Scenario Design Article, We need some...

[Ricky B]

Okay OJW, I will give it to you that you are close to me, just a half year back - but I definitely feel my age after riding my bicycle 100 km in 4 hours last weekend, more than double my previous long distance at once. My knees still ache from that but not enough to stop riding this week.

As to rookies, we are all that way still, in some game situations!

Rick

[Zemke]

WoW, I am impressed 100k in four hours is moving out and doing so for a long time! Reminds me that I need to go run, or jog, or walk fast....maybe later.

But, back on the topic of "how to design secnarios", and at the risk of looking "dumb and lazy", (because this may be in the documentation, but I have not seen it yet), what would really be nice is to have some kind of definition of what all the fields do in the .pdt file. Many are pretty obvious, but others I am not so sure. For example, on artillery stockpile, the setting on all the files I have looked at is 100. Does an increase of that field, increase the fire power, or reduce? There are some other things that are not explained anywhere, and it would be nice to have documents that were more specific than what I have been able to find, (and granted I may not be looking in the right places).

[Ricky B]

Okay, to see what the various PDT settings do, if you open a scenario that uses the pdt that you want to view in the game engine, then press the F4 key, it opens up the pdt file for viewing. Click on the Help button and it opens up a help file showing what the various values mean. I think this will get you what you want, if not, please let us know what it is missing that you are looking for. There is also a pdt editor for some of the games, that might provide some help to you but I don't believe so - my guess is that is what you are already looking at the values through?

Rick

[Zemke]

Yes! Thank You very much Ricky B

[Marquo]

:smoke:

But wait...I am 57 y/o...and training for a modified triathalon (kayak rather than swimming). I am guaranteed to be number one in my age group (lack of competetion). I learned this trick 10 years ago when I won the eastern Maryland Tae Kwon Do championship; I tried to refuse the title and trophy, but the judges remarked that if anyone in my age catagory wanted the title/trophy they could have come to fight me for it. :)

The Redskins will win the Superbowl this year no matter what any of you think :stir:

Back to lurking.

Marquo

[Dog Soldier]

Zemke,

You will find scenario design challenging and rewarding for PzC. The HTH system run by Foul is a great way to get feedback and fine tune your final design. Many experienced PzC play testers who helped HPS with various PzC titles are blitz members.

Dog Soldier

[Ricky B]

:smoke:

But wait...I am 57 y/o...and training for a modified triathalon (kayak rather than swimming). I am guaranteed to be number one in my age group (lack of competetion). I learned this trick 10 years ago when I won the eastern Maryland Tae Kwon Do championship; I tried to refuse the title and trophy, but the judges remarked that if anyone in my age catagory wanted the title/trophy they could have come to fight me for it. :)

The Redskins will win the Superbowl this year no matter what any of you think :stir:

Back to lurking.

Marquo

Excellent Marquo. best of luck with it.

Rick

[Zemke]

Zemke,

You will find scenario design challenging and rewarding for PzC. The HTH system run by Foul is a great way to get feedback and fine tune your final design. Many experienced PzC play testers who helped HPS with various PzC titles are blitz members.

Dog Soldier

Yes I am getting a lot of satisfaction working learning about building scenarios. I have tried the HPS system with CM, and time it took to get feedback and then change and then more feedback, I guess I was not very patient with the process. How long does it normally take with a PzCm scenario to get approved?

[Mr Grumpy]

How long does it normally take with a PzCm scenario to get approved?

That is a "how long is a piece of string" type question, the variable factors are.....
1) How big/long is the scenario,
2) How fast do the testers play,
3) How active is the designer in getting new versions completed, in my experience the designers can be the biggest issue, almost all upload the scenario and then do nothing and expect testers to just come along and arrange the testing regime, only a active designer will succeed, often the effort you put in will be matched by the results you can achieve.

We had a scenario tested & approved in a month once, but it was only 17 moves long and only required one update to hit the pass score.

As a rule of thumb scenarios over 35 turns and/or SM5 will not make it through the system due to the sheer time they take to play.

You cant short cut the system, if you want to ensure the scenario is balanced it has to be played out by various testers which is going to take time, the best way forward is to use testers you know are reliable rather than throw it open to anyone, your problem is that you may not have been here long enough to build up profiles of enough reliable players, you can get away with two, but four would be better.

Having said all that you are more than welcome to try, but you will need patience and be prepared to put constant effort in.

[Zemke]

Here is the problem I see, no design is perfect till it is tested several times, and still there are going to be minor issues someone will find with it. But lets say a person tests their scenario twice, then posts it for HTH testing thinking most bugs are worked out, but they may not be, or as I found was the case in CM some really good suggests came from the HTH testing, and to incorporate them required the scenario to re-go testing, which seemed very frustrating because the scenario had passed already. I do agree HTH testing makes the fairest games possible.