large [SP/MP][COOP] Patrol Operations - Official Thread

[ramius86 13]

[*]Headless Client AutoDetection

I've started mission with HC but HC doesn't move in any slot and there isn't an HC slot. I've simply to put this in a random slot?

I've tried start a mission with HC in a random slot but AI are spawned on server, not hc

[olivr.M 10]

Congrats

[streetal 10]

When i unzip the file from Armaholic, i only get a notepad document, no .pbo files. Where is the correct download for this?

[Senshi 10]

Some bug reports:

1) If the "remove dead vehicles" setting is enabled, vehicles are removed very aggressively. While it's a nice idea to reduce clutter and increase perfomance, currently the players' side vehicles are NOT exempted from this function, resulting in vehicles being despawned a couple of minutes after being deserted.

2) We had the "clean airfield" mission just now, and our bobcat got its engine killed en route by a surprise attack. Despite the gunner position being manned, the vehicle despawned, ejecting the confused gunner...just when we had organized an engineer team to be brought up to get the vehicle back up.

I think player vehicles should stay up for a looooong time, no matter if deserted or damaged. Maybe a map marker to indicate them once they are abandonend for 30+min in the field (if players forgot the location ;) ), but in every other case I think it's the whole point of the logistics system to take care of those vehicles by the players. Only despawn vehicles if they truly are irrecoverable (=exploded).

3) After some more firefights at said airfield (perhaps after eliminating the last enemy soldier, not confirmed) we surprisingly got a "Task successful" message despite not a single crater having been cleared. Maybe a buggy victory condition?

4) A "Defend" mission was placed on a military base south east of the airfield. The name displayed was merely the variable "%1" (Defend %1 on the task name), and the mission did not trigger despite us being set up at the target location and waiting 15minutes... No enemies were spawned, simply nothing happened. Had to skip that one. The "%1" variable being used might be because there was no named town/village in the vicinity, which usually are used for the task name?

5) Heavily wounded/downed players become invincible, but still are targeted by the AI. This leads to immersion-breaking effects such as an AAV spending hundreds of 30mm rounds on the player, chucking huge parts of flesh out of him without anything more happening. Or a tank shooting HE shells with the only effect on the body being propelled a couple of meters...Continued injury after being "down" should at the very least increase bleeding drastically and lead to quick KIA

6) While "assisting" a downed player, we found that when using "cancel first aid", the downed player would instantly be revived (with the message "... was helped up by ... " showing), disregarding the actual progress of the first aid progress bar. This allows "cheaty" near-instant revives.

7) The list of roles to assign via Squadmod is limited: We could not find an explosive specialist (for demo missions). Also: Who has access to the mine detector for mine clearing missions?

8) We got the mission to transport urgent supplies to a town, to be picked up at the "return point" in the base. Nothing was available to be picked up at the return point, so we had to skip the mission.

9) We had the mission to "capture O'Brien" (made me laugh :) ). Got him captured, flew him home, ordered him to move right on top of the return point and: Nothing...task success did not trigger as expected. We decided to execute him (couldn't shoot him in base, so we decided for the far less noble "run-over" execution method...) which then triggered a task failure. Which also was a bit odd, because the task description states that an "elimination within the RoE is accepted".

10) Dynamic Weather is not synchronized amongst the clients. One can have the fairest weather with the next experiencing a thunderstorm. I think this is a stock ArmA sync issue?

11) Are "ambient ground patrols" working? We played now for many hours with the RCs and today with the Release version, and never encountered a random hostile patrol. With ambient air patrols we did encounter the occasional lone CAS helicopter.

That's all the issues for now we encountered, I think.

On the upside, some good feedack for the last RCs: Love the new VAS system with individual gear lists for each role. Very nice idea and awesome implementation, even if players complained about "yet again having to set up their default gears". But once they figured out that they could store the presets per-role, it quickly was accepted as a nice idea.

3D HUD is absolutely awesome and blends perfectly with the ArmA "future" setting. It's useful without being obstructive or too gamey.

