Games

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Work, Swat, Wesnoth, Work, Wesnoth, Work, Swat,… I’ll be happy when the weekend comes… Or when I finish this campaign in Wesnoth lol.

Like always, as work increases… E-Mail, Journal, School, Sleep, Games, and Codea decrement their places on my priority list until work levels out again. Just thinking about work tomorrow, just makes me sick. I really need a !@#$2 vacation! No work, no code, no games, no nothing… just blissful rest and relaxation.

Fat chance of that happening within my life time…..

SWAT time + looking at the games enemy weapons

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I finally got to play some swat 🙂

Spent the day testing a new common-ops load:

  1. MP5 9x19mm Suppressed SMG, FMJ or JHP depending on primary OPFOR
  2. M1911A1 11.43x23mm Pistol, JHP or opposite of primary
  3. 3 M84 Stun grenade
  4. 1 Hornets Nest stingball grenade
  5. 1 Door wedge
  6. 3 C2 breaching charges
  7. Tactical Assault Vest (No Armour)
  8. The games ol’lucky helmet or AN/PVS-7 night vision goggles; depending on lighting conditions and method of engagement

I rather like using no armour in SWAT 4: TSS. When suspects deal 2 times the damage we can, walking around in heavy body armour really doesn’t help. Well, if the enemy has an M1911 (many maps give them Bereta M9s) or the sawed of shotgun with the “low” ammo type (50% chance of low ammo). Then heavy armour might save your virtual life, but other wise it’s just dead weight. A single AK47 FMJ fired from ~1050 unreal units away, will kill a player wearing heavy armour during a Multi-Player Co-Op game. And worth of note, all but a few weapons have a maximum range of 4000 unreal units, in TSS the exceptions are the Remington M700 Sniper Rifle (remote control only) at 3000uu, breaching shotgun, and the Taser/Cobra (Stringray) stun guns

Suspects always use JHP in these weapons according to the SwatEquipment.ini file fr SWAT 4: TSS:

  • M1911A1
  • MP5
  • MP5 SD
  • Desert Eagle
  • M4A1

and 10% of the time, suspects with FN P90 can get JHP rounds in TSS.

The rest of the time the enemy uses FMJ for clip based weapons (e.g. hg,smg,ar,lmg) and buckshot for round based weapons (e.g. shotguns). Some weapons use a “_LowAmmo” a certain % of the time (Python, M9, SawedOffSG, all come to mind). But generally the only differences between SWAT weapons and Suspect weapons is cosmetic (e.g. no tactical light) and numerical (they get less magazines for reload, not that I’ve ever seen them reload — they are smart enough to switch to secondaries in a firefight instead).

All things considered, plus the games ridicules concept of ballistics…. I’d rather have the speed of no armour, then the protection of light armour. Simply put, I don’t plan on getting shot often lol. The light armour vest will protect in some situations and in those, heavy armour does better. But most of the time, you get hit, you get dead, so why bother? The ability to cuff, reload, and switch between weapons at a more realistic pace is also worth the trade off in protection hehe.

Weapon popularity in the regular SWAT 4 maps, as noted by ‘cmd> grep identifer ContentSystemEneemyArchetypes.ini | wc -l’. Note that many suspects (especially terro-type) have access to plenty of weapons and a chance=precentage of how likely they are to use a given weapon type; to control just how often they will use an item in the available weapons list. This is just a summery of how many times a given weapon was specified as available.

Pistols:

M9 found: 43
USP found: 21
PythonRevolverHG found: 14
ScorpionHG found: 12
IngramHG found: 10 (This is basically a MAC-10)
1911 found: 5
Glock found: 0 (Model 17)

Sub Machine Guns:

UMP45 found: 15
MP5SMG found: 13
UZISMG found: 11 (Suppressed)
HK53 found: 9
SilencedMP5SMG found: 0

Assault Rifles:
G36kMG found: 10
M4MG found: 8
AK74suMG found: 8 (Proper name: AKS-74U, U = Ukorochenniy)
AK74MG found: 6

Pump1SG found: 12
SawedOffSg found: 11
M1Super90SG found: 8
M4Super90SG found: 0
Pump2RifleGripSg found: 2

I’ve yet to check the TSS maps for the enemy weapons though.

The USP40, HK53, AK47, and Colt Python being some of the most deadly of enemy weapons. The Uzi (accurate headshots), Ingram (very heavy bullets), and Scorpion sub-machineguns are also quite hazardous. By comparison, the only weapon available to players in MP Co-Op that really works well, is the AK47 :. The FN P90 added in TSS helps out, if you are willing to pump in a lot more rounds, heck… I remember on one live op map. I took the P90 because I knew there would be little time to reload, if we had to go dynamic. I ended up using like 32-38 rounds per kill at near maximum range (if not occasionally beyond!) to drop tangos, which is tricky because the weapon is very inaccuate at long range in TSS lol.

