CO08 Escape Chernarus Ports for Altis and Stratis.

[Vormulac 13]

My local branch is already updated for 10 players, so this change will probably be in the next update.

Well then, carry on :D

[DaViSFiT 21]

My report:

- with standard settings unplayable (350ai, performance bad, ai too strong, mission goal isnt reachable on a realistic view).

- clean up the mission. all objects are loaded the hole time? better just spawn bases and so on only 1500m around the player. performance overall is not good even with medium settings. use cleanup scripts.

- set standard settings much lower. we played the hole mission yesterday with most settings on 1.0 and it is not possible to sneak. we had the hole time fire from all directions and couldnt get away from that.

- would be good to implement HeadlessClient.

- On start the dead soldier isnt a good story, would be better e.g. if a civilian would help us and give us a gun from the door and unlock the door.

- using other vehicles to flee is not possible. within seconds somewhere missiles come in.

- at the end both helicopters where destroyed. bad end and we couldnt do anything against that.

- good idea, nice that if the team is too loud and too slow the enemys get reinformances. Perhaps the time should be a bit higher.

- Perhaps a bit more interaction with civilians, we just ignored them. would be cool if we can ask them where we are (if we would find a civ in a house of in his garden) and he give us the name of the city.

Edited January 21, 2014 by Numrollen

[NeoArmageddon 958]

My report:

- with standard settings unplayable (350ai, performance bad, ai too strong, mission goal isnt reachable on a realistic view).

Thanks for your feedback:

Standart Settings are meant to be used for a full squad of players (eight) and a good dedicated (as the params say).

But even with high settings we get around 30 FPS on our i7-server rig. Would be good of you can say something about your server and game/machine settings.

- clean up the mission. all objects are loaded the hole time? better just spawn bases and so on only 1500m around the player. performance overall is not good even with medium settings. use cleanup scripts.

Objects are not loaded the whole time except for a very low amount of static objects. Everything else is created on the fly, cached and cleaned up if out of viewdistance.

- set standard settings much lower. we played the hole mission yesterday with most settings on 1.0 and it is not possible to sneak. we had the hole time fire from all directions and couldnt get away from that.

The numeric AI values are not standart settings, they were build in as a request for more granular AI tweaking. I recommend using the "normal" difficulty param (first or second) only. With ArmA3 AI "Easy" and "Normal" is quite challenging

- would be good to implement HeadlessClient.

It's planned but not easy, as a lot of script were written before HC was even possible and we need to disentagle some things.

- On start the dead soldier isnt a good story, would be better e.g. if a civilian would help us and give us a gun from the door and unlock the door.

We didn't want to alter the original gameplay. Maybe you should say something about this in the original A2 Escape thread. Also scripted Civ interaction is always very errorprone, especially with the dynamic character of the mission.

- using other vehicles to flee is not possible. within seconds somewhere missiles come in.

Turn down the amount of enemys and the difficulty. You obviously set it to high. The mission is hard, but there are a lot of videos on YT showing 3-4 players beating the mission.

- at the end both helicopters where destroyed. bad end and we couldnt do anything against that.

You can try hacking another comcenter for a new extraction. And what happened to the gunship escorting the helicopters?

I also recommend to secure the extraction zone before the helicopters land.

- good idea, nice that if the team is too loud and too slow the enemys get reinformances. Perhaps the time should be a bit higher.

The reinforcement time simply depends of the distance a patrol has to your location. The reinforcement is not really scripted: patrols get redirected to your location by other patrols distress calls.

If there is only one patrol (because you killed all other silent) there won't be any reinfrocement (except helicopters or a motorized patrol).

- Perhaps a bit more interaction with civilians, we just ignored them. would be cool if we can ask them where we are (if we would find a civ in a house of in his garden) and he give us the name of the city.

The original mission used BIS Alice module. This is not in A3 so we removed it from the mission. And you complain about bad perfromance and to many AI and ask for adding more civilians and scripts? The Alice-Module and all comparable script are always very resource heavy. And why ask a civilian in his garden, if you can just read the village name at a sign? :D

And I hope you have seen our planed features list on our site, some questions are already answered there: http://escape.modfact.net/index.php?page=dev

[DaViSFiT 21]

dedicated server: i7-3770K, 32GB Ram, new server exe, newest malloc, ram disk. I dont know what your i7 is running at but with 350ai you need about 5ghz to get 30fps. perhaps you can post your dedi settings?

yes we played with max player (8) and still not possible. there is no place to hide cause every spot out there is full with ai. we restarted with medium settings but it feels still like we had a 600m ring around us where ai spawns the hole time. The problem is NOT if you make this mission. i tought you should more sneak and hide and try to surprise single enemys and go on slowly to not get in danger. But what we saw was more like Rambo against the rest of the world ;)

even with turned down enemys later on most squads have at launchers with them and they are always spawning around us. so there is mostly no save zone. Or did i get it wrong?

civilians could be outside on their country house. Going in a city isnt a good idea, feel like we were trapped ;)

i dont know what happened to the gunship. we where killed after we take off. the hole team was killed. The saw the text message: mission successful but then we die and mission was not successful :confused:

[NeoArmageddon 958]

dedicated server: i7-3770K, 32GB Ram, new server exe, newest malloc, ram disk. I dont know what your i7 is running at but with 350ai you need about 5ghz to get 30fps. perhaps you can post your dedi settings?

