=jps=sgtrock

I originally posted this question in Configs and Scripting but didn't get any replies. Sooo, I thought I'd post it here as it probably fits better here anyway.

Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at it. 🙂

Hello? Let me ask the question another way. Is there any way to connect the Workbench to a source code version control system the same way that you can in Visual Studio Code? Or should I rely on an external tool like TortoiseGit? TIA

I know the intent for editing missions, scenarios, campaigns, etc. is to remain in the Workbench throughout the development process. What I haven't figured out is the best way to set up version control. Personally, I prefer git but I'm open to exploring other options if they work better with the Workshop. What are you all using? Any preferences? Gotchas to look out for?

I have to admit, I have a hard time understanding why this capability wasn't built right into the game engine from the beginning. It's not like BI hasn't done it before so they already have high level designs that work. It should have been a relatively easy exercise to add it in. Still, as others have stated this is a tech demo and not really a full game. It'll be interesting to see what direction they take Arma 4 even if we never see the capability in Reforger.

Hello? Is anyone from BI following this forum that might have an answer? Thanks,

Title says it all. I'm a long time Arma fan going all the way back to the initial release of Operation Flashpoint. I am planning to host a LAN party near the end of July. I would love to host Reforger locally for it. I was planning to host it as a listen server but I see that option was pulled as of 0.9.5. I have tried to host a separate instance on an old laptop on my local LAN but I am having zero luck connecting to it. Are there any instructions about how that kind of server config should be set up? TIA,

Maybe I missed it as I skimmed through this thread but I didn't see anyone including server admin tasks on their wishlists. For example: Role based authentication so I, as a server owner, can set limited privileges for some users. Allow them to kick, ban, etc. The original Half-Life engine had a mod called Admin Mod that made this a relatively simple task. It was the best way that I've ever seen to make sure that your server has near 24/7 protection to protect against griefers. I've never seen anything like it as a mod for any of the ArmA engines, which is a real shame. Make it easy to report player abuse to a server owner via an in-game mod. Even if it's just a quick email sent via a quick button selection, at least it becomes possible to find the right timestamps in the server logs. Keep the ability to run a local dedicated server for LAN play. Too many games these days have either stripped out this function from existing engines (I'm looking at you, Insurgency:Sandstorm) or don't include it at all. It's silly to do this. It restricts the ability to do local testing of MP mods, for example. Not to mention, makes it a lot harder run a LAN party. 😉 Consider how to best modularize the game engine. This is already done via the headless client option, for example, to improve AI performance. It's still a pain to get configured correctly, though. You still need to buy an additional license to run it, too, which has never thrilled me. I would love to see this extended to the back end. There's been some talk in this thread of moving away from a single global lock which is definitely a step in the right direction. I keep wondering if it would make sense to extend that thinking to consider breaking up the game engine to run in microservices inside containers. Done right, it would make it a lot easier to scale performance up as object and player counts go up. What do you think? Do these kinds of features make sense to people?

Thanks, mad_cheese. I didn't realize that you hadn't released the beta yet since the update date on Steam was from this year. How stable is the beta at this time? Is it playable in both SP and MP? After thinking about the errors that I was seeing I had tentatively come to a similar conclusion because I had seen you mention AIC previously in this thread and elsewhere. I'll give that a shot. Thanks for all your hard work!

