KolgujevConflict/Arma

[Guest]

@ liljb15

heh lol, your persistance is admirable

Unfortunately the mission is not in beta stage yet, nice try tho....

Sorry, mission like this takes huge time to complete, there is no miracle workaround for this except for having multiple people working on it, which has seemed impossible to find someone willing to take part - although understandable considering the complexity and effort required for mission apps, this is just the way it is, and most of us have RL prioritized, so time to spend is almost always limited. Sure, if there was a team of say even three people working on this, it would prolly be done, but, there is me, CSL has assisted in a number of applications, but for the most part, there is only one person working on this mission...

Anyhow, I dont want to drag this topic out, for fear of moderators closing it until progress resumes, so Im not going to post again for a while until there is something to post about, or else Im in the end just spamming the forums, these guys here do a good job of keeping the forums clean and proffesional, I want to adhere to this.

[johnny vet boy b 0]

Glad you're alive and well SpecialEd. Keep boffing the muff.

[Chip360 0]

Wow! Ive never even seen this thread, mustve been burried. I have to say, Im Flabergasted

Just reading about the artillery, and all the other details really made me crave this new mission (Which will be SP! THANK GOD! ArmA is a great game and all, but its really missing a lot of the little details and personal touches, this mission gives me hope that some day ArmA will be a whole new game, through the help of modders and mission makers like you. Thankyou for embarking on such an ambitious project, I hope all the best for you, and I can wait however long you need to take to get it released, good luck!

[CharveL 0]

I see I'm going to have to brush up on mission editing if this cool project is going to see the light of day. Hehe, balancing with RL time is a tough one I agree.

Till then, this bump is for potential project help.

[Guest]

Thanks all for the kind words guys

Update:

Working on the TownHide function now.

Descided to make this application standalone, meaning it will be released as a seperate app, partly so I can actually release *something* from my work on this mission rather than having to wait x more months, and its essentially a stand alone style anyhow.

The performance boost from this app will be gigantic, it will litteraly be able to clean out entire towns forces that are not vehicles and restore them properly. This will enable modders to be able to populate litterally as many towns as they would like, with as many units as they would like, and this app will store all of those units - except towns x distance from player group units. This is only Sp compatable.

It will support hiding static units (units that are stationary, ai disabled), supports hiding units manning static weapons, including spotlights, and will return them to manning those objects, supports hiding units on waypoint plans and returns them to their original positions within the wp plan.

The reason this has actually become relatively easy to do, is that the scripts work on a town to town area basis, rather than by the group. The only script running constantly will be a small master script that checks player group distance to each town area, and executes hide/show accordingly. There is also only 1 global variable used to store all units per town, so both the management of the scripts and the global variable will keep this script from ever causing the savegame bug.

Usage will be very simple as well, only needing to name units desired to be of the 'static' type, and give appropriate marker names with each unit for them to watch - the script will recognize these units as 'static' and will restore them with ai disabled, and watching the provided marker. Any units not desired to be hidden are put into a global array provided, and any units that are not in that array, and are not static, are stored and later returned to their pos, allowing them to resume any waypoint plan.

Currently im not doing actual moving vehicles tho, it would be quite difficult to start getting into that area considering the wide scope of issues there.

To show what a dif this makes, I used a test mission, with all towns populated at start was getting around 20 to 25 fps, then I removed most of the units from all of the towns except the one I was in, jumped to 45 fps...

Getting the inital structure ssetup has taken some time, but now that it is setup, its going really well.

[Guest]

Sorry, making a second post here to hopefully fix wierd issue here with pag8 being blank and not loading - refer to bottom of page 7 for most recent update I just put in

Edit, it fixed it -

[CharveL 0]

See now you're just being cruel.

This keeps sounding better and better.

If you um...need someone to test your progress so far...you could twist my arm.

[Guest]

Thanks CharveL for the offer m8

This app, alike most others are big enough and complex enough to warrant having to test as I go to be sure I dont forget stuff/build script structure wrong - but beta testing might be a good plan for this, certainly keep this in mind -

[Jolly_Roger 0]

Looks nice for me !!!!

I hope play this mission soon

[Yarrow 0]

I read some of these posts, and I must say you are doing a amazing job here!! Cant wait till the final product. I also think it is nice of you to take your time. It will only make the "mission" much better! Keep on it!