We always run the mission pretty well on a i7-3770k with 8GB Ram. Medium or Low Enemyscount 3-5 player. Far spawn distance. ServerFPS at around 40 FPS, can drop to 25 near large cities due to increased enemyspawn. Vormulac and his mates play with a similar server and even more enemys and players.

i tought you should more sneak and hide and try to surprise single enemys and go on slowly to not get in danger. But what we saw was more like Rambo against the rest of the world ;)

Most of the time we sneak this mission. Sometimes we barricade ourself in a building if the enemy forces are pushing to strong. But we never feel like "Rambo against the world".

even with turned down enemys later on most squads have at launchers with them and they are always spawning around us. so there is mostly no save zone. Or did i get it wrong?

Enemys don't spawn if you stop moving. The caching and procedural patrol generation generates new patrols as you move on, but there are no unlimited respawning waves of enemys. The spawn system don't work this way.

i dont know what happened to the gunship. we where killed after we take off. the hole team was killed. The saw the text message: mission successful but then we die and mission was not successful :confused:

"Missions successful" means your made it to the extraction. You can still fail by getting shoot down (or survive the crash and get to another extract). Would be strange to get killed after extraction and also win.

Are you sure you are running the correct version (1.6). Sounds to me like you are using a very old build without our changes of the last months (new spawnsystem, gunship, better balanced AI and loadout, performance optimization).

EDIT: Some serveradmins report that the overall server performance had a significant drop with the new 1.10 patch. This sould also affect Escape.

Edited January 21, 2014 by NeoArmageddon

[DaViSFiT 21]

Vormulac and his mates play with a similar server and even more enemys and players. Would be strange to get killed after extraction and also win.

Are you sure you are running the correct version (1.6). Sounds to me like you are using a very old build without our changes of the last months (new spawnsystem, gunship, better balanced AI and loadout, performance optimization).

EDIT: Some serveradmins report that the overall server performance had a significant drop with the new 1.10 patch. This sould also affect Escape.

So, would be good to hear the server/dedicated settings then. 40 serverFPS would be good, we played on medium and had 18-30. Always around 40 ai around visible and several vehicles around (civ and military), so about 120-140ai always on the server. dont know why we had this bad performance.

We dont play beta/dev build, only full release. I downloaded the mission one week ago.

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Just played a round with new 1.10 Patch and 5 players. Performance stable at 42 FPS with All medium settings. We sneaked a while around, ambushed a roadbarrier, gathered a Fenec and a Varsuk and made our way to comcenter and the coast.

And by the way: It doesn't say "Mission complete", it says "Task complete, roundevous with allied forces" :D

So, make sure to download the newest version and the latest serverpatch. Try to lower the difficulty. Some of the hints are old. I recommend "Few Enemys" for groups up to 4 players and the medium settings for 5-8.

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Here is a little preview for the 1.7 update:

[Dezztroy 10]

Is.. Is that Chernarus? Oh yes.

Will there be an easier way to change the enemies that spawn than manually changing all the classnames in the scripts? Chernarus without AKMs would just feel wrong.

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Is.. Is that Chernarus? Oh yes.

That's not Chernarus :D

But I also have a similar picture of Chernarus on my HDD.

[razzaman 10]

Hi Vormulac,

Firstly i would like to congratulate you on what is simply the greatest mission me and my team mates have ever played on Arma3!

That being said, this is our preferred mission but cherno is our preferred map.

I have ported (the best i can) everything from your current 1.6 version over to the cherno map.

Everything works brilliantly apart from a couple of things and i just wondered if you would be willing to take the time to give me some much needed advice?

1) On initialization, sometimes the mission will load but the cherno environment will not (maybe 1 in 5 times it will load perfect)

2) I notice that your com towers are created with coordinates, at the moment when i finally obtain a map, all i see is the red icons for the ammo dumps, no towers, and there is also a lot of markers north of cherno in the ocean. Could it be as simple as editing the coordinates for both the ammo and towers??

