kkkonge

Seems we all would like BIS to implement the ability to modify the terrain (eg. blow holes, dig trenches, add rivers etc.). Why has no one designed a crater yet? Ever played Ghost Recon? In one of the missions, you're supposed to guard a single NATO tank from rebels with AT weapons. The battlefield is sprinkled with craters from the nearby artillery guns. Those craters mostly consist of dirt that has been moved a few metres or so by the blast. Thus, the 'hole' inside isn't really that deep! Why haven't anyone designed a small series of craters in this way? That is, make a realistic looking crater from the same principles as the trenches at 'fortress-ofp.com'. It wouldn't take that much effort, since no animation is really necessary; an explosion itself would probably disguse the sudden placement of the crater. One could add smoke to the crater, if one wants to (just modify the fires done by CAT). I'm not doing this myself, due to lack of modelling skills. But now it is out there...

You could just set up a recursively trigger that would run a 'checking script'. This would run say every 1 secs. The script should contain an evaluation of how far one is from any chopper, and what kind of unit one is playing, thus determining if one can ectually enter the chopper (use assignasxxx for this)

I had a similar problem in one of my missions; splitting a big mission in two, all the destroyed tanks that were scattered over the battlefield seemed to disappear by magic! What I did was to estimate their position at the end of Part #1 (could be done by parsing their choords with the SaveVar-cmd., though). In Part #2 I positioned the tanks, sat their dammage to 1. During their blow-up, I did a cutscene, where the tanks were not visible. Also, I sat the sound volume to 0 and played few notes from "Track 2 - Walk". After a few seconds I slowly turned up the volume, and the player never knew what just happened. This little trick also left the tanks smoking. Quite neat!

A hint: Don't use script-loops if you want to continuosly check some state. When saving the game during the running of such a looping script, OF will not re-start the script when you reload the savegame. Instead, use a recursive trigger: Define some arbitrary variable (say varCheckState) as true in your init.sqs. Also add a 1 sec. delayed, repeated GameLogic trigger that activates on varCheckState. During its activation (ie in the On Activation field) you falsify varCheckState and run a checking script. This can also be done at the end of your script. In the On Deactivation field you negate varCheckState again (to 'TRUE', that is). This way the trigger will run the checking script once every second. This allows for easier coding, and as the varCheckState variable is saved in the savegame, it will re-/deactivate the GameLogic trigger upon reload. If you want to run the checking script only when a certain condition is met, you just add some boolean state to the Condition field of your trigger.

Use a game logic, you say? It actually works (gee, and I never knew...), but: Come to think about it, I actually got the idea of an invisible unit quite some time ago. I was designing a mission, where the player's squad would join with another group, outgunned and desperately trying to hold a certain hill. For this mission to work - to create the right sense of chaotic battle in the air - I wanted the soldiers to fire at each other without actually hitting. That is impossible with OFP, though you can use the 'fire' command. This makes any gunner fire more or less upward, and it looks quite weird. A workaround is to create an empty unit, say a civilian car. Via 'Dofire' the soldiers readily shoot the unit to pieces, but this behaviour only applies to empty cars, tanks planes etc. and not to easy-to-hide objects like helipads, mines and so on. Furthermore, one cannot make the machine gunners fire salvos, only a series of single shots. And that's how the idea of the invisible unit came up. Place him at a distance from your soldiers, make them shoot at him, move him away, wait a while and then move him back again... For the time being I've decided to put that mission on hold. One may argue that an invisible unit does not have a lot of uses, but I find that in some cases, it would be quite obvious to use such an item. I imagine the coding may either be quite difficult or very easy to do. Maybe someone would like to give it a go?

Working with FP for some time now, I've often found that I needed some sort of a dummy guy. Especially when working with vehicles I've come across several problems: 1) You can't pre-determine what seat a given character will occupy, 3) lights cannot be left on in empty vehicles, 3) and the bug where you exit a vehicle, but then find that you cannot re-enter (only if you are not the squad leader). The latter can be solved, but I just thought that having a totally invisible unit (physically invisible, non-intelligent, can't get shot, does not show up on squad listings etc.) would be quite usefull. This way one can, say 'fill up' a chopper/car with invisible guys in order to ensure that the player is seated across another vital character/on the backseat - or cars could be left with their engines running - or the exit-enter bug could be worked around - or you could use it as a pinpoint dummy (inv. helipads are a bad idea with choppers in the air) - or... Maybe this is just a lame idea. Maybe not. But I think it would be interesting to see someone do it. Oh, what the heck, let's be honest: I need the sh*t... Â

Hm-hm... If you place your waypoint directly over the tower, the 'Insert waypoint'-dialog will contain a 'position in house' drop-down menu. You then simply select #1, #2 etc. I dont know wether this is 1.46+ only, but that upgrade is free, so...