[MP | COOP 02 - 10] Altis Force Recon: West

[meatball 25]

NOTE: This mission is now part of the

"Altis on Fire" Campaign. Please check out the AoF campaign thread for more information and support!

Altis Force Recon: West

COOP 2-10 Players

by Meatball

Description:

The invasion of Altis has begun! The 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion of the USMC 2nd Marine Division has been staged to support the larger invasion of Altis. The Force Recon Company of 2nd Recon Battalion has been sent in as the spearhead to create chaos, confusion and destruction throughout western Altis.

Features:

- Over 61 Missions/Sub Missions with randomized AI for long term replayability for 2 - 10 players!

- Parameters available to change number of enemies (based on amount of players), enemy skill level, weather, time of day, and ambient Civilans

- Headless Client support and auto detection.

- Unlimited player revives, but player must be revived by other players.

Installation:

- Extract the .pbo file(s) to your Steam/SteamApps/common/ArmA 3/MPMissions folder.

Changelog:

v 0.91

- No longer need to search through the huge task list to find task information when looking at your map. Simply click near the marker on your map and the task information will be displayed!

- Tweaked VAS Box to limit available gear to Blufor equipment.

- Added a Parameter to allow disabling of the VAS. Will limit roles to default loadouts.

- Continued balancing of AI in an attempt to remove some of the AI load from the server.

- Added in a few 'surprises' for players.

- Tweaked the out of bounds triggers.

- Few task and mission fixes.

v0.9

- Headless Client Support and auto detection now built in! To use a Headless client, load up the mission, connect to the mission as an admin and then connect the Headless client. The HC should connect to the Civilian Headless Client Slot. NOTE: If the HC crashes/disconnects during mission, you will need to restart the mission and reconnect the HC for AI to work properly.

- New 'Recon Engineer' role should be able to handle all of your repair needs.

- Players will now air drop at the Central Altis step off point as opposed to just being teleported there. Remember to open your chute!

- JIP players can now air drop on the rest of the team as opposed to having to grab a boat and try to meet up with the team.

- Added in parameter to turn ambient Civilians on/off as I found they were actually causing a decent hit on larger game FPS counts. Default setting is Off.

- Added in Zealot's Civilian Vehicle Spawn script to add randomly spawned civilian vehicles into towns & cities.

- Multiple AI spawning/caching improvements to speed up spawn and caching speeds.

-Added in a handful of new missions and random events to the mission.

- Lots of task and mission fixes.

- AI balancing adjustments.

- Removed edits to the base loadouts for each role since VAS is available for players to loadout any way they wish.

v0.8

- New starting location of "Central Altis" available that allows the team to step off inland. Be warned that choosing this starting location (from the flagpoles) is a ONE WAY TRIP and you cannot return the island starting locations once you are dropped inland.

- Added in win conditions if someone completes all the tasks.

- Added in new random events that occur during the mission.

- Updated to VAS 2.2 and tweaked the VAS box contents.

- Continued work to tweak AI balance and server FPS issues.

- Various task and mission fixes and tweaks.

v0.7

- Replacement of old supply crates and implementation of Virtual Ammobox System (VAS) by Tonic. VAS boxes are located on each starting island.

- Swapped out old cleaner script with new Repetitive Cleanup Script by Aeroson

- Fixed problem with "Recon Ifestiona" mission. You will now fail the mission if you destroy any of the enemy vehicles prior to observing them all.

- Added in a timed events/tasks including supply drops, naval artillery support and more caches that may occur during the mission.

- Further tweaks to streamline AI creation and caching.

- Minor bug fixes and tweaks to some objectives.

v0.65

- Fixed problem with "Destroyed Bridges" mission.

- Some updates to streamline AI Enemy and Civilians. Particularly around lag/fps hits caused at the beginning of the mission caused by enemy AI creation and caching.

- Minor tweaks to some objectives.

