Warfare Proton Mods

[Proton 11]

As players can do air I think air support is best when it is left to them.

I do understand now that there is a huge demand for a scaled-down version, so I will definitely try to add something like in Oden's version.

Luke: I could not reproduce, everything I see from here is normal. Players are moved temporarily by the BIS scripts while doing respawn, probably a script gets stuck there, and I have seen this even in ArmA1. I will check your server as soon I have some spare time. Until then: Is it reproducible 100% the times? What were you exactly doing before that? What about "error in expression" lines in the .rpt files?

[spamurai 3]

Loaded the Proton Mission for the first time on our 31st Wrecking Crew Server.

Encountered some bugs:

JIP players initially spawn in the ocean. A respawn will return them to dry land.

There is a problem for JIP commanders... they appear to lose the "Construction" ability from their action menu's.

I encountered problems with the High Commander mode which would cause a CTD while the Command Bar was toggled into the High Commander Mode. A random attempt at issuing a command to a group might trigger a CTD.

A Human Squad leader that CTD's with other human players in his group caused problems for the returning player who crashed out, but JIP using the same player slot. That player became commander of a "ghost" group... with no units in his group bar, but clearly his former units were still associated with him. Buying new units did not add any units to the Command bar, but the units would exist, only not commandable by the player. Using the Proton "Reorder Squad Icons" action, sometimes revealed a unit from the former group... disbanding that unit gave command to a surviving human player in the former group.

[Taggart517 10]

When transferring funds, it would be better if the minimum amount was $100, at the mo its $1 and it takes forever to enter a reasonable amount.

[Proton 11]

Taggart517: I do not understand. You have a slider on the dialog.

---------- Post added at 11:06 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:19 AM ----------

Spamurai:

JIP players initially spawn in the ocean. A respawn will return them to dry land.

Reproduced. For some reason sometimes it works as normal. Perhaps this is what Luke is referring to, but a respawn from the menu fixes it, so I am not sure why he said they "end" in the water. Looking into what is causing it, it was not there earlier.

There is a problem for JIP commanders... they appear to lose the "Construction" ability from their action menu's.

I could not reproduce this. Tried going into commander, giving back to AI, disconnect, reconnect, going into commander, disconnect as commander, reconnect and being commander again without a vote. Construction menu was properly shown all the time.

I encountered problems with the High Commander mode which would cause a CTD while the Command Bar was toggled into the High Commander Mode. A random attempt at issuing a command to a group might trigger a CTD.

I could not reproduce it again. I never had a crash because of the command bar yet. Actually, since the 1.02 update I never had a crash at all. What command had you given?

A Human Squad leader that CTD's with other human players in his group caused problems for the returning player who crashed out, but JIP using the same player slot. That player became commander of a "ghost" group... with no units in his group bar, but clearly his former units were still associated with him. Buying new units did not add any units to the Command bar, but the units would exist, only not commandable by the player. Using the Proton "Reorder Squad Icons" action, sometimes revealed a unit from the former group... disbanding that unit gave command to a surviving human player in the former group.

It is even harder to reproduce, but I can imagine these ugly stuff may happen when somebody crashes. The engine should maintain consistency in these cases across the network, but obviously it does not. It looks like the player's group list can start holding corrupt entries if the player's group had another player, probably the internal pointers go wrong and they are not checked or removed properly. I cannot really do anything about it from scripts, the best is what the reorder button does: it goes through all units in the group and re-adds them to the same group, letting the engine do a second check about the consistency of the units (that part of the code may be less buggy). But I doubt that I can remove units from a group which became corrupt at the engine level.

I recommend not to use BIS's join option now, let people stay in different group. Or take the risks if somebody crashes ;)

Edited August 14, 2009 by Proton

[Gutm@sher 10]

Complete noob question here. i cant figure out how to get your mission running on my server. played for a bit last night on military gaming without issue (good fun btw!). the pbo name MP_Warfare32V18E_PE13.Chernarus shows up on the lobby mission list instead of the proton warfare and when you select it, it pops back to our server's default mission. works fine on lan however. here's what i have tried with my server:

- place pbo in mpmissions folder only

- place pbo and bisign in mpmissions and bikey in keys folder

- place pbo in mpmissions and bikey in keys folder.

when i joined militarygaming server, it downloaded the mission to the mpcache even though i already had the updated mission in my computers mpmissions folder. I'm sure its something easy i'm hosing up here, but it escapes me. my guys are looking for a good warfare and this is definitely one of them. now if i could only show it to them! thanks in advance.

