Several Questions for (Advanced) Modders (under current Beta)

[janh 0]

Hi guys,

I am have accumulated several questions working for month on various problems, and cannot find satisfying answers here or on the other modding forums (Devheaven etc). Some things may be depreciated commands that do not work with ARMA2 anymore, others may be bugs, or just not intended to work as such. Any help sorting this out, or advising me of "efficient" scripting alternatives is much appreciated:

- forcespeed: doesn't seem to work with ARMA2 anymore? Is it due to the recent beta patches? Is it a bug? This would be an extremely useful command for all class vehicles!

- limitspeed: seems that it has to be looped continuously, else the unit will return to its old speed? And the loop delay must be short else the unit will be hopping like a rabbit? A bug? Any alternative but to have to use another thread to get a unit to limit/force its speed? Given the scheduled and non-scheduled environments, I could add an FSM to do so, but with SLX_Wounds, ACE, ACRE, MMA etc. the scripting load is already pretty high. I would leave more resources for my own scripts if possible... Ideas?

- fireAtTarget: Is this intended for vehicle turrets only? I cannot get to work on class Man. Bug? Not intended? Workaround? This would also be a useful to avoid the lookat, selectweapon, fire or action[] sequence by a single command.

- Is there any command like the "say" that allows to broadcast a text to adjacent players/man (within a defined/custom radius)?

- Dead "Man class" objects: It appears that dying soldiers etc. forget name, side, group and ALL variables attached to them via "setvariable". This looks like a bug to me? It would be most desirable if setvariables could remain stored since that would make storing much information indirectly passed between scripts (like dragger, dragger "called/approaching", healing, actionIDs etc.) a lot easier. For the side and faction associations one can always check "getNumber (configFile>>"CfgVehicles">>typeof _dead>>"side")", and reassociate with the "SIDE" or "WFSideText", but it causes unnecessary scripting overhead in my opinion. Also looks like unintended functionality, or has this been like this since ARMA2 release? Do you know any workaround aside from storing things in global variables/arrays or in the group namespace?

Many thanks for any answers!

Stranger

[janh 0]

There is one more problem I ran into a couple of times, which I had to solve "inelegantly":

- not only "iskindof" (stated in wiki) but also "Counttype" (not stated) do obviously only work on classes in CfgAmmo and CfgVehicles. Right? At least I have issues to get scripts to test whether "M16" iskindof "Rifle" or such with both commands. One can script a looped function that checks "inheritsfrom" for the tree of objects in CfgMagazines and CfgWeapons, but this probably adds unnecessary load/overhead compared to a hardcoded function, as usual I guess.

It would be nice if both commands could be extended to the CfgMagazines and CfgWeapons in a patch or ARMA3, though. But does anyone know of an "efficient" function as an alternative?

- Does anyone know of a function that can CHECK for "connected water areas" or "water routes" between connected points, perhaps given a water under keel threshold?

Something similar to the BIS "plotroute" function for tracing routes along road networks? The latter is pretty elegant, though for many user-made maps it seems to fail since road networks are not properly connected/defined, are too scarce (often with Vietnam type maps) or do not allow for many interconnecting loops (or sometimes roads with barriers at the sides, or twin lanes with barriers in center cause AI routing issues later -- e.g. on Fallujah's highways). With some larger changes, this function works like a charm, though.

I tried to devise a similar function for boats around deep water, or along rivers, but even considering water depth, gradient and such it is either vastly inefficient, or often fails to find connections to inland water ways. Does anyone know of a working, efficient script for this problem?