- Updated to newest version of BTC Revive (0.96)

v0.61

- Disabled some AI debugging hints that had been left on.

v0.6

- Updated the starting locations. There are now 3 Insertion points available, north on Atsalis island, south on Monisi island, and west near Savri island. All gear is located on Atsalis, but you can teleport from island to island using the flag pole there and your action menu and step off from any of the island with boats available on each.

- Some bug fixes and tweaked missions.

- Fixed a problem with some of the militarize/caching not functioning properly.

- Unlocked most of the civilian vehicles on the map for players to 'liberate'.

- Made ambient forces a bit more aggressive, but dropped the number of patrols around the players. (Thanks for the suggestions Shadow.D.)

v0.5

- Expanded the operational area to all of western Altis and added in a huge amount of missions. Now up to 60 missions/sub-missions!

- Added an AR/AAR to give the recon team some punch.

- Added Satchel charges to starting kits and boxes for bigger booms.

- Added a secondary starting location for players off the south coast. Available as a choice in the parameters.

- Multiple bug fixes/tweaks.

- New Name: 'Altis Force Recon: West' in case I ever get motivated to do an East version of the mission.

v0.3 Alpha

- Multiple bug fixes/tweaks.

- Added about half a dozen new tasks/sub missions.

- Updated starting player backpacks and gear carried to better match long range recon goals.

Known Issues:

- Players will occasionally lose their ability to revive or be revived unless they disconnect/reconnect to the server. Bug reported to BTC Revive script writer, Giallustio.

- If you hijack a vehicle from a defended area and drive outside of the caching range, the vehicle may despawn. Bug reported to AI Spawn Script Pack writer, spunFin.

Credits & Thanks:

- AI Spawn Script Pack by spunFIN

- =BTC= Revive by Giallustio

- Civilian Vehicle Spawn by Zealot

- Headless Client Auto Detector by elec

- MAD Ambient Life by MAD T (Based on TPW's Work)

- Repetitive Cleanup Script by Aeroson

- SHK Taskmaster Script by Shuko

- SLP Spawning Script by Nomadd

- Virtual Ammobox System (VAS) by Tonic

Latest Version:

- Armaholic Link (Thanks Big!) - Altis Force Recon: West

Edited April 24, 2014 by Meatball

[SD_BOB 10]

Hey, gotta say i do like the mission concept. It works well for a relaxed night of lets just go and do something.

I'm assuming this has been reported and hopefully fixed (not had chance to test the new version). But we have found in the previous two versions, that the "ambient" enemy patrols, air drops, trucks etc. Do not seem to engage the player group, the patrols just carry on no matter what and the reinforcement heli drops and trucks, seem to respond to the contact from objective AI but once deployed on the ground near the player group, just remain passive.

[meatball 25]

Thanks Shadow! I'll check into it. It's a balancing act between making sure there's enough AI floating around to keep the players on their toes without having them always under fire.

[meatball 25]

v0.60/0.61 Released

Changelog:

v0.61

- Disabled some AI debugging hints that had been left on.

v0.6

- Updated the starting locations. There are now 3 Insertion points available, north on Atsalis island, south on Monisi island, and west near Savri island. All gear is located on Atsalis, but you can teleport from island to island using the flag pole there and your action menu and step off from any of the island with boats available on each.

- Some bug fixes and tweaked missions.

- Fixed a problem with some of the militarize/caching not functioning properly.

- Unlocked most of the civilian vehicles on the map for players to 'liberate'.

- Made ambient forces a bit more aggressive, but dropped the number of patrols around the players. (Thanks for the suggestions Shadow.D.)

Known Issues:

- Problem with the "Destroy Bridges" mission in Kavala. You can destroy them and the marker will update on the map showing it's succeeded, but you will not get a pop up saying it's succeeded and the task will not check itself off. Seems to be an issue with the way bridges are 'destroyed' and I'm working on it.

- Many missions still not fully tested in MP/Dedicated and my not work as intended.

- Players will experience a few minutes of lag as mission start as AI is setup and cached.

See updated initial post for full information and download links.

