Wings Over the Pyre

07:38 am - A Brief Guide to Infective Linguistics

Cross-posted from the DropTeam fora:

Unfortunately for the sanity of my friends and I, DropTeam has actually infected the way we discuss ... well, pretty much anything that has to do with communicating semi-covertly in public places. As typical for a group of geek-guys and lesbians, it's typically about the fairer sex. (What? I told you it's a weird group.)

• I'm goin' after the enemy flag! or I'm goin' in!
  Translation: "Your choice of female target is so overwhelmingly attractive that I'm going on the approach; cover me."
• I'm attacking!
  Translation: "I'd hit that." "Your choice of female target is quite attractive." Alternately, emphatic yes.
• I'm escorting the flag!
  Translation: "The target is quite attractive but more observation or data is required for confirmation." Alternately, "I'm covering you."
• I'm holding position.
  Translation: "No opinion." Alternately, "Meh."
• I'm recovering our flag.
  Translation: "The target is somewhat unfortunate or is otherwise not really desirable, but not immediately offensive."
• I'm defending!
  Translation: "Your target is unacceptible to me." Alternately, "emphatic no."

It's at this point that I start getting worried about the sanity of those I spend too much time with ...

Now, if we could just get a few more voices for the bots, this would become ever more ironic.

The sad thing is that Starchild, Eric the .5b and I can use this elaborate shorthand at this point without much thinking about it. The only reason there was a post at all is that we were discussing the fact we needed intermediate steps between I'm attacking! and I'm holding position! and I'm defending! while at the mall today. I'm goin' after the enemy flag! is sort of the dynamic extension of the set to a state that has not as yet been actually needed.

I'm a damn geek.

08:16 am - Dropping Teams in Your Lap

So, yeah ... it looks like the opportunity to write the DropTeam novel is going from "vaguely joked about" to "it looks like they might want it, seriously."

Which, truthfully, is just a bit this side of terrifying.

The really terrifying thing is that my current employment comes to an end, in any time-devotional sense, on the 18th of this month. Then there's a week at the end of October.

And then NaNoWriMo begins.

It is sane to actually demand a minimum of two-thousand words a day out of yourself for a month, with the intention of actually selling the smelly dog-fart that'll inevitably result? It's not that I can't produce that much text, of course. I did well more than that on Iteration X Revised, in a per-day sense. I just can't stand to read anything I produce about two weeks after I write it.

So, me being me and devoted to using the most bizarre tools that I can in an effort to make twiddling and screwing around look good, dug up FreeMind from my archives and started laying out some node structure of ideas that I think are important to get down with connections between them for the novel. Some people like outlines. I like node-link maps.

Of course, what I really want is a full 3d node-map creator and projector, with the ability to let the nodes find their own least-energy patterns based on the way they're connected up, but I fear that'll have to wait a few dozen more years before the interface to deal with such comes to fruition.

Still ... it's a start. Getting a semi-pitch opportunity, having the tool at hand, having a whole month free without having to worry about a real job ... It's almost providential. If I were a religious man, I'd be terrified.

As is, I'm just short of that.

Interestingly, reading Universalis actually helped rather than hindered working in this format. The focus on bought Traits with the power of a thing dependent on how many Traits describe it has made me acutely aware of where the weight in my narrative falls, even so early as sketching out the setting details. LiveShips are a big chunk of the setting, so they get a lot of verbiage, but also a lot of details which can be summoned up during the story. The Space Aztecs (to be named properly later) have ... well, nothing yet. They carry no mass in my narrative as yet.

These are handy mental tools, too. As important as the way to visualize the structure directly.

I'm ... ready, I think. For this.

Is the world ready for me to join the universe of Michael Stackpole and Fred Saberhagen? Is the world ready for me to write a novel? Even a crappy novel for a niche video game from a niche video game company?

Am I ready?

Current Mood: nervous

08:25 am - Hunting the Wumpus

... so you don't have to.

So, no shit, there I was, busting my chops trying to figure out how to properly construct maps for scenarios in DropTeam. Figgling with more realistic-looking maps was frustrating me, because the bloody things were insisting on being all confused.

