Mynock

If you want some sounds for this script to play when the player swings an object, hits an enemy, etc. PM me, I have some that might work.

So the positions aren't indexed in any way with the return value of emptyPositions? Obviously it knows how many are empty total, but I figure in retrieving that information maybe it's still indexing it somehow but not displaying it.

One of my all time favorite WW2 planes. Interesting.

It could be that having the trigger acting as the waypoint activation is skipping the wait times for the waypoints. Just a guess.

Right click on the trigger, select the option for waypoint activation, then link the line with the loiter waypoint. You can ask all you want, but I don't know the answer, so I can't help you... I don't do scripting for dedicated servers so I don't know what has to be changed, that's why I suggested asking someone else who does.

You can use a trigger linked to the loiter waypoint so that the helicopter will not complete the waypoint until the trigger's condition is met. That will allow the helicopter to loiter until you complete whatever objective and then continue on it's route. I don't typically use AI controlled squads in my missions, but the method of checking to see if each group is in the helicopter will probably still work and you can try using that to prevent the helicopter from leaving again until both squads are aboard. Don't overlook the assignAsCargo command, sometimes that can be used to manipulate the AI's behavior around vehicles. I'm curious myself honestly, so if I get some time late tonight I might play around with what you're trying to do. I don't script for dedicated servers, you'll have to ask someone else.

One suggestion I can offer is to use the loiter waypoint instead of a cycle waypoint for the helicopter to remain on station. You can set the direction you want the helicopter to circle the area now; it's quite handy and might help solve your issue if it's related to the cycle waypoint somehow. Also, make sure you set the helicopter's behavior to careless. It sounds like perhaps the pilot is still in combat mode or something and that is why he is taking off without your team after the objective has been completed. If that's not the case, you can use a bit of scripting in some triggers to force the pilot to stay on the ground until your squad is in the helicopter. You can do this a variety of ways, but one of my favorites is to get the helicopter to land and when the waypoint is complete I use the flyInHeight command set to 0 to pin the helicopter to the ground, then I use a trigger that fires when all living members of the squad are in the helicopter to reset the helicopter's flyInHeight to whatever altitude I need and then he flies off. I've had good success with this in the past, but sometimes I have to ghetto rig it with a transport unload waypoint to get the helicopter to actually land (even though it's empty of cargo at the time), but hey, it works.

Once again I think you're painting the community as a whole (especially those who are non-vocal on the forums and not part of the "quite a few of us...") with your own ideal brush. The campaign you described I never played, but honestly it sounds like something that would have turned me off from future Arma games had I played it. I'd never have been able to beat it, and not everyone finds it enjoyable to grind on a mission forever until they miraculously do. I got stuck on several East Wind missions for months at a time, but after 300 hours I eventually got that campaign finished (and then BI went and combined it in an update so now it'll never show as complete on my game again...). Without those saves I'd have never finished it and likely would have shelved Arma 3 for good. At the end of the day, it's a video game, and video games are meant to be entertainment. I don't find frustration entertaining. I don't mind a challenge, but when a challenge becomes frustration in a video game, something that has zero impact on my actual life, I choose to quit, not because I'm a "quitter" in the traditional sense, but because I want to enjoy my free time, not be frustrated by it. Why play a campaign or mission that's no longer fun when I can enjoy something else? But again, just my opinion which is being projected into the vacuum of the internet which makes it essentially worthless. Everyone in this thread is leaps and bounds better than me at playing the game and making missions; I'm just the annoying voice from the corner of the room. I know my place.

Seems like those of you advocating for few or no saves are quite good at the game. If that works for you and you enjoy that, awesome, but the shoe doesn't fit everyone... Let me give the opposite perspective. As someone who absolutely sucks at playing Arma, not being able to have unlimited saves causes me to quit a mission instantaneously. I am simply unable to complete missions in one go due to my lack of skill. And yes, I know, here it comes, "well get gud bro" and "practice, go slow, don't suck." Unfortunately, there are those of us out there who will never be good at shooting games no matter how much we practice or whatever tactics we use. It was the difficulty of this game that ultimately led to me going from not even knowing how to open the editor to now making compete mission for the game; I needed to be able to make my own missions I could actually complete myself because the official campaign was too difficult for me. Unlimited saves vs one or no saves changes nothing about the campaign from a difficulty perspective or enjoyment perspective. What it does do is heavily limit or eliminate the fun for some people. I don't find it fun replaying the same beginning sequence of the first mission of a campaign 100x because I can't save the game. I doubt I'm alone in that aspect. A good campaign should be fun, otherwise why bother to play it? If you personally don't want to have unlimited saves... then don't save the game while you're playing... but don't limit those of us with less talent from enjoying the campaign or mission because we aren't good enough to beat it in one sitting. Time is the other issue. I've encountered several campaigns that for whatever reason the creator decides a mission should force you to traverse 5+ kilometers of enemy infested terrain to reach an objective. I simply don't have 2 or 3 hours straight to sit there and play the mission, so if I can't save, I can't finish it.

