Hovis

Lo folks, I'm looking for some general help with my all round mission making ability, as I am really but a humble nub. Something I've been looking at lately with missions is setting the scene, exploiting ArmA's ability to make really spectacular scenes unfold and so on and so forth. For instance I like to monkey with lights, so on one night spec ops mission I set it during a storm and had helicopters patrolling with their lights on, all looked very nice. But I've noticed some things hurt the frame rate more than others, and some flat out hammer it. For example I had a zombie mission where the mission begins with the players flying over a town where the zombies are eating the civvies, big mistake, the server rolled around crying. So anyway, long and the short of it is, what are the least server/system hungy bits of eye candy and what are the big no no's? I mean for instance are vehicles a big system hog? As an aside to this I've been wondering for an ordinary mission for, say, ten or so players, what would you folks consider to be the maximum amount of units? Can the game handle around a hundred or so, or should I scale it all right back? Any help much appreciated.

Well my system specs aren't a problem, I play with my clan and we have a 'no man left behind' policy, which basically means we all aim to make missions playable by all so nobody is pressured to upgrade if they don't want to. With that in mind things such as heavy fighting in wooded areas are a bit of a no-no for example. Regarding view distance, how far does the slider scale go? I've never really attached a number to the slider, but my own view distance is 2000m. If I can cut it down and nobody notices that's grand.

With an Iraq mod, if you want to do justice to the realism of ArmA you should really have a crack at dealing with the political realism of the situation on the ground, regarding the factions and such. By this I mean the forces should really stack up as follows: Blue: US Military. Iraqi Military/Police. Independent: Mercenaries Local secular militias Criminals Opfor: Imported Islamist insurgents Turkish special forces Iranian special forces Sunni/Shia extremists It's worth bearing in mind the brunt of the fighting, or at least the dying, in Iraq is being done by the Iraqi army and police and any mod that seeks to accurately reflect the conflict should take that into account. It should also take into account the cheeky sods nipping over the border from Iran and Turkey, the barking mad Jihadi tourists from all over the globe and the huge army of mercenaries involved on both sides.

Hmm. Well a workaround could be to have a Humvee in front of the target Humvee, and have the IED destroy that Humvee, and use the destruction of that Humvee as the trigger switch to unleash ambushy mayhem.

The worrying thing for me about Chammy's is that it's broken some missions, and I have no idea why. I love the sounds, though they are no perfect in all cases, but I think it may have some issues other than that, so it's not ideal if you are a MP mission maker.

Thanks muchly. It'll make a nice change to have to fight troops that aren't using some variant of the AK-74 or other.

Quick question, will the Turkish forces be Bluefor, Opfor, or independent? Personally I think they'd be good candidates for Independent or Opfor, as they are most likely to end up fighting against (in potential campaigns) US, Greek or coalition friendly Iraqi forces. But that said are there any Bluefor irregular or Iraqi troops? Damn politics, you'd think three factions in a game would be enough to cover every side in a situation.

Eep, my bad, I should have searched some more first. Seems there is such a mod in the pipeline. My bad.

I'm a big fan of zombie mods, and my clan plays a lot of Yomie/Crappy Zombie Mod missions, so I'd like to see work put in on them. Some sort of CTI persistent thing like Evolution but with armies of the undead could be amazing. I make Zombie missions, mostly really simple ones, but I'll nose around and see how practicable such a map might be.

Lo folks, I'm trying to restart a remote ArmA server for which the usual operator is in bed. I can access the main directory of the server using Leech FTP, but clicking on the exe itself does nowt. Anybody know how to run the .exe file over FTP?

Lo folks, I'm running a 24 player server for my clan/mates and it's usually fine except recently I've noticed that it won't run some missions. I select the mission on the list and it just thinks about it for a second then returns to the mission list. At first I thought it could be a version problem, checked and it's 1.08 all round. Then I thought it could be a mod problem, but the server has all the mods that are in use, and I'm pretty sure it has the same mods and versions of mods that I have, even ones I haven't used. That said there is something odd in addons, I've noticed that some of the .pbo files in my versions are of a different size to the ones on the server, no idea what causes that, but I thought that could be a factor perhaps? Could it also be possible that me copying the .pbo's from my addons folder to the server addon folder, rather than using them fresh from the .rar file could be a problem? I'm not sure what's doing it, but I'd really like to rectify the problem is possible. I'm probably going to reinstall and repatch the server anyway, but wanted to know how to avoid this happening again. Any help much appreciated.

Just wondering if I give Opfor troops a laser guided bomb designator thing, can the SU-34B use it to drop bombs just like the Harrier does? I know it's probably a silly question, but I need to know for sure and it's not something I can test in practice on me own.