[Guest]

Thanks Yarrow

Indeed its the choice between time and quality or less time and less quality, I cant even bring myself to do it any other way than what I feel is right, even after stripping a number of ideas out its still taking alot of time, ah well, seems like thats modding for you in general anyhow...:p

[Guest]

Update

Just tested running both TownHide and TownShow scripts, its working

I am seeing just one unit not being restored, prolly an error in my unit count in the array, which i will need to fix, but, its working

In the town im testing in, ive got 3 Mg gunners, 4 tower guards and 6 patrol units, everyone except one tower guard is being spawned right back in place, and manning Mg's/spotlights, watching correct directions, this is awsome

Still some more work to do in this particular app, but its looking real good wohoo

[liljb15 0]

Can I beta test!!!??!?!?! I want to play your mission so bad.

[CharveL 0]

Sounds like a brilliant bit of scripting too that will really pay off dividends in framerate and immersion. There's nothing quite as disappointing as going a bit out of the way on some mission only to find the world completely deserted.

I wonder if this could be applied for general mission building to populate towns on-the-fly (sort of).

[Guest]

Sounds like a brilliant bit of scripting too that will really pay off dividends in framerate and immersion. There's nothing quite as disappointing as going a bit out of the way on some mission only to find the world completely deserted.

I wonder if this could be applied for general mission building to populate towns on-the-fly (sort of).

Nothing really brilliant my friend, what I would call 'brilliant' stuff would be like some of the dialog stuff people like CSL and others have come out with, that stuff is way beyond me.

Honestly it takes me a very long time to do scripts, this app now equals wieght of 35 kb so far, and took me about 10 hours at least over 3 days to do, I constantly have to check and recheck everything im doing to be sure im putting it all together correctly.

"I wonder if this could be applied for general mission building to populate towns on-the-fly (sort of)."

Would be impossible to do that, to populate towns with this, without having preset locations of the various towers and their gaurds, mg bunkers and their gunners, stationary gaurds and patrols, they would just be scattered alover the place and would look like crap.

Really to create an alive town/base the easiest way to do this is to just place the units by hand in the editor, especially when it comes to static units (not moving, guards primarily) - and with really very little effort put in by the mission maker, this script will hide/show all those units, heck u could populate every town on the map and this script can completely take out the lag, aside from any potential lag due to a town nearby of course, but we wouldnt want that town hidden now would we ...

There are random patrol scripts of course, first ones to come to mind are CSL's and Kronzkys. Although I cannot say honestly if this script app would confilct with those units being used in random patrol scripts in towns or not, if it did I suppose a small subscript could be put in by the mission maker to account for this, I cant cover everything/

Anyhow, as usual, there are some bugs I dug up in the resulting multiple tests last night upon respawning units, seems there is some funky random thing going on where spawned units with a waypoint plan are getting like kinda stuck, where they stand there spinning around in circles, and out in the wide open with the waypoint right in front of them, Ill need to determine exactly what this is and find a fix, it only happens like once out of 5 times, but it needs to be fixed. Everything else works great, tower guards go back in their towers, etc, Mg gunners spawn and get back in weapons (resetting ammo to Mg's per spawn as well so they dont man an empty or half empty gun).

Hey, btw again thanks for the support and interest CharveL, much appreciated

@liljb15

The mission is not in Beta stage, nor is it close to it, sorry, the mission has been in the works for well over a year now, and it certainly will not be next week or next month when it will be ready for beta testing, but when it is ready, it will likely be put up on Ofpec beta testing and your of course will be welcome to try it out

[CharveL 0]

Quote[/b] ] Really to create an alive town/base the easiest way to do this is to just place the units by hand in the editor, especially when it comes to static units (not moving, guards primarily) - and with really very little effort put in by the mission maker, this script will hide/show all those units, heck u could populate every town on the map and this script can completely take out the lag, aside from any potential lag due to a town nearby of course, but we wouldnt want that town hidden now would we ...

This is what I mean actually. Units and their respective waypoints would be placed accordingly on mission design but your script would only show the ones in your particular town or vicinity to reduce lag. Sort of a dynamic actor loading script.

[Guest]

Quote[/b] ] Really to create an alive town/base the easiest way to do this is to just place the units by hand in the editor, especially when it comes to static units (not moving, guards primarily) - and with really very little effort put in by the mission maker, this script will hide/show all those units, heck u could populate every town on the map and this script can completely take out the lag, aside from any potential lag due to a town nearby of course, but we wouldnt want that town hidden now would we ...