Suggestion: Instead of the "personal" rally points that exist right now wouldn't a single squad-based rally-point (to be placed by the SQL) not make more sense? While I agree that the tent town of rally points looks cute, it's useless for JIP players that have to catch up to their squad. They either have to be taxied in or do a HALO jump. Personally, I would like to disable the HALO function entirely on our server, as it also beats the purpose of logistics and the focus on "staying alive" a bit by providing a too simple means of insertion. In turn a player-based logistics and SQL rally points would complement the no-HALO-vesion perfectly, I think.

EDIT: Forgot about that: We had the "Research vessel distress signal" mission and expected some nice diver/boarding/ship-on-board action. Were a bit disappointed when we all suited up and inserted by speedboat, sneakily diving the last hundreds of meters expecting to board the ship by surprise. Nope, no way to get on the ship, and the only enemy are a bunch of hostile speedboats...was a bit "meh...". Especially as 3/4 of them got themselves beached out of range of the research ship...but I guess that's just stupid boat AI.

Would it be possible to get some hostile infantry on the boat (and a means for the player to get on board from the sea?). Some hostile divers would be a nice touch as well.

Edited December 1, 2013 by Senshi

[ziant 14]

thanks for releasing this for public. been waiting for this. :)

[roy86 367]

Cheers Guys, I'm glad your enjoying it.

the Virtual ammobox doesnt allow modded weapons to show up is there a way to fix this?

Ammoboxes are fixed to the unit classes, not your traditional VAS. The mission configs can be added to if you want to include specific addons but there are too many for me to cater for so I have opted for a license to support your own modifications and ports.

<AWESOME FEEDBACK>

Cheers senshi, I'll be reviewing and fixing any bugs that are logged in the dev-heaven project. Otherwise its too much text to read :p

We had an awesome launch and I'm looking forward to adding to it in the future. Plenty of more feature updates to be added in but I'll stagger those out over time as we go.

Cheers,

[Senshi 10]

Alright, I'll bring those issues over there to soil your squeaky clean issue tracker, then :) .

[hansson0728 12]

Hi, i saw this video, ARMA 3 Bullet Damage Enhancement (Patrol Ops 3: Remove AI Body Armour) i really like and i would like to incorporate it one of my missions. how does it work ?? how can i use this in another mission ???

[Predator.v2 10]

Some things.

- Maybe you could remove the default inventory items from the ammoboxes? Yesterday the first public player joining our server realized, he could grab himself a marksman rifle and explosives and other cool stuff, ignoring his rifleman kit

- In our round yesterday, after some time we realized, that everyone could enter vehicles and aircrafts without the need of an crewman/pilot kit. The kit restriction system worked on a small test before our round, but broke down after some time. Any idea why? He have just used the default parameters, NATO vs CSAT version.

- Is it intended, that squadleaders can change kits of their squadmembers, including crewman/pilot kits? I thought crewman/pilot kits were restricted to admins?

- Maybe you could add a way to grab a engineer kit ingame? Not sure if that is possible or if you always have to grab the proper kit in the game lobby.

- Critically wounded players take way too long to bleed out and can't be killed => game breaker.

- Quite often our medics couldn't revive players, but our riflemen could?

- When you drag a player, you are stuck at the "drag stance" even after you dropped the wounded.

- When you revive someone on a higher floor (first floor, watchtowers), the player reviving "teleports" to the ground floor and the wounded player will be instantly healed/revived.

- Could you add a parameter for "squad redeployment points"? Every single player building his own tent is a bit ridiculous.

- Redeploy points need some kind of "overrun/blocked" functionality, so you can't drop them on top of your objective and endlessly respawn despite of enemy AI overrunning the place. Maybe a parameter like "Redeploy Point overrun by nearby enemies at: 10m, 20m, 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, 300m, ...

- Was there any kind of "cooldown" for HALO jumps? At least on default settings we haven't noticed such a thing.

