*zeewolf*

Anyone remember the Chechnya island for OFP:R? That is one of my favorite ever islands, sure the guy who made it was slightly nutty, what with writing Allah Akbar on every bus shelter and using peoples' addons without permission. But he made one hell of a good map. It would be amazing to see it converted to Arma 2 using Chernarus objects and vegetation. Also a less sensible request: Venezuela map on the scale/style of Mercenaries 2, now that's what you call a PMC.

Question about the grass. Those look like Sled88/Berghoff/Invasion44 team's grass models and textures, when I have used them there are some major problems: 1. When two people are lying in adjacent tiles of grass they usually cannot shoot each other, the bullets won't go through the grass. Have you solved this issue? 2. With the grass that has the ground texture layer, on steep hills it is possible for a prone soldier to lie "underneath" the grass model's ground texture. I got around this by only using the model with no ground texture and making a version that uses the alternative "grain" type texture. But it still doesn't solve the bullet problem.

Funny you should say that; the same rumour seems to be going around on the Chinese VME forums.

I agree about the colour tone, if anything DR's colours are even more extreme. But one of the biggest problems with Skarikiska at the moment is that very few of the structures in villages can be entered. In DR about 90% of the buildings are enterable making firefights much more interesting. While the Chernarus buildings look the part they don't allow for the level of house to house fighting seen in Dragon Rising. Also Skira has far more shrubs and boulders, it's a challenge to drive off-road in a jeep at full speed without hitting a rock. Again this affects missions by making the few roads more important. Finally Skirinka/Little Kiska island is not present. The first campaign mission and two fire team engagements take place here making it an important location. The island is within spitting distance of Skira's southern peninsula, so it would be much nicer for this to be added to the existing map.

I believe this was all done with DEM data of the real Kiska island meaning it's not using any data from DR. FYI although some work was done extracting DR's game data, I don't think the terrain data was ever positively identified. The game's audio (.fsb), textures (.fui) and models (.hkx) are extractable however. It's obviously better to concentrate on making this island look like Skira rather than the real Kiska which doesn't have any villages on it.

You think that's a coincidence ;)

The 115.com links from your forum seem to be working for me. Maybe you can just post these in an announcement and ask for more people to host it (e.g. armaholic or armedassault.info).

Yeah, there's been some movement on that area ;) VME have released a PLA mod for Arma 1, and they are definately still working on stuff for Arma 2. The situation with Operation Halfmoon is not so clear, we need confirmation from fromz.

Thanks Alex for taking the time to update the community on your work. Can the Arma 1 VME mod release be announced on BI forums? I'm sure there are still a lot of people who would love to try this.

Errr, to me "the other PLA mod" (VME PLA mod) and OHPLA's textures and models look incredibly similar. I wouldn't be surprised if they were part of the same thing. Regarding the download for Arma1. Do you have CAA1 for Arma 2? I'm betting the soldier models won't work but vehicles might. EDIT: And when you say "out" that VME thread is completely dead. ---------- Post added at 11:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:27 PM ---------- I've signed up and posted a thread politely asking for information. Their english will be better than our chinese.

I don't think people will care about that. Can you give us a list of what's in the mod?

A DL link to something is definately in the first post in this thread. Given that later on it the thread they start talking about bugs on WZ-10s and Mi-17s I'd say it's worth a go. Look at the babelfish translation it says "Downloading address: Tourist, if you must examine that this placard hideaway content please reply" I think that means you need to be a member to see the link. Maybe someone with some vague knowledge of chinese can sign up and get the link.

Yeah, given the amount this has progressed versus the amount of time since the last release I think we really need to make an effort to find out what's going on rather than relying on fromz anda few others to keep spoon feeding us.

What grabbed my attention was the December 1st 2010 bit at the top of the thread and the fact there's a reference to a download address near the bottom of the opening post. Unfortunately I think it says something about not being able to view the dl link if you're a guest. I've just got a feeling that somewhere on the VME board they've released some stuff for beta testing. Wow nice find, that's a pretty long video, they must talk about release dates at some point?

I think there's still some activity on this or a similar VME PLA mod judging from this thread at the VME forum. Babelfish doesn't work too well so is there anyone here who can read chinese, and would care to translate what's going on?

Yeah, I managed to recreate some of DR's campaign in OFP Resistance using Kinmen Island and a ludicrous number of addons to get all of the weapons, vehicles and similar looking grass (at least nearly all of DR's PLA vehicles are available for OFP thanks to VME). Are there any Arma 2 PLA mods available aside from Operation Halfmoon?

You know who I'm referring to

Excellent work. I hope someone can add the finishing touches (and possibly add Shrinka/Little Kiska island). Then all we'll need is a full PLA side. I wonder what the Dragon Rising community will think of this...

