Thank you and congratulations on your purchase of the The Omega Concern's Omega Combat System HUD, the premier combat simulation system in Second Life. Your OCS HUD is designed to maximize balanced gameplay and deliver a compelling combat, RP and gaming experience.

OCS system HUD upgrades are for life, regardless of version number.

Please read this manual before using your new HUD.

Items marked with an orange star () are the most recent changes.

THERE IS A TECHNICAL SUPPORT PASSPHRASE SOMEWHERE IN THIS NOTECARD, WHICH YOU MUST USE WHEN FIRST CONTACTING YOUR TECHNICAL CONTACT ABOUT THIS PRODUCT. We just do this to make sure you've read the instructions so that we can assist people with truly vexing problems not already answered within.

Wearing the HUD

From your inventory, right-click the OCS HUD and select "Wear." By default, it will attach to the "Top Left" screen position. It can be attached to any attachment point on your screen.

The HUD is small, but provides a lot of information vital to the OCS player.

Team/Faction Flag: This shows the flag for your current team or faction. This is the same flag which will appear on the "flag patch" of other OCS equipment such as vehicles.

Armor Indicators: These light up to indicate if you are currently protected by personal armor such as a helmet, a building, or vehicular armor such as a tank.

Hit Point Meter and Hit Points: This represents how much "life" you have left in you on a scale of 0 - 100, zero being dead.

Stamina Meter: Shows your stamina from maximum (blue) to exhausted (red)

Run Indicator: Shows if you are in "Always Run" mode (toggled with Control-R)

Level: This is your OCS player level, based on your earned experience points.

OCS System State: This indicator has three colors:

Red: OCS is off. Your OCS weapons will not cause any damage to other OCS players, or may not function at all.
Yellow: OCS is in a 'wait' mode, and will come up after a mandated wait time. It is important to note that you can still take damage in this state, but your own OCS weapons will not cause damage. The wait mode is enforced on HUD attachment, or when OCS has been manually turned off and on.
Green: OCS is on and operational. You may take damage, and your OCS weapons will do damage.

The OCS Viewer

The OCS Viewer is a specially modified version of the standard Second Life viewer, designed to work in concert with the entire OCS system to provide a level playing field and a simulation that offers more realism and immersion.  The OCS Viewer is optional, and information about it can be found here.

Operation

For most of the time, the HUD is simply worn, doing its job of enabling your OCS weaponry and registering when others cause you damage. Clicking the HUD pops up a menu with a few options:

• OCS Off/On: This allows you to manually turn off your HUD. Be aware that there IS a delay for doing both during which time you may yourself take damage.
• WWW: Takes you to the OCS player ranking page and shows you and the players above and below you. You may also view other players' details and faction scoring data.
• Depart: This is simply a polite way to message the other players in the region and let them know you're leaving the area.
• Reset: Resets scripts in the HUD after a 30-second delay. Useful if your weapons have gotten "stuck" in the event of a crash or logout while you are deceased.

Camera Restriction

If a regional administrator has enabled this option for the region in which you are playing, moving your camera more than 8 meters away from your avatar will cause you to face a blank, pale blue screen. Don't be alarmed, pressing "Escape" or any of the movement keys will snap your camera back within range and you will be able to see the world again.

From vehicles or other seated positions, your camera will have more freedom, allowing you to cam out to approximately 50 meters.

Your support passphrase is "Oh, my HUD."

Team/Faction Messaging

The HUD comes with a gesture, "/t" which can be activated and used to send chat to friendly forces in your region by typing "/t message". (Alternatively, you can use "/130 message") For example, April Heaney types "/t Hello!" and she and her teammates see:

[TEAM]: (C2) April Heaney: Hello!

The team message format is that player's map sector, the player's name, and their message.

What are map sectors? We'll use the Fulda Gap sector map as an example:

A region has 16 sectors, four north to south, lettered A to D and four west to east, numbered 1 to 4. The northwest sector is A1, the southeast is D4, and so on. This is to give friendlies a general idea of each other's whereabouts. The object that comes with the OCS HUD, "Topo and Sector Map of the Fulda Gap Region" will attach to your bottom HUD point if you need it as a reference until you get a feel for the lay of the land and how that correlates to map sectors.

OCS has several damage types that equate singly or in combination to real-world forces.

