Hovis

I was really disappointed by the building garrisons. They are really good until the insta-kill garrison units appear. Flame tanks and grenadiers. Completely ruined that aspect of the game for me.

The mission is set at midnight, and it's a multiplayer job (not sure if that will affect things, but it has done so in the past). I'll have to see if the lights are on when I try the mission out live I suppose. In the meantime I've resorted to using fires cunningly concealed in vehicle wrecks and exploding vehicles. It just really needs to provide enough light to enable the players to make their first kills and get some nightvision of their own. Thanks for the help by the way

Thanks guys!

Hi folks, I'm making a co-op mission with a squad as the playable unit but due to the small area the mission is focused in (defending a farmyard) I want the AI members of the squad out the way until the players respawn as one of them. The ideal would be to have these characters spawn in a barn and hit the dirt until a player takes control of one of them, however I don't know how to stop them doing stuff. Any suggestions?

Shameless bump cos this is doing my head in and I would rather learn how to do it properly rather than just tell each individual in turn do disableAI. Anybody know the correct command line to disable a groups movement AI?

Random hypothetical wars eh... 1. Turkey versus Greece. There's a lot of tension there and the Turks are a pretty mean bunch. 2. Turkey versus Kurdistan. Once the US has left Iraq Kurdistan is a sitting duck for the Turks and they want it. There has even been some friction between the Turkish military and US forces there, including the capture and eventual release of a Turkish special forces team in the country. 3. Somebody already beat me to the punch of the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, but there's a very good chance that Ethiopia and Somalia might go to war again if the Union of Islamic Courts make another bid for power against the UN backed Somali provisional government. The UIC guys are heavily connected to Al Queda types in Africa, which is why a US Spectre gunship over Somalia at the behest of the provisional Somali government had a pop at some of their people a few weeks back. Turned out the gunship annihilated a bunch of innocent people due to faulty or absent intelligence, but it at least shows that despite the Mogadishu disaster the US has not necessarily ruled out action in Somalia, even if it is by proxy. 4. Russia versus Georgia, or an escalation of the Chechnya conflict. Somebody beat me to this one too. It's very possible. Putin is a mean, mean man. Hard as nails and as ruthless as the devil's own divorce lawyer. Hell he even has people killed openly and messily in foreign countries (see the recent spate of London poisonings as a case in point). If he sees a reason to go for it Georgia and Chechnya could get hit. 5. Iran Versus the USA. I reckon we might see the USA use air strikes on Iran, but I think a US attack on the ground against Iran is completely out of the question. The military, the political capital and the will of the American people to fight dirty wars in the desert has been expended in Iraq. However the reason I say Iran versus the USA, not the other way around, is that I believe that Iran may make the first move, if it hasn't already. Not a direct attack, because if you go head to head with the US on the battlefield you get burned, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Iranian weapons, training special forces and explosives experts found their way over the practically open border. Iran and the USA are definitely close to war, so it's in Iran's best interests to assist the Iraqis in bleeding out the US military strength in that country, in much the same way as the US supported the Afghans against the Soviets and the Soviets supported the North Koreans and North Vietnamese against the USA. War by proxy with plausible deniability is the way forward. The big war I think people talk about but that will never happen is the China versus USA one. China is the reigning global superpower now, no question of that, but its power is not military. China has very little capacity for force projection, no modern carrier battlegroups and no high tech air force. But it does have money. The USA owes China an immense sum of money. That binds those two nations. The China versus Taiwan flashpoint is there, but China knows if it invades Taiwan it destroys what it wants there, the industry and the people, so it's a total waste. Japan in the region has made itself safe with an incredibly sophisticated, if short ranged, defence force and the Koreas are bound by mutually assured destruction so they won't get up to much either. In terms of the wars I'd personally like to see, basically there are none, but I would take some small satisfaction if the UN backed an international strike force to bomb the crap out of the Sudanese airforce and any militia convoys they can find. The Darfur genocide is ongoing, nobody has done a bloody thing about it (in fact by the time the UN calls something a genocide it's usually over), hundreds of thousands are dead, millions are displaced. It'd be nice if just once the international community said, "Look Sudan, you've been using your air force to kill civilians so we're going to annihilate your air force." France did something similar when jets from the Ivory Coast attacked their soldiers, they simply blew up the entire Ivory Coast air force and said, "If you can't play nice we'll take away your toys".

So I think I've got it, but I can't make it work. I'm trying the following command in the squad leader (named 'lead' init line: {_x disableAI "move"} foreach unit group lead This gives me an 'missing;' error. So the syntax is evidently wrong, any ideas how?

That sounds like an interesting command, could you please explain precisely what it does? Does it set the guy to 'Danger' behaviour, or does it set him to the behaviour level of a character who has already been shot at (or are they both the same thing)? Just trying to get a better idea of how the AI handles various states of readiness y'see.

I'm working on a town attack mission and I'd like to use rooftop snipers. I put some in the original version but when the shooting started they immediately went to ground, bad idea since this put them below the low parapets on the roofs, meaning they couldn't fire or be fired upon. So I'm wondering is there a simple command I can put in the init section of a units properties to get them to not move, to stay either standing or kneeling (preferably kneeling) and target/fire at will?

