berndN wrote:Thanks for your work Merr. I followed your advise and have commented on the mentioned thread. Just some ideas I have regarding smoke. Hopefully this will be included in the next update.
But thanks for you we can play this one
You're quite welcome. Thanks for adding your views as well. I don't think we can expect smoke to be in BA (soon) because I fear that it requires a major re-write to impliment all the aspects of smoke and we all know their priority is getting a Mac version out. We would want the AI to use it as well ... I have ideas on how the AI can use it but I'll have to experiment with the AI code.
In the meantime, yes ... we can play around with the Mod. I'm going to add this to my (MP) Random B.O.C. so players can try it out under battlefield conditons. Players can add this to my MP scenario now if they know how, but I'm going to add smoke grenades and smoke mortars to some tanks before I make it an official change.
pipfromslitherine wrote:You make the point that ideally smoke would allow for some kind of partial obscuring/cover.
Yes ... I think smoke is a usefull tool in BA (like everyone suggested). In my scenario, if you tried taking the MG42 on head-to-head (without smoke!) your men would get slaughtered.
junk2drive wrote:I note that the 2 rounds don't land exactly where you think they will, just like real arty. I was able to march right up to the base of the hill, then into the smoke next to the emplacement. I did take op fire damage.
I'm using the same code as IndirectFire. If you look in the scripts folder, you'll see the new BSF's ...
- IndirectSmoke.bsf
- IndirectSmokeLogic.bsf
Also, if you want the mortar to use both shots, instead of one, you'll get twice as much smoke around the target tile. Unfortunately, more smoke "effects" lowers framerate, a problem that I fear is going to kill fps if we use this for offboard artillery
. The only solution to this would be making the smoke effect a 2D (non-animating) object. If I do smoke for offboard artillery I'm going to drop about 1/3 of the rounds in the target area (to start with) and see how the fps goes.
Here's how to add that extra "round" of smoke for the mortars, it's easy to change since I left the original code in there....
- Open the IndirectSmokeLogic file, and scroll down to the function IndirectSmokeAttack.
- You'll see code commented out (//) like below ...
Code: Select all
// for ( i=0; i<GetAttrib(me, "BOMBARD_SHOTS"); i++)
- Just replace that code above with my current code, so it all looks like this ....
Code: Select all
for ( i=0; i<GetAttrib(me, "BOMBARD_SHOTS"); i++)
{
for (j=0; j< MenLeftInUnit(me) ; j++)
{
Also, a smoke round landing on a unit will cause a little suppression (~5 reduction of morale), but it shouldn't cause any casualties. I zeroed out the parameters and left the original full script in there so anybody can simply add in some damage if they wanted to.
I read that the US Army had two types of smoke ...
- White Phosphorous (willy-peter)
- Hexachlorothane--Base Initiating (HCBI)
WP had a nasty burning effect but didn't put out as much smoke as HCBI.
Anyway, players can screw around with the smoke volume and damage effects to suit their own taste.