So, back to basics. Time to build a maze!

OK, its an 8.2km-wide maze, built out of desert mountain and sand ... but its a maze nonetheless. The basic idea is that its a great hunt-to-kill environment, with wonderful camping spots that can be disrupted by frightening amounts of artillery.

Plus, its fun to watch the dropships try to sweep in for landings.

The problem is that even after getting the textures right and twiddled ... it doesn't work.

Oh, you can load it. You can start it. You can drop in it.

But sometime right after the first bots drop in, the system slows to an absolutely horrid crawl, with painful, eye-gouging horror.

My suspicion is that once the bots drop and start planning their paths for attack, they lose the thread because there are so many blind alleys and bits of impassible terrain. Thus, they end up just spinning their wheels in painful frenzy, bogging the system down and getting uglier and uglier with every passing moment.

Its my theory, anyway.

Still, Hunt the Wumpus! Eh? Eh? Yeah!

Current Mood: creative

09:52 am - Arctic ... Hell ...

Mind fading fast. Wanted to share some preliminary renders of some terrain I'm thinking of putting in for a DropTeam scenario called "Arctic Hell."

And there's a chance I can turn this obsessive plunge into yet another setting into a book pitch, one which I think I could be assured of getting dealt with fairly if I actually took it up.

A novel, even. I'm going to try and get my thoughts in order for a serious pitch after Con season, with an outline and a first chapter written up. Experience can't be any worse than the last time.

Current Mood: contemplative

07:25 am - Singin' the Mercury CMD Blues

I'll turn Eric the .5b and Starchild into a decent fighting team yet.

I'll lure Rio into our evil web of tactical and strategic notoriety after Dragon*coN, if the stars be right.

I'm spending an awful lot of time writing posts on all of the DropTeam fora, and I'm pretty much the self-appointed copy-editor of the DropTeam wiki.

What I'd like to do is continue yapping at the developers of DT until most of the things I want work their way into the system (I'm getting range circles for the Cobra AA Turrets and Hermes EWP in the next build, which'll be released the next day or so, and after that I really want a little smarter bot brains in non-human run vehicles), make sure I have a positive-but-recognized image on the fora, get known to folks for being hard-working and relatively on top of the actual game system, and then ...

Well, some people have a great time running World of Warcraft Guilds. Back in the day, I used to run MU* servers, and liked it.

I kind of miss being the organizational center of a group that gets things done.

I've actually injected the seeds of my thoughts into the discursive universe. The idea of game-supported meta-groups of folks that like to play together isn't wholly new, though I don't think its been served much by traditional RTS. Nor is it particularly well served by traditional FPS, at least on the PC (Battlefield 2 could use some improvement there).

So, basically, I want to run my own DropTeam Company.

That's "company," as in "organizational element of a military force larger than a platoon and smaller than a battalion." Or, if you must, a fancy name for a DT Clan.

I realize that this is sheer madness. Moreover, its the kind of madness a true megalomaniac would take on, along with all the other things I've taken on. Still, it should be a nice side-line for a while if I can manage to make it happen, along with regularly-scheduled Company combats and maybe some custom training scenarios, if I can work out how the scenarios get built in XML.

I also need a good name for the Company.

Luckily, I don't need any of this for a while. Until the game's where I'd like to see it to commit other peoples' time to it, I don't feel pressed.

Besides, I have to train up my platoon leaders first.

Current Mood: tired

03:55 am - Noob!

You know its true.

Amusingly, I've been trying to marshal both Starchild and Eric the .5b through the newb phase of DropTeam tactics. Both is them are fantastic shots (unsurprisingly, far better than I am, truth be told), Their problem is they really don't do so well at engaging a mobile defense.

Yes, I know they're both reading this. Maybe they'll take the opportunity to ask what th'Hell I'm talking about. :)

Still, its a lot of good, hardcore fun, and I look forward to trying to put together a solid team of DT players for the inevitable squad-on-squad hardcore action.

