PlannedAssault web based mission builder

[_William 0]

Small update, with a big chunk (6km x 4.5km) of Chernarus available now for mission generation: Gorka. More open than Chernogorsk's surroundings, more cover than near Vybor, and larger. This should be handy since most of you generate missions for the default Arma2 and Arma2OA maps.

Also added are the East German (DDR) National Volksarmee units from Vilas' P85 Germany add-on. I had already added the BDR Bundeswehr units; the NVA are nice as well with characteristic uniforms. Staying within the cold war era, I've added Trouble's BAOR FV438 Swingfire and Bedford trucks. The Swingfire isn't perfect, but it finally gives the British a long-range anti-tank capability.

In one of my test missions, an NVA platoon of BMP-1s ran into a FV438 platoons which was backed by another FV438 platoon at the next hill; the result was amusing with both sides launching a bunch of ATGMs (AT-3's from the BMP-1s, Swingfires from the FV438) at each other.

William

[lms_oid 10]

I've discovered this amazing tool today and I must say it's impressive. Thank You for this great tool _William!!! Challenging, immersive and interesting SP Missions are built in no time! I just have a newbie question : Is paradrop from C130 aicraft supported? It's the only thing I can't figure out how to make work for now!

lms_oid

[_William 0]

I've discovered this amazing tool today and I must say it's impressive. Thank You for this great tool _William!!! Challenging, immersive and interesting SP Missions are built in no time! I just have a newbie question : Is paradrop from C130 aicraft supported? It's the only thing I can't figure out how to make work for now!

lms_oid

Hi, lms_oid. Welcome to this forum and thanks for your feedback. Paradrops aren't supported yet. I'm currently working on adding the Czech Army DLC (maps and units). In the background, I'm reworking attack planning so the 'cannot find maneuver space' planning failures become rare, and mounted attacks become a possibility.

William

[lms_oid 10]

Thank you William!

[_William 0]

Another update, to cover BI's newly released Arma2: Army of the Czech Republic downloadable content. I've covered both maps: the small airstrip map (Bukoniva) is available in its full size, and for the Bystrica I'm covering the southwest 6x4.5km (out of 8x8km). Bukoniva is suitable for every kind of vehicle. Bystrica is better suited to tracked vehicles, due to its dense forests and steeps hills (wheeled vehicles are more likely to become stuck, and lack the weight and wits to get 'unstuck').

The Czech armed forces units have been added to unit database, with the exception of the RM-70 rocket launcher vehicle. I'm a big fan of large, combined arms, battles, and artillery is a key part of that. However, the ACR DLC RM-70 vehicle currently is not compatible with the Arma2 artillery module (it lacks three lines of config data), unlike its elder brother, Arma2's BM-21 rocket launcher. As long as the RM-70 isn't compatible with the artillery module, myself and other mission makers won't be able to order AI groups to fire artillery missions with the RM-70 (and it won't work with the support module either). I've submitted a bug for this, and you can do me a favor voting the bug up here.

William

[_William 0]

lms_oid triggered me to take another look at para drops. How hard could it be to add this, with support for helicopter insertions already in the planner, and some experimental scripts already on my hard drive from a year ago. To cut a long story short, we now have para drops, and I've learned few things the hard way about stubborn/uncontrollable fixed wing AI pilots (*).

The paradrops implemented are the 'classic' massive combat jumps, with troopers jumping with two man per second from the aircraft at low altitude (at least 100m/300ft for small aircraft, and higher for large aircraft such as the Il-76, An-72). The combat jumps are announced with a count-down, the ramps/doors are opened, and if the pilot stays on course, all cargo units jump above the drop zone and the doors close again. If the pilot changes course, the drop might be aborted, and the pilot may try another run; you'll be informed with a new count-down.

Especially when the DZ is near hostile forces, things are likely to go FUBAR, for the para troopers and the hostiles alike. As usual, Arma2 makes these situations look pretty:

See for more images and background info this update.

The only thing I'm not perfectly happy with is the automatic selection of drop zones. I've been working on a more general mechanism that should make picking drop zones easy, but I'm not yet done. For now, I'm reusing heli insertion locations as drop zones, while allowing you to manually place DZs if you want to.

And I didn't get to testing these for ACE, where units probably are not given a parachute.

Now, it is time for me to get back to better (mounted) ground attack planning. Meanwhile, if you have feedback on the para jumps, let me know.

William

*: AI pilots don't look ahead to the next-next waypoint, so they fail to fly a simple (hermite-spline) curve through upcoming waypoints. They routinely start flying through all waypoints again when arriving at the final waypoint, despite the final waypoint being a HOLD waypoint. They can try for hours to hit a 700m 'radius' waypoint but fail doing some due to elevation differences in the terrain...