[USMCLuke 10]

The version we run on MG has a few tweaks here and there to make it fit our play style a bit better. Mainly just small things like reducing the max distance you can build from a town and toying with money depending on how we feel like playing. That's why the version you had did not match ours and you had to download. You're doing everything right as far as how you need it set up on your server, but it sounds like you may have something in your default server config file that is causing the other mission to start, namely having something in for mission rotation.

[Proton 11]

Complete noob question here. i cant figure out how to get your mission running on my server. played for a bit last night on military gaming without issue (good fun btw!). the pbo name MP_Warfare32V18E_PE13.Chernarus shows up on the lobby mission list instead of the proton warfare and when you select it, it pops back to our server's default mission. works fine on lan however. here's what i have tried with my server:

- place pbo in mpmissions folder only

- place pbo and bisign in mpmissions and bikey in keys folder

- place pbo in mpmissions and bikey in keys folder.

Forget about the keys if you are not using server signature checks. It should work if you simply copy the .pbo to the MPMissions folder in the arma2 root directory. Just as Luke told you may have something mixed up in the config file of the server.

[Gutm@sher 10]

Thanks for the input. we are currently running aas mission in auto rotation so i'll get with the bubbas and see whats going on there.

[cheeseds 10]

I was testing out arty yesterday and i selected my arty units and when to the communication menu and there was no options at all just a blank panel. and i was getting some double entries on the mouse wheel menu around double deckers (main camps or whatever you want to call them) i dont know what caused it i just noticed it the other day

[Alexrey 10]

I dunno if it's been asked before, but why can I only spawn at my HQ? Everytime I die I have to travel 10 minutes to get to the battle again. :(

[cheeseds 10]

I dunno if it's been asked before, but why can I only spawn at my HQ? Everytime I die I have to travel 10 minutes to get to the battle again. :(

if it was only for one game its most likely a arma bug but if it were consistent then it maybe protons

[USMCLuke 10]

Proton has it that way intentionally so that people can't spawn over and over at strongpoints. If you want another respawn point, then you need to buy an ambulance and keep it w/i 800m.

[Proton 11]

Alexrey: You have plenty of ways to stay close to the battle.

First, you can use fasttravel to get closer to the action. The advantage of this that you can take AI units with you. I am currently implementing changes the fasttravel system to enable it for AI without your presence, so if people want rapid action, they can pump up the FT speed and move troops to the frontline pretty fast.

Second, you still can use the camps around the town to respawn, but if you die closer than 100m to them or there are too much enemies around it, you cannot respawn there anymore. This is to avoid what could be seen in Arma1 warfare a lot, namely, that a lone Rambo wipes out an entire town by spawning on the same camp a hundred times, or people kill their attacker by respawning until it tries to cap the same camp. Take more camps around a town for a safer respawn.

Third, as Luke mentioned, you can also buy a mobile respawn and use that. Hide it somewhere close to the battle.

Fourth, you may ask your commander to place a building close to the frontline. You can respawn at any building. However, it can be risky, as you need the MHQ close to enemy lines for doing that.

Edited August 16, 2009 by Proton

[Batstat 10]

Hi thx for a excelent mission Proton. Tested it last night on our dedicated server.

My inital comments:

For new players you could consider to

1. In the readme, give info to server admins where to put your key and bisign files. And maybe how to activate it.

2. In the readme, link to a guide where game mechanics are explained, and how to access various menues, as player and commander. Optional link to a guide that have most in common with your mission.

Two thing I noticed:

Playing the mission with Arma II beta client against a plain dedicated server did hang my UI in the lobby, when I choosed none as game parameters.

Consider to make a variabel lenght intro, where userinput are disabled while waiting for server to settel all the init script. Give the game to the players when the server is done with running startup script. This will lower the bad side effects of yellow and red chains, witch todoay is bound to happen after the mission start.

Edit: The time for server to init, givs away server and to some extent network performance. Witch could be used to hint about what settings the mission best can be played at, if this is known numbers?

Edited August 28, 2009 by Batstat

[Batstat 10]

Scratch the beta error report. This is a known beta bug.You can't log in as admin, when using beta against dedicated server not running the beta. Somebody told me yesterday.

[The.Yield 10]

It's become something of a ghost town in this thread, lol.

My group and I had an excellent game last night (about 4 hours long). We reduced the AI to 10 per side to make things a bit less "bogged-down" towards the end of the game. Noticed a few things just in case this warfare is still under development (haven't been keeping up).

1. Fast-time just doesn't seem to work at all... simple as that.

2. Artillery, at least for us, seems completely broken. The last several times we've tried to use it, we simply get blank communication menu's. Not sure if that's some kinda' addons conflict or what, more testing is needed.