Hi. I recently started messing around with C2 again after running across the Youtube video that discussed how to assemble and disassemble the static weapons from High Command. The problem that I'm running into is that I can't pull up the High Command context menu as shown in that video. Whenever I right click on a waypoint for a unit, I end up getting the standard BIS menu which doesn't include the Action submenu shown in the video. The video is dated March 27 2018. The version of C2 that I'm running is the Steam version updated May 28, 2019. I'm running just C2 and CBA3. No other mods. The problem is showing up on both Altis and Stratis. Same set up on both maps: Blufor: One Player character -- Officer with a NATO Squad Leader loadout One Mk6 mortar team 2 Rifle Fireteams Opfor: One CSAT Rifle squad As soon as I set a waypoint for a unit and before I try to right click on it I see the following error in the middle of my screen: ' if !(false) then ([(group |#|this)] call MCSS_C2_HC_HP_WP_COMPLETE; ...' Error Undefined variable in expression: this File C2_CORE\FNC_AI\fncs_HighCommand.sqf..., line 597 When I right click on the waypoint, the error remains on the screen and I get the BIS menu instead of the C2 menu that includes the Action submenu. That's it. About as basic a mission as you could imagine. The whole point of it is to test the ability to give the mortar team directions to move, deploy, and prepare to provide indirect fire on a target. I have tried just about everything that I can think of with no success. Does anyone have any idea why I might be seeing this error? TIA

Hi Darkhound7, Thanks for the thought. However, my issue had nothing to do with port forwarding after all. See my updated comments at the top of the post.

Not sure why this wasn't obvious, but I was able to successfully finally get a server using TADST. All I had to do was... set up a mission cycle! Not sure why that would matter, but there it is. My guess is that if I had set "-world=empty" as part of the launch line, any of the three setups would have worked fine from the beginning. Newb mistake. I assumed that was taken care of by the built-in tools that I was using. Next step is to try the Linux VM option again to see if I'm right. Even if I'm not, at least I have a working configuration to test. Note to all server admin newbies: Make sure that you set that parameter in the launch line if you want people to vote for missions when the server first starts. Hi all, I'm hoping I can get some help figuring this out. I've been working on this issue off and on for several years without much success. If you're not interested in the back story explaining the context and are just interested in the technical details, jump down to ***. There are about a dozen of us who have been getting together for more than 20 years for LAN party weekends. Lots of beer and whiskey gets drunk, virtual enemies get blown away, and many rounds get expended on the range. All in all, it's always a great time. :) As we've gotten older, we have been focusing more and more on co-op games. It's at the point now that that's about all that we play. I'm the guy who puts together the game servers for these parties so I have a lot of experience doing so. My personal preference is for Linux servers for a number of reasons but I can set up and run a Windows gameserver. Over the years it's gotten harder to find games that allow for setting up dedicated servers for co-op games for more than four players. Frankly, it's gotten tougher to find games that even SUPPORT LAN games well and the ones that do are rarely the ones that support co-op. It's gotten frustrating to say the least. These days we're pretty much limited to games like Red Orchestra 2, Insurgency, and CS:GO when it comes to shooters. Red Orchestra 2 dedicated server is easy. Insurgency dedicated server is doable. CS:GO is easy to set up now that I FINALLY found a game launcher that works and works well. CS:GO gets boring after a while, though. The Arma series is fantastic for this for all the obvious reasons. I used to run a dedicated Arma and then Arma 2 server back in the day so I thought that a dedicated Arma 3 LAN server wouldn't be all that hard. Unfortunately, I have had no luck so far. **** So that's the background. Here is the set up that I'm trying to test: I am not running the beta code. Port forwarding is set up on my router for 2302-2306. Based on an old post that I found I also tried forwarding 8766. For the three server configurations below, I tried using a very simple server.cfg file. About the only variable was trying with loopback both on and off. In all configurations, I was able to successfully start the server. In all configurations, I faced the same problems: I could not see the server on the LAN tab of the in-game browser so I couldn't select it. I also tried but was unable to successfully connect using Direct Connect. At no point did I see any evidence of a connection attempt in the available logs. For testing purposes, I have a single Windows 10 Pro laptop with a 4 core i7 CPU and 16 GB of RAM. I'm using that to both play on and host the dedicated server. The Windows firewall is enabled. Arma 3 is enabled to allow inbound and outbound traffic for both private and Internet connections. Using Hyper-V, I configured a simple CentOS virtual machine (EPEL repository enabled so I could get all of the necessary ancillary library files) with one dedicated core and 4 GB of RAM. This gave me a standalone Linux server with its own IP address. (P.S. If you are unaware, Windows Firewall does NOT affect any Hyper-V VM.) From that configuration, I tried two different ways to set up and run a vanilla Arma 3 Linux server. The first avenue that I tried was the Linux Dedicated Game Server Manager. The second avenue that I tried was to follow the Arma 3 wiki instructions here. As I noted above, neither route worked so I started wondering if the Linux server had been abandoned. Maybe I was dealing with a version mismatch. For my final attempt I tried Tophe's Arma Dedicated Server Tool to start up a Windows based server. I had once used it for Arma 2 with OK results. Going this route, I shut down Steam, used TADST to start the Arma server, restarted Steam, started Arma 3, then tried to connect. Same result as before. At this point I'm at a loss. I have three questions: What on Earth am I missing? What can I try to troubleshoot this? Is there some other approach that I can try with an expectation of success? Any suggestions would be gratefully accepted. TIA

