Month: October 2007

Individual Skins

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To do list…

import customs from SoliderMilhaus

for each supplied do;

edit class file -> change ‘Special Air Service’ to ‘SAS_Name’ so it *fits* in the bloody loadout screen, thank you!

overwrite heavy armour textures -> Fix bug in old SAS Skin (he used the files)

finish screwing with my skin

import rasa’s skin

replace old SAS Skin no armour vests with new version and append

 [SAS]
Someone

to the name tags

add SoliderMilhaus personal and personal lapd skin (as thank you for suppling these skins).

create installer for personal skins.

On the other hand, also finish work on regular skins and make installer for that. Include LAPD SWAT Skin with it for good measure. Maybe old ‘SAS’ uni to I dunno

bed time, brain is crashing.

Alpha versions

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normally I’d post this in the forums but because I want the screen shots to be embedded and thats not nice on a forum with so many pictures… I’ve posted them here.

Thanks to XFIRE being a total dipstick and replacing about 10 screen shots I took with all the same picture… most of my shots were lost. So many of these come from Grishenkos help.

TODO LIST:

remove box on green/gray bdu shoulder
make new blue bdu
darken (again) green bdu
remake trainer/di light vest
fix arm patches on green/blue bdu

Pictures:

Sabre light armour, rear vest; An old picture that radicalGhost helped me take.

Me in the same uniform crouched and stacked with a gas mask and light armour.

Sabre Uniform during testing, light armour and helmet


Sabre heavy


SAS Blue, light armour — I need to remove the lower armpatches and I’m not sure if I like the shade of blue yet.

First draft of the Drill Instructors skin, light armour + helmet looks like it’s gonna be called ‘SAS Trainer’ in the menu because of word length (instructor doesn’t leave room for Drill or SAS to show up). I think I’m going to redo the vest and put ‘TRAINER’ on the back instead of [SAS] and reduce some of the text in front.


Same draft of the skin but in no armour and NVG (so the head shows better).




With Grish and myself


My screenshots of the SAS Green seem to have been lost in the upload =/.

With Grishenko to help me test some to night heres a few more pictures and edit them in.

Green no armour
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Sabre light
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Sabre no armour
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black heavy
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trainer
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Speed Runs

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Dang it I’ve done this 3 times all failures…. Hostages keep getting into cross fire and the USP40 JHP has more penetration then you would think lol.

My new personal speed goal is < 2:00 and >= %60 accuracy

2:12 -> 62%, = FAIL, barrel room blew up and another hostage got FMJ through a hostages arm.

1:58, -> 60% = FAIL, Two hostages killed in crossfire… they just walked into it

1:53 -> 69% = FAIL, A few hostages died in cross fire…. barrel room and one LOF.

Screens shots on my destop…

I’d kind of like to be able to score a passing grade in my own training challenge lol…….. Grrrr….. Tomorrows another day.

The Spidey Speed Run Challenge doesn’t even have any one on the score board… If those dang hostages would learn to duck instead of walk around life would be eaiser lol… What persion IRL is stupid enough to want to get shot in a HR ? lool.

Funky….

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A set of strange dreams…

At first, I was a bounty hunter competing with an old flame (and apparently a bounty huntress) over the current query (female)…. Trying to avoid being killed by, involved with, or injured by either of them while still scoring the bounty. Rather interesting dream now that I think of it lol.

And the second, ordered by an ex member of the Beetles to track down and actor to be his Executive Producer for a film, or “kill him” if he said no. It was like being one of Fat Tony’s goons on the Simpson’s lol.

It’s normal for me to have crazy dreams, if I dream at all. I don’t put much stock in any of my dreams. Because they tend to get very weired after awhile.

It seems I’ll have no days off this week, got dog runs from now til Thursday. Lucky for me, the Live Op I have planned should still be able to go according to schedule, good thing I planned on an early launch time for it. I don’t think I’ve *really* had a day off in 3 or 4 weeks now. It would be nice just to have a few days where I don’t have to do any thing for ‘having to get it done’.

Hmm, maybe some day I’ll get lucky and win the lotto… Thus being able to afford a nice 6-week, all expenses paid vacation to Hawaii to re-cooperate from being over worked.

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I find my self longing, yet having already lost. Stumbled, defeated, beaten. Yet I stand again with determination.

Will I fall again? I wonder and think of vile pains.

What use is one without the other?

Once a time of happiness, turned to a time of sorrow….

Where not even pain resides any more.

Confusion and uncertainty astound me.

I pray for my own sake… To change and want to change, to repent in honesty.

If temptation is removed, how can it truly be an end to it?

