Abandoned Armies 1.4

[thobson 38]

Mikero created an excellent Editor Upgrade when this mission was in the final stages of beta testing but because the mission was built and mostly tested using General Barron's Editor Upgrade that is the one I recommend.  It is a pity that Mikero's EU was not avialable early enough for the mission to be tested fully using it.  There was one issue with Mikero's EU to do with the placement of the steel beds but I think that was fixed.

[mandoble 1]

I have Mikero's editor103 and it is fully compatible with this mission, no errors at all.

EDIT: And this is the only editorupdate I have. All previous ones, as well as objects1 and 2 were deleted long time ago.

[thobson 38]

That is good to know thank you.  Mikero's EU has a few interesting units - spies and the like - that I might have used had it been available a bit (say a year) earlier.

[pecel2u 0]

I have Mikero's editor103 and it is fully compatible with this mission, no errors at all.

EDIT: And this is the only editorupdate I have. All previous ones, as well as objects1 and 2 were deleted long time ago.

Are u create diffrent folder for every MOD? coz it still saying that i missing addons that is exist in my addons folder. O ya, i've reinstalling the game but this problem is still there.

One more, when i reach the second civilian hut near la trinite, they are already dead..is it make any different if i get them first then the other that the marker pointed on the map to save civilian near la trinite?

[mandoble 1]

No, I have 1.96 + mikero's. Anyother addon is placed in mod folders.

[thobson 38]

There are two groups of civilians near La Trinite. Only one has a marker on the map. The ones with the marker should not be dead when you get to them.

[redface 1]

after hearing all the praise and raves, I finally decided to pick up this mission

I hate to mention this, but I get stuck right at the start

When I load the mission, I immediately get an "out of body" experience: my field of view is inside my torso, or (another attempt) I could even see my own leg. It's like I'm sunk into the ground, I can only move when I throw away the gun etc.

I thought it was due to the steep cliffs, and tried to take the boat to a more normal beach, but as soon as I disembark, I get the same dragging feeling.

Is there any special script going on at the start or is it just me?

[lilwillie 47]

In my experiences the game(it is a game, not just a mission) can do weird things unless you run just V1.96 and no Mods.

Make sure that is what your using. Hope it helps

[thobson 38]

Thank you lilwillie.  You are correct, some addon can do some very strange things.  Also it is worth mentioning again that unofficial addons - even if they are not used in a mission can still effect performance.  Check out: here  and here.

I hope you get it working redface, what you are describing is not how it should be.

[moricky 210]

Hello,

I've played this mission for all day and now I have problem - Stamenov is dead, his army too (west_loons is 0), but nothing happens. No cutscene, no Alexi's commentary, no change in briefing. So, what should I do?

EDIT: Variable okForMsg is false, prevous cutscene was prison camp in Le Port, all west towns except of Arudy and La Passagne are cleared (La Passagne was cleared too, but I cannot change the flag).

BTW: Perfect mission, little lagy, but absolutely free. Only that rain on the beggining was not so pretty (night and rain - deadly combination).

[Connors 0]

kill the other army, simple.

[moricky 210]

I know that I need to kill Andropov and Stamenov. Stamenov is dead, but not for the mission - objective about his killing is still uncomplete, so the objective about killing his army. But I've done both.

EDIT: Now it is allright. I've set variable okForMsg to true through my debug console and all was ok - objectives, commentaries, more saves, ...

In late night I completed whole mission (after almost whole day fight) and I'm impressed. I hope you want to do something similar in ArmA (and I hope it will have campaign structure, because nowm it was laggy).

BTW: My offensive against Stamenovs HQ became to the largest and longest battle I've ever seen in OFP. One hour of ingame time and more then two hours in my time; me against whole Stamenovs army and part of Andropovs; sniper fight with Hunting Rifle, then defense of the gas station, sneaking into the city, massacre of civilians (not done by me, but I cannot stop it by myself), eliminating elite guard, killing Stamenov, finding M1A2 and at the end a massive tank fight of all three sides ... excellent experience).

EDIT2: This error appears when mission is loaded (on start):

(Error Array has 0 elements, should be 3)

[bardosy 154]

IMHO the essential of Abandoned Army IS this is one mission and not campaign. You couldn't (or only with very hard work) do this in a campaign. (Eg. you can destroy the fuel station and the armies have no fuel for AFVs... etc)

[lilwillie 47]

EDIT2: This error appears when mission is loaded (on start):

(Error Array has 0 elements, should be 3)

[/i]

Do you have any OFP programs or mods, addons running with the mission?

Threw it's beta and release it was found that anything other then bare bones 1.96 OFP would cause crazy unknown bugs like you experienced.

[moricky 210]

1.96 and changed island textures by WGL (which have no effect to technical aspects of the game).

Played with no addons except of needed ones (and I think I still have TOP1 addon in folder).

But I didn't noticed any bug during play except of the one with okForMsg variable.

EDIT: And I think that campaign structure of "single player CTF" is possible - just imagine something like Jagged Alliance 2 in OFP/ArmA.

[thobson 38]

After over a year of building testing and getting comments from many of the people that have played the mission I am now convinced that any addon in the addons folder other than those that are standard + the the editor upgrade can do some very strange things.  Even changing the island slightly can change object ID numbers and so cause problems.  See my past above dated 14 August for how to deal with non-standard addons.

I deliberately made this as a mission not a campaign as I wanted the player to have complete freedom over what they do and how they do it and I wanted their early decisions to effect the later game play.  Also there is a lot of stuff on the island that need not be found to complete the mission - I also wanted the player to finish the mission wondering if they have found everything.

