[SP] Lost v 4.0 - Like a mash-up of 'Dogs of War' and 'Manhattan' (without the bugs)!

[markb50k 1]

If its consistently 5 seconds I would think you could diagnose it.

I do a check for the war status every 60 seconds so it's probably not that Could be the check intel script. Look in pulse.sqf and that should show you all the cyclical checks.

Since you are running your own version you could remove the version check which may run every 5 seconds since its worthless to you? Just some ideas

Sorry but I don't notice any consistent hiccup like you describe

[Rydygier 1302]

Thanks, already adjusted all these pulse loops, some disabled (these first-time missions). I guess, only with weak CPU these cyclical lags are present. This must be something with called code, as spawned or execVM-ed code will rather suffer delays, than causing any lags, so for these loops replaced call with spawn and added some sleeps. Two possibities: 1. I missed some loop; 2. This is not because of loop, but maybe caused some another way (???) cyclical CPU overload. Noticeable is, that this is not present in older version... Well, I'll investigate this further.

PS. I must admit, that this is first and for now the only mission, I liked so much, that I wanted to do such adjustments for future usage. :) I even have somewhere on my HDD very early, unfinished version of quite similar SP dynamic, that I made before I learned about Lost. It shows how close is the Lost mission to my tastes.

Edited July 10, 2012 by Rydygier

[kiberkiller 10]

Nice mission markb50k!! Overall i cant really complain but i have some suggestion to make it better.

1. I dont really like the search houses and get random enemy spawned concept, maybe because it's not really tactical to me. How about raiding guard posts, enemy patrols, road blocks, armory, camps and etc to find items instead of searching houses. This way you can recon the area and plan your attack properly.

2. Recruiting volunteers can be done by raising the town affinity toward you, after the town have increase to certain point then you get recruits from there.

3. Units experience - I'm not sure if it's possible but it would be great if after certain numbers of kills your units will level up/ have better stats. Gives you more incentive to bring them to battle and let them do the killing.

4. Gain skill - Maybe adding random mission where you can learn skills like lockpick or repair added to you.

5. Enemy air - Once i manage to find a M1 tank and i saw there's enemy hind in the air, after i shoot it down i notice it keep coming every 5-10min even after i shot like 4 of them =( . I dont think the enemy can send that many reinforcement at 1 time.

6. Military Vehicles - I dont like the idea of finding random empty tanks on the map, how about you find it on deserted military camps or captured by the enemy. this way, you need to raid the enemy camps to get better vehicles or ambush enemy patrols and repair it.

I'd like to have all of these things as well. Particularity changing separate houses into single Town entity, Warfare style.

To be honest, I stopped playing Apocalypse and went back to playing Lost.

Apocalypse doesn't really have any structure or that same sense of progression as Lost does and it gets dull after a while.

[markb50k 1]

Nice mission markb50k!! Overall i cant really complain but i have some suggestion to make it better.

1. I dont really like the search houses and get random enemy spawned concept, maybe because it's not really tactical to me. How about raiding guard posts, enemy patrols, road blocks, armory, camps and etc to find items instead of searching houses. This way you can recon the area and plan your attack properly.

2. Recruiting volunteers can be done by raising the town affinity toward you, after the town have increase to certain point then you get recruits from there.

3. Units experience - I'm not sure if it's possible but it would be great if after certain numbers of kills your units will level up/ have better stats. Gives you more incentive to bring them to battle and let them do the killing.

4. Gain skill - Maybe adding random mission where you can learn skills like lockpick or repair added to you.

5. Enemy air - Once i manage to find a M1 tank and i saw there's enemy hind in the air, after i shoot it down i notice it keep coming every 5-10min even after i shot like 4 of them =( . I dont think the enemy can send that many reinforcement at 1 time.

6. Military Vehicles - I dont like the idea of finding random empty tanks on the map, how about you find it on deserted military camps or captured by the enemy. this way, you need to raid the enemy camps to get better vehicles or ambush enemy patrols and repair it.

overall it's a great mission, thanks for a job well done =D

1. a lot of that is already set up, i.e. enemy patrols, camps, weapons caches, are already in the mission and you can search those for loot. you dont even really need to search houses. you have choices.

2. your method, which was actually an older method i used to use, ended up being too repetitive. so i changed it. now you can raise affinity and when you do youll know where the resistance fighters are OR just search the houses until you find them. Again, choices. And in this case, i prefer the way i have it now.

3. Its possible. Something to consider. The old versions of LOST actually had running scripts for each unit that raised their skill as they did things. It ended up being something i hardly noticed, but cost significant CPU processing. Arma 2 gets too busy with so many scripts running at the same time.

4. Also possible.

5. The enemy can do that, and will. But it will run out. They only have a limited number of air assets.

6. You can find vehicles at deserted camps or capture from the enemy. You can ALSO just run across an empty vehicle. Again, its choices I give and variety.

Overall, I appreciate the feedback. It seems that overall you want a more RPG aspect of the mission, which I will admit, I have tried to add to it, but obviously you could continue to add more RPG features forever.