Give the civilian a variable name, I'll use taxcollector as an example. Create a trigger, in the trigger's condition field write !alive taxcollector. In the On Activation field use the BIS_fnc_endMission function to fail the mission. For the successful portion, create an area trigger. Set the trigger owner to the civilian unit (right click the trigger, select set trigger owner, drag the line to the unit and left click). Set the trigger conditions for Vehicle Present. Leave the conditions field set to this. In the On Activation field use the BIS_fnc_endMission function to complete the mission successfully.

Do medical helicopters actually fly in and patch soldiers up and get them back in the fight? I was always under the impression medevac meant exactly that: Medical Evacuation. So I could see it being used to extract incapacitated units with significant wounds, but if someone was hit in the arm or leg and it wasn't critical I figured the medic would just patch them up if they could stay in the fight and then maybe extract them later when the AO isn't hot if necessary. But I've never been in the military, so for all I know I'm wrong.

The simplest way I can think of is to disable the simulation for the objects on the table and possibly for the table itself if required. However, the downside of this is the objects will no longer react to the environment, so if for example the table is inside a building and the building is destroyed during combat, the objects will float in mid air. There are ways around that though as well, but require a little scripting and extra effort.

Why not start one up yourself? Sounds interesting to me, and like lexx suggests, define some requirements that must be met but keep it slightly more open. An example: Requirements for mission: -Objective must be of the seek and destroy type -Objective itself is open as long as it can be definitively destroyed (could be a radio tower, enemy officer, enemy vehicle, etc) -Player and all friendly units must be OPFOR, enemies must be BLUFOR -GREENFOR cannot be used, CIV use is optional -Objective must be within "x" radius of grid 123456 on the map "y" -Insertion point or mission starting point no more than 1.5km from objective -Mission must start between "s" and "t" hours -Weather is open -etc etc etc That way you have some defined structure, but the mission maker can be creative about meeting the requirements. Yes all the missions will be seek and destroy, but think about the variety of objectives you could create for that. If you really wanted to think outside the box, the objective could be to destroy the lunch table in the enemy's mess hall or something goofy like that. Or sabotage the enemy officer's personal quad bike because it will make him so sad he will surrender. Even the classic "steal the car" concept still has a lot of room for creativity. Lots of different types of vehicles in the game to steal, and lots of different ways to go about it. Stealth, loud and fast, deception or distraction, etc. 24 hours is a bit of an extreme window, but if it was something like a week to submit the mission and then a week of playing and voting, I'd probably give it a try. If you don't want to organize one, maybe I will, I think it sounds like a fun idea.

I initially tried to go the route of volunteer voice actors or people who did it more as a hobby for a much lower cost. The problem I ran into was lack of commitment. It doesn't work well to have a character's voice change 3 or 4 times during a campaign because people abandoned the project. While I appreciated their willingness to donate their time, I think once they realized how much it actually was they lost interest (or some of them demanded more money than the initial "donation" I was making to them). Getting actual contracts seemed to be the most efficient way to actually get the work completed in a timely manner. Unfortunately it's too expensive to justify. If Arma had a legal and reliable way of charging users $1 to download the campaign so I could recover my costs, I'd pursue it. But I can't do that, not just due to BI policy, but also the policies of the mods used in the campaign. As a result, I have a 90% completed campaign sitting on my hard drive, but without the voice acting, which was meant to be a very key component, it's going to remain there. But I'm not mad about that at all. I have a fun campaign I can now play myself minus the voice acting, which I know how I wanted it to sound anyway so I can use my imagination to fill that in easily. I enjoyed the time I spent making it, but for now it's going to remain just for me. To give an actual example, I paid one of these hobbyist voice actors $50 to submit the lines for the entire campaign for a roll consisting of ~300 lines. I kindly asked them for about half of those lines to do a few renditions so I could choose which sounded best. After two months of waiting I had absolutely no progress and the individual eventually emailed me saying they thought it was too much work and wanted an additional $250 and 4 months more to complete the work... I'm a hobbyist mission maker; I do it for fun, not to be internet famous in the Arma world. Playing with the editor is enjoyable to me (dealing with the opinions of people who play my missions however.....). Perhaps if I were on the other end of the spectrum and cared what people thought of my work and such I'd shell out the money for the "fame" but in my opinion I'd be wasting a ton of money to ultimately accomplish nothing. No one pays me to make missions, but everyone else reaps the rewards of my work right? I'm not interested in throwing my money into a vacuum. The attitudes of certain sectors of the Arma playerbase have soured my experience of releasing missions and other work. Because of that, I have absolutely no desire to spend my money for their benefit.

