Ah WW2 Online.... Teacher, Mother, Secret Lover.

*Ahem*

I agree about ARMA being the closest to real life modern war, but the problem is you don't see it when you're playing. There could be thousands of players/agents across the map, but from the ground it still feels like a battlefield game.

Lets say you're running down the street after a firefight, and come across an allied tank going the opposite way because command says its needed elsewhere,
You dont stop to think about the scale and how so much is going on at once, it's just a random tank to you.

Gah, I'm bad at explaining.

Basicaly ARMA has the scale, but you don't get the sense of it because you're doing other things. It's not like a war documentary where it tells you whats happening all over the theatre/map.

"where things like economy come into play."

Modern state-vs-state warfare is unlikely to give you a lot of time for economics.

Dunnigan gives figures of the order of 2% effectiveness degradation per day for modern units involved in combat against similar units (due to skipping maintenance, resupply problems, casualties and battlefield friction). This implies that ~25-30 days after you start actual ground fighting, every unit which is involved is depleted beyond useful.

That's barely enough to time to gather reserves from mothballed gear and get them to the field.

He sees fighting lasting a month at best before both sides are too tired to continue and either shut it down or settle in for a much lower grade warfare.

Or, of course, someone has uncommitted units which means they win.

I'd say if you want to make your war game as realistic as possile consider makeing it like the call of duty campain. Even if your making an MMO-FPS you can make it look like this campaine. But don't try to make it like call of duty online, because that is not realistic at all.

Since this happens to be a topic I invested considerable time in thinking about, I will post some of my thoughts and conclusions on how to realistically simulate a war.

Falcon 4.0 and also EF-2000 already had a war simulation running in the background. That simulation determined the strategic/operational events on the battlefield and the missions for aircraft were generated from those. I think this approach is the way to go, only with current processing power available, you can simulate it in much more detail.

Burnhard correctly mentions the fact that a 1:1 simulation in high-detail is simply impossible. So there have to be "levels of detail" to the simulation. Detail should be highest in areas where "important characters" are present (i.e. players or perhaps high-level AI's) and can be toned down in areas where there are none.

This is technically very hard to accomplish, but certainly not undo-able. Think of it as the grass and trees you see in current FPS games. They weren't hand-placed by artists, their look & location came out of a generation algorithm. It is possible to use a similar algorithm to generate the location & state of tanks & soldiers when "zooming in". Armies become divisions become battalions become companies become squads become individual soldiers.

It would not be "real" but "good enough". And from a quantum physics point of view it would be correct, since as long as nobody's looking at that tank, it's whereabouts become more and more uncertain :-)

ARMA I/II are the closest thing available to a war simulation at the moment but there are some serious issues with how the simulation is set-up that utterly destroys the feeling of being in a war and should be avoided/solved. Here's a short list:

First of all the re-spawn system. There is no re-spawn in real life. If you die, that's it. You're dead. The same should be true in a simulation. "Then where's the fun if you die early in the war?" I hear you ask. "You get to wait until the next one starts?" No. That wouldn't be fun. My idea on how to approach this is to populate the world with AI soldiers only. They start fighting the war and as a player you can "take over" a soldier. If he gets killed, too bad, just pick another one.

In order for this to work, there should be lots of AI to chose from. Which is great, since a 64 vs 64 people war/battle (as in ARMA) seldom happens in real life, they usually are a lot bigger than that.

Experience can be modeled by allowing people with less experience to take over privates only. Once you get better at it, you can work your way up the ladder, eventually playing a strategy game from a map room 100 kilometer behind the front line (if you like that kind of thing) or take over the head of state and direct the war from the White House or Kremlin.


Second comes (the lack of) properly modeled logistics. Things don't just pop up somewhere, they need to be moved from where they're made to where they're needed. If you model the logistics behind weapons, ammo and perhaps even food, it automatically opens up venues for alternative attacks to cripple your opponent. It's what keeps numerically inferior parties alive in a war against a larger opponent.


The third thing I personally would like to see is some sort of recording/reporting feature in the game, so that after each game ends, a "history" of it is available that players can look back upon to see how the game developed over time. A look "behind the scenes" of sorts. I think this is what's bugging me most about playing ARMA Warfare for 8 hours and then the game ends. Once you win or lose, all you get is a cheesy stat screen. Some kind of playback (if even from the map view only) would give you something tangible which you could show your buddies and tell them "see that great outflanking maneuver I did here? That was the decisive turning point of the battle".


