Better flares

[houldendub 10]

Basically, I'm a little bit tired of the flares being as bad as they are in A3.

I've done a little bit of poking around the internet, these forums and the wiki to see if anything's there. I've found a number of things which may help, but basically I need a nice big helping hand (or lots of little ones) to get going, I've only really started looking at proper scripting thanks to this need for better flares and my addon knowledge is verging on the "well I know how to install them" mark.

Firstly, in the Event Scripts page of the wiki, there's a reference to a "onFlare.sqs" file, with a description of "Executed when a flare is lit after being fired from grenade launcher.". Now, this looks like a big win here, but a question for you gurus; does this automatically load when a flare is fired? Or does it require something to execute the file? It's also an .sqs file, which I thought was outdated and .sqs files didn't work with Arma 3, yet the tick is there that it DOES work?

Would it literally be a case of adding the relevant commands such as "setLightFlareSize", "setLightFlareMaxDistance" etc here into this onFlare.sqs file?

Another idea I had was to attach either (number pulled out because it seems you need a metric ton of flares to have any sort of effect) 15 additional flares on to a flare that has been spawned, or attach a simple light source on to that flare and then control the light source's parameters using the relevant commands. The problem with this, would be to either create a script that detects what colour flare is being fired using arrays and such, and then attach the relevant colour flares/lightsource back on to the flare, or create a bunch of individual scripts for each flare colour (this seems bad, running scripts on the offchance a certain colour flare is used).

Basically I've got a vague idea of what needs to happen (potentially, as I say I'm an extreme novice):

1. Get position and colour of the flare being fired

2. Attach additional flares/light source on the fired flares position

3. Tune the flare/light source so as to match up to the flare that's fired

But yeah, that's basically the ideas I had. I'll update this as and when I can confirm any of this works, or whether it's a wild goose chase. Any ideas or other help would be awesomeeeeee.

-Houlden