Group and leader question

[lorlabnew 0]

Have this editing question guys which I can't figure out...

I need to assign a whole infantry squad to new leader (player) after the mission starts. I used the "JOIN" waypoint, what originally seemed to be OK, but after some testing I found out that for unknown reason the squad is facing wrong direction half of the time and mostly ignores the "watch

direction" command. Thats highly annoying and particularly deadly behaviour during the mission. Neither doFollow command does any good... rearranged waypoints and units facings, no help, still wrong facing.

I decided to try group&leader commands to see if the facing would improve, and I see the syntax for "leader" and "group" in manuals, but can't make it work....

Should I call these lines in the initialization fields, on in .sqs script? I tried both and while there is no problem to asign group name (Group = group officer1), I can't assign the player to that squad as a leader... (squad is infantry group, and player is separate unit). If I call those lines in the .sqs script, I'm getting errors.

Could someone knowledgeable post some example how to do it? If it doesn't work (regarding the facing error) I'll just assign player directly as squad-leader, but would be much better if I wouldn't have to (since I would need to change some scripts, dialogue sentences etc.)

I looked in so many manuals and tutorials, can't find this anywhere...

Please help. Thx in advance.

Dave

[lorlabnew 0]

OK, I'm kinda bumping this up, but I'd like to add a few observations to explain this problem more accurately:

1) first, I can make separate group to join my player, who becomes a leader at that point; what's bad is the fact that after about 200-300 yards of advance these guys won't listen "watch direction" command anymore... why the hell is that?

They will understand and perform both "watch direction" and "change formation" for about first 100-200 yards. We

advance a bit further into the hill towards the enemy positions; at that point they'll turn around, and stubbornly

stay watching for instance east direction instead of original west. They IGNORE the command entirely.....

Since I thought it's the squad and leader related problem because in game "joining", I tried waypoint JOIN setup, I tried JOIN command in .sqs script (in various flavors), I tried to re-arrange all waypoints, all facings, I joined the squad as a whole, as individuals, no help.

I tried setFormDir and other commands in .sqs, but it's not difference. once my guys will advance into the middle of

the hill, they'll turn and face the wrong direction, showing their back to the enemy.

Is there any reason why they would do this? Like waypoint order, or higher ranking officer in that direction, or unknown

object there (like a ship on the horizon, which AI units my not recognize as friendly because distance), or whatever?

I repeat the problem once again for accuracy: they IGNORE command "watch direction" suddenly and keeping turned into

wrong direction unless squad is advancing....I replaced the joining squad with another squad where player is squad-leader since the mission start, so no joining is necessary (Infantry group with officer as player). and the problem  p e r s i s t s ....

I wiped the map, placed a test setup with only squad and leader, and all is OK.

I'm getting completely sick of this since I've been working on this scenario for 2 weeks, and this is a major problem I see...I don't want to post the map anywhere with this glitch of course.

Can't simply believe that I'm the first person who has this problem and that with such an amount of so many skilled people around this board nobody knows...

Please advice. Thx a lot in advance.

Dave