• Impact: This is damage done directly to a target, generally by bullets or shrapnel. Unlike horseshoes or hand grenades, impact damage is only applied from a physical contact between the projectile and the target. Personal armor will mitigate but not prevent this kind of damage. Buildings and vehicles are almost immune to impact damage.

• Blast: In technical terms, this is an overpressure from a point source. In OCS, this would be from explosions. Blast has the effect of damaging targets and pushing them away from the point of blast. Blast is somewhat mitigated by personal armor. Heavy armor vehicles such as tanks or fortified buildings offer considerable protection to the occupants from this type of damage. Blast can deliver tremendous force to nearby targets, but it is important to know that blast damage falls as a cube of distance from its origin. This means an explosion could be fatal from 2 meters away, but only moderately damaging from 10 meters. This cube falloff does not apply to shrapnel, which falls as a square of distance.

• Radiant: Radiant damage includes such things as fire, intense heat sources, or radiation. For instance, fire will damage players while they are too close. It will also damage objects, potentially destroying and setting them alight as well. By this mechanism, buildings can potentially burn down by the spread of a fire.

• Flash: Weapons such as stun grenades do not take off hit points, but can blind players for several seconds, making it much harder to take hit points off from other players. Stun weapons are generally only effective in limited areas.

• Drowning: If enabled in the region in which you are playing, if you remain underwater for too long, you will take damage and eventually you will die.

Bunnyhopping and Flying

A regional administrator can disable the standard avatar jump, allowing instead for a much more realistic "hop" and preventing "Bunnyhopping" - jumping repeatedly while running to make one's self harder to hit. Flying, while able to be disabled in a region, is easily worked around. OCS administrators may enable a flying damage penalty, applied to any player who is flying in that region.

Teleport Cool-Down Times, Non-Physical Movement and Sit-Target Jumping

Teleporting to a new region will result in OCS offensive capabilities being disabled for a 30-second period. Teleporting within the same region will result in OCS offensive capabilities being disabled for a 60-second period. Sitting on a box and editing the vectors to move about, or jump-sitting on a prim from a distance violates the laws of physics.  Punishment for such violation is death.

Stamina, Fatigue and Health

If enabled in the region in which you are playing, your stamina is affected by your level and current hit points. Less points mean less stamina, and higher levels give a moderate bonus to stamina. When running or otherwise moving quickly on your feet (think running down slopes) your stamina meter will start to drop.

If your stamina meter hits bottom, your vision will begin to red out, and if you keep going, you will be blinded until your stamina recovers to minimum levels.

Experience Points and Levels

Experience points are awarded by taking hit points from other players. Note that this does not mean you have to kill (i.e. take ALL hit points away from) another player. Once could in fact have a very successful OCS career merely wounding other players. As you gain experience points, you will ascend in levels from 1 up to the current limit, 25. Each level requires greater experience points than the previous did to attain the next level.

The difference in levels between two combatants is taken into account. A player lower in levels than oneself is worth less than a player of one's same level, and again less than a player above one's own level. Point values can also be adjusted per team or faction, to make a member of a team worth more or less points to one's own experience points and the team score. A team or faction can even be set to be worth negative points, thus punishing those who take hit points from them.

Where your player data lives

All player data is stored not within Second Life, but on an external server elsewhere on the Internet. This data is associated with your unique player key, and not with the HUD you are wearing. Therefore, when you upgrade to a newer version of the OCS HUD, all your player data will be retrieved from the server.

Our little disclaimer: While player, region and weapon data should in theory be available always and permanent, we can not guarantee that network or other issues will not prevent the storage or retrieval of your data, nor the continued existence thereof. However, we do own the domain(s) upon which the data resides, make backups regularly, and do what we can to ensure everything will continue to work indefinitely. In the event of a major service disruption, we have plans in place to migrate all of the most current data to other servers as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Player Skills and Accuracy

OCS features lifetime player stats, and among the most important to your combat experience will be your accuracy. Level 1 players often find hitting the broad side of a barn a worthy challenge for their marksmanship. Even with a perfectly accurate sniper rifle, the Level 1 player's inherent accuracy is not high enough to make them a very effective sniper.

As a player gains experience and levels, he or she will gain accuracy and speed with all weapon systems, and more quickly with the weapons they use most. Therefore, a higher level player is generally a more effective combatant than a lower level player simply because they can land more rounds on target. What also affects a player's accuracy is the weapon they use. Please see the section "OCS Enabled Weapons and Ratings" below for detailed information.