I completely agree with you. Operation Halfmoon is excellent for small arms and units but with only the ZTZ-99 and ZSL-92 for armor and the Z-9 for aircraft it's not realistic to expect decent missions to be made for this addon. So despite the extremely high quality work Fromz put in it's currently more of an Operation Half-finished. The last patch of OHPLA even had a mandarin voice pack but they don't seem to work in OA. Just getting a WZ-10 gunship would be brilliant although I'd like to see the following vehicles for a "complete" PLA side: WZ-10 attack helo ZBD-97 (very similar to BMP-3) PGZ-95 (Similar to a Tunguska) PTL-02 (like a Stryker MGS or an AMX-10RC) ZLC-2000 (like a BMP-2) Mi-171 (reskinned Mi-17) ZTZ-96 (cheap version of ZTZ-99) J-10 and/or J-11 (reskinned Su-27 would do) Does anyone know if VME-PLA or OHPLA is still active? If they are I'll shutup and go back to waiting patiently.

I'm trying to find a way of customising the cloudlets generated by the default destrType (explode, smoke and vertex deformed crumple). Is there a way to do this with CfgCloudlets? Alternatively I know I could set AllVehicles's destrType to destructMan and use a killed eventhandler script to generate a drop effect but (having tried this) the eventhandler never seems to get called on remote machines. I.e. calling of the eventhandler script is locality dependant. Is there an easy way to get the killed eventhandler to run on remote machines? Bearing in mind this will be a mod script rather than a mission script (so they'll be no access to pre-placed objects).

Say if I were to run an init eventhandler for every vehicle which just did: _v = _this select 0 @!alive _v [_v] exec "\my_mod_scripts\explode_n_burn.sqs" exit I've always steered clear of @ for MP scripts and used delay based loops as far as possible as the performance can easily be tweaked. But when you're doing effects type stuff it's nice to be able to get them bang on. Do you know how efficient @ is performance wise?

Thanks Sanctuary. I was going to try that but I read on the Bis wiki entry for local that "In MP remote objects are not initialised in functions called by initline or init eventhandlers." Which I took to mean that init eventhandlers wouldn't be called on remote machines either. Is this entry wrong or am I interpreting it wrong?

Yeah, I know about the "Auto vehicles", trouble is they can only carry one person. They are a real pain for a human player to use because you can't use the gunner's sights like you do in the Battlefield games. A human player is limited to using the driver's sights or the external view (which has a severe vertical parallax error on the crosshair). The point of the scripts I've done is to allow an AI to locate an empty vehicle and board the appropriate position without instructions from a player. If a friendly vehicle is nearby they preferentially board a free crew spot in that. When they encounter an enemy they can switch to the gunner's seat to move the turret of a tank and shoot at enemies. For an AI pilot they must be able to operate the weapons in a similar way to a human would without a gunner. A gunship is pretty pointless if the pilot always needs to wait for a gunner to board so the weapons can be fired. The scripts I've done rely on smoke, mirrors and extreme fudgery to do this. If no one can actually see through the illusion then that's fine, they can treat the bot roughly as they would a human pilot/driver. But I've not had any feedback from anyone who can offer an objective opinion on what I've done.

I've looked through quite a few multiplayer and coop missions but I've never seen scripts that can do the following: (Assume a single editor placed AI playable unit in a single unit group that never merges with any others). 1. Identify and mount an empty vehicle or (preferentially) a friendly vehicle with an empty crew spot. Run-time created vehicles must work to allow for MP respawning vehicles. 2. When driving a vehicle by themselves, look for enemies, if an enemy is detected (and the weapon's on their vehicle is able to kill the enemy), switch to the gunners position and engage the enemy. Once the enemy has been engaged switch back to the driver's postion and continue to their waypoint. 3. When flying a helicopter without a gunner, fire the helicopter's rockets and missiles in a "manual fire" style. Does anyone know of any example missions where this has been done? I'm specifically interested in using AI players to balance teams in Battlefield1985 type games. But I can see applications for this in other game types. I've done some work on this myself (see the AI demo in the mission pack linked in my signature for my fudged attempt), but I was wondering if I'm trying to reinvent the wheel here.

I've recently released a whole bunch of Multiplayer missions, they seem to have been popular with 400 odd downloads, but I've not had any feedback. I have released several "packs", each consisting of three missions of a Battlefield1985 conquest style of gameplay based on scripts by ])a)(. They are: Battlefield1985 conquest pack 1 v1.1 Battlefield1985 conquest pack 2 Battlefield1985 conquest pack 3 I'm very interested in what people think of the Saint Phillippe AI demo I put in pack 2, as it includes scripting to allow AI players to autonomously operate vehicles (locating and boarding empty vehicles, switching to the gunner's seat when they detect an enemy, use a "manual fire" like mode in helicopters). This comes in real handy for balancing the team numbers out. I've also released an Oddball Mission Pack which brings Halo like Oddball gameplay to OFP. I've made a "Crazy King of the Hill" style game type (again copied from Halo), I'll release that too if anyone's interested.