com/en/game-view/ ... ron-front/
And this one is Eastern Front.

So we have both fronts

Um... WOW! those games look awesome.

guess I may have to finally buckle to years of pressure from my friend and buy Arma2. Only to MOD it into Invasion 1944!!! LOLOL

Released and available at steam for 26 bucks.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/91330/

and here the trailer:
http://store.steampowered.com/video/91330/81677

For me the important question is the mission editor/file format. I would like to be able to generate an ARMA-style coop mission from an active SEOW campaign, run the ARMA mission and then merge the results back into the SEOW campaign.

Anyone got any clues on file formats etc?

Cheers,
4Shades

The Arma II engine is superb....

But I woud say its the wrong scale for a 'seow' kind of approach.

Its a FPS shooter, you are one person...or at most you can take a vehicle. You can control upto 12 ai (or about 3 vehicles...) but the scale of anything you were to play out in an Arma II type battle would have almost no relevance to an il2 style seow.

Also making maps for Arma is a hugely complex process and takes teams years sometimes.

To integrate a ground combat simulator with seow I would say that CMBN (Combat Mission II) would be a far better choice.
You can have upto about a couple of regiments a side ( 5-6 companies) and/or upto about 50 vehicles. (depending upon players PC's)
Its extremely high fidelity and you can play out a battle as an RTS in realtime (the usual battle length is also appropriately 1- 2 hours, you set this.)
so its nice & quick to resolve.
Importantly the map editor that comes with it is very quick and simple to use.

The first modules are West front but they will expand it to include other theatres over time, they covered the Eastfront in the first version and are pretty sure to return there again.

The scale that is possibel in Combat mission is also possible in ARMA2.
There is no high level of command as in CM, but there is also no such thing in a IL2 COOP.

But it is still possible to have big tankbattles and the like.

ARMA2 is not a first person shooter like Red Orchetsra or Battlefield.
ARMA2 is a tactical shooter. It has huge maps in even bigger scale then combat mission.

I think it is possible to take out an area of battle from the MP and run it in either CM or ARMA.
I think we should both.

How many players can join CM?

What is certainly a lot of fun is to try to find your way back home as crashlanded or bailed pilot while enemy field police is already looking for you.


I´ll check for the mission file format and the "eventlog"

(Arma IIOA etc is Ok...I have them.)

However I do have reservations:-

The scale that is possible in Combat mission is also possible in ARMA2.

Not in the ARMA II I have it isn't.
Arma has performance issues with large numbers of anything.
It always did, its better now but not good.
Its other weakness is its Ai which is notorious.
(and from what I have read about IF44 has not changed...)

ARMA2 is not a first person shooter like Red Orchestra or Battlefield.
ARMA2 is a tactical shooter. It has huge maps in even bigger scale then combat mission

Its a FPS whatever they want to call it. It looks great though.
You run around with a gun shooting at people. The AI is poor so there is very little tactical about it. The only way it may be differentiated from the others is that it is a harder core game and the people that play it are different and tend to design more involved & realistic situations or it, but beneath that, its a FPS that is a little bit more realistic.

Personally I don't see how its at all relevant to seow. Accurate ground war resolution is an issue with il2. I don't see how any FPS is going to resolve that.

A good tactical or strategic war game. Yes that might makes up for some of the weakness.
Seow's weakness is not not that you cannot run around with a rifle or drive a tank IMO.
But its ability to accurately resolve ground combat on the Regimental-Corp-Army scale.

Chuck an FPS into the mix and its not really enhancing seow in the slightest. If anything seow would be giving credibility to the fps for very little in return.

Sorry for sounding negative.

I have actually ordered IF44 so I am not against it, It does look excellent.
But it is what it is. WWII arma2 .
I don't really see how that relates to il2 or seow or how it would enhance it.

seow isn't a persistent online world where everything is possible in first person and its never likely to be is it.

242Sqn_Chap wrote:(Arma IIOA etc is Ok...I have them.)
Not in the ARMA II I have it isn't.
Arma has performance issues with large numbers of anything.
It always did, its better now but not good.
Its other weakness is its Ai which is notorious.
(and from what I have read about IF44 has not changed...)