Current Mood: pleased

08:53 am - The Terror of Terragen

You might think that the left required me to hire a helicopter in the Tucutan, but in fact its the result of ten-minutes' twiddling in Terragen, one of the tools they use to build the terrain models for DropTeam.

Now, it looks like it'll take a lot of tinkering to go from a complicated rendered image to a multi-channel height-map ... which may or may not be taken from real-world data, like, say, the area around my house or further up 316 towards Athens, but ...

The idea of having cruel metal machines descending from the sky to wreak havoc across a 15.1km x 15.1km area just sounds like fun.

This probably makes me a bad person.

Current Mood: creative

07:42 am - Bot Wrangling

Folks, repent, for the end time is nigh.

No, I don't mean Jesus is inbound any moment and about to drop a Rock-like most electrifying deity in sports-entertainment history Jesus'-elbow across our shoulders. I can take that skinny punk all by myself.

No, I mean I've been being the voice of reason and wisdom in an online forum full of prickly and obsessive grognards, and being lauded for my ideas. I know, I know, its kind of horrifying when you get right down to it, and yet ... there it is.

Yes, I've been active in the DropTeam fora.

Thus the new icon for a specific game instead of the generic wargame icon.

My latest opus on the DropTeam forum concerns the evolution of the game's tactical interface, in particular better means of dealing with autonomous elements, thus, bot wrangling. It simply would not do to let it go without at least an excerpt from the beginning:

Provocative title, not that provocative concept. I needed a thread to ramble about useful additions to the bot wrangling interface.

As stands, there's a lot of focus on playing from a FPS-esque direction because getting the bots to do useful work from the tactical screen (hereafter abbreviated "tac") is not just awkward, sometimes its a real pain in the tookas. But, given a bit of polish -- OK, a lot of tears, sweat, and programmer-bile -- it could be a lot easier.

I'll just put out a chunk of ideas that have been kicking around my head and some notes:

• Multi-point Commands: Being able to give multi-point orders with different modes at each point will help a lot when it comes time to orchestrate moving groups together. Not only that, but it'll help a lot when just trying to get a bot to pull any moves more complicated than driving straight at the enemy without babysitting them. And that gives the players more time to come up with good tactics and even better strategy.
  
  The bots should be able to follow a path of at least five points, shifting from "Defend," "Attack," etc at each one.

[...]

And so on, over several more points, including discussion of a minimal set of formations platoons should have available for command.

The thing that struck me last night came as Eric the .5b and I were warming up for a night of delicious bloody destruction by going a few rounds on the DropTeam demo server, which doesn't have infantry or a number of the latest additions, but is still nicely serviceable, is that once upon a time, I'd discussed with him the kind of game that would satisfy the both of us and play to our strengths, a game which could be played from a FPS position, on the battlefield directly, firing the guns and choosing positions, or from above in an RTS position, directing swarms of lesser elements around to aid and support the human-directed units. Perversely, DropTeam is aimed squarely at that niche. While Eric was "in the shit," firing AP iridium darts at oncoming main battle tanks, I was soaring above the chaos, directing bots to give him supporting fire, dropping minefields directly in front of advancing enemy elements, and occasionally popping onto the battlefield myself to snipe at long distance with ATGM launchers from the safety of a sensor jamming field. It was, in short, almost a perfect mix of everything we're both good at, and that gives me a good feeling.

Often, when we're playing Battlefield 2, I get the feeling that I'm not exactly pulling my weight. Oh, I know, I'm a fine sniper and a perfectly serviceable bombardier, but neither of those roles get the attention that others get from charging directly into short-range firefights and tangling up directly on a contested base, even if my sniper rounds or long-range support from a tank helps take it. But those things don't seem quite so intriguing, since others seem to make them irrelevant as a means of operation.

For example, I think I'm the only one that ever pops smoke out of a tank or IFV when I hear a lock-on, even though you can throw it into reverse and turn a bit and often have the shooter totally miss through the impenetrable haze. But that's good doctrine for keeping the element alive. Of course, I think I'm the only one that's ever run out of ammo in a Bradley IFV in B2, too.

