Wicky

I'm really in a lonely position here defending my opinion on the Nival forums. Even the gamers don't want to hear what I say, they call it dumb when one tries to increase abilities/skills, and they insist that Nival shouldn't do anything and rather have everyone play with self-imposed rules, while on the other hand they don't even know themselves, where the boarder between using self-imposed rules and using overpowered skills/weapons is. If you still want to help me better not reply to any of my threads as that would probably push you into the same lost postion like me Oh well.

The enemy standing on top of the roof of the sniper tower can be seen here: http://members.liwest.at/wicky1/gibtsjonet.jpg And the funniest thing I've seen yet was when a civilian got frightened by a sniper shot, ran in panic past the window from which my sniper had fired his shot, grazed it causing it to close, and my sniper got pushed outside by the window bars, fell 1 floor down to the ground and landed in front of 5 enemies who had quite a surprised look on their faces Wicky

It's hard to predict what will be the outcome of Silent Storm, but as long as it is selling good, there will be further development and that keeps the hopes up for everyone, that the game someday lives up to each of our individual expectations. And in my humble opinion, the best for all of us would be a licensing of the truly fantastic, breath-taking and mind-boggling engine to other gaming companies. This would earn Nival a lot of bucks, and us gamers a truly awesome choice of great games. Every game better or worse has a limit, on how long you can play it before it gets boring, but licensing can extend that period up to a multiple of it's lifespan, as we have seen with Baldur's Gate melting into Icewind Dale series or Planescape Torment, while having a successor and several expansion sets on it's own on top of that. Or Quake, after the one millionth and first optimisation melting into Wolf-ET and Halflife and countless other clones, still a good choice after the decade it already exists Pardon me for going off-topic a bit, but I couldn't resist spreading this thought... A science fiction game with aliens under the S2 engine.. yummie Or a fantasy setting turn based game with magics and warriors and archers, where a blast fireball puts a castle to ashes, all under the S2 engine... This thought is hard to resist for me And back to topic: This is the only way I could imagine a Jagged Alliance 3 game under this engine, while S2 will always stay S2. Wicky

Hellu Biggles, could I ask your opinion please? What do you think about Nival making changes to the skill system in the addon? I kinda figured I might ask for your help in putting some soft pressure on Nival to work out those problematic skills like hiding in plain sight. It's been often talked about, but I haven't read much about Nival's response, and their plans about this so I'm a bit worried. For example, the other day I had my spot skill raised from 30 to 100 points in under five minutes, just by standing outside a building and listening to the enemies' steps. Or in melee combat, and knife throwing, once my skill became very high it just cost 0 AP to attack an enemy, allowing unlimited repetitions. Or that the APs increase just when you run from one end of the map to the other, no matter if enemies near or not. Or a very high level scout bursting over 46 squares with a silenced beretta(26 range!) - constantly sweeping two enemies away every round, with the precision of a swiss clock - not cheated, just soloing on imp.difficulty This "bigger better faster" skill-system reminds me more of diablo2 than of a true strategical game. And then when I read Nival doing polls in their Sentinel Forum, on topics if there should be Panzerkleins; how to design the ending mission; and how the voice-overs should be, I get the impression something is going into the wrong direction here, shouldn't the better question be about more strategical depth? But my voice is too small to be heard in the large pool of customers. But you surely have some influence as admin of the biggest (and best! ) fansite, maybe I could ask of you to play with your muscles a bit to try that these issues get a little bit of notice? Because I have posted these problems already twice on Nival's Forums, once without any response at all, and the other time I got a lonely single answer in a week's time (agreeing with me btw). ;( Best regards, Wicky

Uhm, I use teleport quite regularily It is not a cheat. I do that when my soldier gets stuck (and repeatedly get invalid path.. try again) and the thing won't fix by itself, then the "teleport" command forces a re-calculation of the pathfinding, transitions (like ladders, exits) and such. So when you are in the middle of a broad street and suddenly can't move a millimeter, and you get "invalid path" and it won't stop, then type teleport, wait a few seconds and everything is fixed properly again. The name "teleport" is probably bad chosen, but then again: think about it! You are stuck, no obstacles in sight but still can't move, and you are cursing life and what not.. then you just want to get away from there and just continue playing somehow. So of course, teleport will catch your attention. But instead of teleporting, it fixes the sticky pathfinding :roll: what just was, what you needed. That's how I stumbled over the teleport command, too Really clever, ain't it ? Wicky

