Back after a long break

[MarkShot]

I am on DW 1.04 with LWAMI 3.11.

(1) Was there ever a later LWAMI released beyond 3.11?

(2) I see there is something called RA. Where do I get it? (I found some Russian forums, but I don't read Russian.) Aside from playable platforms like SCXIIc/SCU does it do anything beyond LWAMI?

(3) Is the major scenario download site for missions still SubGuru or is there someplace else?

Thanks!

[FPSchazly]

Originally Posted by MarkShot

I am on DW 1.04 with LWAMI 3.11.

(1) Was there ever a later LWAMI released beyond 3.11?

(2) I see there is something called RA. Where do I get it? (I found some Russian forums, but I don't read Russian.) Aside from playable platforms like SCXIIc/SCU does it do anything beyond LWAMI?

(3) Is the major scenario download site for missions still SubGuru or is there someplace else?

Thanks!

1. Nope, 3.11 is the most up-to-date release.

2. Here's the link (1.40 latest): http://www.redrodgers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4912

RA adds more playable platforms, as you noted, and also adds a lot more non-playable platforms to the game. In terms of modifying game dynamics, RA does not seem to be as "comprehensive" as LwAmi (read the LwAmi manual to see what I mean). But, it depends. LwAmi goes into great detail about sound propagation and weapons modeling (i.e., physics). Certainly in RA, they modified how the AI detects the player and the AI will engage much earlier and overall is more aggressive. In the stock game, the AI would only engage upon confirming the player's identity, but the AI acts with much more of an "intuition" now. I think LwAmi did this to a certain extent, but RA does not have a comprehensive manual like LwAmi (at least to my knowledge) to verify some of these claims. I think you'd have to comb through change logs.

I've recently started a series where I'm trying to put numbers to these differences to see how much of a change certain differences make. The first video is on differences in active sonar detection ranges between the mods:
The main takeaway is that RA modified just a few boats' detection ranges with many boats having identical ranges as stock, but the ranges have been greatly reduced in LwAmi.


3. SubGuru is still pretty much it. People who do multiplayer will exchange maps that don't really get published anywhere. Every now and then a new map gets published here and some may get published on Red Rodgers (RA forum).

[MarkShot]

Thanks for all the helpful info.

Although I didn't necessarily find the AI to be much more aggressive in either SCXIIc/SCU or LWAMI 3.11, I found it did a much better job of self preservation due to: not sensor improvement, but much more extensive doctrine coding. Stock Sonalyst's subs were road kill, but not after getting a doctrine upgrade!

[MarkShot]

I tried, but I could not get RA to run without crashing on either Win7-32 or Win7-64. Whenever, it runs a sub mission it crashes.

Thanks, anyway!

[MarkShot]

I decided to simply replace DW Stock 1.04 doctrine with RA 1.40 doctrine. This should still yield better game play (and I avoid the RA crashing).

I checked the doctrine files and they are far more extensive.

Thanks.

[Pirate]

That may cause crashes in some situations, cause the doctrine files contain names of entities and the RA doctrine files contain the names of entities same as the name of entities on the RA database.
In other situations it may not even do anything because many new RA doctrines are in new files with different file names from stock, and you using stock database objects are still referencing original doctrine files.

[MarkShot]

No, I checked and the very basic doctrine names have almost 2X the code in the stock game.

I assumed that I would be running with a doctrine subset, since I would not be using new objects.

If it yields crashes, I can just give up on the idea.