Edited August 21, 2012 by _William
spelling & grammar

[delta99 34]

Great work as usual William.

Are there any plans on being able to place units more precisely on the map. I always find this to be the biggest hurdle in using the system.

Also it would be great for people to release their missions for download directly from Planned Assault website. There must be some that people have created that are fantastic but I don't think I've seen them posted anywhere.

[viper0311 10]

I was wondering if you could implement Amphibious Assaults to your mission generator? I would love to have missions where you have a bunch of AAVP-7a1s come in from the shore and drop off the Marines in the back and take the objective. This could also work with being able to add infantry to the back of any land vehicles before the mission starts such as with helicopters. If you could implement this it would be greatly appreciated.

[_William 0]

Great work as usual William.

Are there any plans on being able to place units more precisely on the map. I always find this to be the biggest hurdle in using the system.

Also it would be great for people to release their missions for download directly from Planned Assault website. There must be some that people have created that are fantastic but I don't think I've seen them posted anywhere.

I could improve unit placement in two ways. First, I could use 800x600 images for the map instead of the 640x480 which gives a bit more control over unit placement. Second, I could take a bit of freedom to move units to better positions as part of generating the mission.

I'll look into bigger maps. If you can tell me exactly what kind of units get misplaced and why that is important to you, I might be able to fix some of that as part of mission generation.

I was wondering if you could implement Amphibious Assaults to your mission generator? I would love to have missions where you have a bunch of AAVP-7a1s come in from the shore and drop off the Marines in the back and take the objective. This could also work with being able to add infantry to the back of any land vehicles before the mission starts such as with helicopters. If you could implement this it would be greatly appreciated.

My aim is to have amphibious assaults before Arma III arrives as a product. I'd love to create landings, with air support, with smoke screens, with ships firing guns, etc. I don't have a clue how hard the 'arma' part of that will be, since I haven't handcrafted some test missions yet. From a planning perspective, one tricky thing will be to identify those sea/land borders that allow infantry and vehicles to make it inland with sufficient maneuver space to mount a successful attack.

[viper0311 10]

One thing I could see you doing is breaking up the coast into areas, like you do with your other missions. Have one area be the staging area, where the AAVPs will hit the shore and drop off the marines in the back. From there all you should need is have them do attacks in the same matter as they would in your other missions. I may be over simplying it since I am not 100% sure how the system works. And from the planning perspective, amphibious assaults in general are some of the toughest operations because of those things you mentioned. So it will be hard either way to come up with a good planning process for it.

[delta99 34]

I could improve unit placement in two ways. First, I could use 800x600 images for the map instead of the 640x480 which gives a bit more control over unit placement.

I would go even bigger like 1024x768 or perhaps have it optional if possible.

Second, I could take a bit of freedom to move units to better positions as part of generating the mission.

I'll look into bigger maps. If you can tell me exactly what kind of units get misplaced and why that is important to you, I might be able to fix some of that as part of mission generation.

I figured the units were moving or setting themselves up already given the proximity of the selected location. I can't say for certain really whether units are getting misplaced it just seems like I can't really place them where I want them. I am mostly talking about the units placed in a defensive position as any others are moving to form up points anyway so it doesn't matter that much. Or perhaps I am completely missing the boat on how the placement of units affects the outcome of the battle anyway. I have only created a few test missions and haven't really investigated this fully.

[marker 1]

Hey William

First of all, thanks for supplying us all with a great utility!

Unfortunately, at this moment I cannot get past the first page, I am receiving an error everytime I try and go to the second page!

Is there a problem with the site at the moment?

I have tried using Firefox, IE9 and Chrome, but still the same for them all!

Thanks

[_William 0]

Hey William

Unfortunately, at this moment I cannot get past the first page, I am receiving an error everytime I try and go to the second page!

Is there a problem with the site at the moment?

Thanks a lot for reporting this. Indeed, I'm having problems with the site. Working on it...

And fixed... Mission creation works again. You may want to delete the empty mission for which you couldn't select the game.

William

Edited August 26, 2012 by _William

[the chief 15]

Hi _William,

Firstly, thank you for building and sharing your fantastic Planned Assault with the community. I really enjoy using this facility in arma 2:CO. I was wondering, if you had any plans to make Iron Front Liberation 1944 available in planned assault?

cheers

[dragon01 902]

I just noticed that female soldiers&marines addon doesn't seem to be in the supported addon list. It'd be nice if you could include it. Link: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=12248

An option to mix them with normal squads would also prove useful.

