Copy and Pasting Playable Units and Setting Groups to Playable - Tutorial

[sakura_chan 9]

I may not be a mission designer, but I am making an upgrade of sorts for the mission editor. One problem I found was that it is not possible by any means to copy and paste a unit while retaining its 'playable' condition. Also, laying down groups requires that each unit needs to be manually set as playable in the editor. I'm not sure if this has been suggested but I thought I would throw it out there anyways. Maybe sticky? This can save people a lot of time.

Individual Units

Place the unit to be copied. If copying the player, make one copy first and use that copy for the base.

Set up anything that you want applied to all the copied units

Make sure you DO NOT set it as 'playable' or 'player'

Set the "elevation" (or "Pos Z" in my mod) to a specific low height, I used 0.001

Copy and paste the units as you see fit, then save the mission.

Minimize A3, and open up the mission.sqm in notepad (or whatever you use). It would be a good idea to back it up at this point.

Using the 'replace' option, search for the elevation condition that you set for the units you want playable.

An elevation of 0.001 would be

offsetY=0.001;

replace it with

player="PLAY CDG";

Save the mission.sqm and reload it in A3

Any units that had an elevation of 0.001 are now playable and elevation is reset to 0

Groups

Same idea, but a little different for groups.

Place your group, set its direction to 0.001

Don't rotate the group yet, keep it facing 0.001

Save the mission, load it in notepad. Back it up.

Using replace, find the azimut line for the group. A little weird, but it won't be exactly 0.001, here it is 0.00099999993

azimut = 0.00099999993;

Replace it with

player="PLAY CDG";

Save the mission and reload it in A3

Any units that had a heading of 0.001 are now playable. Now you can rotate the group.

Edited October 2, 2013 by Sakura_Chan

[Kunsa 10]

Thats really neat.

Does anyone know: If you set a unit playable and during the mission the unit becomes non playable, if you can set it back as playable again? I think setPlayable is broken as far as I can see (unless Im using it wrong). I understand that if you didnt have the unit already set as playable at the beginning then it would be difficult to set up a new playable unit on a server (perhaps?) while its running. If however, it was playable at mission start, you would think it would be easy to reset it to playable again. This thread makes me wonder if its a variable somewhere that can easily be toggled back on.

[Gunter Severloh 3949]

If BIS were to implement the ideas suggested:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?149002-Make-multiple-units-playable-at-once-amp-other-editor-option-features&p=2326350#post2326350

we wouldn't need Sakura's time consuming method to make this work.