I never finished getting all of the quotes from each individual because once I got a couple I realized it was going to cost far more than I'd ever spend on something I would get zero return on. I was in need of 5 major parts, one of which had ~30 lines per mission for a total of 12 missions, and the others ~20 lines per mission. The quotes I got were estimates for the entire project, and the three people who sent me their rates explained that if the work was significantly more difficult than I made it sound or I wanted re-do's, changes, etc it would all drive the cost up. Those three people combined wanted a total of $875 and I still needed 2 more people on top of that. If Arma had a legal way of allowing me to charge someone to play the campaign, I might have put in the effort and money. But I knew I'd never see a dime of that in return, and based on how certain sectors of this community react to regular missions people put time and effort into I knew it certainly would never be worth it for "fame" or "notoriety."

I think a lot of people don't understand how expensive sourcing voice acting is. I had big plans to do a fully voice acted campaign. Then I got some quotes. Scrapped that project in a hurry because I didn't have hundreds and possibly thousands to shell out for what was essentially community service to Arma players. And we all know asking for donations yields nothing; let's not kid ourselves here, if it's free people will only use it for free.

To elaborate slightly on what davidoss wrote: You can set waypoint behavior or individual unit behavior to careless but also set their combat mode to open fire. They will move to the location in a careless format but will still fire their weapons if required. This works especially well for vehicles that have separate drivers and gunners.

Thought this would be straightforward, but it's not (for me anyway). All I'm trying to do is move a single player scenario along when a specific object is targeted by the player with a laser designator. I tried things like enemytruck == laserTarget player; laserTarget player == enemytruck;in a trigger, but no luck there. I also tried in a script something like _target = laserTarget player; waitUntil {_target == enemytruck};but again, no luck. I'm probably being retarded as usual and missing something painfully obvious. But yeah, any suggestions are appreciated. I don't want to use a radio trigger or an addAction; I want it to fire the trigger or continue the script when the player laser designates a specific target (similar to lasing the enemy artillery spotters in the Death Valley mission in East Wind, just with the handheld designator. Can't find the right .pbo to see how BI did it, I've looked everywhere I can think of). If it's not possible that way then so be it, I'll change the mission design, I'm not interested in a workaround that involves another step or anything other than the player lasing the specific target.I've considered an if/then script for it, but as far as I know that only works at a specific moment in time that I have no way of calculating since every player will go through the mission at a different pace. I suppose I could run a loop that constantly checks, but I'm still not sure an if/then will work if I can't even get it to work with a trigger.

Awesome, just tried it out with a trigger using (laserTarget player distance enemytruck) < 2;in the condition field and a quick hint to make sure it works and it does. I omitted the "vehicle" since the player isn't using a laser on a UAV, but good to know that will work for that in the future. Thanks for your help, I knew I was just not comprehending something relatively simple. Now my player can call in a strike on a target with ease without a need for extra actions, support modules, etc. Exactly the solution I was looking for.

Ahhhh, it's making a new "object" now I understand. Wow that is a really poorly worded wiki entry, no wonder I was thinking "wtf I'm doing what it says." Well then, I will try out your code and see what it does and if it will work. With my new found knowledge though I'm also wondering if it would be possible to check the distance between the target object and this new invisible laser object being created and once the distance is below a certain number (like 1 or 2 meters) it would fire a trigger or something. I'm interested to try both methods now. Thanks for the explanation; sorry I couldn't wrap my head around the wiki entry wording at first.

I guess I'm too stupid to understand, but isn't the laser target object the object I'm "painting"? You make it sound confusing. There is only the one object, the truck. So it should be returning whatever the laser is pointed at? I realize something like the side view mirror of the truck might not register, but I figured the center of the truck's body would at least. Thanks for the wiki link, but I did consult that already.

You could try disabling the simulation on them with the check box option. But to be honest I've never tried that myself on an ammo crate so I'm not sure that will prevent folks from sling loading it.

For 2: You can lock the vehicle so no one can use it via the attribute menu for the vehicle. That's the easy way. You can disable damage and such as well with the other checkboxes if you need to. For 3: At the bottom of the attributes window for each crate you can edit what items are contained in the crate. Players can still interact with them and open the inventory, but it will be empty. Again, that's a simple way. I'm sure for both of those you can do fancier stuff with scripting, but if you're new to the editor the easy way might be best for now.

You can limit the height of a trigger now. It was implemented in one of the recent updates.

Does it dump the file straight away? Or does it move it to the recycle bin? That's my go to place to check first, but for all I know Arma just makes the file disappear. I've only lost missions from catastrophic HDD failure from which there was no recovery, but I've never tried recovering a deleted file as you describe.