Edited November 21, 2013 by Meatball

[SD_BOB 10]

Hey Meatball, cannot seem to access the Armaholic link for the download. Get an error followed by a promt to login, assuming is on a private section of the site.

Edit:- http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=23404

Just for those who haven't seen it on Armaholic.

Edited November 21, 2013 by Shadow.D. ^BOB^

[meatball 25]

Yeah, would help if I linked it correctly. Sorry about that. :) Be a new version popping up shortly with some more fixes/tweaks. Edited the link above to match the correct one.

[meatball 25]

v 0.65 Released

Changelog

v0.65

- Fixed problem with "Destroyed Bridges" mission.

- Some updates to streamline AI Enemy and Civilians. Particularly around lag/fps hits caused at the beginning of the mission caused by enemy AI creation and caching.

- Minor tweaks to some objectives.

- Updated to newest version of BTC Revive (0.96)

Known Issues

- Many missions still not fully tested in MP/Dedicated and my not work as intended. Please let me know if you find any problems!

See initial post for download link.

[Cipher76 10]

Hi. Thanks for creating this mission, it's damn good.There is lot to do, lots of exciting firefights and tasks. Enemy patrol's keep you on your toes, when moving to next objective. Me and my friends had good time playing it. No problems/bugs detected so far. :)

[meatball 25]

Hey, thanks for the feedback and glad you're enjoying it! I've got a new version with a few bug fixes and some minor tweaks half in the works, but want to get some more missions play testing done to make sure nothing else needs to be fixed. Let me know if you run across anything.

[TechTuts 10]

I have had very good fun with this mission, me and my friend have completed about half of the objectives across multiple sessions in about 8 hours

One problem I have noticed is that after a long time or lots of saves (not sure) the patrols stop working, I keep finding empty helicopters and armoured vehicles with their engines still on or slightly broken

One other problem is the mission 'Recon Ifestiona', we got notifications for all of the vehicles, yet it did not complete the objective, I think we may have destroyed one of the vehicles, which meant we could not complete the objective.

One suggestion is to add a freeze time option because I prefer playing the missions at a certain time of day

Other than that I have had really good fun, thanks

Edited December 2, 2013 by TechTuts

[meatball 25]

v 0.7 Released

Changelog

- Replacement of old supply crates and implementation of Virtual Ammobox System (VAS) by Tonic. VAS boxes are located on each starting island.

- Swapped out old cleaner script with new Repetitive Cleanup Script by Aeroson

- Fixed problem with "Recon Ifestiona" mission. You will now fail the mission if you destroy any of the enemy vehicles prior to observing them all.

- Added in a timed events/tasks including supply drops, naval artillery support and more caches that may occur during the mission.

- Further tweaks to streamline AI creation and caching.

- Minor bug fixes and tweaks to some objectives.

Known Issues

- Many missions still not fully tested in MP/Dedicated and my not work as intended. Please let me know if you find any problems!

See initial post for download link.

[meatball 25]

v 0.8 Released!

Changelog

- New starting location of "Central Altis" available for an inland drop. Be warned that choosing this starting location (from the flagpoles) is a ONE WAY TRIP and you cannot return the island starting locations once you are dropped inland.

- Added in win conditions if someone completes all the tasks.

- Added in new random events that occur during the mission.

- Updated to VAS 2.2 and tweaked the VAS box contents.

- Continued work to tweak AI balance and server FPS issues.

- Various task and mission fixes and tweaks.

Known Issues

- Mission still not fully tested in MP/Dedicated and some tasks may not work as intended. Please let me know if you find any problems!

See initial post for download link.

[ziant 14]

"Updated to VAS 2.2 and tweaked the VAS box contents."

do you mean you limited the VAS content to faction gear and equipment (OPFOR/AAF gear and custom content disabled)?

please say I misunderstood that sentence because I'd really like to play the mission with user generated content enabled.