I have just downloaded Iron Front and created a test mission with 100 tanks fighting each other. It runs very smooth, not fps problems.
And the maps are between 7x7 to 16,5x16,5km.
Looks like Combat mission or bigger.

Its a FPS whatever they want to call it.

It may well be a FPS but to put in one pot with all the other arcade game isn´t doing justice to ARMA2.

Personally I don't see how its at all relevant to seow. Accurate ground war resolution is an issue with il2. I don't see how any FPS is going to resolve that.
...
I don't really see how that relates to il2 or seow or how it would enhance it.

Seeing it from that perspective I don´t see a relation between IL2 and SEOW either, yet still we use IL2 for SEOW.

Iron Front/ARMA2 may not be perfect for ground warfare but is far more better than IL2.
Furthmore it´s just as much fun as IL2 to me.

It sounds a bit like it must be a either or decision.

P.S.:
Isn´t Il2 also a FPS only that you sit in a plane?

I more or less agree with Chap. What is interesting here is to compare the AI between the two. While ARMA has a ground war AI that is higher resolution than IL2 in the end they both fail to produce realistic combat. I have ran ARMA missions with hundreds of AI actors but the results are mixed. What they both lack is a command and control interface, either human or AI. This means that there is no real time response to changes on the battlefield, the AI will continue to follow more or less the instructions originally assigned in the MP regardless of the resolving situation on the ground. Of course ARMA gets the nod here as it does allow for the AI to respond individually and to a limited degree collectively to what is happening on the ground in real time. Giving the AI in IL2 even a limited ability to respond to situations would be useful but has to be weighed against cpu cycles.

What I find interesting about this discussion is that while we plan IL2 mission for the ground war at "Regimental-Corp" level the airwar continues to be at a squad level. Ignoring this inherent conflict of scales, you can also see that the statistical engine in IL2 must resolve conflict between units on an individual unit level not at the Regimental-Corp level. It has been my opinion for sometime that every sim should be used at the level of squad interaction as that is the way the AI was designed. This means scenarios that do not involve huge maps or thousands of units. Even if it were possible to realistically reproduce Regimental-Corp level warfare who would want to individually plan that with the current MP interfaces. Strategy games do not have individual units shooting at each other in real time and if they did you would need a super computer to run the simulation. SEOW compensates for the conflict in scale between the air and ground war by applying it's own statistical engine but that too has limitations. People want large scale conflicts, you can see that by the campaigns that are designed, but to my knowledge their is no game that will support this.

Good discussion guys.

Some more comparison facts would be nice.

Multiplayer:
ARMA2: 50 humans (soldiers) + large numbers of AI actors
CMBN: 2 humans (commanders) + large numbers of AI actors

Map Size:
ARMA2: ?
CMBN: ?

Logfile:
ARMA2: ?
CMBN: ?

AI Sophistication:
ARMA2: ?
CMBN: ?

Map Editing:
ARMA2: complex
CMBN: straightforward

Can anyone help fill the blanks in?

Cheers,
4S

What is driving this discussion? Do you want to take the results from two games and combind them and if so why?

Anyway I took the time to find some other opensourse combat simulators as background material. Don't ask me wy because I don't know


OpenGeneral

http://luis-guzman.com/index.html


The Combat Simulator Project

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... =Main_Page


Danger from the deep

http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/gallery/


Delta3D

http://www.delta3d.org/

Multiplayer:
ARMA2: 70-80 humans practically in COOP (depending on hardware),
230400 theoretical limit (144 * 4 (144 groups per side, 4 sides * 400) humans, depending on number of slots/soldiers created as playble in mission
CMBN: 2 humans (commanders) + large numbers of AI actors

Map Size:
ARMA2 (I44 Mod): 28km*23km (Chernarus), 12km*12km(Takistan), 20km*20km(Desert) / IronFront: 16kmx16km (Staszow), 7km*7km(Baranow)
CMBN: ?

Logfile:
ARMA2: possible but to what detail I still need to find out
CMBN: ?

AI Sophistication:
ARMA2: scripted movement with fairly realistic behavior when getting into firing range
CMBN: ?

Map Editing:
ARMA2: complex
CMBN: straightforward