Operation Remembrance mod for Battlefield Vietnam

I know it's been a while since I last put out an update for Operation Remembrance, but I've still been working on it when I can. I'm currently estimating the release date for V1.2 to be somewhere in spring of 2024. This update originally had two main goals: add a France vs. Viet Minh campaign, and completely overhaul the AI coding. While the Indochina campaign is in the works, and almost all of the relevant weapons and vehicles have been added, the AI recoding has somewhat fallen by the wayside as I've turned my attention to revamping a number of game mechanics, tweaking and adding weapons and vehicles, and a few other things that I'd like to talk about today.

First off, weapons and kits. With the exception of about five or six rifles, all rifles in Operation Remembrance now come with a bayonet attachment as an alternate weapon. This works just like the bayonet in Bf1942: Road To Rome. The primary fire button fires the weapon, and the secondary fire button stabs with the bayonet, instead of switching your view to iron sights. Note that for a few weapons, the bayonet stab animation is currently missing. This is something I'm hoping to fix in a later patch.

The M16A1 equipped with a bayonet.

A new mechanic to make certain sniper rifles more effective is scopes with different magnification. In real life, some of the rifles used in the Vietnam War had variable magnification, usually between 3x and 9x. To replicate this, sniper rifles with variable-power scopes in-game now have two different versions, one with the scope's minimum magnification as the default weapon in its kit, and the other as an alternate weapon with its ammunition count linked to the first.

View through XM21 scope at 200 meters, 3x magnification.

Same view as above, 9x magnification.

A lot of weapons used by Communist forces in the Vietnam War were used in multiple variants or copies, such as the Soviet RPD machine gun and its direct copy, the Chinese Type 56 LMG, or the Soviet PPS-43 submachine gun and its Chinese clone the Type 54, and many others. To reflect this, Operation Remembrance has a new feature that will randomize the names on these weapons to give some more variation in the kill feed and create a broader sensation of just how many weapons were really used in Vietnam.

As far as kits go, the entire set-up has received a heavy amount of changes and streamlining. A few notable alterations are:

Removing the stop-gap "Punch" weapon by rearranging certain kits so it's no longer needed. For example, anti-tank kits now have three small anti-tank landmines in their second slot, instead of the punch weapon.

The Minelayer, Saboteur, and Engineer classes have been combined into two new classes: Demolition Expert, and Engineer. The Demolition Expert has powerful weapons for damaging or destroying enemy equipment, and the Engineer is able to both lay mines and safely detonate enemy mines.

The Pilot and Tanker classes have been combined into a single class named Vehicle Crewman.

Additions of new weapons and rifle grenades have allowed the NVA and VC factions to have kits in the Grenadier class for the first time. This has also resulted in the deletion of the Spotter class, which substituted for the Grenadier in those factions. The spotter weapon can now be found in the Officer kit.

Many weapons have different ammunition counts depending on what kit they're in. For example, an M16A1 used by a Rifleman or Non-Commissioned Officer has 300 rounds available (in either 20- or 30-round magazines), while an M16A1 used by an Anti-Tank trooper or Medic has only 160 rounds available, in 20-round magazines only. The Soviet PPSh-41 is used by kits that are designated "primary" (Rifleman, NCO, Engineer, etc.) and has 284-315 rounds available depending on the variant, while the similar PPS-43 is only used by "secondary" kits (Medic, Vehicle Crewman, etc.) and has only 140 rounds. This is to encourage players to choose their kits more wisely depending on the situation they face.

Now, for the changes to vehicles. We'll start with aircraft. There isn't much here that's different. You can see a video in the previous article showing off all the new helicopters I've added, but I've also added a few new fixed-wing aircraft, including the American O-1 Bird Dog, and the F4U Corsair and SBD Dauntless for the French, as well as a few others that I'm going to keep a secret for now.

Stationary weapons: Again, mostly the same, but I've added a few new ones like the Chinese Type 63 multiple rocket launcher and the Soviet ML-20 howitzer, and tweaked a lot of existing ones. Notably, the ZU-23-2 has received some new modifications to make it less overpowered against aircraft.

One area of the stationary weapons section that HAS seen significant changes is to the mortars. Mortars are now divided into three classes: Light, Medium, and Heavy. Light mortars now use the original mechanics for BfVietnam mortars, meaning that bots can use them again and they're less sensitive to being placed on ground that isn't perfectly flat. They have a maximum range of 250 meters and spawn on a few maps, but are more commonly found as deployable mortars in the Crew-Served Weapon class. Medium mortars use a system borrowed from Forgotten Hope Secret Weapons that helps you to determine the range your mortar will fire at. They have a maximum range of 500 meters and are only found as spawns, as they still require being on a surface that is completely flat. Heavy mortars are exactly the same as medium mortars, but are more powerful, have a lower rate of fire, and have a maximum range of 750 meters. At the moment, problems with the medium and heavy mortars mean they're being kept out of V1.2, but should be added back in a patch shortly after.

Quite a few new land vehicles have been added, both for the Indochina campaign and the regular campaign. One thing that I'm particularly happy about is the addition of certain light vehicles like the Soviet Dnepr M72 motorcycle and the GAZ-46 amphibious car. These and other light vehicles like unarmed jeeps will be found much more frequently on most maps, making it easier to get around both in singleplayer and in multiplayer. On some maps, every single flag will have at least one of these vehicles spawn near it.

For naval vehicles, a few new large ships have been added, as well as some small ones. The Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, which was previously the only carrier in the mod and could spawn all different types of aircraft on it, has been supplemented by the Essex-class carrier and the Essex-class "Landing Pad, Helicopter". While the Essex LPH exclusively carries helicopters, the Essex CARRIER serves as a platform for light fixed-wing aircraft like the A-1 Skyraider, A-4 Skyhawk, and F-8 Crusader. The Forrestal-class carrier now only spawns larger fixed-wing aircraft like the F-105 Thunderchief and the F-4 Phantom.

Instead of the Gearing being the only destroyer class available, there are now three: the Fletcher-, Allen M. Sumner-, and Gearing-class destroyers, which all have different combinations of weapons. The sole type of Sampan, which carried a DShK machine gun, has now been supplemented by an unarmed Sampan variant that will spawn in some "neutral" locations like the village on Operation Game Warden to make moving around maps easier for BOTH sides, and by a Sampan with a mortar.

One last feature of V1.2 is a switch to what I call "modular" coding. This takes advantage of an existing mechanic in BfVietnam's Refractor engine to allow multiple weapons or vehicles that are very similar to re-use common code. This means that some objects can be created with far fewer lines of code. For example, there are two versions of the M3A1 Grease Gun in V1.2, and they're exactly alike except that one has 10 magazines and one has 5. It takes 53 lines of code to make the Grease Gun once, so two would require 106 lines. But with modular coding, 51 of those lines only have to be used once, and the two weapons can be created with just 3 lines each, for a total of 57 lines for both weapons, compared to 106 without modular coding. The end result of this means that for you, the end user, the sizes of certain files are smaller, and the game should be able to load and run a bit more smoothly.

That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by to check out the latest on this project, which celebrated its eleventh anniversary back in August. Operation Remembrance might be moving slowly, but it's not ready to stop yet.