No one has any clues? HELP! Oh, for the good old days of the Quake network model when even the SP game ran as a client-server app. It sure made setup and testing pretty trivial. ;) TIA,

Sorry, I just tried to DL this test mission as I'm also struggling to get this all working correctly. Unfortunately, I'm getting a 404 error. Is it still available somewhere? TIA === Never mind. I figured out how to get it from the Examples link in your signature. Thank you! I'm looking forward to trying it out.

You're absolutely correct. The one thing that OFP lacked for really good PvP was a decent JIP system. We get that with ArmA but seem to have traded away the smooth play that made the original MP gametypes so much fun. :(

Hi, all; I've run into a frustrating problem that I can't seem to figure out. I've created a very simple mission with a Description.ext and mission.sqm. When I choose to export it for multi-player, it saves the resulting .pbo in my local server directory just fine. If I run a dedicated server then join from the same PC, it goes into an infinite loop. The console output repeats, "Mission <missionname> read from bank" about every 10 or 15 seconds. The weird part is, if I delete the .pbo and just copy the mission subdirectory from my work directory, the dedicated server runs just fine (well, except weather defaults to just a nice day instead of the thunderstorm I called up). Anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

I tried just firing up the standard DM and team DM mods that come bundled with the demo, but people got tired of them pretty quickly. So, I'm looking for a set of good co-op or team vs. team mods. I would prefer ones that will work with the demo version so people don't have to go out and buy the game just for one LAN. Is there anything out there that will really show off the game and convince people to buy it? Thoughts? Links? Comments? TIA

I took a look at the demo for OA last night. I like what I see of it, but I think it has the same issues as the original; the MP modes really don't demonstrate just how much fun a properly designed ArmA2 mod can be. And no, I don't think I'll be able to persuade this bunch to buy the game based upon my say-so for one LAN party. :( Still, I am planning to take a look at Armaholic to see what might be done. Any BI staff or modders reading this thread that may have some ideas? TIA

Thanks for the suggestions! More information about the target audience: These are mostly older gamers (mid 30s to early 50s) with a handful of the next generation showing up occasionally. Run and gun games can be fun, but there's definitely an interest in the kind of tactical game that only something like ArmA can provide. IOW, we do like a game that helps us work together. This bunch is most definitely NOT interested in any game or mod where each player only gets one death with no chance to respawn. There would definitely be interest in vehicles if they fit a mod well. Anyone else have any thoughts on what would work?

