Problem with "infinite" spawning

[grandelemental 21]

So I've been trying to work with a SP mission that keeps a certain amount of hostile AI units spawned in a map, kind of like the old Flashpoint dynamic missions for Arma 2 but obviously much, much simpler. Every time a unit is killed, a new one spawns, keeping the amount of units constant (test value has been 15, and that includes the player as well). The problem is that after about ~150 spawns, they just stop spawning. I've tried all kinds of alternative solutions but can't quite work out why this keeps happening. I've had a while true loop to spawn units only, if the unit limit isn't reached, and if it is, just sleeping a couple of seconds. I've tried adding an event handler "killed" so that when a initially spawned unit dies, it immediately respawns a new unit. But no matter how I try to accomplish this, after a unit has been spawned around 150 times, the script just doesn't spawn anything.

Everything seems to point into a some kind of limit with either event handlers (I have no idea if they get deleted when the unit they are assigned to dies) or dynamically named groups. Is there a way to completely remove a unit with ALL parameters and allocations assigned to it (like group names and such), so that it won't fill up the space? It's a longshot, but I've honestly no idea what causes this, how to fix it, or whether it's even possible. =(

 

[dchan200 18]

There's a hard coded limit of 144 groups and I think that is your problem here. To check if this is the issue, could you run the following once you notice that the AI have stopped spawning:

 

hint format["# groups: %1", count(allGroups)];

 

[grandelemental 21]

2 hours ago, dchan200 said:

There's a hard coded limit of 144 groups and I think that is your problem here. To check if this is the issue, could you run the following once you notice that the AI have stopped spawning:

 

hint format["# groups: %1", count(allGroups)];

 

Yeah, this was it! I completely misunderstood how ArmA handles groups beneath the surface, I assumed that the empty groups would be automatically deleted and their resourced could be reallocated. Now I get around this problem by just spawning some static groups and refilling them when the units are all killed.

Thanks a lot mate!

[dchan200 18]

2 minutes ago, grandelemental said:

Yeah, this was it! I completely misunderstood how ArmA handles groups beneath the surface, I assumed that the empty groups would be automatically deleted and their resourced could be reallocated. Now I get around this problem by just spawning some static groups and refilling them when the units are all killed.

Thanks a lot mate!

Glad it worked for you.

 

Just to note, another approach to handling this problem is by periodically removing the empty groups yourself:

 

while {true} do
{
    {
        if (count(units(_x)) == 0) then
        {
            deleteGroup(_x);
        };

    } forEach allGroups;

    sleep 60;
}

I have not tested the code above, but I think it should work.

 

[Larrow 2794]

Just use the Killed EH. Either respawn units into the group of the killed unit OR delete the group and create a new one.

e.g place this in a gameLogic

h = this  spawn {
	_numActiveUnits = 15;
	
	TAG_fnc_spawnUnit = {
		params[ "_pos", "_type", "_group" ];
		
		_unit = _group createUnit [ _type, _pos, [], 0, "FORM" ];
		_group addWaypoint[ [0,0,0], 0 ];
		_unit setVariable[ "spawnPos", _pos ];
		
		_unit addEventHandler [ "Killed", {
			params[ "_killed" ];
			
			_pos = _killed getVariable "spawnPos";
			_type = typeOf _killed;
			_side = side group _killed;
			deleteGroup group _killed;
			[ _pos, _type, createGroup _side ] call TAG_fnc_spawnUnit;
		}];
	};
	
	for "_i" from 1 to _numActiveUnits do {
		[ getPos _this, "B_Soldier_F", createGroup west ] call TAG_fnc_spawnUnit
	};
};