- We played through several defense missions and we had some difficulties understanding the "losing condition". It seems that whenever you arrive at the defend point, you already have enemies guarding the point. You must clear these enemies and then defend several waves of incoming enemies. Do you have to instantly lose, if an enemy gets too near to the defend marker after some time? Or do enemies have to be in a "cap radius" for some time?

- One mission was pretty bugged for us. It was the one, where you had to retrieve a civilian "vessel" (probably a boat) and drop a supply box upon it, to repair it/solve the situation. Well we approached the objective with a full littlebird (loaded with a supply box) and an attack littlebird. Around 800m distance, we wanted to drop the lifted box, park the little bird and engage the target on foot (with some cas support), but the second i dropped the supply box (still 800m out, behind a hill), the task was cleared.

- "Dynamic Weather is not synchronized amongst the clients." We had the same issue. Bad for proper immersion..

Will report even more feedback over the next few days. Still great release/mission for the first version. By the way, what happened to the "dressing room"? Where you could select uniforms and stuff, while in 3rd person view?

[geestyleed 1]

We had a lot of fun with that mission so far!

But we had some strange problems:

1.) The pilot got shot out of a heli due to a single bullet multiple times - that is pretty strange - which lead to some casulties ;)

2.) Ditto for tanks - mate shot with a 7.62 at a our t100 and shot driver and gunner out of the vehicle

3.) You nearly get unconscious really fast (hit a wall with 2km/h down, dipped a bit harded with a heli on the ground -> down etc)

4.) Public gaming ist pretty difficult when only the admin can assign classes

5.) I can agree on multiple points above.

But nevertheless great mission which will stay on our server!

[L3TUC3 32]

Thanks for the release. The most fun I had on A3 public servers in a long time.

[ajax420 0]

We run Robalos ASR AI mod on our coop server. Will it conflict with this mission? Has anyone else tried it yet. ASR AI is the only way we have found the bis ai to be any good at all. I really want to be able to play against ASR AI in this mission. Regular bis ai are just dumb as dirt. And have you got the HC to work with battleeye running?

Edited December 1, 2013 by AJAX420

[albertfish 11]

Awesome! This is currently my favourite mission in Arma 3.

[cigar0 12]

Ok this was great, very great.

Question: Could you give us your custom Intro for a download? This Text in the middle is cool.

Edited December 1, 2013 by Cigar0

[roy86 367]

I've started mission with HC but HC doesn't move in any slot and there isn't an HC slot. I've simply to put this in a random slot?

I've tried start a mission with HC in a random slot but AI are spawned on server, not hc

HC can go in any slot (we use one of the support roles for that). I'll double check the scripting but our sessions have the AI local to the HC.

Hi, i saw this video, ARMA 3 Bullet Damage Enhancement (Patrol Ops 3: Remove AI Body Armour) i really like and i would like to incorporate it one of my missions. how does it work ?? how can i use this in another mission ???

Simple damage handler assigned to the spawned AI that increases the damage they take. Nothing special :p

Great Feedback

More Great Feedback

Thanks for the feedback. Are you able to log these into Dev-heaven. That way I can track these and get these fixed/implemented. Always happy for suggestions, feature requests and bug reports but need them submitted through dev-heaven.

We run Robalos ASR AI mod on our coop server. Will it conflict with this mission? And have you got the HC to work with battleeye running?

Should be no conflict and RE HC, yes but I can't remember what we did.

Could you give us your custom Intro for a download? This Text in the middle is cool.

I'll post something in the A3 editor scripting section when i get the time.

Cheers for the great feedback :D Thank you all for your support!

[zach72 1]

Just played this for the first time tonight with about 6 players. WOW.

Very impressed, very slick, well written mission. Server performance good throughout (although we did get a lot of red chains)

Will be hosting a public version of this 24/7 on our servers, with ACRE enabled (via our TeamSpeak)

Will give more feedback later in the week when we've play tested it a bit more.