Emotion can brew, feelings arouse. Loneliness can be blinding, yet how to endure endless sorrow?

Not by following instinct, not by going in ether direction… Shall I sink like a rock in water?

I know not what to do… My course lays a head of me, but alas I only can see an arms reach ahead of the path.

Others are more fortunite, many have the freedom. Still more have the chance of hopes joyful deliverance.

The pain is gone, in it’s place it leaves some thing worse. With it comes the stench of anguish .

Hope is truly a two edged sword, to lead one through perseverance or into drowning in the mud.

Is realization better then pain? Yes in a way… One can stop hurting and see things for what they really are… Sick in the head and collapsed from torment.

I must correct my self, yet find my self flying to distraction quickly and with ease… When I should be most resolute.

A fight in which I stand, as if alone but yet not really alone..

There is one who stands with me, even if I do not fully understand..

One who feels the blisters of my indiscretions. The face, I can’t bare to see… For what pain I must have caused.

Forgiveness is one of the universes greatest inventions but one must really straighten the course before ye can find it.

The road that I must take,is one I now know I must. But I do not know if I can keep my self on the path I must follow.

It is so easy, to be so sure of my self now. But when the time comes, will I crumble or be crushed under the weight of my own feelings?

Only time with tell, and I pray for the redemption of my soul.

The in purities must be burnt away, even if I must ripe them away with my bare hands. It is better to use an eye, then to be ruined. To lose an arm rather then to be destroyed forever.

I’ve got to put my own foot on the path, it is not one that I may be led in. But one that I must walk in order to find my way back. No one can place me on it, I must come to it if I am to follow it. Not of duty or requirement, but of free will.. To choose it. I can not have it chosen for me, I need to be the one who starts, not the one to cooperate.

— The tormented mumblings of a mad man.

Busy day

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Dang gum it has been a busy day.

Had plenty for work to day and I’ve spent most of my time off work hacking at the SOP Rewrites. Trying to get stuff sent off to GCHQ to approve.

So far the parts of the Table of Contents that have made it to GCHQ are:

   3. The Element Formation
         1. Roles Within an Element
               1. Summery of Roles Within an Element Formation
         2. Organising the Element
               1. Fixed Element Formation
               2. Liquid Element Formation
   4. Standard Equipment
   5. Equipment Handling
         1. Shooting Techniques
         2. Target Discrimination
         3. Reloading
         4. Tactical Aids
   6. Room Clearing
         2. Dominating the Room
               1. Points of Dominance
               2. Areas of Responsibility
         3. Securing the Room
   7. Rules of Engagement
         1. Definitions
         2. Classification of Threat 
   8. Planning and Leading
         1. Way of Engagement
               1. Dynamic
               2. Stealth
               3. Notable Variations
   9. Appendix I: Battle Drills
         1. Making Entry
               1. Bang and Clear
               2. Breach, Bang, and Clear
               3. Shotgun Breach, Bang, Clear

I am making an updated talk as I send out the sections. So that list is not accurate in number or position. It’s just the parts that have made it to the Nit picking by HQ phase.

Almost 0400 here, time for bed…. Good thing work is in the afternoon or I wouldn’t have been able to get this much stuff done.

I bet GCHQ is going to drive me crazy some how….. lol

What is in a name?

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Well, the make the point short. On the Department of Agriculture map in SWAT4:TSS. Up on Level 3 you have a number of hallways, sort of like this:

|            room       |
|  door    door    door |
|-----------------------|--------------|
                  |     |              |
|-----------------|     | door         |
|  hallway              |              |
|-----------------|     |              |
|          |      |     | door         |
|          | room       |              |
|          |      |     |      room    |
|__________|______|     |              |
|  hallway              | door         |
|-----------------|     |              |
|                 |     |              |
|          room   |     |______________|
|_________________|_______________ Stairs

What really pisses me off, is not the very dangerous multiple entry doors. Which when we try multiple entries, we usually need enough men to breach because a random one is usually locked lol.

Is that usually when moving down the central main hall, usually #1 slices left and runs ahead. Rest follow, and check left (hopefully) to make sure it is still clear. The way I was trained, if I called it ‘Clear’ before moving it would’ve been acceptable but hey, I was training to become a [SAS] Recruit back then lol. The problem is, it is just not safe….

If you are just a Private in the regular Army it might be ok too. But this is [SAS], a clan that through solid team work and realistic tactics. In My Humble Opinion (IMHO) comes as close in Video Games to being as good as the British SAS is in real life.

