baddo

The ArmA configuration files are not C++. I now understand that that is what you meant in your first post by "i know u can do C++". The style of the configuration files is C++-ish though. Some sort of scripting formulas can be inserted into configuration files. But it really isn't C++. It's data that is handled by C++. Suggesting C++ as a "scripting" language for a game is far from rational. C++ is NOT easier and faster (to write). You got that seriously wrong about C++. Also it is not an interpreted language. I don't know how much you have experience programming in C++ but what you said hints that it is very little or not at all. Perhaps you should explain better what you actually want, instead of just saying "I want C++ scripting". hmmm what do you think you are doing when you use ArmA scripting language? Maybe you mean that things should look more object-oriented in the scripting language level?

You could try "say" instead of "playSound" although I don't know if it works for the idea. Wolfrug above says some possible problems about it. I don't know if the AI soldiers react to sounds played with playSound. I guess they don't, but I didn't verify it by testing. The thing here with the example I showed, would be to keep the original weapon sound as the farthest distance sound, and when the listener is closer to the weapon, then you would add another sound on top of the original to make it louder and sound different. That way it could be done without creating an addon. Replacing the original weapon sound requires you to create an addon I think. But I think "say" should be used instead of "playSound" like Wolfrug says. The playSound works if it is used only for the singleplayer's weapon, as I did in my testing. For that the example I showed works very well. And then the system should be disabled for cutscenes, if what he says is right. Although I can see that it is not easy to get right. Probably requires a lot of tweaking to get right.

There is I think a PHP script made by Kegetys which gives you more choices: (copied link from his signature, I hope that's ok, if it isn't ok then I'll remove it if you keg ask) Go to Sotapelinimigeneraattori page at http://junk.kegetys.net/generator/ I got these now: Hostile Operation - World Command Battlefield Warfare Storm War Enemy Terrorism Confrontation - Enemy Terrorism Danger First Company - World Simulator Assault Terrorism Warfare Cold War Mission World in Conflict Force War Conflict of Virtual Operation in Sight Force Cold War Cold War Confrontation World Assault Joint Warfare Battle in Sight Warfare Encounter - Operation of War Storm Crisis Defence Force of Enemy Storm Flashpoint Danger - Battlefield Mission Flashpoint Operation - Battle Command Assault Company Cold War Battle - Storm Defence Company World Assault Opposition Conflict - Storm Conflict Mission Battle Storm Confrontation Virtual World Combat Encounter Conflict War Encounter Battlefield Conflict Mission Enemy Company Battle Forces Force Storm Assault Cold War Operation - Danger Combat World Virtual Armed Defence Company Flashpoint Conflict Assault Command Confrontation Storm Crisis War - Dangerous Command Silent Combined Operation Assault Terrorism Terrorism Battle - Confrontation Armed Battlefield Future Operation Dangerous Warfare Cold War Troops Operation Combat Force Battlefield Danger Project Storm War Assault Operation Crisis Terrorism Crisis of War Dangers of Assault Conflict - Terrorism Cold War Encounter Operation Combat Attack I think one of those will do, if they need another name.

This has to be a joke  It is a joke...?  It isn't?!  I'm not sorry for laughing at this suggestion. I honestly think that C++ is not at all suitable for the purpose. There is a C Scripting Language CSL, but that is not at all the same thing as using C or C++.  And it's GPL so it's surely not an option for BIS.

I played just for the fun of it with sounds played from "fired" event handler in Operation Flashpoint. Here is some example I wrote for someone else about it, I think it was at www.ofpec.com forum. This method means that the sound is played together with the original sound of the weapon. The method worked well for me in single player mode. I did not test it in multiplayer at all. Description.ext: <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">class CfgSounds { sounds[] = {}; class singleShot { name = "single"; sound[] = {"single.wss", db, 1.0}; titles[] = {}; }; class burstShot { name = "burst"; sound[] = {"burst.wss", db, 1.0}; titles[] = {}; }; class autoShot { name = "auto"; sound[] = {"auto.wss", db, 1.0}; titles[] = {}; }; }; single.wss, burst.wss and auto.wss are sound files in sound subdirectory in the mission directory. As you might have already guessed, they are meant to be played when a weapon has been fired in a corresponding fire mode. Trigger (to collect the units from the trigger's area and add the fired EH to them): <span style='color:Brown'>axis a = 100, axis b = 100 activation: anybody present type: switch condition: this on activation:</span> <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">{ _x addEventHandler ["fired", { if ( (_this select 2 != "throw") && (_this select 2 != "put") ) then { if (_this select 3 == "single") then {playSound "singleShot"} else { if (_this select 3 == "burst") then {playSound "burstShot"} else {playSound "autoShot"} } } }] Â } forEach thisList One tip is that do not start a script file from the event handler, but stuff the required code directly into the event handler initialization code as I have done in my example. The same method should work in ArmA too, I see no reason why it wouldn't. But I haven't test it in ArmA. I'm sure if there are any changes needed for ArmA, they are easy to do.