Armor

There are three types of armor: Personal, Building and Vehicular. Personal armor is that which is worn, such as helmets, bullet-resistant vests and the like. "Building" refers to fortified bunkers and similar structures. "Vehicular: refers to armored vehicles such as tanks, armored personnel carriers and attack helicopters. Your armor protection is indicated at the top of your HUD with three lights, green, blue and orange indicating personal, building and vehicular respectively.

HP, effects of low HP and HP Regeneration

Your Hit Points can be thought of as your health, on a scale of zero to 100. 100 means full health. Zero means dead. Your skills are affected by your hit points. Lower hit points will adversely affect your accuracy, reloading time, etc. A region may have enabled health regeneration. This means players who have less than 100 hit points will gain a certain amount of hit points per minute, until they are back to 100.

Death, Respawning, Recovering and Death Penalties

Death and destruction occurs when a player or OCS-enabled object runs out of hit points. For players, this results in a death animation, and the screen will go red and then the world will fade to black. The player's weapons will be shut down, and if driving or flying a vehicle, will release control of that vehicle. There is a "death wait" penalty during which the player simply has to sit and wait.

Respawning: If there is a respawn point for the deceased player, and he or she is more than 10 meters from that point, they will see a message telling them so, and to click on the screen. Upon clicking, the world map pops up, with a pre-selected destination which is that player's proper respawn point. The player clicks 'Teleport' and upon arrival, the screen will clear, and the player will be alive, weapons armed and ready to go.

Recovering: If enabled, players will respawn with 1 hit point. See "Medical Assistance" below to learn how to remedy this affliction.

Depending on the regional settings, additional penalties for letting yourself get killed may be incurred. A player may lose experience points, and optionally, may even lose levels as their experience drops below the amount required to reach a given level.

Players will be immune to damage for a limited amount of time when they respawn. By default, this is ten seconds, but may be set differently in different OCS regions.

Medical Assistance

Players may regain hit points faster than the regional regeneration rate by being assisted by other players with medical kits, or by spending time in an appropriate hospital facility if one is available.

Player broadcast announcements, Region hopping

When a player enters a region while wearing the OCS HUD, or a player puts the HUD on or takes it off, other players in that region will get a message stating such. The message will state what the player has done, the unique ID for that player's HUD, and a version string. It is frowned upon to attach and detach one's HUD while in play with others.

If a player makes more than two sim crossings in under 30 seconds, their HUD will be disabled for 30 seconds.

About The Omega Combat System (OCS)

While there are many combat systems in Second Life, OCS came from the idea that realism makes for a more compelling combat experience. OCS weapons are created from research and consultation with the people who have and do use the real-world systems everyday. Weapon effects are calculated from real-world physics using mathematical models, with some adjustments made for the scale at which Second Life exists. Forces that can be applied to players also affect other OCS-enabled objects such as buildings and vehicles. OCS environments are reactive and interactive, meaning you can shoot out windows, blow up that building your favorite sniper likes to use, or yourself have to make a hasty escape from a burning building. OCS weapons know not your team, nor you. Weapons will damage friend, foe and neutral alike.

Because of this, OCS is a fairly intuitive system, in which weapons will generally have the effects one would expect to see in the real world. Even with body armor, players can take at most a couple of small-caliber bullets, and large caliber machine guns and sniper rifles will take one down in a single shot almost every time. Armor will mitigate but not prevent damage from weaponry, and certain armor is only effective against certain kinds of forces that may damage a player.

Players will gain skill as they play, gaining the most skill in the types of weapons they use most.

OCS Enabled Weapons and Ratings

Because of the variety of effects that may be in play on the OCS theater, OCS requires weapons that conform to a very specific protocol. The "OCS Certified" mark indicates that a product is compatible with OCS and provides information about a products OCS capabilities. Let's look at the OCS certification marks for the SIG 556 and M1 Abrams.

A Note About Animation Overriders (AOs)

Because of how Second Life handles animations, some AOs may interfere with the animations done by your OCS gear. AOs also frequently interfere with mouselook aiming, making a weapon appear to not shoot where one is aiming. It is suggested that you shut off any AOs while using OCS gear.

The End

OCS was a long ongoing project before it was ever released to the public, and we consider it a "work of the state of the art, in progress."

The Omega Concern promises to support your OCS HUD for the lifetime of the product, with free upgrades and bug fixes for all versions.

Above all else, have fun. :)