Attempting to Implement a Drone-Only Faction (ALiVE)

[Mr. E Meat 1]

Hello! As the title suggests, I'm currently trying to create a faction in ALiVE that uses only drones, primarily UGVs. I've gotten pretty far with this, but I've kinda hit a wall. My apologies if this is not the appropriate place to put this question, I'm just reposting this here since I don't know if I'll find an answer on Reddit.

 

TL;DR: my current process of crewing the vehicles with AI pilots ends up removing the UGVs from their original group. The UGVs losing the appropriate groupings means that they are no longer receiving their orders from OPCOM, and will idle in place. I need a method to either crew the UGVs while maintaining their original grouping, or to resync the newly formed UGV groups with OPCOM. Reprofiling via the admin menu has no effect; I think this is because the units were spawned by OPCOM and thus considered already profiled?

Long version with context:

 

I used ALiVE's ORBAT Editor to inherit some drones from other factions and put them into my custom faction, compiled into a PBO, etc. Currently, the faction consists of just one composition, which is 4 armed stomper UGVs. I set up a small test mission on the VR map, with NATO on one side and hostile INDFOR Drones on the other side. I created a script that populates the UGVs with "AI" pilots and gunners. (These AI units are the same type used in vanilla when you set a UAV to fly autonomously, for example.)

 

The problem arises when the UGVs are created; they are spawned as empty vehicles, and empty vehicles cannot be placed in a group by themselves, as far as I can tell. The groups are still being made by ALiVE when it spawns them at the objective; I could gather that much from Zeus, seeing that group callsigns were not being given sequentially, such as the first UGV on the list receiving callsign Alpha 1-5.

 

To make this work, I think I would have to reassign each UGV back to its original group, or at the very least to some group that OPCOM knows about. This would require me to keep track of three things:

 

    1. Each UGV group spawned by OPCOM

    2. Each UGV spawned by OPCOM

    3. Which UGVs were spawned as part of which groups

 

1 and 2 are trivial on their own: I can set up initialization handlers on the composition class and on the UGV class, which is how I handled crewing the UGVs. The problem comes with linking the two in a way that avoids mismatches. I would use the units command, but it returns an empty array when used in the initialization handler, likely because empty vehicles aren't being put into the group at all.

I am open to any advice on this, since I am extremely unfamiliar with ARMA 3's scripting.

 

If you are here from the far future seeking answers as well, I have little more to offer you. Here are pastebins with the contents of my mission's description.ext and script file that I am using to crew the UGVs:

 

description.ext

onTurretUGVSpawn.sqf

[Ancient One0 0]

hey man, im not able to help but i wanted to ask how is that faction going as i for some reason fell in love with UGV's and drones