Well, it's scriptable to work without changes to configuration. So you would not need any addons.

Then it's good to learn how to organize your addons and how to load only the addons you need into ArmA. You should ideally load only those addons which are used by the missions you will play. That can be achieved well-enough by arranging your addons into separate folders and using Kegetys' ArmA Launcher to start ArmA: then you can choose which addon folders you want to load for the particular playing session. http://www.kegetys.net/ Hopefully this helps you to stay organized with your addons from the get-go.

A simple solution is to create more folders. I use Kegetys' ArmA Launcher to start Arma, with it it is very easy to enable/disable a mod folder. You can find that program from http://www.kegetys.net/ I have a folder @mods in ArmA folder. Inside it I put the mod folders. This way the ArmA folder is not cluttered up with the extra folders.

I think there are some ArmA scripts around here somewhere which measure frames-per-second. My gut feeling tells me that the developer version of ArmA has a way to show performance numbers on-screen, but my gut feeling also tells me that they disable those kinds of features from public release versions. This is of course pure speculation and not any kind of knowledge. I've never heard of anyone being able to enable any sort of original in-game FPS display for ArmA or for OFP. If there was a way to do that I'm sure the developers would have told us. Edit: One thread about FPS script: http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....;hl=fps see if that works for you.

Yeah it's funny. But did you hear about the cat which had to be euthanized after getting hit by an artillery round recently? CNN article about it: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/12/artillery.cat.ap/index.html I'm sure it was an accident and the cat wasn't in al-qaeda. These kinds of accidents happen in Finland sometimes too. For example in Niinisalo, Kankaanpää - Karvia some people get sometimes rounds into their roof.

I'm a bit worried about the economy too. But what I am a lot more worried is that people will panic and draw their money away from the markets and hide them in some old sock of theirs. That is what we definitely don't need now. I've been actually cooling my girlfriend down about this, as she already lost a good deal of money from her investments and is about to take it all back even if it means that she will lose. I'm thinking she should just keep her investment, as it is not a financial disaster for her even if she loses it all, so I think it is better to just let it be now and let the economy sort itself out, and take the money when she can take it with profit. But we need people not to be overly optimistic about their capability to pay mortgage payments etc. But at the same time we want to have people spending money and not drawing it away. In Finland during the 1980's the banks were, as I have learnt, sloppy, and the result was ugly things started to happen when the 1990's started. That together with the downfall of the USSR which caused us to lose lots of trade, we got major problems. In 1991 both of my parents lost their jobs among thousands, I think tens of thousands, of others. It was not a happy time indeed... fortunately they were able to recover relatively quickly, but many others weren't. I wouldn't want to see similar things happen now.  I think it was some economist or someone like them, a wise man anyways, who said something along the lines of "predicting economy is like going into a completely dark room and feeling with your hands what the room has inside" I think that is even too accurate, I think predicting which way the economy is going to go next is not at all as accurate a thing to do as feeling things in a dark room with your hands  Because emotions make people change their investing behaviour. You can talk all day about making rational decisions, but people are after all emotional and can be lead into believing something which is totally not true, and then the "totally not true" thing will turn true as the people believed it and panicked, and made it become true.

