jpolchlopek

This weekend, I got out of work early and drove into West Hartford to the only remaining wargame/model/table-top role-playing game store that I know; War & Pieces. An older gent with a pot-belly, a wandering eye, and a head full of knowledge spent a good 45 minutes chatting with me on where to start with my game. What I really needed to know about was rules and where I could start. This has pretty much always been my method for doing something: find someone who knows more than me and ask them.

The little research that I had managed to do seemed to single out the game Advanced Squad Leader as being a real brain-melter with more rules than you could shake a stick at. Armed with this and a rudimentary knowledge of C, I figured this would give me a good handle on where to start taking apart some of JA2’s wonky rules.

Of course, they didn’t have a copy of ASL, but he managed to come up from the basement with a copy of Sniper!, which smelled like it had been sitting in an attic box with mohair sweaters and leisure suits from the seventies. It seemed to have a ton of rules for pretty much everything, but I still felt like it was missing something.

Rules, after all, are abstractions meant to represent real life. The problem (or blessing, really) is that practically none of us who play wargames have ever been in a fight, much less a war. So the notion of being able to judge rules on fighting wars for veracity is pretty preposterous. Luckily, my “find the smart guy” approach to learning paid off, as I was led to the globalsecurity.org’s collection of Army field manuals, specifically those on urban warfare (MOUT) and movement in general.

As with all things, the more I learn, the more I scale back my original plans. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but I’m of the opinion now that determining line-of-sight rules, visibility, or reaction times are going to be pretty much arbitrary; trying to actually base them on science brings out a rather large can of worms that can only be opened with four or five years of schooling in cognition and perception. So, rather than redo everything, I’ve decided to do a feasibility test by adding one new feature: leading a room clearing operation with a grenade through the door.

Close Quarters Combat (CQB) in JA2 is one of the more frustrating aspects. Like real life, room-clearing is extremely deadly and tense; unlike life, though, the things that you or I might do to preserve our life or reduce risk are impossible. If we know Mook #1 is behind a door, we’re probably not going to stand silhouetted in a door-frame and scream “Suprise!” after opening it. We might push it open, kick it open from the side, peek our head around a corner, look through the keyhole, or any number of tricks to keep our head from stopping bullets.

In MOUT, grenades get used with an incredible frequency to clear rooms, stairwells, flush out loopholes, and do most of the dirtywork in urban exploration. Practically every other paragraph contained the phrase “be sure to clear the room with a grenade before entering”. This makes sense: cracking a door, dropping a cooked-off grenade in, and then storming the room shortly after detonation is infinitely safer than wandering in and looking for party-favors.

You can’t do any of this in JA2, though. You can only open doors from the square directly in front of it, which means anyone on the other side inevitably scores an interrupt and perforates you. Neither can you bang-and-clear in a single motion; each part takes a separate action and the door can only be opened all the way, or not at all. See above on perforation.

So, the next step is to see if the code can be jury-rigged to support this sort of idea. The idea itself is simple: have the bang-and-clear action, if performed successfully, cause a grenade to be tossed “through” the door without it ever being opened.

The question is if the code can be massaged to allow this, though if the 1.13 guys were able to include high-angle grenade launching, I assume that this shouldn’t be impossible. More on this after I find where the grenade launching code is stored.

It seems that for the average American, the time spent in the car is the only real time we get to do anything close to “meditation”. Certain professions tend to be more meditative (I regard my classical guitar practice in music school as meditation), but by and large, most Americans who do not practice some form of contemplative prayer at home typically end up doing something close to it while driving.

This is really just a very long way of saying that I had an idea about one of my story’s end-of-act catastrophies. Randy Ingermanson’s “Snowflake method” for novel-writing feels that every one of a story’s three acts needs to end in some sort of disaster which provides the impetus for the act that follows. While I’m not terribly fond of making anything creative into something formulaic, my cup of ideas doth not exactly runneth over right now, so I’ll take what I can get.

Anyway, in my failed first-draft, the protagonist J—was pretty much a wreck from page one. While he’s supposed to be a terrorist operative, the character I had created had so many hang ups and neurosis that he had to expend a significant amount of energy just holding himself together. Not only did it make the love-interest a bit more preposterous (though I did try to mitigate this by making the girl sixteen years old, or so) but it just made him both unmysterious and somewhat unlikeable. For a novel which is supposed to model its hero after Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko, this just isn’t going to work.

What I didn’t, and still don’t want to do is make a character which is your standard untouchable cyberpunk-noir action hero. Richard Morgan pretty much nailed this archetype in Altered Carbon, anyway, so I’d just be renting space from him. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about making J—a bit more dynamic and display some real growth and change throughout the narrative. To do this, I’m going to Humpty Dumpty him. This is the nature of my single-serving epiphany: start him as the calm, cool, bad-ass mofo, then break him and show what’s really underneath.

