Post by Swampfox on Mar 21, 2021 15:58:19 GMT
S! All
Good to see some new pilots...maybe former RBers...joining us Saturday.
The reason we ran a non-repair scenario March 20 2021 was to let those who have not seen the negative effect of target hardening on one side winning a war experience it. Yet, some feel the war was "won". It was not.
Zilski, Cameljock, Ted and I have been working on getting scoring programs to work with iMap. The hope is that iMap can become one new option for our wars. There are so many beautiful mountain, valleys, lakes and farmlands where Island scale wars can be fought. Unfortunately, the marriage between existing scoring programs and iMap could not read the vast number of targets within a full scale CUSTOM TARGET map like Alsace, Flanders...etc. With much time being invested by Cameljock and Zilski in finding out which targets "light up" and which do not, I soul searched all possible technical reasons...and suggested that my naming of targets may have been the problem, or one of the problems - it was...but it was something bigger as well. It was discovered that the choice of scoring programs which had been tested over the last few years, produced back in the the heyday of Squad Wars is a primary issue. The C++ scoring program I produced in 03 was intended, by design, to become a broad- function program starting with scoring, would not "see" or score targets well. It is being reviewed and may rise to its potential...but first....
I went to the Wayback program, scoured the old Wings-of-Valor website. There I realized that although a number of scoring programs modified from the original server program had been created, but while we had them in our list, we had not been testing some of them. Once I shared my assessment of the situation, Zilski and Cameljock found that the majority of targets could be "seen" and "lit up" by one of the programs which was designed (I believe in that case, Klay Pijon) to include Custom Maps identification by way of the lndmrks.dat file I used to make all custom targets...with iMap being by far the biggest custom map in RB.
OK...so what? What does that have to do with target hardening? As we have been discussing gently for years, we could switch to a timed game...say, 1:30 hours, 1:45, or 2:00 hours.....have the non-repair option setup, and have more targets than would likely be destroyed within the timeframe and would buffer the varying numbers of pilots flying on a given week. Meaning, if one target hardens, you go on to another one. I don't know what happened to execute the target hardening yesterday...it could be anything, ranging from unknowable to someone not exiting to gold room...re-lifing without returning to base...whatever. There would always be some potential for frustration if someone works on a target, brings down every single destroyable element, yet it does not fall...but that event seems to not happen very often fortunately.
So, with a timed war...you bomb as much as you can and the scoring program scores for that time period. Includes kills, etc., and comes out as a total score for all aspects. Like the Big Squad wars of yesteryear. But would work as well with our small (and hopefully increasing in size) wars of 8-12 pilots...
This is the only way we have now to neutralize the worst effect of target hardening. And it is now highly likely we can run wars in iMap with scoring.
I hope this epistle brings clarity to the problem and opportunities to resolve target hardening and to maybe even move to some new security solutions.
Thanks to Cameljock, Zilski, Ted and others for their contributions. There was a good reason for running the non-repairing targets, once and for all hopefully.
BTW...the iMap and other pages on redbaron3dofficialsite.com load slowly in some cases. That will be fixed this week.
S!
Swampfox
Good to see some new pilots...maybe former RBers...joining us Saturday.
The reason we ran a non-repair scenario March 20 2021 was to let those who have not seen the negative effect of target hardening on one side winning a war experience it. Yet, some feel the war was "won". It was not.
Zilski, Cameljock, Ted and I have been working on getting scoring programs to work with iMap. The hope is that iMap can become one new option for our wars. There are so many beautiful mountain, valleys, lakes and farmlands where Island scale wars can be fought. Unfortunately, the marriage between existing scoring programs and iMap could not read the vast number of targets within a full scale CUSTOM TARGET map like Alsace, Flanders...etc. With much time being invested by Cameljock and Zilski in finding out which targets "light up" and which do not, I soul searched all possible technical reasons...and suggested that my naming of targets may have been the problem, or one of the problems - it was...but it was something bigger as well. It was discovered that the choice of scoring programs which had been tested over the last few years, produced back in the the heyday of Squad Wars is a primary issue. The C++ scoring program I produced in 03 was intended, by design, to become a broad- function program starting with scoring, would not "see" or score targets well. It is being reviewed and may rise to its potential...but first....
I went to the Wayback program, scoured the old Wings-of-Valor website. There I realized that although a number of scoring programs modified from the original server program had been created, but while we had them in our list, we had not been testing some of them. Once I shared my assessment of the situation, Zilski and Cameljock found that the majority of targets could be "seen" and "lit up" by one of the programs which was designed (I believe in that case, Klay Pijon) to include Custom Maps identification by way of the lndmrks.dat file I used to make all custom targets...with iMap being by far the biggest custom map in RB.
OK...so what? What does that have to do with target hardening? As we have been discussing gently for years, we could switch to a timed game...say, 1:30 hours, 1:45, or 2:00 hours.....have the non-repair option setup, and have more targets than would likely be destroyed within the timeframe and would buffer the varying numbers of pilots flying on a given week. Meaning, if one target hardens, you go on to another one. I don't know what happened to execute the target hardening yesterday...it could be anything, ranging from unknowable to someone not exiting to gold room...re-lifing without returning to base...whatever. There would always be some potential for frustration if someone works on a target, brings down every single destroyable element, yet it does not fall...but that event seems to not happen very often fortunately.
So, with a timed war...you bomb as much as you can and the scoring program scores for that time period. Includes kills, etc., and comes out as a total score for all aspects. Like the Big Squad wars of yesteryear. But would work as well with our small (and hopefully increasing in size) wars of 8-12 pilots...
This is the only way we have now to neutralize the worst effect of target hardening. And it is now highly likely we can run wars in iMap with scoring.
I hope this epistle brings clarity to the problem and opportunities to resolve target hardening and to maybe even move to some new security solutions.
Thanks to Cameljock, Zilski, Ted and others for their contributions. There was a good reason for running the non-repairing targets, once and for all hopefully.
BTW...the iMap and other pages on redbaron3dofficialsite.com load slowly in some cases. That will be fixed this week.
S!
Swampfox