Uh... what? Â Â Have you found a better singleplayer campaign than Cold War Crisis? There is no match to it that I have seen, not even close. It's not just nostalgism/faded memory, I've played it recently again and it still rocks compared to its competition. Also it should be recognized that while some great user-made addons exist for OFP (and for ArmA), only small percentage of them are close to being as good as or better than the stuff made by BIS. The Modding Community isn't the kind of heaven some people seem to think it is. It's full of great promises of great addons and relatively little actual delivering, and of that small amount of actually delivered addons, most are not even close to the level of BIS-made stuff. Might be a bit pessimistic view, but it's something to remind you of realism. Addon creation for ArmA is much more challenging than it was for OFP. It is in my opinion over-optimistic to expect that we would get lots of great user-made addons/big mods for ArmA. I'm welcoming peoples' hard work certainly, don't take me wrong here. But the cold realism is that most addon projects either die before they get released, or the quality of the released addons are much lower than that of the stuff made by BIS.

I'm not going to buy a multiplayer-only ArmA. Maybe I will just go play OFP: CWC campaign over and over again... that would mean no more money for BIS from me so BIS better come up with good singleplayer stuff next time. I'm sure they are trying.

There are a lot of 'addons' which consist of only scripts, and which are only really usable if you create a mission and use those scripts in your mission. They are often not 'plug-and-play' type of addons. Also notice this. Some people are against creating an addon for scripts: it creates one more dependancy which players need to find and download and install and load... instead of if it was just inserted into the mission PBO itself, then you only need to get the mission PBO and voila, It Just Worksâ„¢ Which one you choose. [rant]I personally don't like it every time I see a multiplayer mission which requires tons of addons from various sources. I think it is essential for a multiplayer mission's success, to either 1) rely on a bigger mod which is one simple download, or 2) not require addons at all. You can ask single players to download 35 different addons from 35 different locations, but please don't do it for multi players. [/rant] But in the case when you already have the addon X which has some 3D model, then it makes sense to include scripts inside that addon because you anyways need to download and install it. BUT notice! If there is fighter jet addon A and missile script compilation B, and you would like to see them combined into one addon. Then it is the responsibility of the creator of the A to include the B into the addon. The creator of B is not at fault here. The creator of B provides scripts for people, for mission makers and for addon makers, "here, see what I made, use it in your mission or in your addon! i'm out for beer." that's as far as it goes from the B side usually. It is usually nothing complicated to use special features of addons which are started from a script. It usually takes only a short read of a readme file to find out how to use an addon's special feature. Also in the case of using a script not included in an addon is usually not complicated. Don't be afraid of the mission editor, I didn't hear of even one case in which someone was bitten by it (to death).

Surely most of the Finnish men let's say 21 and older who play ArmA are ex-military. In the sense that they have gone through their conscription time in the Finnish Defence Forces (FDF), which is nowadays from 6 to 12 months. I'm an Armoured Jäger of an Armoured Reconnaissance Company. My main job was to drive an off-road truck. My weapon was the RK-62 which should be familiar from the FDF Mod for some people here. The reconnaissance training missions were exciting and interesting for me, I would have liked to have most of the training camps like those. Otherwise it was quite boring. Operation Flashpoint was a thrill. With FDF Mod even better of course. The FDF has lots of Soviet equipment, so a lot of the equipment in OFP was already familiar to me before playing the game. ArmA hasn't really impressed this far. OK there are some significant technological changes compared to OFP like streaming and join-in-progress, but that doesn't really make up for the negatives, like the very disappointing singleplayer campaign. Maybe OFP Cold War Crisis set the bar so high that it was very difficult for BIS to come up with something as good as that, and thus the disappointment of many. I've had some good multiplayer sessions with ArmA, so that makes up a little bit. I am in a sort-of waiting mode regarding ArmA. I wait for the patching situation to stabilize. I also wait and see if the FDF Mod comes for ArmA too - that might be just the thing I need to get excited. But I can't know, so I'll just wait and see what comes, if anything. It might be that before I get really excited about ArmA, we have already ArmA 2. But this doesn't really bother me at all. I've got my hands full of other things to do so it isn't a bad thing if I'm not much into ArmA right now.

Alright, so it is not possible for a U.S. state to separate from the Union without using violence. Unless both sides agree on the matter, that is. It is the answer I was expecting to hear. The European Union is in this regard a much looser union.

