Before I begin I'd like to thank Comjak and Monsteri for their argueing which gave me this idea.

Behind enemy lines


The Idea
The idea for this this game mode was born from the arguement that zombies have been over-done and the skill requirements to shoot and kill something at any range that can't fight back are null at best.
So this arguement inadverdantly asked the question "If you don't need skill to play zombies why do people like playing zombie games?", well the answer is quite simple. People like long odds, it activates a players fight or flight response and might even release adrenaline into their body if they are deep into the game.

So here is the question I asked myself, "How do you add skill to a zombie type mode?". The short answer would be to give them guns, but thats stupid because everyone knows zombies don't shoot guns...but Somalis do...

Thats began my inital thought process of haveing a "Black hawk down" type scenario in which players would need to completely co-operate in order to survive. There is another problem though, Horde mode has been done before. So after some thought the idea evolved into "Behind enemy lines"

The Game mode

Imagin yourself with a handful of special forces soldiers behind enemy lines sabotaging convoys, assassinating high value targets, calling in airstrike packages, rescueing POWs, and raiding power plants. Now imagin your out numberd 100-1.

Gameplay

You and 11 other players (or if in single player 11 other AI with super gun accuracy) start somewhere in a map current ones will work with idea so there is no need for specific maps for this mode. You would then be tasked to reach an objective such as the first objective would be high ground of some kind so your "radio communication with C&C" can be established. From that point on you will be orderd to complete any number of the before mentioned missions behind enemy lines. Always out numberd, always out gunned where stealth and team work is key. The cresendo of the mission would be to reach your extraction point and when there it would start up a mini horde mode until a helo arrives.

Makeing it work

"But Newa," You might ask "How could people survive such odds!?!"
Good question, first thing to do would be to make the OP4 teams' accuracy horrible. Remember that your fighting a milita of some kind and the players are special forces.
"But Newa OMFG 1 hit and you dead, and 100+ plus guys can pump out alot of lead even if they cant hit the broad side of a barn they are bound to get lucky!!!". True, thats why we need to add some kind of body armor, its already been sugested in the fourms and I think it was highly receptive from the Devs.
The Second thing to prolong player life expectancy would be to add classes, to have player play a role that could imerse the player and encourage co-operation.

Here are a few ideas on player classes
Officer: Pistol, ability to call in support strikes (maby re-enforcement spawns) (Players must protect or their game could end)
Fireteam leader: m16a4, m203,
Engineer: Shotgun, c4, LAW
Squad automatic rifleman: m249, grenades
Medic: mp5, health packs(Or revive from dead packs if you dont want to implament a health system)
Rifleman: Assaultrifle?, hand grenades
Sniper: sniper rifle, silenced pistol

Third idea to improve player life expectancy I noted in the Officer class, he could have the ability to call hin a Huey Helicopter and respawn dead player, so protect your officer!

*Update*

Additional Mid Mission Objectives (MMO)

- Steal the car
- c4 the railroad tracks (or bridge....I work on the rail road, please don't do this in real life.)
- Path finding (find an sutable area to have AI friendlys insert via Helo into an area to assault their own objective (players can choose to help or not all the players need to do is find a good LZ nearby their objective)
- Rescue the civilians (either load them onto a bus and get somewhere safe to have a Helo come extract them, or hold off any attackers while a Helo extracts them where they are.)
- Destroy Out-of-commission tanks that are being repaired. (kill the crews before they can jump in the tanks!!!)
- CSAR (Combat search and rescue) Reach a downed fighter pilot before the millita forces do and get him BTB.
- Communication interuption, destroy a series of OP4 radar(Or communication) trucks.
- Disrupt enemy AA capabilities, destroy a series of OP4 radar trucks

Updated 3/24/2013

- Destroy enemy weapons cache (Perhaps make weapon boxes destroyable?)
- Lay minefield, players (or the engineer class) would lay down 3-4 landmines in an area and could choose to watch ai set them off or leave.
- TSP (Tactical strike package) Intel has located an underground bunker, get in position, paint the target location with laser and call a tomahawk cruise missle, target must stay painted until package arrives on station.
- Deliver weapons cache to underground resistance fighters. This would require a new truck like a 5ton and when you press F in the back it would drop a gun cabnet. You could also use this truck in normal game modes, you could also use the same truck model to transport troops. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M939_Truck , to differentiate the 2 differnt versions one version could havve the tarp over the back.

Updated 4/3/2013

- Eliminate High ranking enemy commander or warlord (infiltrate, sniper, or assault mission, players can choose how they want to handle it)
- Destroy fuel depo
- Steal the map. An enemy AI is carrying valuable intel and the players must intercept him before he reaches his destination. Make the enemy AI surrender or kill him and take it. The intel would then be brought back to the radio (base)
- Destory enemy convoy. The enemy is moving reserve troops upto the front lines, make sure they don't arrive.