[meatball 25]

Correct, I've pulled just about all of the non-NATO gear out of the VAS boxes to simulate what the Force Recon team would actually have access to prior to mission start.

[ziant 14]

:(

alright then.

by the way, it is a good mission to play though. keep up the good work.

[meatball 25]

Thanks! If you really want the other weapons and such, just pull apart the pbo file and edit the config.sqf in the VAS folder. You can add/remove whatever weapons and gear you'd like.

[ziant 14]

yep, already got it done. :)

[meatball 25]

v 0.9 Released!

Some great updates this version! I'm considering entering this into the ARMA Content Contest, so please let me know if you have any feedback or find any bugs!

Changelog

- Headless Client Support and auto detection now built in! To use a Headless client, load up the mission, connect to the mission as an admin and then connect the Headless client. The HC should connect to the Civilian Headless Client Slot. NOTE: If the HC crashes/disconnects during mission, you will need to restart the mission and reconnect the HC for AI to work properly.

- New 'Recon Engineer' role should be able to handle all of your repair needs.

- Players will now air drop at the Central Altis step off point as opposed to just being teleported there. Remember to open your chute!

- JIP players can now air drop on the rest of the team as opposed to having to grab a boat and try to meet up with the team.

- Added in parameter to turn ambient Civilians on/off as I found they were actually causing a decent hit on larger game FPS counts. Default setting is Off.

- Added in Zealot's Civilian Vehicle Spawn script to add randomly spawned civilian vehicles into towns & cities.

- Multiple AI spawning/caching improvements to speed up spawn and caching speeds.

-Added in a handful of new missions and random events to the mission.

- Lots of task and mission fixes.

- AI balancing adjustments.

- Removed edits to the base loadouts for each role since VAS is available for players to loadout any way they wish.

Known Issues:

- Players will occasionally lose their ability to revive or be revived unless they disconnect/reconnect to the server. Bug reported to BTC Revive script writer, Giallustio.

- Mission and tasks have a lot of moving parts, and there still may be some issues/bugs.

See initial post for download link.

Edited January 10, 2014 by Meatball

[DaViSFiT 21]

HC didnt work so good. he spawnt about 90ai on the server, only 7 on the HC? performance wasnt so good, most had 12-25fps only. Hmm the weather perhaps ;) Normal that all tasks are active from the start?

[meatball 25]

HC didnt work so good. he spawnt about 90ai on the server, only 7 on the HC? performance wasnt so good, most had 12-25fps only. Hmm the weather perhaps ;) Normal that all tasks are active from the start?

That's actually somewhat normal because there's about 81 or so AI that spawn by default on the server that are 'targets' or static defenders across the various tasks. All other AI that spawns should occur on the HC and you'll see that number go up and down as the defenders and patrols spawn in and out based on player location. There is one caveat, civilians. The Civilian script actually runs on the client side and seems to really put a hurting on the FPS. If you had Civilians enabled, I suggest you turn them off with the parameter available. I may see about shifting some of that original AI over to the HC, but since they aren't 'spawned', but are part of the mission itself, it's a bit more work, but doable. Also looking at a better way to handle Civilians in general.

That being said, Force Recon does suck up CPU power because there are a _lot_ of things going on with a lot of AI/triggers, and the like. I've been cleaning things up and trying to make it run more efficiently as I'm finding stuff. I've been able to run 8-10 people on a server / hc that are both running on the same box (Core i5-3570K overclocked to 4.0 Ghz, 16 GB RAM) and the FPS/CPS stays above 48 on both of them the entire time but it took a lot of tweaking to get there. Here's a couple of server suggestions that will likely help your server performance overall and definitely seemed to help me out.

1) If at all possible, run the latest 'performance binary' of the server executable. Lot of the changes in that build are supposedly going to be in the upcoming patched version of the server, so hopefully everyone will just start seeing the better performance.

2) Run the server using the latest version of Fred's memory allocator if you have the RAM for it.

3) Run the server and all clients with the '-nologs' startup switch.