At this point, i dont see me adding much more to LOST as I am concentrating on APOCALYPSE.

I saw mention that someone went back to LOST after playing APOC, I say thats great! I'm glad that I can give people choices for the style they play. I guess that's what i make missions for.

Also, Realize that you can make APOC play like LOST by just having the enemy far outnumber your side. Thus you end up fighting a guerilla style war. Just a suggestion...

[Snake_61 10]

Still like playing "LOST" a lot...but I'm having problems!

Updated to Ver.5.7 and it still takes very long to search Houses.No matter if Chernorus-Map or Podagorsk-Map.

I'm on first day afternoon 5p.m. in Podagorsk and gained 26%victory, I think after so much battle the CPU-load could be high?

Standing near a door of a house, takes very long to get option for "search"...then after clicking on search still very much time to get any result!

But if I switch to map then back, it happens that "searchcommand" instantly appears or the search shows any results!?

This is not always the case...

Don't think the CPU is the bottleneck, it's a i7-920 @4GHz...

Oh yes...another strange thing happened: started Mission with Ver.5.4 then updated to 5.7 manually.

But last time I played I got a message (ingame) that it updated automaticly to Vers. 5.5 !

Again,great Mission and big challenge...but Housesearching is slowing down so it's becoming almost unplayable.

Any clues or help are realy welcomed.

[markb50k 1]

the message about updating to 5.5 is fine. code-wise, i didnt have to do anything special to go to 5.7 so the updater code doesnt show it. those messages are only for updates that that i have to do some code to change your save game.

unfortunately i'd have to do a complete rewrite of LOST to long-term improve the performance of the search houses, by moving all the scripts to FSMs. Dont know if i am up for that.

[Snake_61 10]

Thank You Mark, as always You take care of Your "people" ;)

Glod to know now about this "problem" and knowing it's not my machine, which causes trouble!

Take Your time, I know Your in that Apocalypse-stuff involved these days.

[fishshrike 1]

Love to play Lost, but was wondering whether it is possible to play as some of the OPFOR factions?

Edited August 15, 2012 by Fishshrike

[markb50k 1]

sorry, but the short answer is no. the effort to add in the ability for the mission to allow for any combination of allied and enemy sides and factions was a major part of my decision to start the Apocalypse mission concept. I had to rebuild it from the ground up to do so, and I dont think it would be doable to LOST without a major modification.

If someone wanted to take up that effort, I'd be grateful.

[fishshrike 1]

Okay- I'll tinker around and let you know if I get anywhere.

[Shad0wCatcher 10]

Apologies for semi-resurrecting this, but I'm trying to wrap my head around your init_weapons // init_factions scripts. Searched multiple permutations however didn't find anything remotely close to what I'm requesting. Are the numbers posted before the classnames in the weapon init script percentages or absolute numbers to spawn? Just working on a few personal edits to add more flavor (via ACE classes). Same deal with the faction init and duplicated unit classes. I can only assume that adds more "weight" per se for each particular unit. Am I close on that?

At any rate, I am immensely enjoying this mission type so far. I've been having an absolute blast with it. Thank you for producing this fine work and sharing it with us.

On an odder note. I've been running this on Tigeria (as well as a quick Chernarus test) quite a bit (love that island) and I've noticed every single air patrol with USMC or mixed USMC / BAF units as friendly w/ Insurgents or Russians as the east faction are either Apache AH1 (BAF version) or the AH-64D. I was expecting Hinds; not friendly 30 mike-mike blowing my ass to pieces.

Edited August 21, 2012 by Shad0wCatcher
One further point of note.

[markb50k 1]

the numbers in both cases are weights. i think in init.sqf you see i use the numbers for the weapons to construct the big array of weapons, and for each number i add another copy of the corresponding array.

for init factions, yeah, more rifleman means i want rifleman weighted more than snipers for instance.

as for the odd note, are you saying that you see AH1s and AH64s as the enemy helicopters as well? If so, that is not intended. let me know and ill take a look.

[Shad0wCatcher 10]

the numbers in both cases are weights. i think in init.sqf you see i use the numbers for the weapons to construct the big array of weapons, and for each number i add another copy of the corresponding array.

for init factions, yeah, more rifleman means i want rifleman weighted more than snipers for instance.

as for the odd note, are you saying that you see AH1s and AH64s as the enemy helicopters as well? If so, that is not intended. let me know and ill take a look.

Good deal on both notes. Much appreciated. Regarding clarification, correct. I've only run a small sample size (approximately 20 mission starts of varying difficulty) however in each of them I've not seen a single Hind in the air. They are spawning however. In my last mission start one was parked on one of the helipad compositions in pristine condition. However, the only air units I've seen flying have been BAF AH1s and AH-64Ds; all enemy-controlled. I only took notice of it as I haven't run US Army as a blufor faction yet for it to even be an option to spawn; only USMC or USMC / BAF mixed. Opfor has been either Insurgents or Russian factions; never combined; always one or the other. I thought at first it might have been a simple config error causing the air units to spawn only Apache subtypes but I got a little sidetracked adding most every permutation of every weapon / ammo type in the ACE classlists to the weapon init.