After cringing through a lot of games. I remembered an old training session I attended, Blade was RSM and it is the *only* training session I ever saw him conduct. He was showing us how to cross an outside window. The tactic was against common tactical advice and normal SOP on the matter. But it was basically a strange variation of a Leap Frog. It was not what I would advice for windows but I think it is worth mentioning. Basically #1 would sneak & peak the window, run shout for cover, run accross. #2 do the same, #3, e.t.c. — only problem is very easy to DIE doing it the way he showed us because of the angles. It was an ok way of doing it but not safe for a regular sized window. So with this coming to mind as I sought a way in my mind to safely cross it. I’ve refined the idea into some thing different. It is closer to a traditional leap frog but with a bit of our T-Junction tactics mixed in.

Basically the advantage is we do not really lose speed. Yet we gain a lot stronger covering as we move quickly.

Let us assume on the map that we are coming off the stairs, and want to cross the first hallway.

|            room       |
|  door    door    door |
|-----------------------|--------------|
                  |     |              |
|-----------------|     | door         |
|  hallway              |              |
|-----------------|     |              |
|          |      |     | door         |
|          | room       |              |
|          |      |     |      room    |
|__________|______|     |              |
|  hallway              | door         |
|-----------------|1    |              |
|                 |2    |              |
|          room   |3    |______________|
|_________________|4______________ Stairs

#1 would slice the pie and HOLD and cover the hallway to his left. #3 would step to the other side of the hall and cover ahead of the element. While #2 runs accross.

|            room       |
|  door    door    door |
|-----------------------|--------------|
                  |     |              |
|-----------------|     | door         |
|  hallway              |              |
|-----------------|     |              |
|          |      |     | door         |
|          | room  2    |              |
|          |      |     |      room    |
|__________|______|     |              |
|  hallway              | door         |
|-----------------|1    |              |
|                 |     |              |
|          room   |4   3|______________|
|_________________|______________ Stairs

Now that #2 is covering a head, #3 can form up, #1 is still covering the hallway, R.G. has the stairs.

|            room       |
|  door    door    door |
|-----------------------|--------------|
                  |     |              |
|-----------------|     | door         |
|  hallway              |              |
|-----------------|     |              |
|          |      |     | door         |
|          | room  2    |              |
|          |      |    3|      room    |
|__________|______|     |              |
|  hallway              | door         |
|-----------------|1    |              |
|                 |     |              |
|          room   |4    |______________|
|_________________|______________ Stairs

Now #3 covers rear so the R.G. can cross. Rear Guard then mirrors #1 to cover the side hall and #3 ccan get in formation.

|            room       |
|  door    door    door |
|-----------------------|--------------|
                  |     |              |
|-----------------|     | door         |
|  hallway              |              |
|-----------------|     |              |
|          |      |     | door         |
|          | room  2    |              |
|          |      |3    |      room    |
|__________|______|4    |              |
|  hallway              | door         |
|-----------------|1    |              |
|                 |     |              |
|          room   |     |______________|
|_________________|______________ Stairs

#1 now crosses, gets back in formation, and off they go — I’d suggest immiediately moving out once Point is in position and EL calling for the R.G. to Follow (RvS) or for Trailers (S4) so he knows “Yo, we’re leaving — get your stuff together”.

|            room       |
|  door    door    door |
|-----------------------|--------------|
                  |     |              |
|-----------------|     | door         |
|  hallway              |              |
|-----------------|     |              |
|          |      |1    | door         |
|          | room  2    |              |
|          |      |3 GO!|      room    |
|__________|______|4    |              |
|  hallway              | door         |
|-----------------|     |              |
|                 |     |              |
|          room   |     |______________|
|_________________|______________ Stairs

I’ve posted this in SNCO’s for opinions and most of all, a name for it… my only suggestion is Point Cover.

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I can barly wait till Saturday…..

When I’ll finally be able not to worry about work =/

If I get lucky….

*SIGH*, it’s a living.

Personal Training

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Kill House: SAS Hallway, Practice Mission on Veteran mode.
Character: Eddie Price (Ex SAS, also Dings 2nd in command of Rainbow in the book).
Armour: Light Blue BDU / Vest.
Primary: H&K MP5A4 SMG with attached suppressor (SD) and JHP Ammo.
Secondary: SIG-Sauer P228 Compact Pistol and FMJ Ammo (no attachments).
Tactical: Primary and Secondary magazines (no grenades).

Debrief:

Before the operation I disabled all elements of the games HUD (Heads Up Display) except for the on screen weapon, e.g. I could see my MP5 but no icons, cross hairs or ammunition counters.

