SAS

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Hooah a stroke of luck!

Just caught Top Gun starting a few minutes ago, usually I always find it on after the first halfhour r so; but my favorite part is in the beginning. They’re dancing with the MiGs, when Maverick and Goose end up inverted above the MiG, almost canopy to canopy -> Mav gives’em the bird while Goose takes a Polaroid of the look on the other pilots face xD –> Priceless !

Managed to get through work today in one piece, singing a song in my head to keep my mind else wheres; but not to bad a day overall, I guess. I don’t really have a problem with working a lot, it’s having to scrimp and scavenge my time whenever I’m /not/ working. My family drives me nuts at times…. and after work tomorrow, I’m expecting a headache with what’s planned.

I did get to have sme fun today though, joined PG#3 for a few games of SWAT 4. My custom skin is labeled 3.x.x beta, but I think unless I find any visual bugs of interest that it will probably be going gamma soon. I really like how the last take on the NWN BDU came out. The no armour vest didn’t come out as intended, but I kinda like it, really might pass as “no armour” if it wasn’t for the dang games design.

I can’t wait for the weekend…. I outa be off Sat/Sun/Mon, and I’ve got a projects meeting n Sunday. Hopefully it won’t take forever to pull off, but I might get some of the other days to actually get stuff done on, hopefully anyway…

Thoughts on my SAS Skin and past skinning ops

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I’ve been working on a ‘personal’ project for a recent change of pace. A personalized skin for SWAT 4, the proper name of it would be ‘[SAS]_Spidey01’ but there’s not a lot of room visible in the loadout menu, maybe 9-11 char at the most.

The first prototype is based on the United States Navy’s Working Uniform, the armour is currently a hybrid of the light armour vest from my teams ‘SAS Black’ skin, Miles made that armour vest and it is one hell of a great design! I’ve incorporated elements of the no armour vest, which is basically the games rendition of an Omega Elite Tactical Vest from Blackhawk. So the vest design actually combines two of my favorite kits lol. I’ll probably use it for both my skins light and no armour setups; a few modifications perhaps, depending on how the game lays out the ‘pouches’ and crap. One sad thing, the game auto-places pouches and gear on top of the skin, wrecking some potentionally good designs :. So I’ve kept the rear of the hybrid vest fairly plane; my name and a subdued but tell tail marker visible in the stack.

The BDU kit is a mixture of the new NWU the navy is working on, but with a little bit of my own ‘flare’ added to it, to help it blend into the games darker setting more readily. I used a sampling of the digital pattern to help get it right, but to be honest, I would prefer the woodland pattern… Let’s just say, when I was growing up — U.S. troops often wore a woodland camo; or a chocolate chip style desert camo, that I would describe as “I really hope the other side has CHS disorder”, b/c it looks more like a bullseye then a camo in my opinion :. In the US, the camouflage used by our troops has at least been moving in more realistic directions, this ain’t 1955 after all… If you’re going to use camouflage, odds are ya don’t want to stick out.

Any ways, back to topic lol. The skin pack I made for [SAS] was fairly simple yet made to be distinctive — when you see an [SAS] Member walking around in the SAS skins, ya gonna be happy your not a tango.

Vyro created a fairly simple black skin for us based on the Taiwan SWAT skin many of us had officially adapted, this is what I refer to as “Version 1”. Later on I made a few adjustments with Miles and referred to it as “Version 2”. The current edition, was a package with full installer. Containing the black, sabre, trainer, camo, and desert kits. SAS Black being a very distinctive yet attractive design, yet unrealistic in the sense that there is a huge winged dagger on the back of the vest, and “Special Air Service” written underneaths the members team glow-bar. Thats what I consider “Version 3”, I lent direction to the project and Miles worked some magic to make it great. The SAS Sabre included in the package was however a more realistic skin, very lightly adorned and a fairly drab shade of gray. I greatly desired a skin that resembled one of the old Sabre skins from SAS Realism Mod (from SWAT 3). It would’ve been impossible without Miles help, thanks to him, the goal was successful :-). The other skins, I mostly made myself but used the same vests for. SAS Camo, which I created the BDU from a sample of British camouflage and then specially crafted the hood to go with it, it’s my favorite BDU ;-),. The other one was designed in memory of one of our Live Ops, in which Lazko and I were the last members standing, injured from the tips of our pawns hair down to the toes, and barely a left bullet between us. It was just like the SAS Camo skin, a “second prototype” in camouflage BDU; but made with a British desert pattern.