Only issue I've seen so far, is I couldn't un-deploy my rally point tent (love this concept though), so couldn't create a new one - and couldn't find where to un-deploy it from base.

[boomit4 11]

Having an issue where I start the mission but it just ends at the loading screen. I am running this mission on a dedicated server.

[hansson0728 12]

yeah i read up on this and i think i got it right :)

[Rages123 10]

Ammoboxes are fixed to the unit classes, not your traditional VAS. The mission configs can be added to if you want to include specific addons but there are too many for me to cater for so I have opted for a license to support your own modifications and ports.

is there any way to just get the original VAS box without having to add a bunch of classnames? that would take way too much time with all the mods i have, or just make it so it doesnt restrict anything

[roy86 367]

is there any way to just get the original VAS box without having to add a bunch of classnames? that would take way too much time with all the mods i have, or just make it so it doesnt restrict anything

Hi Rages,

Not in its current state as an open ammobox goes against the reason behind why its done like that.

However, you can download a fresh copy of VAS, overwrite the "VAS\fnc" folder with the fresh one and it should be back the way you want.

---------------

Also, to explain some things that were asked earlier and also in PMs,

• The below three roles can be assigned to any "PO3 Role" in-game but a "PO3 Role" does not grant privilages of mine defusing, use of FAK and repair vehicles as that is an engine limitation in specific unit configuration.
  
• - Rifleman (Explosive Qualified) are Explosive Specialist in disguise and can defuse mines.
  
• - Rifleman (Medic Qualified) are Medics in disguise and can use FAK to fully heal a player.
  
• - Support Engineer (Crewman/Pilot) are Engineers in disguise and can repair vehicles.
  
• Team leaders can assign their own squad roles, members and squad name. Admins have ultimate control that can over-ride any squad but Team leaders are allowed control of their own squad.
  
• Defend tasks fail if all friendlies have been killed or left the area (>300m) after arrival (there is a bug on hard levels with miss-aligned success criteria)
  
• HALO Cool-down is a mission parameter that by default is 0 seconds.
  
• The paperdoll system was removed from release while a new gear system is developed to cater for it.
  

I hope that clarifies a few points :D

Cheers

[zach72 1]

• Team leaders can assign their own squad roles, members and squad name. Admins have ultimate control that can over-ride any squad but Team leaders are allowed control of their own squad.
  

Didn't realize that being logged in as admin was why I could sort out the roles when I tested this earlier.

If no admin is on the server, is doesn't seem to allow a squad leader to assign roles to him squad. Says you are not authorized to change the team or you don't have permission or something. So not so good as a public server at the moment unfortunately.

[corey88 10]

for the HC you need to log in to the steam account its attached to on a local pc and join a BE enabled server with the profile name you wish to use then copy that over to your server. as you need to except the BE licence agreement to join a BE server.

there is another way to do this but i cant remember what files need to be edited and where

[terox 316]

Excellent quality on release.

Just a few tweaks from what i can see of the mission so far, I've added 3 tickets to DEV heaven.

Thanks for the considerable effort and long hours that have obviously gone into this.

[meatball 25]

- "Dynamic Weather is not synchronized amongst the clients." We had the same issue. Bad for proper immersion..

I'd love to hear more about this since it looks like they are using the weather script that I wrote :) Unless they've made any mods to it, we've run that weather script on both dedicated server hosted and player hosted missions for upwards of 6+ hours and the weather has always stayed in synch between the server and all the players. The only caveat being that it can take a few minutes sometimes for a JIP player to synch up correctly. Any other information you could offer would be appreciated.

Edited December 2, 2013 by Meatball

[terox 316]

Ref HC

Would it be possible to create a designated slot for HC.

Perhaps a civilian slot as one would not normally try to take that slot (Theres always the exceptions though)

Reason for this is so that the avatar that the HC creates just doesnt sit in spawn waiting for an idiot to shoot it or run it over

Edited December 2, 2013 by Terox