Medivacs

[Daniel 0]

I'm not fully clued up with whats currently available at the moment in terms of revive scripts and stuff. But here's what i'd like to add to missions for my unit.

Basically, our serious missions usually have respawn turned off. However, it'd be nice to strike a balance between shitting yourself that one bullet might ruin your day, and the fun of dragging a wounded comrade back and getting him on a casevac chopper.

Best case scenario would be this:

You take a slight hit as you do now, and the squad medic can patch you up.

You take a serious hit and you either die, or there's a slight chance a revive script will kick in. In which case any soldier can get you back on your feet using your personal medical gear, but you'll still be unable to fight properly unless you can get a casevac back to a field hospital. Perhaps if direct explosions and headshots killed outright, but there was a chance of being incapacitated by body hits that would usually kill you in vanilla ArmA.

This would add extra elements to our games such as casevac missions for pilots and covering casualties that would usually be either dead or magically brought to life by the medic.

But the idea of knowing you can always be "revived" kills the immersion for me.

Also, nothing against SLX, it's a great mod, but it really wouldn't suit us. So i'm hoping there's a scripting or small addon solution.

Cheers.  

[norrin 9]

I've often wondered about adding an element of this to the revive script.

What I was thinking was that you'd add a damaged eventhandler to the unit which would keep track of where the player was hit and the amount of damage that occurred.

If the player was hit in the head for instance and killed its unlikely that he'd be able to be revived or if was hit by a tank shell or rocket and received a very high level of damage once again he'd be dead out right. If on the otherhand he was killed by small arms fire to the leg there would be a chance that he could be revived however he may not be able to stand and walk, he may be able to kneel. If hit in both legs he'd only be able to crawl when revived. etc etc. My feeling is in this situation all players should be able to heal/bandage small levels of damage whereas only medics should be able to revive.

Some of these sorts of features are already possible in the revive script using the built-in options and Hulking Unicorns prone script, however, I've never looked into whether the damaged eventhandler can be used in this way. Now that the revive script is pretty stable maybe its time for me to look into this further.

[Serclaes 0]

I wouldn't even go that far and check where the guy has been hit. I mean, the "revive" is as far from real as a wounded soldier returning to battle, which is quite unreal. The medevac just adds a heavier weight to a casualty because you actually have to secure him, get him to a landing zone, secure a landing zone for the medevac chopper and a landing zone for the reinserting chopper. Which can put the progress of the whole mission at halt for 30 mins.

The problem isnt even to keep track of the wounded as its possible. I would recommend tho that a wounded takes 4 or 5 places in the chopper (game logics).

The hardest nut to crack that you have is the flightpath of the chopper so that he takes the most careful path when enemy is near and the selection of the landing zone, tho you can attribute less importance to the latter as it would make sense to players loosing their only medevac chopper.

[Daniel 0]

Quote[/b] ]Now that the revive script is pretty stable maybe its time for me to look into this further.

That's cool! I'll check out what your revive script in the meantime.

Quote[/b] ]My feeling is in this situation all players should be able to heal/bandage small levels of damage whereas only medics should be able to revive.

That's be better, yes.

@Serclaes

I'm thinking in terms of having all friendly units played by humans. Also I should have said casevac rather than medevac.

In terms of getting "revived" players back into battle: it isn't exactly realistic but it'd be rather pointless to spend the time securing a casualty and getting him patched back up in friendly lines only for him to spend the next 6 months of the game learning how to walk again.    

I guess making it so they can continue to fight after being healed up would be a necessary gameplay aspect.

As I said, without any chance of being "healed" within the timespan of the mission (which would of course take months or years in real life), there's little inclination to rescue downed casualties.

Having respawn turned off may the the most realistic method but it removes this aspect from co-op gameplay.

[norrin 9]

I started looking into this last night and it seems that the there are a couple of problems with the damaged eventhandler - firstly, the damaged areas are generic eg. legs or arms so we'll have to simplify that part of the script and two it doesn't matter how much damage you receive its always listed as 1.

We may be able to get around some of this by also using the hit and killed eventhandlers but these also have some limitations such as the hit EH does not always trigger when a player is killed but these should at least allow us to determine the type of unit/vehicle doing the damage and if we use them in combination with the getdamage command we should get some idea of the amount of damage done.

[cross 1]

Daniel @ July 14 2008,19:04)]I'm not fully clued up with whats currently available at the moment in terms of revive scripts and stuff. But here's what i'd like to add to missions for my unit.

Basically, our serious missions usually have respawn turned off. However, it'd be nice to strike a balance between shitting yourself that one bullet might ruin your day, and the fun of dragging a wounded comrade back and getting him on a casevac chopper.

Best case scenario would be this:

You take a slight hit as you do now, and the squad medic can patch you up.

You take a serious hit and you either die, or there's a slight chance a revive script will kick in. In which case any soldier can get you back on your feet using your personal medical gear, but you'll still be unable to fight properly unless you can get a casevac back to a field hospital. Perhaps if direct explosions and headshots killed outright, but there was a chance of being incapacitated by body hits that would usually kill you in vanilla ArmA.

This would add extra elements to our games such as casevac missions for pilots and covering casualties that would usually be either dead or magically brought to life by the medic.

But the idea of knowing you can always be "revived" kills the immersion for me.

Also, nothing against SLX, it's a great mod, but it really wouldn't suit us. So i'm hoping there's a scripting or small addon solution.

Cheers.  

Daniel,

take a look at Norrin's revive script and the options in it.

There are many (possibly enough) options there to make you happy. You'll find options like reviver restriction (only medics) and wounded time (you die after a certain seconds), revivee walk restriction (cant walk so need to be transported to a field hospital) etc..in the pack. Set it up according to the mission.

And yes...if you are not paying pvp, and have the time, doing a proper medivac or a casevac might give more immersion.