I manage to feel pretty useful in a DropTeam entanglement, with my ability to direct multiple elements at once and a sense of strategic deployment. And, at the same time, Eric can feel like he's fighting the good fight, rushing up to take out the trash in concert with my units, making a fine example of the meat-grinder and driving at high speeds in dangerous vehicles over rough terrain.

There are few games out there that try and straddle two very different continuum of games, but its nice when they do it, and do it well. How many other folks would game together more happily if there were more games that catered to their particular foci and let them shine, individually? It seems like there should be a market.

DropTeam seems to be having a fairly significant gameplay-affecting release every two weeks, at this point, and they don't seem to have any intention of decreasing the pace, given they've already announced a WWII mod that registered buyers will get for free. I'm not particularly interested in the WWII form, but the idea that such a thing is just fine with the developers and important enough not just to do, but do well, is fantastic.

Possibly relatedly, I've kind of taken it up myself to do the basic structuring of the relatively virginal DropTeam wiki. If you feel like helping out, get intrigued and involved by DT, and think you can help out, by all means, pile in. It'd be a full-time job just going through the fora and pulling out the best of the tactical advice and element stats.

This has been your weekly wargaming broadcast. We now return you to your regular broadcasts of war, already in progress.

Current Mood: creative

07:58 am - Merit in the Mouth

Well, good to know that, even with my mind fogged with ambien and exhaustion, I can still break the rules of logical consistency. Or be vocabularied. Or somesuch.

Been spending a lot of tonight working on the DropTeam wiki. I may not have a clue what data to feed in, but I'm a master of structuring information for cross reference. We'll just have to see if it comes to anything, but the game creator has said he's very impressed with what we have so far.

Current Mood: tired

08:06 am - Read It And Weep

Read it and weep, bitches!

Not bad for a guy who can't hit the broad side of a barn if you fire, well, a tank cannon at it. High Explosive. Followed by a Katuushya rocket barrage and potentially even a nuclear drop. In this case, I'm just firing the 125mm gun on the front of an M1 Abrams at a variety of targets moving across my prow. The 90% hit percentage gives me warm fuzzies, and the one miss was only because the target ducked behind a convenient bush as I was lasing range. Hardly my fault at all!

The secret? Actually paying attention to the ammo the tank commander calls out and remembering the one in the chamber is the last one he called out. Don't switch your ammo solution in the ballistics computer until you're on that type of round. Once I got that through my thick head, getting first-shot hits on moving targets became a lot easier. (You wouldn't believe the difference in arc and lead between the HEAT and DU KE penetrator.)

I'm really feeling rather gratified, strangely. Its a good feeling.

I also laid down a few rounds of training in the M2 Bradley, which has its own infantry dismounts to run around and shoot things, as well as reload its guns. The TOW launcher is particularly interesting, given that it reminds me a lot of the AT-4's in Battlefield 2 ... Except, unlike a proper mechanized infantry assault, the contact occurs at ranges of under 2km. While a Brad likes to engage with missiles around about 3.7km. No wonder I feel cramped when I'm running the B2 battlefield ... its way too rock-throw.

Yeah, I'm still enjoying playing Steel Beasts.

Its actually helping me be a better DropTeam player, with the high-end focus on maneuver and careful planning over dash-in-and-pray methods.

Speaking of DropTeam:

August 2nd, 2006
WWII Expansion for DropTeam announced

TBG Software and Battlefront.com today announced a new DropTeam expansion, this time set during World War 2.

DT-WW2 (working title) is an exciting extension of the DropTeam game system set in WWII. Players command realistically detailed WWII tanks, infantry, and guns in a detailed environment populated by up to 16 players per side.

As with the original DropTeam, each player commands a single unit at a time and coordinates his actions with teammates to achieve various victory conditions, or can play from a more strategic perspective by using the commander's interface on the overall tactical map to issue orders to units much like a traditional RTS game.

Steve Grammont, co-founder of Battlefront.com said: "Teams that know how to use complimentary units in combination with each other will likely crush those who don't. For example, one player may command an armored half track while another rides inside wi th an infantry team, while a third sticks close by with a heavily armored tank for protection.