I really really should have been to sleep about four hours ago but I wanted to get this done. Lol. Once I finish it up if you'd like I can shoot you the file to look over if you desire.

[markb50k 1]

ok ill look at the code. AH64s are in USMC so they should spawn for friendlies, but definitely not for enemy.

---------- Post added at 15:42 ---------- Previous post was at 14:38 ----------

Code looks like its fine, Shadowcatcher, can you tell me what weights you are putting in your faction choices?

Its been so long since i've looked closely at the Lost code, so I misspoke above, the only gunship patrols are enemy, and friendly factions chosen CAN contribute classes to the possible enemy spawns. So its possible that AH64s gets flown by opfor.

so if you choose USMC, the AH64 gets added to the possible list of enemy gunships.

if you choose BAF, the BAF AH1 gets added

but only one instance of each class gets added.

If you choose Russia, this gets added...

["Mi24_V", "Mi24_P", "Mi24_V", "Ka52","Mi24_V", "Mi24_P", "Mi24_V", "Ka52"]

so, the majority of the time, even with one AH64 entry and one BAF AH1 entry added to this array, the Hinds should win out most of the time.

Now for when you choose CHKDZ, since they have no gunships, you will ONLY see western helicopters, so you are correct there. I would always choose RU vehicles with at least weight 1 in this case

Edited August 21, 2012 by markb50k

[Shad0wCatcher 10]

-snip-

That's what I figured when I looked at the unit inits and didn't see any helos for Insurgents mark. Much appreciate your time. I'll probably end up adding a few helos to their init so they aren't so lost. One really odd question though if you have the time: I added an ACE Force Recon machine-gunner unit to the USMC base unit init (ACE_FR_MG; his superclass is FR_AR) but when I recompiled and restarted the mission none of the factions were listed at all except for Civilians. Once I removed it everything returned to normal.

Any thoughts on why that might be? Possible load order issues? Anyone else have any problems like this?

With regards to the weapon config I'm still proofing it. Just got back from a business trip that ate up literally the entire day.

[markb50k 1]

My guess is you had a typo when you added in your new classname or forgot a quotation mark or a comma. The civilians and troops are invited in different files. If all you see is the civilians it probably couldn't compile the init factions file. If you aren't already you should run arma with the -showscripterrors option enabled on the command line. It will make it really easy to see those kinds of errors

[Shad0wCatcher 10]

Added a couple commas to the ends of my array lists. Oops. Read below however.

EDIT: Your scripts still aren't recognizing ACE ammo or weapons. I've gone over my own configs six ways from sunday. It's also the exact same list I've used for every one of my missions. Getting a ton of script errors from undefined classes in wtyp1 / wtyp when trying to create the caches. It seems as if it cannot read the ACE classfiles at all; hence my original question regarding load orders.

Edited August 22, 2012 by Shad0wCatcher

[markb50k 1]

well, load order means nothing once you get to runtime. In runtime, the script is just looking for the class presence in the configfile >> "CfgWeapons". No matter what the load order, as long as you are loading ACE in your modpath it should find them.

PM me the array you are using for:

mbVanillaWeapons and mbVanillaMagazines in the init_weapons.sqf (I'm guessing this is where you are making your edits, right? If not, send me what you are using as the new array)

[Shad0wCatcher 10]

well, load order means nothing once you get to runtime. In runtime, the script is just looking for the class presence in the configfile >> "CfgWeapons". No matter what the load order, as long as you are loading ACE in your modpath it should find them.

PM me the array you are using for:

mbVanillaWeapons and mbVanillaMagazines in the init_weapons.sqf (I'm guessing this is where you are making your edits, right? If not, send me what you are using as the new array)

Correct. I'm building new arrays within vanilla weaps / vanilla mags. Using yours as a baseline with regards to what should be rare and what shouldn't.

[markb50k 1]

Update:

LOST now merged into the APOCALYPSE mission as a selectable MODE. Please go here to get LOST.

APOCALYPSE Thread

[minicus 1]

Again, lags the shit out of my computer. :O

[anthropoid 1]

Hey minicus, yeah, when I use large numbers of enemies and if I have lots of things going on in a small area I do notice some lag. It is a processor intensive mission that is for sure. No real way around that except better hardware I suspect ;)

[[frl]myke 14]

Again, lags the shit out of my computer. :O

We surely appreciate feedback posts in this forum but could you rephrase that and add some more details, please? ;)

[domokun 515]

Does anyone have any tips on how to setup an I44 game that is realistic?

The reason I ask is that despite spending over an hour configuring and testing I alway seem to start the mission in a C130 which for June 1944 seems weird.

Once on the ground these historical inaccuracies continue with hescos and sat coms towers.

In fact I almost pissed my pants when I saw a wehrmacht infantry man run away from me to seek shelter in an Igla pod.

WTF!?

Some kind of wunderwaffen?