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"For the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and the strength of the Pack is the Wolf."  Oo Rah Marine Corp.

alright. any chances to disguise as enemy soldier?? thats almost what behind enemy line is. you need to be undetected and disguising as enemy soldier helps with that alot

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co-owner of NEWA

All right, I'm trying to gather up some points what the game would need for such a mod to be possible.

* Making factions uneven by parameters
Very likely coming, it's easy to accomplish, just a few AI parameters. Currently all AI parameters are hardcoded as same between factions, but the "invasion online campaign mode" hinted somewhere earlier already needs some faction-specific AI parameters, so extending the set there is just natural.

* You and 11 other players (or if in single player 11 other AI with super gun accuracy) start somewhere in a map
That's a soldier capacity parameter, in online making players replace AI = bot dies, player spawns nearby, and AI spawns when player leaves. That would need a bit of tinkering, without it the group would grow in size when players join until AI would get themselves killed. Not a crucial point, but a point anyway.

* You would then be tasked to reach an objective such as the first objective would be high ground of some kind so your "radio communication with C&C" can be established. From that point on you will be orderd to complete any number of the before mentioned missions behind enemy lines.
This would need some kind of system for tracking objectives and generating new ones. To me, it would sound like a job for the current "metagame"-component, which is so far a server-only scripting system, which allows the script to receive notifications from the game, currently only on event of capturing the whole map i.e. winning the game. This area could be extended to communicate when some important things happen, it would be completely up to the script to take action on these events. The action could be a radio message and a state change inside the script to follow another event to be reported.

In 0.79, you'll see vehicles being extended to allow proper modifications, along with attaching certain results on vehicles becoming destroyed. The set of potential results isn't vast yet, but can be extended for whatever is thought to be required. Extending it to send a metagame notification is perfectly viable not to mention easy. So there, destroy-vehicle mission support added. Keep 'em coming.

All right, stealing a car or getting back a stolen car is a good choice.

C4, on the railroad tracks, sounds like an item you'd find somewhere which you'd put somewhere else to cause a lot of damage and remotely trigger it, that would need support for destroyable static objects, we've discussed that too but so far there are no plans. I suppose it could be modded as easily as a vehicle without seats in 0.79, never tried it

Rescuing civilians.. That's a problem as currently the game supports just 2 factions, and there's no easy way to arrange certain bots to have certain weapons, in this case, no weapons.

* reach your extraction point and when there it would start up a mini horde mode until a helo arrives.
This would need some tracking over a group of soldiers to get to a specific rectangle at a specific place and range in the map, maybe just the regular base capturing could be utilized for this, who knows. Maybe that would trigger the script to signal the server to make the enemy faction go to all attack mode. Getting the helo there.. well, I'll just skip that for now

* True, thats why we need to add some kind of body armor, its already been sugested in the fourms and I think it was highly receptive from the Devs.
Yes, the aforementioned invasion mode will in the long run need a serious extension to the item system, allowing some looting to take place and carry along items that change certain properties. I'm currently pretty sure we'll go there.

* The Second thing to prolong player life expectancy would be to add classes, to have player play a role that could imerse the player and encourage co-operation.
Not sure how the item system will look like, but it might be you could make the soldiers have classes through having a "class" item, really, not sure. The item could perhaps then affect what other items you can pick up. Another choice is to assume roles by the stuff you are carrying -- probably not that easy when you're playing with strangers, but with guys who want to play the mod as its meant to be played, I'd suppose they'd cooperate?

* Third idea to improve player life expectancy I noted in the Officer class, he could have the ability to call hin a Huey Helicopter and respawn dead player, so protect your officer!
Reviving others is likely coming as a feature in invasion mode through usage of items such as first aid kits, so you'd probably arrange the reviving to work through a similar system.

Just sayin' but maybe we could take a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series turn on zombies? People whose minds have been altered into the most primitive sense? They can still use guns, but have low reaction time, sight distance, and are slow overall.

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Shameless bump.

Now that Online co-op is so popular this sugestion would be a no brainer.
Also added a few more Mid Mission Objectives to the main post.

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"For the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and the strength of the Pack is the Wolf."  Oo Rah Marine Corp.

I'm losing track of the gaps

At least faction specific AI parameters are possible now, with base and border defense parameters. The AI enemy could be made to defend only and make player-faction have one safe base initially.

Soldier count could be set low, and use player-bot compensation factor to get enemy count high. Or, soldier count could be set to 0 (or 1, 0 might trigger PvP related rules) and use initial capacity boosts to set unrespawnable enemy count... not sure if that would fit this mode.

