Drozdov

Set his behaviour to Careless, that should make him ignore any threat. And put 'this setunitpos "up"' in his init field to keep him on his feet. That worked for me in OFP when I had a mission in which a town was attacked and the civvies were scripted to run away into the hills - had to set them to careless or they would just sit and cower. If he's grouped to an OPFOR unit the BLUFOR people will shoot him. Could always set him as a captive to avoid that if the other thing doesn't work (put 'this setcaptive true' in his init field).

I did edit this into my thread above, but in case anyone missed, I've noticed that any time you drop one of Vilas' weapons the game crashes. I suspect it's something to do with the fact that dropping weapons on the ground in ArmA means you actually have that weapon and its magazines appearing on the ground instead of just a generic bag that looks like a satchel charge.

Wondering if there are any plans to convert the OWP Mi8 mod for ArmA? It was one of my favourites, and very well done. It had various Mi8 versions, with nice fast-roping scripts and other fancy little extras. So is the OWP team working on an ArmA version, or anyone else doing an Mi8 mod pack? Mi8s are very useful for all countries since they're pretty common and not too expensive.

I'm always interested in guerrilla and civilian units. I would like much more variety for civilians, including some 'old' looking faces, and far more varied clothes. And also, importantly, some women, since at the moment you can only have a single-gender island which would hardly work. Anyway, I'd like to see civilians in a variety of work and leisure clothes. Would also be good if all the civilians were available as 'Guerrilla' units. I'd also like to have hammocks. Hammocks are crucial for any guerrilla force on the move as they provide you with a dry place to sleep, and a hammock is much easier to carry and much harder to spot than a tent. So we need hammocks for a guerrilla campaign, which would have to have two trees attached to them from which it could hang. You'd need to make hammocks with a variety of different types of tree so they fit in with the environment. Free standing hammocks (without trees built in) might be possible if there are trees in the map close enough together so that it looks as if they're hanging from them. I would try that first to see if it works. You also need to have a covered version of every hammock type, since when it rains you need a cover, preferably some kind of nylon cloth or canvas, suspended above your hammock on another piece of string to keep the rain off you. Ideally a hammock would be a vehicle that you could get in, but having them as an object is good too if you can't be bothered making a custom 'sleeping in hammock' position for soldiers. In general I'd love to see more guerrilla style soldiers and related items. If anyone wants to make some good guerrilla units, remember to make them as generic as possible. Most should be clothed in appropriate civilian style clothing, but it is possible for guerrilla units to have some kind of uniform as well. Generally guerrillas will be dressed in a rough shirt and trousers. Most guerrilla bands won't have access to facilities allowing them to make their own uniforms, although it's likely that some of them would acquire items of camouflaged clothing from the enemies they fight. I'd suggest having two general types of guerrilla fighter - Guerrilla Recruits with entirely civilian clothes representing people who have just joined the band and been given a weapon, and Guerrilla Soldiers, who're the more experienced soldiers who've been with the unit long enough to acquire more appropriate camouflaged clothing - I'd have some of them with camouflage shirts with ammunition pouches, but not with proper camouflaged trousers. And please, no hats, turbans or balaclavas, face masks or anything that would limit the usefulness of the model. Guerrilla Officers ought to be identifiable by an army style cap of some kind. Every guerrilla troop should have two versions - one with a rucksack and all the gear they're required to carry, and a purely combat version without the rucksack. This reflects the fact that guerrillas will either carry all their equipment into combat with them, if they don't have a central camp nearby or a safe place where they can store their gear while they fight, and will need to maneuvre quickly away from the battleground without losing all the stuff they need to keep them from starving. The backpack model would also be used if the guerrilla unit is moving to another location, since the guerrilla has to carry all their equipment and possessions with them on their back. On the other hand, if they do have a safe camp nearby where they can store the gear and retreat to it afterwards, they obviously don't want to burden themselves with all their gear. So there should be two variations of every guerrilla model, one with its gear on its back, and one without. Finally I've some suggestions on naming the troops. A mistake that many modders in OFP/ArmA make is to name the troop after the weapon they carry, so you call your soldier, for example, 'Guerrilla Recruit (AK)'. If you're using civilian clothes, you obviously don't want to limit your weapon selection to the name of the troop. Instead, either just name them all 'Guerrilla Recruit' (if it's possible to have identical names for the mission editor lists), or 'Guerrilla Recruit 1' or 2, 3, 4 etc. This allows you to use different models and doesn't restrict your weapon choice to the model name. I hope someone's interested in making all/any of this stuff - I know it's ambitious, but hopefully I'm not the only one interested in making a guerrilla style campaign. Unfortunately I'm rubbish at add-on making, although I might try to learn again over the summer. By the way I didn't just make all the stuff about guerrillas up, it's based on Che Guevara's book on Guerrilla Warfare which includes all kinds of good information about his experience of how guerrilla bands operate, most of which is still perfectly relevant today even 40 years later.