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Well, never made it to the PS2, but made it t dinner and a good nap xD

Tomorrow I need to clean the newts tank, work n deploying the next site mock up for Rouge, and finish more of todays work. It shouldn’t take to long to have this site mock up ready, so I’ll probably be working on my own stuff son, which reminds me; I wanted to make a quick back-scratcher for taking notes.

The personal project I’m working on, calls for a domain specific language; so I need to start writing the specification for it. Luckily the output is in a language I know well. All in all, it should be about as complex, as implementing a bc that compiles to dc, which is a lot simpler then implementing bc in C, lol.

the past ~48 hours

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Been quite a busy time, I guess lol.

I think I royally fragged my blood sugar; after last nights gorging on beefaroni, I’ve been pissing my brains out (every ~30min). Things are finally starting to resync with the usual input equals output style equation. I’m not diabetic (as far as I know), but many people in my family have had diabetes, most dying of heart attack, stroke, and cancer even when fully healthy. Of course, I’ve always figured it’s a case of which of the 3 will get me first…. But I expect the third, if the first permits in the long term.

I really should watch what I eat, and an extreme amount of pasta and meet is probably a bad idea. As I understand it, carbohydrates from pastas breaks down into glucose slowly over time, slower then a lot of snacks anyway. I’ve no idea whether that is good or bad thing; but I like pasta, in almost all of it’s forms ^_^. Eating a shit load of it on the other hand, is probably just as bad as eating a lot of sugar though :.

My guess is that it caused enough of a glucose spike, that my kidney’s have been workin’ overtime to deal with it. Biology (in general) was never really one of my strong points, in fact… My high school text book put me to sleep lol. The fact that searching the web and thumbing through old encyclopedias was better for passing exams, then remembering the text books contents, is besides the point :-P.

For the time being: I’ve cut the soda from my fluid intake, shit load of HFCS in that stuff… And replaced it with water, I usually drink soda during the day and bottled water at work & at night. Along with sweets, my diet usually consists of lunch, dinner, and a sweet or salty snack or two every few days (although I avoid junk food, because if I had it, I’d eat it).

I managed to download and install Virtual Box. I’ve also got PC-BSD7 in both the 3 CD and 1 DVD sets, the CD ISOs are on my laptop, and the DVD ISO on the desktop (I figured it would be easier to use with VB). When booting off the DVD ISO in VirtualBox, the boot process fails: snap shot. I intend to install it on my desktop, but after one of the posts I read on forums.pcbsd.org (by Graedus I thin), I’m not willing to let PCBSD7 touch my harddrive, until I’ve taken a full backup of my Windows install…. took to many hours to set it up the way I wanted, and I still have no wall paper lmao.

As to the image, I posted a thread on PC-BSDs support forum, not that I actually expect any help lol. In fat, one of the reasons I elected to test with VB first, is in he hopes I might be able to help some of the people having problems with PCBSD7 under VirtualBox.

I can’t make heads or tails out of the output before BTX halted. I know most of the names, corrispond to processor registers. In fact, to be more precise, I believe the ‘e’ is some extended-mnemonic from when Intel’s chips moved into the 32-Bit world. I don’t understand the output though, because I never had time to learn about assembly or dive deep into documentation on IA-32.

I managed to get a little time in, training with Jonsi on TG#1. Do to current affairs, I’ve been spending most of my server time in SWAT (PG3/TG3), but it’s nie to be reminded; I am still limber enough to put recruits through their paces :-). I need to take a look and see what’s going on these days, training wise in RvS.

I also spent sometime to help a friend with porting a page from (invalid) HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Not to hard for me, since I work with XHTML like most people I know, would use MS Word. Although, I personally prefer LaTeX for documents, for a long time; I did use XHTML+CSS as a replacement for word processors. If I had the time to learn to do as much as I can in LaTeX/TeX, I probably would prefer troff; but a more TeXuaL solution is where I ended up investing time.

Also my brain was complimented today, but despite the things I know, it doesn’t do me much good; because no one in this rats nest, will actually pay me for what I know or for using my brain lol. That’s one reason, why I try to be content with the fact, that most of what I know, I learned because I wanted to and enjoyed learning, as opposed to ever learning stuff to make money off it. Although, I do admit… getting paid for what I know, would seriously be an improvement over my current line of work lol. But I’m generally content with enjoying it on my own time.

Now, if only I could change the one point that really does bother me…

Hmm, with about 34% of battery power remaining (according to hw.acpi.battery.life), I think it is time for bed !!!

*sigh*

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SWAT 4 has almsot no consistency what so ever.

Came into a large room, that’s a bit of a double-T junction, followed it in with a bang, since there was a fleeing suspect before. Seucred the area, no problemo. Follow it into the the side hall, come to a door… Spider senses tingling, I slap on a shaped charge and blow the door, coming in with P90 at the ready before the doors even done flying.

