The Cause

[Rejn 0]

Hi there, I cant find my previous topic, did a search for it but seems to have gone. No loss as I wanted to start a new one for the campaign anyway.

I will release all 5 missions updated for version 1.08 soon in a mini campaign entitled chapter 1 of the cause.

here is a link to the last mission I made, its called Back to Carazol. it is up at armaholic:

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=1482&ratings=1

FORMAT: Singleplayer

REQUIRES: V1.08

Enjoy. Please let me know if you find any bugs/ctd's etc.

This mission has been tested fairly heavily and I believe all if not most major bugs have been removed.

Features:

intro

Outro

Random waypoints for friendly and enemy squads

Friendly squads radio where in the city their heading except Blue Thunder (T72) which makes its way through the city central streets.

I have a counter variable running in the background to check how many enemy units are dead. Once 100 are dead the battle shifts from east to west carazol and once 180 are dead the enemy retreats.

You do not need to follow waypoints in order to completet this mission whatsoever. You dont even need to follow your squad.

Reinforcmenets are constant until the enemy the end of the mission.

Please post feedback/crits/comments.

The missions intro is relevant to past missions.

EDIT:

The mission was tailored with performance constraints in mind. I hope all of you have acceptable performance. The illusion of a large battle is hard to keep in especially in Carazol, there are lulls in the battle but there is a fair amount going on in the background.

I will make a few changes to this map based partly on feedback before i release the campaign.

[sgt gul 0]

Hello i just installed and played the mission, i must say its great. But its confusing sometimes because of the large movement etc. But its a great step towards big battles, urban combats. And you did let the corpses disappear right after they are killed? no loss for Frames right.

Keep it coming

[Rejn 0]

Hi Sgt glad your enjoying it

Bodies are hidden after 10 seconds to ensure stable frame rates and avoid any potential CTD due to piled up bodies etc...

Its one of the reasons I added radio messages telling you whenever 50,100 and 150 enemies have been killed.  That way you kind of get a progress report.

You are not told immeadiatley when 50,100 or 150 have died either. Theres usually 30 second delay or so depending.

I wasn't sure how everyone's pc would handle the city combat as Carazol is one of the larger cities in the game.

I run with a GTX8800 but performance is relative depending the settings and as you know ARMA and GTX8800 get on soso

If you guys get a chance please post how performance goes for your pc's and  ur pc specs. Just ram, vid card and CPU will do.

The movement is definatley confusing

I kind of found that to be somewhat realistic with city battles.

Please note:

The waypoints for your or any squad for that matter changes when:

-Reinforcements for the squad in question arrives.

-The sqad reaches its destination waypoint

-When the enemy retreates to west carazol and when 50 enemies die. (Due to occassional problems with at least one friendly squad wondering off outside the city I found it a good idea to make sure that at some point all squads waypoints are force updated)

My suggestion when playing this map is to stay behind your squad but don't advance to far behind enemy lines.

Enemies move in numbers usually and have often surprised me around corners in greater numbers.

If you want to play it safe, advance with the tank. The tank moves down the street bit by bit and waits at each street corner for one to half a minute. If the tank is destroyed another will be on the way at a random time.

Have fun

EDIT: Your call sign is ground hawk 1, any radio messages coming from Ground Hawk 1 will tell you were your squad is heading.

.

[sgt gul 0]

Yeah that adds a great aspect of realism, like i said this could be a next step towards bigger city battles. Its great to fight against numerous enemies, i was ambushed plenty of times. Like you said, the enemies move together with 6/7 guys so its house to house combat in the centre of the city. Thats a good job you did there. I dont have a super computer, but i play at low/medium settings and i didnt get any huge framedrop. But ill test it with higher settings as soon as i get my new comp. My old one is:

P4 2.66 Ghz

1Gig ddr (not DDR2)

Ati X1600 256 MB AGP

160Gig HDD

My new will be (thursday i get it):

AMD Athlon X2 dual 4200+

1Gig DDR2 (ill add 1more in about a month)

PCI-E X1650 512MB

HDD is same.

I hope to play at higher settings with this new computer. I am sure it will be better then the old one thats for sure.

Do you plan to release more missions like this? massive battles, house to house, snipers on rooftops maybe. i think that AI at rooftops will add a more real feeling to the city battles.

[Maddmatt 1]

I was actually going to PM some feedback about it before you released it, but now I may as well post it here.

First , the savegame CTD is caused by a large amount of global variables (about 240). It has nothing to do with corpses or the amount of units. The mission only has about 180 enemies, so you don't need to delete their bodies at all. I don't know how often the friendlies respawn, but you could have a limit of about 100 corpses without a problem.

You mission does appear to use many global variables (I used Laza to open the save file), best thing to do would be to put them into arrays. I still had the save game CTD while testing this mission, but I was using the tracers mod which also added a bunch of global vars.

Also, some enemies on the rooftops go prone and shoot through the small walls there. You could force them to crouch with the 'setUnitPos' command.

Great mission though

[Rejn 0]

For sure

This was my first city mission and it took ages to code and test everything the way I wanted it but no that I have made my scripts working expect more missions like that in the future.

Chapter 2 of the campaign will or should have at least 2 large battles in it

[Rejn 0]

I was actually going to PM some feedback about it before you released it, but now I may as well post it here.

First of, the savegame CTD is caused by a large amount of global variables (about 240). It has nothing to do with corpses or the amount of units. The mission only has about 180 enemies, so you don't need to delete their bodies at all. I don't know how often the friendlies respawn, but you could have a limit of about 100 corpses without a problem.