Hey, nice mods so far Vilas. Downloaded the bandits addon today, I like the textures for the units. I would like to have the 'bandit' models available as civilians, to add some variety to civilian clothes, and also have bandits available for the Independent forces as well. Another thing, instead of having units called 'Bandit AK' and 'Bandit Glock', I think it's much better to have more generic names so you can have a variety of clothes for your bandit unit without having the different looking bandits named Bandit PM or whatever when they might not be using that weapon. I'd prefer if they were renamed Bandit 1, Bandit 2 and so on, or even just name them all 'Bandit'. I think it's much better for mission making and in game. Sure, it's good to call them different names so you know which troop is which, but it's really not necessary. Having specifically labelled troops is very annoying for civilian or guerilla units, because you want to use a variety of models rather than one specific uniform, and you rarely want to use the default weapon layout for all your soldiers. It's just annoying in game when you select your soldier and he's called 'Bandit AK' when he's not carrying an AK. By the way, I've noticed that dropping any Vilas weapon causes ArmA to crash.

Not played it much yet so I can't comment on the graphics, but on testing the A10 I discovered as a few others have too that the Joystick keys are mapped oddly. Everything still has the same function as I've mapped it in the controls menu, but now they do extra things as well - button 2 now switches weapons as well as zooming and locking targets as I set it to (that makes manual targetting a bit tricky), and Buttons 5 and 6 are now mapped to 'Previous' and 'Next'. Needs to be fixed obviously.

Having the north on its own does make a lot of sense. At least you'd then have a geographically viable island, instead of having a tiny island with as diverse a landscape as a small continent. With north Sahrani you could also believabley have a European setting for a campaign - you can hardly do that with a tropical desert with pseudo-Islamic architecture attached on in the south.

It is actually possible now to turn on the ground with a helicopter, using the cyclic left/right control (I think it's called cyclic, but could be wrong). You can rotate around like a slow spinning-top, always assumed it was just a side-effect of the ability in ArmA to control the helicopter as if it's hovering when you're on the ground (i.e. the ability to do a 'wheelie' by pulling the stick backwards). But if it's realistic, then that's fine. And yes, wheel brakes are needed - takes ages to stop a plane on landing, and they don't seem to decelerate as fast as they did in OFP when they used their flaps and ailerons like stopping parachutes.

Was just testing some things on the editor, and discovered that it's apparently impossible to rearm a chopper that has no ammo left in it. Was making a mission which has a chopper in a hangar, without fuel or ammo (as presumabley they would be if not in use), and I wanted to see if it was possible to rearm and refuel the chopper. Refueling worked fine, but rearming did not. So I decided to test that some more, and it seems that you can only rearm a chopper that has some ammo left. It's not a bug caused by removing ammunition from a vehicle's initialisation field, because it's the same if you use up all the ammo of a helicopter that starts up with full ammo. It's definately not just due to me not being able to maneuvre the helicopter into a rearming position, because when an AI is the pilot you don't even have the option of sending him to rearm using the action menu. Strange bug, shouldn't be too hard to fix. I can only guess that it's because an empty chopper isn't recognised as having any weapons.

As a couple of people have mentioned, my only problem with the flight controls is using auto-hover. Whenever I stop and use the auto-hover it does random sideways movements without me pressing anything - if I try and correct them it just does even more drastic side movements. I have the Joystic X-axis mapped to left/right turn, is it possible to correct that with banking or is it just random auto-hovering madness that needs a patch to fix? As it is, it means it's almost impossible to land on a specific location and dangerous to try landing next to trees or buildings.