Ahhh nuts. I don't know how to mod an Opfor laser designator. I could use a Harrier for the mission I suppose. Shame though as the Su-34 would have been better for the mission, being as it has a gunner who can navigate, and I wanted the mission set in bad weather.

Never mind, I found a work around, I now have the crew get out of the helicopters. It's a bit clunky but it works.

Okay here's the problem. I have a perfect helicopter landing set up, two Blackhawks touch down next to each other on a beach, they release a squad of troops each, then fly off. I tested this a lot in SP, made sure it all worked perfectly, all ready I thought for the multiplayer beta. So I give it a go, and a couple of problems appear. 1. The helicopter containing the second multiplayer player (I'm in the first one) doesn't attempt to land, it merely hovers near the LZ. 2. The helicopter of the server player (me) drops me off and flies off with my whole squad. There are four helicopters in total, all using an identical system of waypoints and an invisible H, and all release a squad. The two helicopters with AI squads do the job fine in SP or MP, and when I logged out of the MP (when a friend hosted) my helicopter then went off and carried out orders as instructed. Anybody able to help? It's bloody weird and I have no idea how to fix it.

Reminds me of a Planetside style link lattice. It's a good system. Perhaps having bases needing to be captured by an overland force rather than paratroops that starts from a set point, such as a friendly home base, would help too. That way if you captured a point behind the lines the convoy would not be able to reach it.

I think disableAI "target" or "Engage" removes the unit's capacity to spot enemy units. That might fix your problem, but that'll also stop you from having the BMP2s fire as they approach. Ultimately I think your best bet is to have cargo and transport in different groups.

Would it be possible to set the pilot to careless and the gunner to combat? I think target designation could be a pilot thing, but maybe that'd work. Hmm.

Lo folks, I'm still working on my night mission. Since Paraiso has no street lights I was wondering if there's a way to switch the lights on vehicles to always on, even if the vehicle is fighting and operating on a high state of alert? I want to add Mi-17 helicopters with their lights on you see, sweeping over the city, adding tracers (both to and from) their own lights, and possibly their own explosions, to the darkness. Any ideas how it's done? Most of the lighting commands I have found seem to pertain to street lighting, not vehicles.

I think troops in the same unit as their transport tend to dismount as a defensive measure if they see an enemy. If your beach landing is under fire that could explain it. I'm not sure though, I am a monkey. What I do know is that if I want reliable transport AI the best way to achieve it seems to be to make the transport and the troops that ride in it separate groups. So I'd have the squad leader called Grunt1 and the transporting BMP called BMP1 (cos I'm imaginative). Then run this line: {_x moveincargo BMP1} foreach units Grunt1; I think that is right, but if it isn't you should still be able to find the accurate syntax somewhere online easily enough. With the unit and it's ride split up what I then do is a get out order for the squad synced to an unload order for the transport at the same location. With a bit of luck, that should fix it. No guarantees though, that's just how I'd try it.

Here's how I did this for the intro to a mission. First, I grabbed a pre-made IED script. This one by Jeevz to be exact. You can download it as a file somewhere, but I'm sure if you just cut and paste this into an ied.sqs file you're sorted. Then the first time I tried it I made a helicopter explode with this line: [Heli1, "Large"] exec "ied.sqs"; Bind that to a trigger the helicopter flies through and POW. It goes nova. But it doesn't look great, and still didn't, even when I stepped it up to a "huge" explosion. What worked for me in the end was not exploding the aircraft itself, but exploding one of the crew inside it. In this case I used an Mi17, so I stuck a guy in the back called Bomb, and ran this script on the trigger. [bomb, "small"] exec "ied.sqs"; Sure enough there's a small explosion, like a grenade hit but bigger, inside the helicopter, which does enough damage to cause a fuel leak and to effectively force it to land, fast and hard, and bingo, you've got a cinematic crash sequence. Now I haven't tried this with a single seater aircraft, and no matter which way you try it with this premise you're going to get a fatal crash (cos your pilot is obviously sprayed all over the cockpit). But you should get a nice trail of smoke and crash into the ground effect, rather than a burst in mid air job.

So I'm looking to set a mission in a city at night, lit by street lights. I searched the forum and found a section on switching lights off, which yielded the following Init command. {_x switchlight "off"} foreach (position lighto1 nearObjects ["streetlamp",300]); So I create a game logic called lighto1, change the switchlight from "off" to "on" and have a go. Still darkness. Could somebody please tell me what am I doing wrong?

No lights in Paraiso?!?! D'OH! Well thanks for the help anyway fellas.

The mission is set in Paraiso. None of the lights are on in my night missions. It's odd.

I don't think replacing the spawn point vehicle is that big of a deal, if your command vehicle is in weapons range of the enemy then it's pretty much game over anyway, at least it should be.