Make a MP/Co-Op Missions 'Saveable'

[meatball 25]

I've been digging around without much luck. Has anyone come up with a way to allow players to play longer missions across multiple sessions? Some sort of 'Save' and then 'Load' type functionality?

[jshock 513]

Are you looking for the save/load or a persistent battlefield?

[meatball 25]

Save/Load in particular, but either would be nice.

[jshock 513]

Well I know that for save/load, there is the standard Arma save/load system, but I'm sure that isn't exactly what your looking for. As far as other save/load systems I think they use database systems, which is out of my scope of knowledge. For persistence that is more about how the mission is built and making sure you have a server that won't crash, but if you wanted to have the persistence + the ability to restart the server, the databases would come into play once again.

But this may help you out a bit:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?150293-iniDB-Save-and-Load-data-to-the-server-or-your-local-computer-without-databases!

[meatball 25]

Yeah, see in my case, a Save/Load feature would work best. Many of my missions have lot's of objectives/side missions to do, and it's hard to get them all done in one session. If players could save after playing for a few hours, and then reload and play a few more hours with their friends another day, that'd work well.

Persistence I don't think really fits well since if the whole team gets wiped out, the missions should end and I don't really see how to handle persistence/leaving a server up after everyone drops with that type of scenario.

[jshock 513]

Yeah, other than iniDB I'm not sure of any other means by which to do what you need to, and iniDB might not even do what you need. Hopefully someone else can give some input.

[Gunter Severloh 4067]

I don't really see how to handle persistence/leaving a server up after everyone drops with that type of scenario.

If its just you and friends then lock the server and comeback to it.

When you set the server's server.cfg to

persistent = 0; // If 1, mission keeps running even after the last player has exited the game

then the map will stay on running til the server restarts, or shuts off, unless you have

a timer in the mission that ends the mission then it should work other then that only change would be the day/night cycle still going so it may be

day or night when you get back on, i do this all the time with a mission my buddy and I frequently play on our server.

[meatball 25]

Yeah, I've done a bunch of research, and unfortunately, I don't believe saving/loading is doable at this point. I haven't been able to find any way to allow players to 'save' a mission state, and then reload that mission state without using some sort of database mod/addon. Since the mission files are simply pbo's, there's no way to save files into that pbo so they can be loaded later, and there's no way that you can save/load an external file into the players missions directory with the current command set/engine. If there was, I'm pretty sure I could save out an array that has the list of objectives completed/failed and the teams location at the save point, and then have the mission 'load' that state on startup, but I just don't think it can be done with A3 at this point.

[Gunter Severloh 4067]

Never say never, its been done already: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=26985

look into that and see if that helps you out, suggest asking the author on his thread if you have questions.

[meatball 25]

Hmm, looks interesting and I'll check into it. Though at first pass, really looks like it requires specific server side setting/installs and isn't something that could just be scripted/embedded into a standalone pbo and just work regardless. Thanks for the heads up though.

[hogscraper 10]

If you want full access to what you want to save and how you want to save it, extdb is another choice. Takes a while to learn from scratch but its working pretty well for me.