I engaged room by room, trying to be careful of crossing doors and being detected. Opening doors and slicing the pie, often trying to recon the room before entry. I engaged in close quarters shooting with several enemy tangos including having to shoot with hostages between me and the terrorists and tangos in close proximity to explosive barrels (Vive la JHP!).

During the room clearing I was almost injured by an enemy pistol shot during the first leg of the journey, it hit the door jam next to my face. The single shot appeared not to alert near by tangos as I neutralized the threat with my follow up shots. Continuing with my clearing efforts I eventually reached the bar at the end. And the very pretty lady hostage marking the final room 🙂

Things I can improve on:

My Accuracy, 71% might be very good for me but it is not all that great in a hostage situation.

My door/corner handling, I was almost injured slicing the pie because I could see the tango but my muzzle did not have a clearly lined up shot.

Overall pace, could have been a lot faster / smoother.

I love BSD !!!!

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Well to make a long story short, I’ve got my older brothers old PC (whats left of it). It’s missing it’s Graphics card, Optical Drives, and DDR1 SDRAM and only has a WinModem for it’s Cards but other wise it’s functional. It’s a originally a Dell Dimension 4500, Ma has a 4550 so i used her user manual to check what kind of RAM I would need.

If I bought 256~512mb of RAM and a Networking card I could get a 4th PC running, maybe try and get a Wifi adopter for it so I could move one of the Towers into my room (where my Laptop usually is stored)… 5 PC’s hehe that would be nice!! And if I get enough money for Christmas I could do it.. I could also buy Ma some RAM to upgrade her PC, or just buy her a new 1GB’s worth and take her old 512’s set.

The Box has a Pentium 4, probably ~2Ghz… Compare to my File Servers Katmai (Pentium 3, 500Mhz).

Having 512MB RAM would be an upgrade from 384MB-8MB for Matrox Gfx that the server has. Even if I had to make do with only 256MB, the processor upgrade would be worth it imho.

I have an old ATI Ultra Rage 128 AGP4X card on my shelf, a 32MB card should be overkill for any thing but gaming.

The IMPORTANT thing is, the hulk came with a 40GB Western Digital PATA drive and a 80GB Hitachi PATA drive.

My OpenBSD server is running off an old Office Desktop PC (cica 1998/1999) and only has an old 8GB Maxtor PATA drive. The BIOS also has a known problem that it can only address up to about 33GB of disk, any more would be wasted.

Guess what… OpenBSD can use the entire drive !!!!!

I installed the 80GB HDD and hooked it up to the (E)IDE cable and power thingy and checked the BIOS to see the setup, I could see that the 8GB root disk was Primary Master, 80GB drive as Primary Slave, and the CD-ROM drive as Secondary Master.

I didn’t really learn much about the innards of Computers by looking it up. I learned most of what I know by pulling a PC apart and putting it back together again.

I tried to mount the disk but could not, even with the mount_ntfs program. Probably because of no disklabel. I booted off my Knoppix Live CD to see if it was working. Sure enough, Linux found a ~75GB /dev/hdb1 and was able to mount it as NTFS. I reformatted it FAT32 and booted back to OpenBSD.

To set up the hard drive for usage, I fdisk’d it

fdisk -i wd1

I gave it a yes to updating and moved on to labeling the disk.

disklabel -E wd1

I used the g d command in disklabel to tell it to use the disks geometry and not the BIOS. I setup a 4.2BSD Partition (wd1a) for the full size of the disk and wrote the label out.

Next I formated it with the UFS file system used in OpenBSD.

newfs wd1a

and mounted it to a temporary mount point

mount /dev/wd1a /mnt

And volia it worked !!! I moved every thing from /usr/local/* to /mnt/ and edited /etc/fstab with instructions to auto-mount the new 80GB drive in it’s place.

Terry@vectra-$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1
/dev/wd0h /home ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0d /tmp ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0g /usr ffs rw,nodev 1 2
/dev/wd0e /var ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
# 80GB Primary Slave, PATA drive.
/dev/wd1a       /usr/local      ffs     rw,nodev        1       2
Terry@vectra-$

Now I have good solid storage… No more trying to cram network shares and LAN backups onto a small ~7GB /usr partition.

Terry@vectra-$ df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      147M   31.3M    109M    22%    /
/dev/wd0h      393M    378K    373M     0%    /home
/dev/wd0d     98.3M    2.0K   93.4M     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0g      6.7G    398M    6.0G     6%    /usr
/dev/wd0e      148M    8.3M    132M     6%    /var
/dev/wd1a     73.3G    2.5G   67.2G     4%    /usr/local
Terry@vectra-$

I love BSD !!!