J—still needs to be a capable operative, though. Being able to basically slaughter his way to his goals while smirking and muttering off-hand one-liners will be there at the beginning, but this is a carefully-constructed facade, in the purest sense of the word. “Facade” was originally an architectural term: decorative band of panels or other materials around the perimeter of the roof, often used to conceal the gable. This is a perfect description of J—; a fabricated exterior used to conceal a feature considered ugly. The man-child, the damaged goods I originally wrote is still there, but underneath an exterior which has had years to settle in.

Once I had figured that J—was going to be bit more traditional at the start of the book, I had run into a problem. While I knew that he was going to make a decision at the end of the second act which would catapult him into the third, climactic act of the book, I was stuck for what was going to move him from his noir-hero equilibrium in the first act and work to destabilize him. That’s what I figured out while I was changing lanes while heading west on I-291, early this morning.

While J—and A—got “together”, or at least did their meet-cute among gunfire, early in the first-draft’s initial act, the pseudo-romantic revelation won’t happen until the end of the first act, now. For the first act, A—will maintin her status as just another Jane Doe, a human parcel who J—needs to deliver to his employers. A—will make gentle prodding at J—’s mental armor, enough to make the dramatic reversal at the end of act one reasonably plausible.

So, while J—starts the novel as a cold, bold, cyberpunk action hero, the first act ends with him breaking out of his persona. J—does something “out of character”, again in the truest sense of the phrase.

The long second act involves that set of tailor-made behaviors slowly coming apart, mostly at A-’s gentle prodding. The introspection actually causes J- to collapse inward at the end of act two, motivating him in a blind panic to the events of act three.

This is all really for my own benefit; all these abbreviations and vague allusions to plot mechanics wouldn’t be interesting except for maybe me and my brother. But the idea has come to me and at an unlikely time.

Automotive Meditation seems to be a combination of non-verbal thinking reaching into the the conscious, verbal centers of the mind in the half-waking trance that most of us go into when driving.

So, in short, I had an idea while driving. Yeah.

After playing some more JA2, last night, I’ve come to the conclusion that calculating Line of Sight (LOS) is extremely important.

JA2’s system, possibly because of its use of tiles, calculates visibility in a pretty funky way; enemies have the tendency to pop-out of nowhere, even in a map in the middle of the day. This has the tendency to yank me right out of the game and start asking questions, like “Why couldn’t I see them before?”

In a daylight situation, I would imagine that any enemies which you have LOS to and are not actively trying to hide should be visible. Since most maps in SBT games are well within the range of human vision, I don’t think we have to worry about that. This sounds sensible: daylight + LOS = automatic visibility.

Dawn and twilight seem to be about the same, though common sense says that there’s going to be some ambiguity. We’ve all been in situations during early-morning or evening driving where things seem to pop out at us where previously we saw nothing. So maybe my previous conclusion that daylight should mean automatic detection. We need to consider the variable and falliable nature of human vision and perception.

Let’s create an experiment. Imagine a dimly lit, long hallway which extends into the distance and is not lit at its far end. We stand at one end, and we put another person at the far end. At what distance will we see the other person? At what light levels?

Now let’s make the hallway a room, with furniture and fixtures placed at random. With the same light-levels, will we be able to detect this person at the same distance, regardless of the background clutter?

Now make the room an open space, a crowded forest, let’s say. With the same lighting and distance, does our detection range shrink? Common sense says that the eye will have problems picking out a person among all of that clutter unless other factors, like color, comes into play.

Human perception is a very difficult subject, and not well-understood. In addition, everyone has not only different eyes, but a different visual processing center. I might have 20/20 vision, but just be very bad at visual pattern-recognition. Likewise, my perception will be hampered by eyesight.

I can see why most tile-based games tend to go with penalties to detection based on the type of terrain a target is in. GURPS did the same thing, making it harder to detect someone depending on if they were in high grass, forest, shrubs, etc.

But what about indoors, where (unless we’re doing Close Quarters Battle [CQB] in a disco-lounge) none of the background is going to be sufficiently distracting to hide an enemy? Right now, I’m sitting in a well-lit cubicle farm; I can’t imagine any circumstances where I wouldn’t be able to detect someone who stood up. Reaction time is a factor, naturally, but if we’re doing a strict yes/no detection, common sense says that we will be able to see someone 100% of the time.

So we have two factors at play, here: light and background clutter. I think that I need to start looking at human perception research in order to find out at what point we go from a “clearly visible” or “not detectable by the unaided eye” to that grey area in between where some people can see something, but others can’t.