A brief discussion of CAW scenario editting and behavior
Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 2:13 am
In another thread, Adam Parker inquired of me about randomness in CAW and CCAW scenarios. I have spent a little time looking at the scenario editors for both CAW and CCAW this evening.
You could say that scenarios are composed of five basic building blocks:
(1) Game objects like planes, ships, ...
(2) Graphic collections to be applied to objects for various rendering such as movement, damage, ...
(3) Groupings of game objects such as TFs, TGs, SQNs
(4) Map and weather behavior
(5) Programmed behavior
I poked around and looked at these various areas. A few comments which apply to both games:
(1) For anyone who is displeased with SSGs balancing, there are centrainly plenty of editor configureable parameters which would alter balance to accomodate anyone's taste.
(2) The building of a scenario is first to construct its objects and groupings. Afterwards, warcards (a branching/trigger oriented programming language) is used to script behavior. The warcards are at a semantically medium level in the sense that the objects they manipulate understand actions such as damage, searching, engaging in combat, etc... Meaning that certain basic behaviors are built directly into the games objects. Beyond that warcards provide the added intelligence.
(3) In flipping through the warcards for a scenario such as Coral Sea, it is quite clear that even in the "Historical Scenario" there is a good degree of randomness in the scripting. As best as I could tell, most TGs had, at least, four to five major variants of how they might behave in the scenario when under AI control in terms of where they might search and what basic course of actions they might choose. So, player's can happily know that scenarios should not play out the same way over and over again; even historical ones.
(4) From a scenario design point view, I could not find any obvious tools for forcing specific conditional paths to be taken or anyway to log the series of conditional choices which were taken by the game engine while the scenario was executing. This certainly would be an aid to a designer to rapidly develop and prototype scenarios. Perhaps, such options exist internal for SSG alone.
(5) In CCAW, it is possible to run the game handsoff with the AI driving both sides of the scenario. This looks like a nice option for scenario designers to watch their warcard behave and validate their design. Had CAW included this capability along with the options mentioned in #4, it would be a big aid to designers.
(6) The scenario design process looks similar enough between CAW and CCAW that although automated conversions are probably not practical. It would seem that tedious manual conversion of CCAW scenarios to CAW scenarios is quite feasible.
You could say that scenarios are composed of five basic building blocks:
(1) Game objects like planes, ships, ...
(2) Graphic collections to be applied to objects for various rendering such as movement, damage, ...
(3) Groupings of game objects such as TFs, TGs, SQNs
(4) Map and weather behavior
(5) Programmed behavior
I poked around and looked at these various areas. A few comments which apply to both games:
(1) For anyone who is displeased with SSGs balancing, there are centrainly plenty of editor configureable parameters which would alter balance to accomodate anyone's taste.
(2) The building of a scenario is first to construct its objects and groupings. Afterwards, warcards (a branching/trigger oriented programming language) is used to script behavior. The warcards are at a semantically medium level in the sense that the objects they manipulate understand actions such as damage, searching, engaging in combat, etc... Meaning that certain basic behaviors are built directly into the games objects. Beyond that warcards provide the added intelligence.
(3) In flipping through the warcards for a scenario such as Coral Sea, it is quite clear that even in the "Historical Scenario" there is a good degree of randomness in the scripting. As best as I could tell, most TGs had, at least, four to five major variants of how they might behave in the scenario when under AI control in terms of where they might search and what basic course of actions they might choose. So, player's can happily know that scenarios should not play out the same way over and over again; even historical ones.
(4) From a scenario design point view, I could not find any obvious tools for forcing specific conditional paths to be taken or anyway to log the series of conditional choices which were taken by the game engine while the scenario was executing. This certainly would be an aid to a designer to rapidly develop and prototype scenarios. Perhaps, such options exist internal for SSG alone.
(5) In CCAW, it is possible to run the game handsoff with the AI driving both sides of the scenario. This looks like a nice option for scenario designers to watch their warcard behave and validate their design. Had CAW included this capability along with the options mentioned in #4, it would be a big aid to designers.
(6) The scenario design process looks similar enough between CAW and CCAW that although automated conversions are probably not practical. It would seem that tedious manual conversion of CCAW scenarios to CAW scenarios is quite feasible.