Not included (beyond the textures) in the package were SAS Blue, Green, and Tigerstripe. The SAS Blue, we never could get right… either it would end up to bright a blue (resembling the GIGN skin) or become more maroon, so I chucked it. The SAS Green was chucked, because no matter what I did to it, I still felt it to much of an IFF liability (suspects use old-green, 3~4 colour urban camo, and blue-urban camo uniforms, but OG often enough for SAS Green to be mistaken for an enemy!), so it was chucked. The tigerstripe, I had created because the Vietnam war era pattern is one of my favorites. But ironically, the skin suffered both from a poor distribution of the camo and offered too bright a colour profile to be realistic :-(. So arguably, my first camo-prototype skin in SWAT 4 was a daister, while the second camo-prototypes hit release quality.

The BDU texture I’ve created based on the NWU, I hope will be both my third camo prototype, fourth camo skin, and second successful…..

Two things i need to figure out: arm patches and headgear. The SAS skins basically have the British Union Jack on the arm and occasionally (e.g. SAS Black) the SAS insignia on its arm. But, since this is my skin, it makes little sense to continue that path, because I’m not British. Rather then trying to create a US flag patch with suitably subdueded colors, I’m considering something a bit different both in the modern and classical sense.

For the hood, I’m undecided +S. I could make a balaclava to match the NWU, a blue one (not a colour I’ve actually had luck with), or even use the black/gray ones from the other skins. I’ve thought of modifying the SAS Trainer skin to have more of a beard; but realistically, one would want to keep their face hidden behind a flame retardant hood. I’ll probably make tests with the faces from Trainer, Black, Camo, and Sabre, and see if making one to match the BDUs camo is worth the effort. Makign the hood for SAS Camo took a long time to get it “just right”.

*CHS disorder – Can’t Hit Shit disorder.

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By some odd twist of luck, I didn’t have to work today lol. I guess GOD knew hw much I was dreading it…. But I still ork the way I was raised. When I was growing up, it was a long time before *anyone* was workin’ but I was raised that, work don’t stop until you’re dead; it doesn’t matter if your head is falling off or you feel like death warmed over — you geet off your ass and go into work. That’s the way I was raised, that’s what I expect to have to do, even if I’d rather not lol.

One nice thing, I’ve received a new order, one that opens up quite a lot of possibilities on how I complete it. The jist of it, I had to “fix” the website from using something totally ‘insane’ to something that both works and works as it say it works… A side effect of that, being the sort order of the ranks changed slightly; most notably screwing up the special assignments wing, cadets, and veterans. So what if I’m listed at the tail end of the mighty page? I’ve got a lot more important tasks then what I consider a vanity fix for myself; when I could be doing other things that need doing. Well, my new order basically amount to fixing that, and taking the ol’sledge hammer to thing where necessary.

The code involved I think, is copyrighted from 2002, and I know it’s been hacked by at least 3 different admin team members since 2005. The code is to dependent upon a set of assumptions about the format of the data it manipulates. So there is no simple or quick fix to it, without digging into it. One good side effect, fixing it *properly* also means fixing a few other things in need of fixing, that I ain’t had time for fixing yet lol.

Hmm, maybe Operation Excalibur will happen one of these days just yet… but on a much grander scope then I had originally imagined.

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 !!!

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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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.