Edit:

Judging by the errors you experienced I would guess that some object IDs have been changed.  As a result the 'box' array having zero elements I also guess you found La Trinite a puzzling place - and certainly no real help to you.

[moricky 210]

I'm using only different texture, not the WRP file - that is original. ID's are correct. And as I said, that error had no affect to gameplay, which was simply perfect.

But I still think that campaign could be better. Maybe not for Abandoned Armies, but for any similar project in ArmA

[thobson 38]

What did you find in La Trinite?

[moricky 210]

Empty trade center and many explosives.

It was empty because Stemonovs army was been eliminated and Andropovs army was partly destroyed by me (I destroyed many northern tanks and groups which came to Chapoi to join the last Stemonovs battle).

[thobson 38]

It's hard to tell if there was a problem or not.  The trade at LaT takes place as long as both convoys are running (so the canny player can get a lot of help by sneaking in there between convoys and stealing what they need ).

Your error message relates to the ammo crates at La Trinite so I thought maybe the trade was not working properly.  Basically it works as follows:

After the northern convoy visits the town the southern hut will be empty and the northern hut will have ammo crates containing assorted rifles, handguns + ammo etc..  After the southern convoy has visited the town the northern hut will be empty and the southern hut will contain ammo crates containing mines, satchels, rocket launchers + ammo etc. On the first visit to the huts the one with the ammo crates also has the tripwires and detonators for the custom AP and AV mines.

As an aside - the ammo trucks in the convoys reflect the trade as well, so if you capture one of these trucks it will have different stuff in it depending on whether it is going north or going south.

I presume the explosives you found there were in ammo crates?

[Avenger15 0]

I don't know if anyone is still playing this, but I recently discovered it and absolutely love this mission.  Great job THobson!

I am having some issues though, and I am not as high speed as some of you other guys are with modding the level.  The savegame bug is killing me right now, and I haven't been able to play the level more than 90 minutes straight without having to stop and essentially lose all of my progress.  

I moved a bunch of stuff out of my addons folder, but now I can't even restart where I last saved without the game crashing.  All I've got in the folder is the .pbo's that shipped with the game, editorupdate102 & -103, and the 1.96 Resistance patch.

I also get an error message every time the game starts, to the effect of "cannon find data3d/dum_mestoe/p3d" or something very similar. What is that?

Can somebody help me out here? Thanks in advance.

[Kirby 2]

Damn. my PC isn't exactly low end and it lags like a bitch. lol.

I'll try it *WITHOUT* FFUR

EDIT: Guy above me. Try removing EU 103, might be causing conflict with 102.

And what mods are you running with?

Try holding shift and pressing - on the numpad in game then type savegame

No box will come up to type in after holding shift and - but it recognises it anyway.

[fasad 1]

Avenger15:

It is very hard to find the cause of the savegame bug. It is not just caused by large missions, but combinations of saved variables that OFP doesn't like. I've believe it can be avoided by increasing the windows swapfile size. I use 1536-3072mb. (1gb ram).

Dum_mestoe.p3d is part of resistance data3d.pbo, you may have deleted something you shouldn't have. I'd back up your profile and missions, then re-install, and this time don't put anything other than the BI addons in either addon folder. You only need one editor upgrade (mikeros 1.03).

Blazin:

as the readme says, Abandoned Armies should be played without any mods. A lot of the scripts rely on default behaviour and weapons etc.

[Kirby 2]

I know, but FFUR doesn't really change mutch. 99.99% of Vanilla-Designed missions work fine in FFUR (They're just a little bit tougher and more "hardcore"

[thobson 38]

Quote[/b] ]but ..... doesn't really change mutch

Ha.  The number of times I have heard that!  The largesavegame bug took a lot of working around on this mission.  I had to restructure it several times to get it to work on even a vanilla installation.  The bug is caused by having more variable names active than OFP can restore (it apparently saves them okay it just can’t get them back).  Part of what I had to do to reduce the number of variable names was to make use of object identifiers on the map.  As a result any thing that changes those will screw it up.  I have had people tell me that “I only changed a few textures, that can’t do anything can it?â€.  Well if it changes any of the object IDs on the map then yes it can.  

In the readme file there is an explanation of where to get the instructions on how to tidy up your addon folder.  If you can’t find it let me know and I will dig it out.  Even unused addons can cause significant lag. People I have corresponded with by e-mail have been able to convert a mission that has deadly lag into one that works well simply by tidying up their addon folder.

As I said the savegamebug should not occur with a vanilla installation, but if you can’t get rid of it there is a work around.  It is a pain but it works.  Okay so you have saved your game so you can eat some food, earn a living or just get some sleep.  When you come back the mission do this:

1.  In windows explorer go to the folder that contains your save games.  From memory: continue is the file that allows you to start from where you last exited (if you were alive at the time), save is the file that contains the file created by the one ‘Save’ option and autosave is the file created by the radio saves I gave you.  Note that the continue file is loaded by default when you resume a mission from the Overview screen.  Change the names of these files so that ofp will not recognise them.

2.  Restart the mission at the begining.  As soon as you are in the mission proper <Alt><Tab> out of the mission, go to your savegame folder and put the file names back to what they were before.

3. <Alt>Tab> back into the mission and now restore the saved game in the usual way.

As I said it is a pain.  The above if from memory of what I had to do about two years ago when it was in the early stages of beta testing, so I may have forgotten some crucial step.

The fact that you are getting the savegame bug would indicate to me that some thing else is running in the background that is using variable names.

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On whether people are still playing it. Well I get fewer e-mails than I used to, but the following thread is still quite active (OFPEC Reviewed Missions):

http://www.ofpec.com/index.p....28454.0