Also, the US Army Lite demo version of VBS2 has been made available to civilians, here: http://www.jcove-lite.co.uk/showthread.php/vbs2-us-army-2859p2.html Maybe you could add it to supported games.

Edited September 3, 2012 by Dragon01

[_William 0]

Last week, I rolled out a design change to the PlannedAssault website giving us 800x600 pixel map graphics to position our units instead of the previous 640x480. That should allow more precise positioning of units. Just keep in mind that the mission planner assigns new positions to attackers (duh) and defenders. For defenders, the mission planner analyzes the threat avenues of approach (vehicles and infantry separately) and allocates its defenders accordingly. Support units and anti-air units are kept in the back. One (heavy) armor unit, if possible, is kept back for a counter-attack against deployed hostile forces See this post for more info.

Along with the map graphics increase, support for browsers other than Firefox has improved.

I don't intend to bump the map graphics to larger than 800x600 anytime soon; I want to have the option to use the site from a tablet (currently not possible since touch events aren't properly supported).

Earlier this week, on request of Phaeden (MCAGCC Twentynine Palm's map creator), I've added two areas of the MCAGCC map (Arma2CO only). The map is special in being large (10x10km) and being optimized for large view distances, as you can see in the screen shot below.

Also new are Binkowski's US Marines (as shown in the screen shot).

The two areas supported are the MOUT villages in the southeastern part of the base, and Pullerville in the center.

William

@Delta99: see above.

@the chief: I haven't picked up Iron Front yet. Reviews sound good, and the units do look good. However, I've understood it doesn't allow mods which complicates debugging mission/script problems for me (I depend on Troopmon/GCam to find and follow AI units). And it would be yet another Arma variant with its own AI quircks. In short, I dunno.

@Dragon01: wrt female units, you're better off generating a mission, loading it into the editor and replacing male soldiers by female ones. I don't have data on which I can redesign current army/marine squads to include a woman.

Edited September 4, 2012 by _William
Spelling

[delta99 34]

Great work as usual William

[gudman 1]

Hey William, love your work so far. I can't even imagine what you've been struggling through to force Arma's AI obey orders. So much waypoints and scripts, holy cow.

But I've noticed strange behaviour of defending units. At some point after making their way to their respective positions they seem to start ignoring it. They run pretty far away like they're scared to stay there - and that's long before single enemy unit even showed up. Especially annoying with tanks - they roll and roll forward, like they want to greet attackers personally (and of course, they die very fast).

If I hop in such "confused" group, I see strange orders being issued, like attack FRIENDLY unit. And such orders are issued on and on, and on, 'till I kill squadleader (who obviously is gone bananas from all the stress).

Tested with totally vanilla AI and without external scripts (autoinit-PBO ones). Is it supposed to be like that?

[pachira 1]

This is a very nice tool, I have a few requests/suggestions though. Could you possibly add CDF, Chedaki, and NAPA (perhaps have NAPA split into two versions, blufor or opfor)? I'd love to make some Harvest Red based missions.

Also, I am having some problems with a scenario I made. I have a few UH-1Ys moving to fast rope and I am a soldier inside on of them. Every Venom but mine complete their landing successfully. The one my character is in always spazzes out, and flies away from the objective and stays stationary. Can you give me a hand? Here is the mission files: http://filesmelt.com/dl/Feruz_Abad_Assault.takistan_.rar

Here is a video detailing my issue:

Could it be that PlannedAssault uses an outdated version of fast roping? I noticed stuff in the change log for it that mentions

"- fixed bug in AI choppers moving away from insertion point using a script"

and the PlannedAssault readme mentions an older version of fast roping addon.

Also it would be cool if you had Russian Federation available on blufor.

Edited October 3, 2012 by Pachira

[_William 0]

The CWR2 folks surprised me a few weeks ago with beautiful cold-war era British units, and Dutch marines. I had great fun researching squad compositions and equipment for Falklands War/Cold War era british and dutch units. I've added howitzer, mortar, Stinger, TOW crew served weapons (Dutch marines), camo'd faces and large bergen variants to the unit database. And an Argentinian Chinook...

See this post for more info.

In the coming weeks, I'll be adding the 'Dutch Armed Forces compilation' units to the unit database, and scratching the Dutch add-ons being superceded. I'm testing these units with an improved planner that is more robust in finding form-up positions and maneuver space. I expect to be able to roll-out this improved mission planner within a month.