Since we know we are going to be asked, here are our thoughts on the realism of DT-WW2. The units and environment are extremely realistically portrayed. DropTeam already has an amazingly life like physics engine complete with ballistics and armor handling tha t is extremely accurate. The tactics that DT-WW2 encourages are also quite realistic with a heavy emphasis on cooperation of infantry and armor.

Yet with all this realism the emphasis is, like with DropTeam before it, on having fun! This is a fast paced, adrenaline pumping gaming experience. New features such as buildings that can be occupied/destroyed, the ability to bail out of damaged vehicles, reinforcement zones, air attacks, and other exciting features will make sure of that."

DT-WW2 will evolve over time, covering different theaters of combat at different points in the war. The initial setting will be the hectic battles in Normandy during the summer of 1944. As with the previous DropTeam, it can be experienced using Windows, Mac, and LINUX operating systems. More details to come later this summer!

I'm not really sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, it's WWII, and I'm about thoroughly sick of WWII. Every half-decent engine in the past five years has been WWII. DT is sci-fi, and proudly so ... so it'll be rather sad to see the engine re-tasked. On the up-side, this implies the engine enhancements will be cross-ported back to the original so we can get infantry that can be transported and resupplied with Paladins and the like, which can only be a good thing.

Oh, yes ... If you decide you want to give DT a go, let me know as I recently installed the multiplayer demo alongside the big install. The demo gives you pretty much everything except infantry and secondary weapons on some vehicles, so you're golden on getting the feel of what DT is really about. (Mostly about me trying vainly not to get blown up by rolling my vehicle over, but I digress.)

Current Mood: tired

07:22 am - Drop the Bomb

I'm really, really, too big of a geek for my own good, sometimes.

As I've mentioned before, I own, play, and enjoy DropTeam, a SF real-time wargame which puts you in the command seat of multiple units at once as well as deployment, formations, and gunnery. Basically, its a grognard's dream of a space-sim without the space-bits. As the website puts it:

DropTeam™ is a multiplayer capable, real-time, tactical simulation of armored ground combat in the far future. You’ll battle for control of objectives on a broad variety of planets ranging from verdant Earth-like worlds to desolate, radioactive wastelands. You will use Dropship's (see unit list) to land fighting vehicles and other deployable assets like sensors, mines and automated turrets on planetary surfaces. You will take direct control of various types of armored fighting vehicles while also coordinating your team, including AI, other human players, artillery support and more. Vast, exotic landscapes rendered in real-time with detailed, accurate physics and ballistics systems and true line-of-sight provide realistic combat. There are no “hit points”, limited view distances, unrealistically short weapon ranges, or other gross simplifications that are typical of many other sci-fi games. DropTeam™ can be played online on a public server with up to 16 players, or it can be played privately with as few as 2 players, as well as single-player vs. AI opponents. AI opponents can also be mixed in with human players in order to make the teams any size you like.

So I've been playing DT a lot lately, because they just added infantry units to the game, and they add an entirely new level of play subtlety that is in line with what I'm actually good at. Since the squishies are in five-man squads, and they don't actually appear on the tactical display unless you're actively firing (in which case you can easily see the weapons flashes if you're in LoS) or they're using jump-jets (which registers on the situational awareness tactical displays), they're good for players who don't mind dropping in behind cover, then marching (invisibly) to a good overwatch perch with some foliage and parking still for some time. For me, that means I can shift to the tactical display and command AIs into support or attack positions, listening for my squaddies to open fire as my signal to flip back and punch out some 10mm rounds of my own.

Now, because they're fairly new and because the developer posts daily to the support forum, and because he's a nice and forthcoming guy, there's been a lot of discussion about the infantry mechanics as well as the underlying damage model of the system, because of the kind of damage that the various types of support weapons the infy squads carry along with them. Thus, there's come about a fairly involved thread which discusses infantry and then segued into a fairly intricate disassembly of the idea of having antimatter cell-powered vehicles on the board without antimatter weapons.