Uhm sorry Firebead, then I can't help. But here's yet another one by LoTekK, who has posted this on the Nival forums: Toggle tree crowns hotkey bind switch_particles 'LCTRL' + 'K' bind switch_particles 'RCTRL' + 'K' Add the above lines to your input.cfg and you'll be able to toggle the foliage with ctrl-k (ie, without having to go through the options menu). Wicky

Firebead: I noticed a shadowed outline of the own soldiers who were standing behind a wall in 32-bit color resolution. But unfortunately this feature is not there in 16-bit. Maybe Biggles can help, he wrote a nifty graphic configuration tool which can enable the outlines in 16-bit maybe, too.

Ok here is yet another one If you're lazy to reach your hand over to the 'enter' key everytime and want to save some time, you can assign the keypad's enter key to the same function. Open the input.cfg and look for the following two lines: bind startofturn 'ENTER' bind endofturn 'ENTER' I added the following two lines, so it looked like that: bind startofturn 'ENTER' bind startofturn 'NUM_ENTER' bind endofturn 'ENTER' bind endofturn 'NUM_ENTER' Now when I'm lazy, I just have to reach over to the keypad enter key with the thumb from the hand which resides on the mouse, that's really nifty hehe ! :wink: Wicky

I looked the dart gun up in the editor, and found an extra variable called "chance to stun" at 80% From the underground factory in Swizerland I know, stun is NOT unconscious So my guess is: When you successfully stun an enemy with the dart gun or pistol, you won't see much graphical feedback. He just won't move the next turn. All you can do to see if it worked or not is pressing the "end of round" button and waiting if he moves or not... You still have to punch/kick him unconscious. Anyone confirm my theory?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm *smirks* Well maybe some of you didn't know, that with hotkey B you can switch between the two weapon slots fast

Written By LoTeKK from Nival Forums: open cfgconfig.cfg and find the line setvar game_tbs_on_enemy_spot = 0.00 and change it to 1.00. No more hoovering over the enter-key and pressing it real fast so you get the first turn Wicky

Poor Biggles Didn't you get to hear the radio transmission, where the leader says if he would die, then his fellows should blow up the base so the new technology won't fall into the enemy's (read: our) hands? Beside, is there anything worth looting? I found the AGS Universal rocket launcher which the boss drops (when you gib his body) more valuable than anything else, and if you have the swiss factory mission already you don't need to interrogate him and can kill him for it A full burst from this rocket "gatling" can carry half a mountain away, or crack a hostile Panzerklein open by brute force (in a single round) Wicky

Especially a heavy HE grenade (not fragmentation - those are not effective) causes the air to form a big shockwave that will compress the soldier inside down to the size of a midget (But the PK will get a little bit damage, too) A good sniper can also try to shoot the pilot out, in this case you'll have a totally unharmed PK ready for hopping in. But it might take a lot of luck, but once I managed to kill the Pilot with 1 shot. If you are in an axis PK yourself and fight against terrorist PKs, it becomes ridiculously easy, you just use the PZB Cannon in careful shot mode and you'll almost 100% disable it with a single shot.

I am now Thanks to Banduras from Nival who told me that not all information can be modified with the Map-Editor. The Weapon-Damage Values can only be seen/edited with an SQL-Viewer. One needs MS_Access to edit those variables, but I could also have a look at (but not edit) them with Excel which I'm more proficient with. There are a lot more resource tabs inside the database, the map-editor shows maybe only 70% of them. I got a good glance at weapon-statistics which included hidden variables like recoil-factor, weight, targetting-bonus, AP needed for aiming when you make the first shot, etc. If anyone asks me nicely I could upload some .xls Tables to my webspace Wicky

It's no problem if you know about it. The SQL server is like when you host a game. Just that it's databases playing So when you install SQL it will listen for incoming calls from the internet, but since you only need it for map-editing you can block these calls. I don't know what the worm does but I heard it just tries to login onto your SQL Server if it has a blank password (which is, by default blank) and then spread around. There is no worm on the CD just you could get one, because the Server will also listen to the internet, if you don't prohibit it, and with a blank passwort it could infect your machine. Wicky