Two visual contacts, 11 o’clock and 2 o’clock. A quick shout, first T at 11 starts to spin, I check the other and he drops to a knee with hands up, so keep advancing and angle off to my right — breaking line of fire with the one from 11 0’clock. I closed the distance (7~9ft) and gave the tango a swift punch in his left kidney (his vest looked to thin to have any SAPIs, moving myself into an immiedate circle strafe around him….

The punch didn’t do squat, he kept spinning about with an AKM in arm; I let it rip with the P90, raking the tango across the shoulders and face. 10 rounds later and now behind him and taking the next corner, the tango finally reacted lol.

Suspect AI in SWAT 4 is coded with a range of 0 to 0.333 time unit before they can be effected by a less then lethal / less lethal stimulus. So I know for a fact, if the first swing don’t have an effect, put the S.O.B. on the hard deck.

One thing I actually like about RvS, is it’s consistency. A 2-4rnd burst will drop any tango with any weapon, or the tango will slide through it, and put a mag in your face; as your bullets magically leaving bullet holes behind them, but not in them hahaa.

Just once, I wish someone would design a game that actually gets the model right…

Thinking about a new training plan

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Since my primary task list is webwork, sop technicals, and swat. I think it’s about time I devise a proper training plan for myself, like I’ve used in SWAT 3 and Raven Shield.

“The Warrants Hazard Course” haha.

I’ve yet to decide on the details yet, SWAT 4 is a bit of a tougher game to harden up, since the only hard part is latency lol. Back in SWAT 3, I used to do STFC drills with an entry-length gun (e.g. MP5A2, HK53, AKS-74U, G36C) with one 30rnd mag of FMJ, my side arm (M1911/MK23/P226) with one mag. Plus 1bang, 1gas, 1charge, and set the hostile AI to the maximum. With RvS, I usually set map-specific goals, but often speed assaults, escape and evasion, or tact-aidless clearing at full throttle.

I might try to simulate my SWAT 3 kit, it would be easy enough to package 1 bang, 1 gas, 1 sting, 1 wedge. There is no way to control the mag-counts in SWAT 4 without modifying the games class files, but it would be insane to go with 30/8 (mp5/m1911a1) rounds… In SWAT 3, if you knew how to shoot and it was your own host, you could actually use ammo quite effectively. SWAT 4 usually takes 2-12 rounds of 9x19mm per kill (average 5~7), yesterday a tango survived 6 to the brain… lol.

Map wise, I think a good mixture is order. But the standard maps are so easy, I’ve got to find a good way to make it more challenging, or I could just find a couple of really challenging customs, hmm… think I will do both once the new [SAS] Mappack is ready op hehe.

Pride

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Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

After a thread that came up about uniforms / arm patches, I interjected a comment on the way we used to handle it. I still have the arm patches issued to me as a recruit and trooper, plus the one I made for myself as a trooper. Pictured above is a GIF copy of the one [SAS] Shield issued me shortly after my tryout.

S’all the all rank I ever needed: [SAS] Trooper

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I have to go to work tomorrow 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁

Oh well, at least [SAS] Killhouse Redux is making headway.

Reflecting on recent virtual events

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Hmm, I am sorry to say it but in a lot of ways, I think the new Team Mercury / Hg4 is probably a good thing for [SAS].

With Rasa gone, it seems as if the last resistance to change is also gone. The [SAS] SOPs (from scratch) are now in the hands of a seasoned professional, and I am tasked with the technical aspects of getting them on the website. In Rasa’s new home, he doesn’t have to get things past 2 soldiers, an ex swat instructor, an 8 year veteran of [SAS] gaming, a former Sabre Squad 2IC, or the strict and realism first Spidey01. I miss my friend very much, but I think I’d rather see [SAS] move forward into the future.

It’s amazing how much work is actually getting done now! I wonder, just what mischief he might’ve been up to since I left the RSMs post…. Recent events have left our SWAT 4 wing with less man power in the lower ranks, but progress these past few days has been like watching a bull charge

They (Hg4) have already grown through a few of the people on our “list” of prospective candidates, all of which know the Hg4 founders from there time as [SAS] Members, and each Hg4 founder knows much about our server regulars and what we think of them. Filterhappy, new Trial Member of Hg4’s comment today; actually made me quite happy. Those who actually care about [SAS], are those who belong in the the selection course. I expect all of the people who are of interest to us, will be in Hg4 tags before long, as long as Hg4 does so with honor and those people find what they seek, I’m fine with this. I’d much rather see Hg4 grow, then see dead weight return to [SAS]. I want to see [SAS]’s kind of people make it into the selection course, first and foremost

Me, maybe I am a jerk, but I don’t like people who waste my time. Time is life, life is time, and you don’t get a refund if you fail to spend it wisely!