Hi, all. I had given up playing ArmA just about entirely after one particularly bad night of online play. I connected to three different servers in a row and each time I was forced to drop in less than ten minutes. On those three different servers, I saw in quick succession a pyramid stacker block spawn points, the nuclear grenade kill everyone on a server followed immediately by force-kicking everyone off, and finally, some guy who turned everyone's screen black, then put up an advertisement for KFC. I was so disheartened by those displays of how completely the game had become infested by hackers that I came within an inch of uninstalling the game. As it is, I haven't even fired it up since some time before Halloween. I certainly quit talking up how great ArmA is to all of my clanmates! Since then, I've occasionally stepped briefly into the forums to see if things had improved in any way. You can imagine my pleased surprise to read the announcement of the inclusion of BattlEye in the 1.09 beta patch. This kind of automatic checking is absolutely a necessary step to resolving some of the problems that we see today. However, it is by no means a complete solution. There is nothing like having an admin on a server fully prepared to deal with griefers and with a set of utilities to let him do so quickly and easily. Since I stepped away from ArmA, I've been looking at other games with an eye to hosting something on my server that my friends and clanmates will want to play. At the moment, I'm running a Team Fortress 2 server. This particular mod makes no bones about its goals. It is expressly designed to provide quick, entertaining class based play. As such, it bears little resemblance to ArmA's game style. This really isn't the kind of game that I want to play, but it's what I'm stuck with at the moment. Setting up and managing this server has re-introduced me to administration tools that I haven't used in several years. After some research, I settled on Mani's Admin Plugin mod for administration of my server. It's a mod that's been in active development for quite a while. Over time, it's developed quite an impressive feature set while being battle tested on thousands of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 servers: While it's implied in the description of the list of features, one of the really nice things about Mani's Admin Plugin is that it's relatively easy to add as many admins as desired. It's also easy to manage what privileges various admins have. At one point several years ago, I had about three dozen admins for a CS server that I ran. With that many admins, control over what each admin was allowed to do was critical. I obviously was not about to just tell them all the remote administration password and trust them all to do the right thing. A tool like Mani's Admin Plugin gave me the needed control over admin privileges. I've used this kind of functionality in the past to supply kick, kick/map change, kick/ban/map change, etc. to various admins on other Half-Life based mods. Some of you may be asking yourselves why I wanted that many admins in the first place. The HUGE benefit is that my server nearly always had an admin on, day or night. No griefer was able to create much havoc before being quickly booted from the server. After a while they would give up and go looking for easier targets with no active, aggressive admins. We were so successful in keeping the jerks at bay that players used to tell me that they'd wait as long as an hour and a half for an open slot rather than play some place else. I would absolutely /love/ to have that kind of player loyalty for an ArmA server without having to password protect it. I don't pretend to be much of a programmer. I've done a fair amount of scripting over the years in support of various tasks, but that's about it. I will also freely admit that I know next to nothing about the tools that BI has so graciously given us. What I'd like to know from those who /are/ familiar with those tools is a couple of different things. <ul>* First, would it be possible to develop a similar, server only mod that could deliver similar functionality? If yes, I'm especially interested in the items that I've bolded. Are those achievable with a minimal amount of work? * Second, what potential obstacles would be in the way of developing this kind of mod? * Third and most critical, is anyone reading this forum at all interested in working on this kind of mod? TIA

IMO Wine is a bad idea for a gameserver. Just for starters, it requires running XWindows on a server. Unnecessary software should not be run on servers in order to minimize the attack surface. I certainly hope that BI doesn't think a GUI is necessary for their native Linux binary!

56k? lol I would have killed for that kind of speed when I started. :) When I started gaming online, I was playing Doom ][ over a 9600 dialup using iFrag. Now, that was PAINFUL! rofl

I'd like a Linux server as well. Frankly, I don't see much point in buying the game before I can play it on my server with my friends. And no, I have no interest in running a Windows server, so I'm not converting my Linux box.

/signed

I've been gaming online for about 15 years. By far, the best times online that I've had playing any game have been on well administered clan servers. They always have a raft of disciplined admins who keep the riffraff off, booting any griefer who shows up before he can cause much trouble. Sample a few of the clan servers that have low pings to you. There's bound to be one or two that have a friendly bunch to play with. That said though, for the casual gamer I can't recommend the TG servers highly enough. I've never had anything but a great experience playing on them.