What is meta-SEOW?
What is meta-SEOW?
meta-SEOW is conventional SEOW with all it's features, bells and whistles, PLUS one additional concept: the ability to use different games/sims to run each mission. The "meta" word indicates that SEOW itself is a special kind of game that uses other games to proceed.
Conventional SEOW uses IL-2 as the simulation engine to host/play each SEOW mission in the campaign. IL-2 is the "combat resolver" for conventional SEOW campaigns. Combat action results are written to the IL-2 eventlog and then SEOW picks them up and uses them to evolve the order of battle.
meta-SEOW allows a choice of combat resolution engines. We know that IL-2 works best for air operations and is not so good for detailed ground operations, so why not use a different simulation engine for resolving ground action? Obviously it would be preferable to have a single simulation engine that covered air, ground and sea operations with perfect fidelity but no game developer has got anywhere near that yet, so we need to create a different approach using separate games.
With meta-SEOW, campaign designers can select from two combat resolution engines:
- IL-2 (HSFX mod)
- Iron Front (as an Arma2 mod)
The following video introduces the meta-SEOW concept as a worked example of how intense first-person ground action can be generated from existing SEOW campaigns.
More detailed information on how this all works is found in these meta-SEOW pages.
Campaigning
meta-SEOW campaign admins can mix and match the engines (or run them both for each campaign mission) at any time during the campaign progress. meta-SEOW has code features to allow combat results to be extracted from each combat engine and incorporated seamlessly into the SEOW campaign order of battle.
This greatly extends the range of possible player and commander experiences in SEOW campaigning. Players can be pilots using IL-2 or can be soldiers using Iron Front, and they know that SEOW will always track their locations, actions, fates and consequences from mission to mission during the campaign. Commanders can now see first hand how their strategic orders play out on the ground, and they can issue orders to troops throughout the Iron Front missions using the Arma2 HighCommand module.
Features
meta-SEOW adds new functionality to the Mission Planner to:
- designate and manage areas in the campaign maps where Iron Front missions can be generated and run
- generate Iron Front terrains and missions that are consistent with the SEOW battlefield
- report on Iron Front combat results and generate proper integrated statistics pages
meta-SEOW adds new functionality to the DCS to:
- select mission modes
- combine action statistics
- track each infantry soldier in Iron Front
The Future
Obviously, we could include other simulation engines to the meta-SEOW suite, e.g. Silent Hunter for naval operations. Now that we have proven the meta-campaigning idea works there is nothing stopping us adding new engines to meta-SEOW, but it does take time.