Mind you, it was at this point that my sanity must've snapped, because I lept into the fray (subdued and understated as it was) with this:

Actually, there's a great reason not to use uncontained antimatter explosives on the battlefields we're fighting over:

We probably want to actually have folks live there, after.

I'm thinking not a lot of folks really want to deal with a gamma-saturated city. The cascade effects, the irradiated plant-life, the utter lack of airable farmland ... No, thanks, antimatter may make a pretty and effective attack vector outside the atmosphere, but I think I like to keep it out of the planetary biome that I'll be shifting colonists to.

That said, I have to wonder how the vehicular systems keep from going critical in big, ugly ways when their engines get a penetrating hit. Forget catching on fire and emitting smoke, why don't they go up and take a foul chunk out of the planet? The AM cores have to be sustaining the AM in some unknown fashion, so that a rupture in containment shifts the AM into a less, shall we say, energetic state.

This seems to be the critical bit of energy-supply technology the backstory doesn't really cover well enough for my tastes.

---

It occurs to me, after a leisurely breakfast, that the only reasonable way to figure the vehicular AM cores are to assume some sort of passive containment system.

What we're talking about is some form of Unobtanium(tm)(c) which creates a magnetic matrix, probably in a crystalline matrix. During its formation, its injected / inoculated with AM hydrogen, each atom suspended within a crystalline / magnetic cell, and requiring no power to maintain separation. Liberating power from the system probably involves physically damaging the matrix, liberating the AM in a way that propels it away from the remaining coherent fields and toward what they hit the matrix with, which then reacts with the AM and liberates a relatively small quantum of energy (comparative to, say, a full-bore unconstrained AM detonation; the energy needed to liberate the AM has to be a tiny fraction of the released energy to be worth the effort).

Juggle the numbers on the volume of the matrix material vs the volume of the cell vs the volume of AM contained to get numbers which fit the size of the AM cores on the templates. They specify "micrograms of AM," which is reasonable.

Of course, they have to be using "combustion" in some sense which we don't in regards to their "ICE Engines" (shades of BattleTech), since on Earth "combustion" is about materials combining with oxygen energetically. Since AM really doesn't require any specific form of reactive matter, oxygen or nae, they can't be using it in the conventional sense. If we assume they use the term to mean any energetic release from a physical matrix, it makes some vague kind of sense.

As dan / cal suggests, it probably makes more sense from a hard SF perspective if the fuel cells and patently not antimatter, because of all the points he makes. If its important they be so, we can certainly construct reasonable things around that, but its harder than it looks, in part because of observed failure-modes in the game as we clearly observe.

I may not be as grognardy[1] as some of the tankers in the group, but by Hell, I can throw down with the hard SF writers' crowd on any given Sunday.

Seriously, if you enjoy the odd hardcore tanker / infantry sim and don't feel like throwing down the $120 for Steel Beasts [3], you'd be well served by going ahead and popping for DT. Supported on Windows, OS/X and Linux, for that most complete and rare of gaming experiences.

PS: It occurs to me to add after original posting that adding HMG light infantry squads to the game has more than tripled my kill rates in most scenarios. I park in an out of the way flank, hunker down in grass or, preferably, trees, and tell my boys to hold fire until the bad guys rumble by. As they do, I let fire go nuts at the back of their turrets at full go. The Thors have a soft spot on the back of their heads and Apolos and lighter really can get chewed up by rounds entering from below the center-line through the suspension. Remember, a turret kill is a kill indeed!

1. Grognardy: The state of being like a grognard[2].
2. Grognard: Not a technical term as such, but a term you'll hear in wargaming. It refers to experienced (and, these days, often middle aged) wargamers. The term was originally used as a nickname for members of Napoleons Old Guard. The term is French and means, literally, "grumbler." It reflects the attitude of the veteran troops who knew what was really going on but couldn't do much about it. So they grumbled, and so do most wargame grognards.
   www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/2-c-term.htm
3. Yes, I've gone ahead and popped for the thing, but only after having discovered an untapped cash reserve, else even I couldn't have justified it.

Current Mood: geeky