Kindest regards

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Hey razzaman,

we already backported our mission to a lot of maps (have a look at the last screenshot in this thread). Version 1.7 will propably be realses for more than 4 islands (including A3MP chernarus).

Regarding your problems: 1 and 2 are a related problem. There are a lot of markers that are placed on the map and must be moved. Also chernarus is much smaller than Altis. Prior to 1.7 most of the island values were hardcoded. You propably haven't changed those. That is the reason the mission isn't working properly "out-of-the-box" on Chernarus. For 1.7 we changed most of the code and porting will be much easier.

[razzaman 10]

Neo, that's awesome news! Do we have an estimated date of the 1.7 release at all? You have saved me tons of time and headaches :) Keep up the good work guys.....

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Neo, that's awesome news! Do we have an estimated date of the 1.7 release at all? You have saved me tons of time and headaches :) Keep up the good work guys.....

At the moment we are at a process of reworking the base of the mission. In 1.6 a lot of scripts were direct ports from the A2 missions from Engima. Other parts of the mission were completly reworked with A3 features (for example the AI and the searchleader system).

We are currently creating a completly new framework for the mission. More stable, reliable and expendable. When this is done, we reimplement old features (ComCenter, Ammo and Prison is already finsihed) and then we will continue with some completly new features.

So probably the 1.7 version will be renamed to 2.0. You can track the development process in the offical Git repository: https://github.com/Vormulac/co08_Escape.Altis/tree/2.0

When the mission is playable again, I thought of making somekind of nightly build for the mission.

Estimated time: 1-2 weeks until the 1.7/2.0 is playable again. Propably 1-2 month for a RC version.

[razzaman 10]

At the moment we are at a process of reworking the base of the mission. In 1.6 a lot of scripts were direct ports from the A2 missions from Engima. Other parts of the mission were completly reworked with A3 features (for example the AI and the searchleader system).

We are currently creating a completly new framework for the mission. More stable, reliable and expendable. When this is done, we reimplement old features (ComCenter, Ammo and Prison is already finsihed) and then we will continue with some completly new features.

So probably the 1.7 version will be renamed to 2.0. You can track the development process in the offical Git repository: https://github.com/Vormulac/co08_Escape.Altis/tree/2.0

When the mission is playable again, I thought of making somekind of nightly build for the mission.

Estimated time: 1-2 weeks until the 1.7/2.0 is playable again. Propably 1-2 month for a RC version.

Thanks for the info, ill keep updated.

But out of curiosity, for now, how would i go about altering the dimensions for cherno?

I have moved the relevant markers inc the center marker and extraction / extraction spawn markers.

Would just be nice to be able to play until 1.7 is released. If too much is required then not to worry.

Im not a complete novice when it comes to coding as i can code in html & some php so i can get my head around it, just need pointing in the right direction :)

Kind regards

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Im not a complete novice when it comes to coding as i can code in html & some php so i can get my head around it, just need pointing in the right direction :)

Have a look into "Scripts/Drn/functions.sqf". There is a function to generate the spawnposition (findgoodpos or something). You need to alter the dimensions.

Also you need a new set of village markers. The original villagemarker config is in the vanilla A2 Escape mission.

[lenymo 10]

any update on the A3 chernarus port of this? It is playable (If you dont mind occasionally spawning off the map) and I dont have the time to go through the code and make sure everything is correct for the chernarus map

[armedpuncher 1]

How about you put a please and thanks in that post you rude c###

[RoyWheels 10]

How about you put a please and thanks in that post you rude c###

Thanks for getting me to finally sign up for an account here. Being able to report you for plain nastiness was a good encouragement.

There is no need for insulting posts like this anywhere on the internetz. Just because someone doesn't add a please or thank you does not mean they are being rude. They're just asking a question. Calling someone a c*** on the other hand is way out of line.

---------- Post added at 12:27 ---------- Previous post was at 12:13 ----------

any update on the A3 chernarus port of this? It is playable (If you dont mind occasionally spawning off the map) and I dont have the time to go through the code and make sure everything is correct for the chernarus map

I've been using the Escape mission as a way to learn about Arma scripting and mission making as I love the dynamic quality of it. It's a steep learning curve and my efforts are very much hack and slash :j: but I did manage to get v1.6 to work in Chernarus. The key thing, apart from using the correct village and com center markers, was (as NeoArmageddon mentioned) using the code for 'FindGoodPos' from the original A2 mission. This is the bit you need to copy into your a3 version:

drn_fnc_Escape_FindGoodPos = {
   private ["_i", "_startPos", "_isOk", "_result", "_roadSegments", "_dummyObject"];

   // Choose a random and flat position (for-loopen and markers are for test on new maps).
   for [{_i = 0},  {_i < 1}, {_i = _i + 1}] do {
       _isOk = false;
       while {!_isOk} do {
           if (random 100 > 60) then {
               _startPos = + [8000 + random 5000, 4000 + random 6000]; // Most difficult place
           }
           else {
               if (random 100 > 50) then {
                   _startPos = + [4000 + random 9000, 3000 + random 6000]; // Difficult place
               }
               else {
                   _startPos = + [500 + random 12500, 500 + random 12500]; // Easiest place
               };
           };

Thanks Vormulac and NeoArmageddon for bringing this fun mission to Arma 3. Your code has been great to learn from! :)

EDIT: You also have to change _maxDistance = 1500; which is also in the Functions file. I set it at 500 but try different values that suit you.