I think the technology is certainly available to make all this happen, but that doesn't mean it actually will happen ;-)

In this thread everyone is talking about simulateing war but what about STIMULATEING war? Don't you think that would be the best war game ever?

Ok I think I found our game. Its a new game coming out called DUST 514. It ties into the EVE online universe. If you are not familiar with eve online, check out this video Also check out its wikipedia page and all that. Basically it is a giant sandbox with a player own economy and player driven conflict. By that I mean that factions are created by players, and it is the players that decide to declare war and try to take over solar systems and all that.

Well now they have added in planetary interaction, where players can exploit planets for resources. This also means that corporations made up of players are going to have to fight over planets to take control of what they have to offer. How do they do that? Well the planets are going to be divided up into regions, which players from DUST 514 fight over. Basically, players in DUST 514 are deployed from ships called War Barges, which can be owned by DUST corporations or EVE online corporations. Players from EVE online will pretty much be able to hire DUST 514 players to fight for them on the ground. Its all in the same universe. It is a scifi war, but the principals are still the same. Its a literal war between players from EVE online that is fought in space by EVE players and on the ground by DUST players, all happening in real-time.

Trailer is here

So imagine playing battlefield 2142, except that when you win a game, you just helped out an actual player in another game that hired you. Gives you a little motivation. Although this game isn't our modern war we have been talking about, it seems to be a very large step towards the idea.

[Edited by - Heresjohnny7 on July 1, 2010 12:04:36 AM]

Quote:

Original post by Heresjohnny7 I did some experimenting with massive player-made maps in Arma 2, and came across a 51km x 51km desert map. It felt like it was the right size for this kind of goal. I also found that 10km is a good view distance for a fighter jet flying at 2000 feet. But this brings up a problem: How would some one go about making an environment where from the air a player could be seeing 100km2 of objects and terrain, and yet have enough detail on the ground to include detailed buildings, trees, and grass to make it believable from the ground?

The US millitary simulators achieve this by using different programs for different vehicles/roles. E.g. a specialized flight sim, which using a standard networking protocol, can talk to a ground-sim like Arma2 (or VBS2). The different sims can all stream the world-content from data-servers at an appropriate level-of-detail for each so they're both visualsing the same world (speaking of 'world', they've got a dataset of the entire earth at amazing resolution, which puts fuel to shame ;)).

Ah thats very cool hodg. I was giving something like that a thought. When you enter a game you decide whether you want to be a pilot or infantry or w/e it may be, and different graphics settings are applied for each one. So lets say if you are in a jet, you would have the 10km view distance with little terrain detail (i.e. no grass/shrubs, low res textures on buildings and trees etc.), yet while on the ground, you would have a view distance of maybe 3km, but very good detail on objects and terrain. It is also the idea behind DUST 514 and Eve online. I think some sort of implementation of that idea is the only way to allow the different roles of a war be played by actual players, whether its a soldier on the ground, a pilot in the air, or a commander controlling it all.

I think a problem in simulating war in a game is the behavior of the player themselves. They often lack a key element: Fear. Most online FPS gamers(at least for console gamers) just shoot anything that turns the reticule red without much thought about it. They dont behave like a real solider who has something to lose, because they just respawn. There's no real investment in a 3D model for the player, so they won't behave like a solider would in war. They also tend to lack communication towards common goals and patience(this tends to cause the whole vechicle dumping scenario.

I guess working in a good respawn system would help some of these issues, but I also wonder if a large number of AI bots behaving like real soliders could change the players behavior with some kind of group mentailty principle, idk interesting theory anyway.

Personally I think StarWars Battlefront I & II did a pretty good job of simulating war with the whole control point system.

Good discussion anyway, I'd like to hear what you guys think.

Have you played Modern Warfare 2 on the Hardcore Mode? You have no UI screen, there are no neon names, and you can kill your friends and you dont re spawn.

It really feels intense and there is fear, which is why LOTS of players camp in that game, basically how you would really fight, your not gonna give away your life that easily!

Simulating war with players being an individual unit can be a bit hard, because your efforts tend to feel very little, some players just want the rewards ASAP and dont really care for the long term goal of "winning a war". I feel that needs to be put into consideration as well.

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread however, because it is very interesting. :)