Slitherine

With Pip's help, I've got a little smoke mod ...

Just a quick little scenario to introduce smoke!

Smoke Attributes
- Smoke blocks LOS "through" a tile.
- Smoke does NOT block into or out of a tile.
- Smoke does NOT provide any extra cover bonus. (I might be able to work out a little extra cover, maybe.. it's tile related though).
- Smoke blocks your direct fire ... I wish we had a "partial blocking" effect, maybe someday.
- Smoke dissipates after one-turn.
- Onboard Bombard units only.
- One Salvo consumes two shots. (note... mortars have 2-men, so they have one salvo for each man).



DOWNLOAD LINK ... http://www.gamefront.com/files/20545710 ... oke_v1.zip
- extract zip to \Documents\My Games\BBCBA\CAMPAIGNS.

Enjoy!

Action button looks fine to me.

I've seen smoke debated to death in other games. I think it should:

Not allow firing through it. Commanders would not want units wasting ammo.

Not provide cover. It is not a force field.

Should provide some bonus to concealment if in the tile with smoke.

Just my opinion. Thanks for doing this.

Next step:

Off board arty bonus choice of HE or Smoke

Smoke grenades for troops

Smoke dischargers for certain AFVs

junk2drive wrote:Action button looks fine to me.

I've seen smoke debated to death in other games. I think it should:

Not allow firing through it. Commanders would not want units wasting ammo.

Not provide cover. It is not a force field.

Should provide some bonus to concealment if in the tile with smoke.

Just my opinion. Thanks for doing this.

Your opinion is always welcome, and usually spot on! You're still full of the brown stuff, but all in good fun

junk2drive wrote:Next step:

Off board arty bonus choice of HE or Smoke

Smoke grenades for troops

Smoke dischargers for certain AFVs

Yes ... that's the next step ... and very easy to include.
I hope to see those players who posted their ideas/opinions over at the other smoke thread ...
... viewtopic.php?t=24073

I hope to see Pip dive into the idea, but we know he's awefully busy with Mac stuff, etc.
In the meantime, we (the players) can screw around with it.

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

My eyes are brown...

Nicely done! I am sure there will be lots of debate on the best way that this should work, but it's very cool. You make the point that ideally smoke would allow for some kind of partial obscuring/cover.

Cheers

Pip

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 looks good and works somewhat like bocage.

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 ... - Just replace that code above with my current code, so it all looks like this .... 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.

I did notice a slowdown in FPS. Animation and messages were delayed quite a bit.

junk2drive wrote:I did notice a slowdown in FPS. Animation and messages were delayed quite a bit.

Yes ... I'll have to use a 2D object to mark the tile with smoke. This won't be a problem and I can still have the drama of the smoke animation except the animation will burn off when it's done and you'll see a 2D smoke marker in it's place. The 2D marker will simply be drawn as a white circle, with a big black "S" in the middle. Using a 2D marker is the best approach because I can simulate FLAME markers whenever I get into writing stuff for burning objects, e.g. burning buildings, fields, etc.

Now, I'm going to post over at the smoke thread some ideas that I have working ... wrt direct fire into/out of tiles containing smoke.