4) If the server/HC are running on the same box. Use processor affinity to assign them to different cores. You'll have to do that every time, but you can actually setup batch files to launch your exe's with a /affinity switch, just takes some experimenting to get it right.

5) If you aren't already using it, run the Arma Server monitor to watch the actual performance on the server/client.

Client CPU's and their game/video settings will also have a big impact on their perceived performance with the mission. I ran some tests with a machine running a Core i3-4330 and was barely getting 15-20 FPS. Swapping in an i7-4770K and not changing anything else on the machien bumped my FPS up to 30-35 with no other changes, so even if the server is humming along fine, Clients may be having issues on their own.

Yes, all the objectives are supposed to be active at the mission start. That's part of the mission concept is you can jump in and just go do whatever tasks you feel like. Weather shouldn't have any impact on server performance other than rain just causes a bit of Video/CPU overhead on the clients in general. Try running weather 'clear' if you don't want to deal with rain.

Hopefully you can get it working right, because my friends and I have been having a blast playing the mission for hours on end. Hopefully with upcoming game/server patches from BI to fix some performance issues and some tweaks on your side you can get it humming along great.

Let me know how it goes and if you run across anything specific, please let me know!

[meatball 25]

v 0.91 Released!

Some minor updates and additions. Please let me know if you have any feedback or find any bugs!

Changelog

- No longer need to search through the huge task list to find task information when looking at your map. Simply click near the marker on your map and the task information will be displayed!

- Tweaked VAS Box to limit available gear to Blufor equipment.

- Added a Parameter to allow disabling of the VAS. Will limit roles to default loadouts.

- Continued balancing of AI in an attempt to remove some of the AI load from the server.

- Added in a few 'surprises' for players.

- Tweaked the out of bounds triggers.

- Few task and mission fixes.

Known Issues:

- Players will occasionally lose their ability to revive or be revived unless they disconnect/reconnect to the server. Bug reported to BTC Revive script writer, Giallustio.

- If you hijack a vehicle from a defended area and drive outside of the caching range, the vehicle may despawn. Bug reported to AI Spawn Script Pack writer, spunFin.

See initial post for download link.

Edited January 15, 2014 by Meatball

[DaViSFiT 21]

Thanks for the feedback. Point 1-5 is already done ;) Yes some players had a not so good pc but i have 32mBit internet, 3770K@4,2ghz, 16GB 2133 Ram, 7950@950, -nologs, malloc dll, while playing mostly 2100-2600mb vRam filled and about 80fps when testing alone in singleplayer. I had also some heavy fps drops from 40 fps down to 16 and up again to 30 and so on. server fps was both S/HC on 30fps but we were only 5 players.

perhaps just build things up when people are in 2km range? The idea is cool and nice to see much stuff around

Did you test this one? http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=23644

[meatball 25]

Your machine sounds like it should be fine. Are you running the client and the server on your same machine? How about the HC, where's that? In that latest patch I dropped the initial AI that gets loaded on the server down from about 81 to 55 or so. Can't really pull too many more than that as the others are all parts of objectives in way or the other, but hopefully that will help a bit.

Other than that initial AI, most things won't spawn until the players are within about 1300m of the task location. Patrols in the non task locations are set to spawn only when the players are not at the task locations and will despawn when the players do get close to them. I'm using MAD Ambient Life for the civilian script and have looked at others including DCL, but none of the others ones allow you to do both civilian foot and vehicle traffic. I may try to write up something myself, but just haven't had the time.

This is only the second mission I've made, so I'm still learning as I go, and if you have any other suggestions or thoughts, please keep them coming!

Edited January 15, 2014 by Meatball

[DaViSFiT 21]

server is also a 3770K with 32GB ram, also hosting the HC.

[meatball 25]

Excellent. The only thing I can think of is the HC and Server are trying to both use the same core, but you said you're running the Server/HC exe's with different core affinity, so I'm not sure what else could be bogging it down then. My server is actually lower specs than yours and seems to be holding up pretty well so far.