Well that would be interesting to see. South Carolina breaking out of the Union. Could it be legally possible inside the United States? To non-violently separate a member state from the rest of the USA into an independent country. If like 90 % of the people in one state want it, could they do it legally? I'm no expert of the U.S. law so I really don't know. I'm not seeing it happening though. Just thinking if it is possible within the current U.S. legislation.

It shall be noticed also that the biggest trade partner with the USA is the European Union. http://www.eurunion.org/profile/facts.htm Yes, it's several countries combined under one name, but still. This might have gone unnoticed by many people. According to this information, the USA is very much tied to the European Union financially, and vice versa of course.

You are right, you have no reason to publicVariable something if it is only ever needed on the one machine. You will need to make sure that the scripts/functions which are only needed to run on server, are only run on server. Use isServer command. From thereon you make sure that the global variables which are used only by the scripts/functions run on the server are only present at the server. We can even see a programming security concept here: if you keep as much in the hands of the server as possible, in local variables, then you are potentially fighting off people who try to cheat. I'm saying local because public data is more exposed and more easily changed by definition. So, to add further, my advice would be to minimize the number of global variables. It should be obvious, but I think it is often neglected.

Some discussion about it at ofpec: http://www.ofpec.com/forum/index.php?topic=31236.0 includes a working example function in my post. I use it to create units into guard towers. Copy and modify as you wish if you like to use that. Other examples can be found with a little bit of looking around.

Ragdoll has been, at least on my part, discussed here as a possibility to fix obvious problems in the games BIS creates. It is not necessarily 'ragdoll' what we need. If you can point some other technology to us and to BIS which fixes the obvious problems with static death animations, then we welcome that technology. It goes like this: there is something in both OFP and ArmA which we dislike, in the form of static death animations which can make things look very unrealistic a lot of the time when playing the game. The ragdoll technology is one potentially good way to solve that. Whether BIS actually uses it is of course beyond our control, and it shouldn't be in our control. As an example of how obviously unrealistic things can get in ArmA. I was editing a new mission the other day, which has enemy AI guards in watch towers. When I shoot such an enemy all the way to death, the visual result of it is far from good. Every player can easily say that that is totally wrong. The body of the dead unit is usually over half resting over nothing, in horizontal position. Just one example where it would be glaringly obvious to benefit from a technology like ragdoll. With a ragdoll chances would be good that the dead body would not be hanging in air supported by nothing. It is the feeling of realism in the game which we would like to see improved. It is not that we want BIS to follow other game developers.

I'm pretty sure that assumption is not correct. Bullet hit calculations appear to be executed on the machine local to the shooter and then broadcasted. I draw this conclusion from the fact that players can cheat by increasing the damage values of weapons on their machine, and these effects will work in MP. If the server was authoritative for hit calculations, this would not work. In my opinion it would not be right to check if a hit has happened on clients. Notice I do not speak of what kind of weapon a player has, only if a hit happened or not. It is hard to believe that ArmA would work so that it let's the clients decide if a hit has happened. Due to lag you can have significant error in the location of units shown on your screen. I don't see any other way to reasonably solve this problem other than to do the hit-checking on server. I remember from the OFP times that I thought some times that I had scored a hit in multiplayer, but in fact I hadn't. The reason why I thought that I had hit another player was that the game had too much lag and the other unit was displayed in the wrong place on my screen. If the hit-checking was done locally on my computer, I would have had a hit. The same thing happens in ArmA in my opinion.

Shouldn't you be contacting the publisher of the game and not us?

I decided to retract my further comments relating to my previous post. Might be an interesting side-discussion going on here but I don't see it progressing much. It's going to end up (it already did in fact) with Spokesperson defending communists and others trying to do the opposite. I'm actually a bit tired of that kind of discussions.

I proposed to delay the synchronizing as much as possible in http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....;st=435 Something along those lines. I'm actually not satisfied with that post, but the main point I made in it stands: delaying synchronization as much as possible, or not doing it at all if by any means possible. Everything does not need to be synchronized all the time I think. A lot of network traffic can be eliminated completely by carefully choosing what to synchronize and when. The server should have the only 'correct' state of the game at any one time. The clients will be corrected by the server as required. But ONLY as required. It will be interesting to see how far BIS takes ArmA 2. I am a little bit pessimistic about actually seeing ragdoll physics in that game, but let's wait and see what comes out.