You mission does appear to use many global variables (I used Laza to open the save file), best thing to do would be to put them into arrays. I still had the save game CTD while testing this mission, but I was using the tracers mod which also added a bunch of global vars too.

Also, some enemies on the rooftops go prone and shoot through the small walls there. You could force them to crouch with the 'setUnitPos' command.

Still, it is a great mission.

Hi there maddmatt,

The mission for download on the link here is different from the one I sent you.

I removed the mortar script at the beginning and I removed 3 units on the rooftops (particularly one in the tower) from the west side. I found that once I had shot this guy in the tower and his body hid my game would crash.

So far I have had no more CTD's

I have cut the variables down considerably. There are still alot though. Variable numbers won't have changed much.

I just know that this mortar script I had running at the beginning of my mission has not been tested well enough and that I had constant CTD with a previous version of the mortar script.

No guarantees though but I think I got rid of the CTD in this version. Check it out if you like and let me know if u find anything.

EDIT:

About the corpses, I was just worried about performance and about BSOD crashes/CTD for some.

Because its a city battle I didn't want to place to much pressure on graphics. I will be more lenient on bodies for open battles.

If feedback for performance is all positive I might have bodies stay a little longer in future.

[Maddmatt 1]

Only CTD I ever had in the version I tested was the crash from too many global variables in the save file. Maybe I will test this version later.

I really don't think you need to delete the bodies though, they have very little effect on performance. They will not cause any CTDs. Having bodies also makes it easier for the player to re-arm, instead of having to find one of those ammo crates.

It would be cool if you put back those guys on the rooftops, and made them crouch. It makes sure the player needs to be more aware.

Performance in this mission for me is very good. Especially because of the fog.

Edit: The savegame issue was posted on the bug-tracker here.

[Rejn 0]

Ah good Im glad its reported as a bug.

I only removed 3 enemies off the roof tops, there was also the asthetic problem. Two of them were on the bridge house and one on the tower in the west side. It looked a bit crap cause the one guy kept lying down in the tower and same with the guys on the bridge building. I could get them to crouch by turning off animation ai for them but that only lasts until u save/load a game and then Im not sure if they can move after that.

Additionally the guy in the tower gave me CTD midgame with/without saving. It may have also been mortar script..

in any case having removed the mortar script has lowerd the variables by 6 or so.

So mabey Im just under the magic number lol not sure.

I'll experiment around with all of this in the future. For now I'd like stability as a priority. My next major city combat mission will be (Ortego?) probably.

As for the bodies I may add an extra 5-10 seconds before they dissapear, thats usually a good ammount of time for the player to access the bodies I find but no guarantees as it means multiple hide.sqs scripts running in the back all qeued up. They have to be deleted though because having over 100 bodies all clogging the road would end up hitting performance somewhat eventually.

 In the future Im going to work on a body delete script taht leaves x ammount of bodies.

If you find any further CTD's with the new version let me know. So far so good, Im going to compile all the missions I've released before for 1.08 and with additional fixes and requests in my campaign.

[Maddmatt 1]

Tested the mission a little, I also changed a couple scripts first so that enemy bodies don't get deleted at all, and friendlies get deleted after 60 seconds (since it seems like friendly AI have unlimited respawns).

After playing and getting inside the town I aborted the mission and opened up the save file with Laza. There were 245 variables (the point where crashes start is 240). Some of those variables were from mods I was running (SIX tracers), so without mods the number is below the limit and crashes wont occur. Just to make sure I started up the game and resumed from my save, as expected I got a CTD.

So as long as no mods are being run, this mission should never crash.

Until BIS fixes this problem, the best thing to do is to keep your global variables in arrays using as few arrays as possible. The size of the arrays isn't an issue. Or you could use the SetUnitVariable command and keep all variables in a gamelogic (got that idea from Sickboy).

I have already had a several page discussion about the save problem in the thread for 6thSense.eu Pack 1, so I know all about this damn problem

The CTD problem is not related to performance at all, it's just a bug that we can only work around for now.

Anyway, now about the mission:

The player is an RPG soldier, but I have never had an opportunity to use it except for the RACS 4x4 with M2. I haven't finished this new version so I don't know if you changed anything. Maybe you can add some armour, such as M113s and even an M1A1.

Or let the player have a different loadout, such as an AK74 with a GL. The RACS should have more vehicles in a city like this, especially since it is the border town.

Just ideas of course.

[Rejn 0]

Good idea I will change the player unit to Grenadier instead of rpg

Im wondering can you pm me a link on this array walk around? Im not sure how its done and wether it can be used for unit respawns.

Or if you can give me a quick rund down with example would be great.

I wanted to add respawning enemy abrhams but I had some problems with it... I think I may have found a walk around and might still add it

EDIT: What i mean is I am not sure if I understand how to keep variables in array format, since array format as far as I know is such:

Z=[z,y,z,g,h,i,etc]

[Tuulos 0]

If you add armoured enemys into there AK74 & RPG is good loadout.

I liked the snipers in the rooftops, they brought some excitement when you had to check the upper places too. You could try to add more snipers and place them into more rooftops.

[Rejn 0]

Thanks Tuulos

One of the interesting things with the v1.08 patch is that the ai seems to target enemies on roof's much better. Theres actually a fair few MG's and snipers up there, sadly they tend to be killed beforet he player gets to them hehe...

For my next city combat mission down the track I will have snipers respawn somewhere and climb up the ladders to get into position on the roofs

[Tuulos 0]

You could get some Blackhawk Down-feel by adding rpg-troops to roofs