Thanks matey

So I want to make a mission set with an SLA invasion, and I want air support, namely friendly jets. Thing is though, the Su-34s don't seem to work. I give them waypoints, set them to combat, even give them big fat easy static targets, long run-ups and big orders to kill stuff. Fact remains, I have never seen the Su-34 or Su-34B fire a shot in the hands of the AI. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks it works like a charm

So I'm doing a mission where a squad plus AI troops holds a base under heavy attack, but I'm not sure how to have the mission end. I don't want it to be a kill all enemy mission, because I don't want the player forces to have to advance out of their defensive positions. I was thinking of trying the mission to the arrival of reinforcements, but not sure how that would work. The easiest answer would seem to be a time limit, but it might seem odd to end the mission arbitrarily at a time when the players could be on the verge of defeat. Help appreciated.

Okay I got an IED script, Jeevz's one to be exact. I put it in my mission folder. I've read the instructions, but I get a 'Missing ;' error. Here's what I want to do: I have a truck which I want to have explode into a million little bits basically as the level starts, just to provide atmosphere mostly. The truck is named boom. I have the init line for said truck as follows; [boom, "huge"] exec ied.sqs, word for word what is in the ReadMe. Where am I going wrong?

Ha, found a fix. Needed quotes around the ied.sqs, the readme file neglected to mention them. I'd be miffed about the faulty readme file except the explosion is really nice and big

Tried having the boat move onto the land? Wrecks the boat but might make it work.

Hi guys, I expect somebody has asked this before but I searched and couldn't find anything specific to my problems. So I figured I'd roll up all my problems with my current mission into one thread and see if ya'll could help me out. The background: Basically I'm making a mission for my clan that'll be scaleable depending on how many are playing (by that I mean I'll make different versions, that sort of scripting is out of my reach). The mission is going to be a roadblock/ambush on the bridge leading to Isla de Victoria that should then escalate to a battle for the bridge as US reinforcements arrive. Problem 1: The set up. Should be simple this. I know about using the moveincargo command for my units, but I don't know how to make a group moveincargo. I'm sure there's a way to set a whole group in cargo without giving each individual soldier a name. If somebody could explain that it'd be great. Problem 2: Trucking convoys. I want my ambush to be of a convoy and I want to be able to make that convoy bigger or smaller in blocks. However I'm having real trouble getting my units to act like they are in a convoy. Should I stick all the trucks, Humvees and other vehicles in a single group with column formation in order to maintain a linear transport convoy? Or is there a way to get multiple groups to ride in close formation? Really I want to be in a situation where I can make convoys of constituent groups so I can make convoys up to any length, but I can't seem to get them to behave on the roads. Problem 3: Loading the trucks. Simple question this really, how many soldiers can I fit in the cargo on a 5 ton truck? Problem 4: Revolting Peasants. This is related to another mission I was building but I had to cut this part out cos I didn't know how to get it to work. Basically a spec ops team, in order to reach their objectives had to steal a few civilian cars in a town. Now to add a bit of local colour I wanted to have them kill the civilians in the town, as I had put a couple of groups there just civing it up. It was basically to get the players some early trigger time at the start of the mission, as naturally my target playerbase is very new at the game and could use the warm up. Anywho needless to say when I tested it out killing the civvies upset the squad and they shot me. Is there any way to make it open season on civilians?

Thanks Fasad, the command you've suggested sounds familiar, I'll have a quick go with it now. As for the shooting civilians I think it's probably a little more realistic than most of us would care to admit. Also it tied in with the plot for the mission, the town that the spec ops team passed through was the nearest one to the base, so I was thinking it fair to presume that the civilians in the town would be off the families of the troops at the base and off duty soldiers. Seriously ruthless taking them out, but arguably a legit target of opportunity for insurgent forces in the mission context. I'll try your suggestions out when I get back to that mission later on, thanks again. I've played a mission already that used armed civilians as the enemy, so I'm sure it can be done.

I think a co-op persistent server could be good, and despite being an ongoing concern it need not involve huge numbers of players. A game based on fighting a guerilla war could be good, with players able to spawn at a base camp, tool up a squad and then make moves on the established enemy occupation forces as and when they see fit. I think however something that could really be useful is some sort of implementation of the Dungeon Master concept from the Neverwinter Nights games. For those unfamiliar with the idea basically the Dungeon Master is a player who can spawn monsters, trigger effects, take control of NPCs and basically add the human factor to the module that is created. Giving the AI army an overall commander, with the ability to spawn units and whatever (note though it'd have to be somebody more interested in seeing the opposing force have fun than just wiping them out) would make a persistent mission a lot more fun. It'd mean you could basically set up the islands military to function passively, but if you want to whip up a company of men to put the hurt on a player held base you can. At the risk of sounding too RPG oriented I'd also like to see a rank system and an experience points system cooked up in persistent games, maybe use them to determine who has access to what items. This kind of character progression gives people an incentive to play on, but I don't think there is any capacity to store character data in Arma, so that might be a nonstarter.