The biggest restriction to this mode in general would seem to be that the metagame script isn't getting much of data from the server/game yet. I'm adding some status query functionality for 0.85 which could be made to handle similar stuff with a monitor-like approach, but receiving events (other than the battle end signal) will have to happen later.

Well to be honest I'm pretty hopeful about this game type after that post, thanks Pasik!

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"For the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and the strength of the Pack is the Wolf."  Oo Rah Marine Corp.

Updated, added more mid mission objectives

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"For the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and the strength of the Pack is the Wolf."  Oo Rah Marine Corp.

0.85 has a metagame event for vehicle holder change, which works on the principle that there are none of the soldiers of the vehicle owner faction nearby the vehicle and there are at least one soldier from the other faction and the vehicle is in the other faction territory. In such case it is considered held by the non-owning faction, i.e. stolen.

Theoretically, the metagame script could autonomously decide which enemy vehicle is the theft target for the players as a mission and keep checking the incoming events about holder changes to detect the correct vehicle becoming stolen.

But, is there a home base in Behind Enemy Lines? Without it, this won't work. To make it work without a home base, the engine would need some kind of generic hitbox check for stuff that when objects hit it, it would generate again events to the metagame, so that the metagame could make the mission as a "take vehicle X to hitbox Y" rather than "take vehicle X to friendly territory with no enemies nearby".

Actually, it could work without the hitbox too, but the script would then have to query the vehicle status periodically to check that the vehicle arrives where ordered.



As railroad, it could be made with a static mesh with those tracks and possibly a specific part in it made as a static vehicle, and make the vehicle section in it destroyable. The metagame script would get an event about this in 0.85 and would be able to declare objective completed and reward and generate another objective, if wanted.

I doubt anyone in his right mind will start working on the railroad though, but it's a nice suggestion



Helo not doable yet.



Third faction not doable yet, soldier AI is the only character-level AI implemented so far, and just one is supported, helo not doable yet. Altogether rather complicated.



There's no vehicle repair mechanic, but if it's just theater that there would be some regular soldiers near a regular vehicle that looks like it's broken, doesn't have a driver seat, then it could be doable in 0.85. Handle the event about destroying a specific vehicle type in the script, maybe check that there are no enemies in the block where the tank is, and declare objective complete.

The enemies could be get to protect the tank by setting it with needs_protection in the vehicle specification, similar to how a group of enemy soldiers follow the radar truck.



How to do this.. I'm just speculating here really but
* the script would need to be able to spawn a soldier at specific place
* the script would need to be able to set the soldier's objective to something special, so that the commander AI would not allocate the soldier to defense/attack forces nor as a radar truck driver, but instead skip him from allocations (similar to radar truck drivers are handled in the balancing logic)
* the soldier would need to be low rank so that the player would be able to get him to join his squad
* ..and even if the soldier would be in this special objective mode, he would still behave as regular defending soldier so that he would join the player squad if there is room in the squad
* the script would keep monitoring until the spawned special soldier would reach a specific base/position or become dead to declare objective completion



Script would be able to get those destroy events, but would not be able to set the comms off.



Could be done as theater, have a new vehicle type which is static and looks like weapons cache, and catch the event in the script and declare objective complete. The cache would respawn automatically after the set time though, is that a problem?



Grenade hit trigger gets triggered on any surface, would need some new config parameters to define which surfaces set it off, to create those mines. Hmm, the script wouldn't be able to get info about those mines in 0.85, it's not able to examine items yet.



...



Gun truck is in plans, somewhat.



The script would need to be able to set the rank for an existing soldier and/or spawn a new one with the rank. The script would need to be able to receive events of kills, for convenience, but it would be possible to monitor it through periodic queries already.

This would be possible to achieve already in 0.85 without the high rank requirement.

If player needs to explicitly make a selection of how to handle the mission beforehand, it could be handled with chat commands, doable.



Destroy static vehicle? Doable.



The script would need to somehow interfere or interface with the enemy commander AI, to make a specific soldier to move to a specific position defined by the script.

The script would also need a way to put items in soldier's backpacks.

Mechanic to make the enemy surrender doesn't exist.



The script would need to again deal with the commander AI somehow again. One option is that the commander AI is completely switched off permanently for the enemy, and the script works as the commander AI instead, 0.85 can report most of the data but objective orders aren't open yet.

there isn't an underground bunker, its just an excuse to call in a cruise missle.

Now from what I gather we're waiting for 0.85 for alot of features, then we're waiting for Helicopters, then waiting for a third faction. I know Helicopters are coming in the new few versions, I just don't know about when you might add more factions.

Edit : As Jackmayol pointed out on chat....I ment features scripting wise... because alot of replys Pasik made began with " With 0.85..."

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"For the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and the strength of the Pack is the Wolf."  Oo Rah Marine Corp.