It is not our job to train the public in our ways of doing things, parts of Hg4 may have felt differently before leaving [SAS], but I don’t. One of the reasons why I take part of my time, to teach recruits things when I can. Is because I hope they will benefit from it, and learn to be a stronger member out of it, and to help the NCOs with their tasks. If Joe Blow wants to learn our ways of doing things, they need to survive the selection course just like the rest of us did. A lot of people think we’re too strict, me? I think it’s about as close to the real life 22nd Special Air Service as you are going to find, without joining an army. And I call that a _good_ thing. I guess there is a difference between those that just look for the best they can reach, and those who want to be the best that they can be themselves, and then there are those who also want to help others to grow.

I know the things that I look for in a prospective member, and I’ve come to believe that [SAS]_CO_Random is right, after so many years… He ought to be lol. Jonsi, Nick, Caern, I know that I see the potential in them, the right attitude to move on. That’s one of the reasons why I put extra effort into seeing that their training in the SC is/was successful. It’s also why Timbo was a great loss in my opinion, both in man power and time invested in, should we say, “Let him shine through” hehe. But I guess it wasn’t the path he was destined for. One needs great skill to pass one of our trooper tryouts, but there’s more to it then that,

I made it into the [SAS] Selection Course, and I didn’t even know how to use the Voice Commands system in RvS until about a week or two before becoming a Recruit! Back then, I guess it was a lot stricter. The tryout is hard by most peoples standards, but it really is easy in my opinion… If you’re serious.

One of the reasons I joined [SAS], was because I like to play tactically and realistically. I found the things I was looking for there, Skill, Teamwork, Dedication, Friendship, and FUN, FUN, FUN!!! Most people who are in the team, are there because they enjoy it this way. We like the structure, the teamwork, and we live to improve our abilities while having fun with a few good m8s.

Getting through the SC was quite an exercise, I had to grow quite a lot in my skill set just to make the cut. All of the way, I had teachers helping me to grow, helping me learn the little things that makes this elite team as skillful as it is at what we do. I never really noticed most of it, just how much attention to detail there was here, until I started paying attention during training. My time with [SAS]_Trp_Rand, [SAS]_Cpl_WIZ, and [SAS]_Cpl_Relish most important of my teachers.

I don’t totally agree with some of our SOPs, but they work and work well for the most part. If I wanted to play my way, I wouldn’t have joined the [SAS], I would have made it a goal to prepare myself for BUD/S and pursue the real thing. Because it doesn’t get much better then that outside of the [SAS],and groups like it. Hg4, is not a group like [SAS], and I say that because I know the founders of Hg4 ;-). I play the way I was trained, here are a few differences in how I would personally do things, but this is [SAS], not my back yard

Hmm, I still remember the time I got dumped into a team leaders boots else wheres, and I had to direct us against the other teams defenses. When issuing the insructions for our assault, someone in my attack group asked me if I was in the army :, my reply? No, I’m in the next best thing — the 22nd SAS Elite Virtual Regiment !

I don’t think they got the joke, but they still enjoyed the win lol.


[SAS]_Spidey01
Warrant Officer Class One
22nd Special Air Service,
The Elite Virtual Regiment

Plan of Attack — tongiht through the weekend+monday

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In no specific order:

0/ Train Ez, Spawn, possibly Ghost/Medic as well — operation marshal

1/ Write new interface for the ‘custom’ library on sas <---- implemented, remaining code is 'features', need to test it and place under revision control, along with other changes to the lib. 2/ Build mock-ups for GCHQ of the new docs

3/ Implement the install code for ‘that project’ I’m doing with a few guys from forums.pcbsd.org

4/ Test pythonic bindings to libxml2 (I may need this __soon__) <---- lxml interface to libxml2 accepted 5/ Evaluate gtkmm and py-gtk (I don’t think I like the wxWidgets api after spending so much time with Qt3/Qt4) — run tests under Winsucks, because linking against gtkmm and friends will be the big pain.

6/ look up the api docs for interfacing C/C++ code with Python 🙂

7/ eventually get around to placing my .vimrc, .exrc, .Terry_shrc, and various .site_shrc files under CVS (or other scm) on Vectra. <---- vimrc and Terry_shrc imported, other files being less portable, some name convention needs to be worked out. 9/ try to complete social studies homework before [SAS] SOP Prototype Due Date.

10/ eventually catch up with posting more on my LJ then todo snippets

11/ download Wiz’s latest mix and let’er blast <--- it rocks 12/ Implement my admin scripts 13/ Update cougars settings

14/ Implement my ‘lister’ PHP script <--- done, just need to write the password locker. You know, life would really be sweet…. If I could get paid to use my brain, instead of saving it all for my off-work hours lol. No if I new any companies in this burg that hire and train self-educating-geeks :