There's probably other stuff I've fiddled with and forgotten about but that should get you nearer to the joys of escaping Chernarus.

Side note- I couldn't get the 1.7 code to work in Chernarus. For some reason, no ambient activity would occur if the initial spawn area was away from the coast! Most strange and beyond my limited knowledge to know how to fix.

Edited March 15, 2014 by RoyWheels

[NeoArmageddon 958]

EDIT: You also have to change _maxDistance = 1500; which is also in the Functions file. I set it at 500 but try different values that suit you.

There's probably other stuff I've fiddled with and forgotten about but that should get you nearer to the joys of escaping Chernarus.

Side note- I couldn't get the 1.7 code to work in Chernarus. For some reason, no ambient activity would occur if the initial spawn area was away from the coast! Most strange and beyond my limited knowledge to know how to fix.

You also need to change the amount of Comcenters and Weapondepots directly in the server code to match with the size of cherna.

Also you have to add objects/trigger/zones for the additional elements we created after porting the mission to A3 (like boats and roadblocks).

And if you got the 1.7 code from Git: It's probably broken as I was trying to fix some spawn issues but ran into some serious misconceptions of the older spawncode. I started to recode large parts of the spawn but I am not done yet (due to my limited time).

And just to say it again: Everyone is welcome to join the developing of escape. Just send me or Vormulac a PM.

[RoyWheels 10]

You also need to change the amount of Comcenters and Weapondepots directly in the server code to match with the size of cherna.

Also you have to add objects/trigger/zones for the additional elements we created after porting the mission to A3 (like boats and roadblocks).

And if you got the 1.7 code from Git: It's probably broken as I was trying to fix some spawn issues but ran into some serious misconceptions of the older spawncode. I started to recode large parts of the spawn but I am not done yet (due to my limited time).

And just to say it again: Everyone is welcome to join the developing of escape. Just send me or Vormulac a PM.

I'd love to get more involved if I can improve my arma scripting knowhow. It's all hack and slash for me at the minute. :D

[AstroRetro 10]

RoyWheels, hey it sounds pretty awesome if you have a working Escape Chernarus with the v1.6 code. My team plays Escape Altis v1.6 almost every week and it is still our go-to mission when our other weekly downloads are too bug-ridden, boring or downright silly. Perhaps you can join the development team and it can be released as an informal Alpha/Beta release on this forum to give us old Chernarus junkies the fix we so desperately crave. We would be happy to test it further and let you know of any bugs. It may also give Neo & Vorm the time they need to work their wizardry on the new code so that it can be more easily ported to the many islands they have planned.

My team and I are big fans of the work being done here as this is more than just a mission. It creates a fully-occupied enemy island that does not take kindly to the appearance of intruders and sends out an appropriately hostile and persistent reaction to deal with it. We believe the mission has enormous further potential as the basis for many other behind-enemy-lines scenarios.

[NeoArmageddon 958]

My team and I are big fans of the work being done here as this is more than just a mission. It creates a fully-occupied enemy island that does not take kindly to the appearance of intruders and sends out an appropriately hostile and persistent reaction to deal with it. We believe the mission has enormous further potential as the basis for many other behind-enemy-lines scenarios.

I am always happy to read that people like the mission and think about it the same way like me.

I pushed a litttle Update to the 1.7 Branch. I also uploaded a compiled version here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vmeo63q2tbazx7s/co10_Escape.Altis.pbo

The Version is called co10 Escape Altis 1.7 Dev7.

Some fixed for Revive, Weather (Random Weateher currently disabled) and a lot of other stuff.

[tortuosit 486]

I'm not at my gaming rig... Can this be played SP or as locally hosted LAN with one player?

I'd like to play this as sp. In Arma 2, this has always been my fallback mission if I was sick of other missions,.. Or bored... Or lazy... In Arma 3 its Editor plus Alive... Or the Pilgrimage mission...

Edited March 22, 2014 by tortuosit

[NeoArmageddon 958]

Should work alone with LAN-hosting. But it will not be easy.