3. I think this has been discussed, but bases always starting in the same position is... problematic for the small group of players on the BLUFOR fighting the completely AI OPFOR or vice versa. And more over, the AI is not putting up much of a fight at all. In that game the AI was on the coast and had taken maybe 2 towns and that was it (that's probably a general warfare issue though).

But overall a very fun game! Had some epic moments going in on foot into towns, spec-ops style lol. Javelins from the top of apartment buildings etc.

Great work proton.

EDIT: We've found that some mod(s) we were all using was/were in fact the culprit(s). Not entirely sure what, but my hunch is it was one of the many mods we were using that affects the UI or keybinds. We're doing more testing to figure it out.

Edited August 31, 2009 by The.Yield

[greenpsycho 10]

Hmm, well, I would disagree with your issues, but as you said, it may be other mods running. Last time I played, I remembered fast travel working, and I fooled around with the arty just last night and it was working like a dream.

As for AI not putting up much of a fight, check your settings regarding difficulty, because I believe Proton put the commander on the highest AI setting to avoid such issues. Also, do an ingame "#monitor" after you log in as admin, because I've noticed when your running 20fps (server fps, not your normal in game fps) then everything is running real smooth, HOWEVER, the game is a resource pig and causes resources leaks too, so after a couple hours, you will notice your server fps down to around 13 and all your ai teammates aren't really moving or doing much. This is just an indication of the resource leakage and that the server may eventually crash out

I noticed a couple weird bugs (not game breaking) the other night:

-in the new proton options menu, it doesn't remember your previous settings. IE it defaults to vehicles being locked, so when I set vehicles to unlock at the beginning of the match, and later I go into the options pane to transfer money and hit close, it resets the vehicles to being locked. Not a huge deal

-Also, I was making crazy money from supply the other night because every time one of my vehicles drove past a town on the way to its destination, I got money for it being supplied (even if it was already at max supply). This happened alot around Solichny and didn't notice it much anywhere else.

Beyond that I'm kinda sitting on my hands for a) a super computer that can run this game without problem or b) a super patch that will make it run on my computer without problem

[Batstat 10]

I did som testing, with my 8GB Q9550 server win 7rc64. If you have enough memory, using the -maxmem=2047 on the server make a huge difference. A game that normaly go down after 1,5 hours could using the default settings, could last for 4 - 6 hours using -maxmem=2047 on the server (I don't know what the default settings are)

I tested it using a ideling approch, once in a while I did use fast travel to engange the enemy, only to check that they did respond. When the server used close to 1,8GB with maxmem=2047 it started to become sluggish.

Maybe change the garbage (salvage) routine. Wrecks that are to old, should be removed, or the salvage operation radius made bigger. Remove the need to drive close to the salvage wreck target, if that is possible.

Same for ammo if thats a problem.

Fasttravel did work, I guess one or more playing the game did use one of the provided beta patches.

Edited August 31, 2009 by Batstat

[greenpsycho 10]

good to know.

i think the biggest problem I had before (I'm running mine on my core i7 system running near 4ghz) is that it doesn't really use more than 1 core (and with HT on, sometimes it seems it uses only 1/8 of the processing power, which is....bad)

I'm not running any of the beta patches, BUT i've read that one of hte new ones will over ride autodetection, so if you use the cpucount parameter, it should use it correctly now (again, thats what I heard)

[Batstat 10]

I did notice that the cpu under max load newer used more than 40%. Normaly between 30 and 40%. Disabling HT on the server seems to be vice.

Sorry for my off topic remark Proton, but your mission is huge, and it will tax the server to it's limits.

I hope you continue to develop the mission :D

[greenpsycho 10]

question for proton fans: i've found that occasionally the game is a bit slow, ie, there doesn't seem to be as many enemies to fight town to town (just a squad or 2) and we usually steam roll them. I don't think its the difficulty setting, but just shear mass of guys.

any suggestions? would increasing the enemies funds and starting command points help us out in this regard? Or would I be better off manually adding more guys into the map?

[nuggetz 0]

Does this work with the latest beta patches? I think i tried some time back and the AI didn't build anything.

[Proton 11]

Just to clarify the status of this mission:

I had another non-released version back in 2009, but then Benny started editing warfare of A2. I realized that in the long run I do not have the necessary amount of time to compete with him, and it makes more sense to modify his edition, rather than parallely replicating everything. My efforts to contact other warfare editing people to create a joint project failed.

I am currently running a custom edition of Benny's warfare at 155.198.117.142 ([iMPERIAL] Warfare VETS) which is used in a scientific project.