This is what I mean actually. Units and their respective waypoints would be placed accordingly on mission design but your script would only show the ones in your particular town or vicinity to reduce lag. Sort of a dynamic actor loading script.

There was some sort of mis-communication here, what you just described is exactly what it does.

The main 'master' script checks distance to all 'designated' areas to player group units, and executes hide or show scripts accordingly for those particular areas. This runs throughout the entire duration of the mission hiding and showing appropriate town areas/base areas.

It hides all but the nearest 'designated' areas to player group units - of course this must include players units as well, cannot have players ai being sent into enemy/friendly towns that are completely dead, when they are really not.

But ya, thats what it does.

[Guest]

an update

Finally found a fix for the units stuck at spawn with waypoint plans, simple, Unit doMove getPos unit - ironically this was put into the script as a backup in case of this happening, but it never fired due to the one true root of a number of issues, that is a unit cannot hold a name of a previous existing unit, well, it can be assigned, but the name cannot be referenced to cause the new unit to do anything, this ultimately was the failure.

This is very good to know, very thankfull doMove seems to fix the stuck problem. ColonelSandersLite spent a few hours last night and formulated some code for the script that can fix the name issue here, which was not easy for him to get together, and the result is using globals equal to the units either in their inits or in any code to be able to pass this name on after the unit is deleted to the new unit which is spawned that represents him, and to be able to access these globals for those units. If this indeed turns out to be the best fix, my goal is to have only units that the mission makers desires to have accessable need these globals set to them, therefore again, avoiding use of too many globals to stay far away from the save game bug.

[Jolly_Roger 0]

Nice ed... your work sounds great for me !!!!

[Guest]

Thanks Jolly_Roger

Ive tested the town hide/show function just now repeated times in the same mission over time, no errors, no problems to report, this is huge - has taken very much time and work, and great fortune to find and fix bugs, and get this thing to work.

Id like to give thanks to my God (the one and only ), I highly doubt I could have pulled this off without him guiding me here, its strange how Ive ended up tracking a few bugs, for really no reason as they werent true bugs just to have that path I started on land me in discovering issues I prolly would never have found any other way -

thanks also to CSL, he helped hugely in finding a fix for the newly created units constant name reference, he really had to dive deep to figure out something that would work.

This although is one of the smaller apps Ive made, its certainly my most complex, having dived into an area that Im not used to in depth, multi dimensional arrays, managing element positions, finding elements positions within in array, removing elements, some pretty wild stuff (for me anyhow.. )

Yep, still some more work to do, need to add a number of needed features, then make a master script to run both scripts on multi towns, a dead unit management script to update arrays so they dont get overloaded with dead units.

Still, this is a huge breakthru, time to open a cold one and celebrate (after 10 min celebration back to it... )

[Guest]

Update

Just got back after a long welcome break.

I just got up the rough version of the master script to run the townHide function, I need to go back thru and optimize it, but although untested (and prolly a few errors) it looks like a solid structure and should do the job. Of course the town hide/show scripts are were already tested and fully working some time ago.

Once the TownHide function is tested on multiple towns in a test version, I will need to go thru and make a final version for release that will have both a clean templete and a 3 town sample templete.

Not sure yet if it might need a tester or two, so far testing has been ok solo with this.

There will be some required script altering for users, this is unavoidable, but its very simple stuff, basically just having to input names of certain units in each town and their adjecent watch markers (for stationary units/gunners) and a few primary markers/trigger names for each town. Considering the yield is to be able to litterally populate every town on the map, its not alot of extra work, at all.

As said before, this wont support hiding/showing vehicles, but almost everything else involving Man type units under the sun it does, including, well, everything, it stores even editor placed waypoint plans, stores Mg gunners and puts them back in upon showing them again, even tower guards, spotlight manners -

Funny the hide/show scripts took seemingly endless hours to do, this control script took one evening lol....

[CharveL 0]

Well hurry up man and release it before I break a hip or something!

[gassybutt 0]

Even without the missions, it sounds like it would be cool to be in the middle of these random type battles with the AI going about their business all around you.

Looking forwards to a release.

[Treelor 0]

I *just* now found this thread? Good lord. This stuff is exactly the kind of mission that I'm looking for. Great work, I've been thinking about learning scripting for ArmA (I tried before, wiki didn't help in the slightest) but now that I see that this sort of stuff can be done it's really renewed my interest.

I'm greatly anticipating this mission, hopefully you'll see it through to the end!

[Chip360 0]

Hows the progress on the TownHide Function Going?