@gudman:

I'm not satisfied with how defense combat units react, but it is the best I can do using vanilla waypoints and triggers. What goes on is the following:

- the mission planner analyzes the defensive positions and units available, identifies the sectors around the objective to defend, and assigns units to these sectors (AT units to cover the road, infantry units to cover infantry, heavy armor in the back for a counter-attack)

- each unit is given a guard waypoint in the sector (except counter-attack forces). In Arma1, there was 'findCover' command that functioned, and the unit was also asked to go into cover using a script. The findCover command is broken in Arma2.

- a "guarded by" trigger is placed at the objective.

- when the mission starts, the Arma2 AI will instruct at least one 'guarding' unit to move to the "guarded by" trigger position. The Arma2 AI will instruct another unit to move to the trigger position if the first unit is routed/taken out.

So the guard commands and "guarded by" trigger make the defenders respond to hostile activity near the trigger and loss of friendly units. What you are seeing in your mission is one of the units being recalled to the objective by the Arma2 AI.

The problem is that Arma2 doesn't provide any control of which unit is chosen to defend the trigger. Arma2 doesn't provide any control over the trigger (I would like to enable it once the attackers arrive, not earlier, or disable one trigger and enable a next trigger). Arma2 treats the "guarded by" trigger in a special way, and doesn't respond to the trigger being moved to a different position (something that might have enabled a fighting withdrawal). In short, Arma2 offers very little for a mission creator to set-up an interesting defense without doing extensive scripting. Compared to a product such as Steel Beasts (the simulator), Arma2 offers little control over a unit's defensive behavior from the editor. It's not better in VBS2 by the way.

One work around for this would be to write a state-machine which monitors the defenders and attackers and issues orders on the fly. I don't want to go there since it would make editing generated missions harder.

@ Pachira

Myself, I don't have the time to add fictitious factions to the unit database (and if I would, I'd probably add RACS first). I already run out of time adding 'real' factions RHS's modern Russian Federation forces, Vilas' modern Polish forces, or Georgia's forces. If you or somebody else are willing to spend the time defining units in YAML file based on a few examples I can provide, I don't mind taking your input.

I had a look at your mission (and ran it myself, switching squads, with logging enabled in the scriptings talking to Norrin's fast-rope add-on). I'm running the older fast-rope script and can reproduce your problem easily.

For some reason, the fast-rope script immediately exits for the Delta team heli. Since the other helis successfully deploy their cargo using the ropes, and since I'm seeing the fast-rope script being invoked, the problem is with the fast-rope script or the conditions in which it is being used.

I recommend moving the LZ to a different spot and regenerating the mission.

William

[pachira 1]

A) I see, I could take a crack at adding the CDF, Chedaki, and NAPA. I have no idea how I would do that however. I really would like to see them in your generator (I love Chernarus and the Harvest Red scenario :P) and thus I might as well give it a shot if you tell me how I'd do it. Would it be possible for me to make Russian forces be on blufor too? I'd like to do that as well. I remember reading something about adding blufor squadleaders with 0 chance of appearing to the squad would make them blufor.

B) Alright, I will try that. I probably would be better off using less helis too, since there are only three manually set LZs available.

Thanks for all your responses.

[_William 0]

A) I see, I could take a crack at adding the CDF, Chedaki, and NAPA. I have no idea how I would do that however. I really would like to see them in your generator (I love Chernarus and the Harvest Red scenario :P) and thus I might as well give it a shot if you tell me how I'd do it. Would it be possible for me to make Russian forces be on blufor too? I'd like to do that as well. I remember reading something about adding blufor squadleaders with 0 chance of appearing to the squad would make them blufor.

B) Alright, I will try that. I probably would be better off using less helis too, since there are only three manually set LZs available.

Thanks for all your responses.

Cool. Leave me a PM with your email address, and I'll get back to you with an example.

Wrt your heli fast-roping mission. There's no need to reduce the amount of helis. Just pick heli sections (sections of two helicopters, or even of four in case of Little Birds) so you have fewer groups and need fewer LZs. PlannedAssault is smart enough to put multiple infantry squads into a single group of multiple helicopters if cargo space allows it.

I typically test large insertions (two Chinooks, four Little Birds) with as many groups as possible crammed into those helis. Arma2 can handle large fights; it's just the default mission editor that makes it too cumbersome to set up these large fights.

[pachira 1]

Sent ya the message.

[alan.rio 18]

William, great job with this tool, I'm still getting the hang of it but so far its been a blast. Literally.

Anyone got any nice missions they have put together that they would like to share? Is there any repository of missions?

[Sakowski 1]

Would be nice if there would be more mods supported or maybe actually doing a standalone .exe version :'D