rick rawlings

Try copying your init file over into a new notepad file. When you save it as init.sqf, make sure that "Save As Type" is set to "All Files" and that the encoding is set to UTF-8. Like kylania said it is most likely being seen as a text file and not a script file. RR

I'm trying to do a voiceover for my intro and have music playing in the background... so: I set up the voiceover as a sound to play during the intro, which worked fine except for when the AI started shooting, the gunfire drowned out the voiceover. enableEnvironment false only cuts out the background sounds, not those of the rest of the activity happening in the intro. So then I turned all the sound off and made my voiceover a music track, but apparently the engine can only play one music track at a time so I get either the voiceover or the background music. Does anyone know a way to get a voiceover, a music track and no AI or game sounds all playing at the same time for an intro? (My acting talents are not strong enough to work without the dramatic music in the background ) Thanks! RR

Copy it somewhere safe first. Then open the one in your Arma profile with notepad. Make your changes and save it with the correct extension and make sure "all files" is selected under the file types and the encoding is UTF-8 so it doesn't save as a text file. RR

Precision values are located by difficulty level in your ArmA2 player profile in the My Documents folder. If you drop them down to .5 or so, you see firefights that look like you see in youtube battle clips, a lot of shooting and not much hitting. Leave them at the default values for the wonderful 3 5.56mm rounds in your forehead from 100m snapshot :) RR

I am trying to fade to black and fade back in during a mission to simulate loading weapons and ammo on a truck. This is what I have so far: titlecut ["", "Black Out", 5]; ammo1 attachTo [car,[0,-1.7,0]]; titlecut ["5 Minutes later", "Black In", 5]; exit I get a flicker of black and the "5 minutes later" and bam! I am back in the mission. I have tried something like: titlecut ["", "Black Out", 5]; ammo1 attachTo [car,[0,-1.7,0]]; ~10; titlecut ["5 Minutes later", "Black In", 5]; exit and I get the same effect, just a moment of black. This happens with sleep as well. I have also tried something like: titlecut ["", "Black Out", 5]; waitUntil z; ammo1 attachTo [car,[0,-1.7,0]]; titlecut ["5 Minutes later", "Black In", 5]; y=true; exit with a separate trigger conditioned to y that countsdown 10 sec and then makes z true, but then the whole effect waits for 10 seconds to give me a moment of black. I have also broken it up into two scripts where the first one just fades out and then the second one, after a countdown of 10 runs everything else. Anyone have a good way to get a solid 5 seconds of black in the middle of a mission? Thank you, RR

I presume it puts film grain on the screen! :p I tried the sepia one and Bam! everything goes sepia in the mission. The film grain one didn't seem to do anything immediately, you may have to sync it with the cam player or something else, just look under the modules tab in the editor and you will see there are a few movie related ones. RR

That I am not sure about. If you can find a mission where it has been used you could just un .pbo that one and see what they did. There is a film grain module in the editor so the easiest way may be just to recreate it yourself in the editor, if you can! RR

This was supposed to be in the ARMA2 and OA editing forum. Could a mod move it please? Thank you and sorry for the error! RR

In the intro and outro sections if the camera script is not running you default to the view behind the player character and you can only move your head a little to the left or right, this sounds like what you were getting. Call the intro script by changing the this exec "camera.sqs" to this exec "intro.sqs" if you called the camera file "intro.sqs" Also, if you are using notepad make sure you drop down when saving as to "All Files" and use UTF-8 as the coding option. You only need to create the camera once at the beginning of the intro and destroy it at the end, otherwise you are just moving it around. Consider an intro a mission that is executed exclusively by the AI in real time and you just move the camera around to capture the events, either instantly from one scene to the next with _camera camCommitPrepared 0 or have it move over time by changing the 0 to another value. Check out this video tutorial and the others in the series to get you started, they helped me out a lot! RR

Change your player "camera" init line from this exec "camera.sqs" to this exec "[i]yourscenename[/i].sqs" for whatever the name of your scene is. Then click "preview". When you are done, abort, change your player init line back to "camera.sqs" and do some more! RR

For me, the popularity of this game rests on the same basic issues that it always has, from Operation Flashpoint through Red Hammer and Resistance up through the present day: Clunky interface: When we got Operation Flashpoint, my buddies and I said "Oh, it looks like this game was made in the eighties." When we got Arma II, we said "Oh, they've updated it. Now it looks like it was made in the nineties." Or, have you ever tried to use a ladder in a hurry, but couldn't get your cursor to be right where it thinks the rung should be, whether or not that lines up with the graphic, or had a bracket menu that wouldn't cycle properly or even come up at all? My friends and I, who have come up from Pong all the way through Pac Man fever up till today still had trouble figuring out how to get the chopper in the campaign to go where we wanted it to. Most people, right or wrong, expect more polish for $50 bucks. Bugs: Most people will jump right into the campaign, figuring it to be the meat and potatoes of the game. Imagine how much fun we were having when the obstacle course in the very first mission wouldn't trigger properly for about 5 tries. Other issues like getting stuck climbing up in mid air in the red brick house and not being able to get out are not game breakers, but certainly contribute to that "Why am I paying money to be this frustrated?" feeling. Implementation: There's an incredible amount of features in this game, almost none of which run hassle-free. The inertia system is a great idea, but it has the un-intended side effect of creating comedy when you try to get through a door or take a few steps in an eloquent manner. Turning around in a hallway with a couple of guys can be fatally difficult. Had they made the player just a grunt, you could argue that regular green infantry might get tripped up like that, but a Force Recon squad? The civillian conversation system is a great idea, but when the old woman tells us that she has just seen a team of special forces operators in town and I'm like, "Lady, that's us. You just watched us walk over here." it loses some of the specialness. Which leads me to: The laugh/cry voice system/dialogue: Walking up behind my buddies who I had convinced to get the game, I was presented with a greeting dialogue option, so I clicked on it only to be confronted by a "HI. there." All the effort that BIS put into this game over the years was largely undermined as I was wiping soda off my monitor after that little exchange. There aren't many game breaking points to be found for me, but I can certainly see why someone new to the franchise would be put off by them and, truth be told, despite having purchased everything but Queen's Gambit and being a mighty fan of Operation Flashpoint, I can really only half-heartedly try to convince them to hang with it. I wish BIS all the best and will most likely continue to buy their products, I just wish they would get some of these issues in hand to expand the player base. It's hard to constantly put up with a 200 ping trip to Europe for a little BerZerk. RR

Wait and see. I noticed that when I gave the order to my squad to get out of the flying Osprey, thinking they would para-drop, nobody moved. The Osprey kept flying and eventually went to the main airfield where it proceded to land and taxi to the main terminal area. There is a good chance that this is what your A.I. Osprey is doing. RR

Thank you both! I'll give them a shot and report back if there are problems! RR

I'm trying to create a tracking script that follows a car around the map and reports in every ten seconds, so I wrote this in a script that is called in the init.sqs: #start "car" setMarkerPos getPos car1; ~10; goto "start"; exit for a marker named "car" and a car called, well, "car1" but I get an error #7 with a failure during preprocessing when I go to check the mission. Anybody help me with the error? Thanks! RR

A while ago, I wrote a very beginner level mission editing guide that covers many of the basics that are as relevant to ARMA II as to Armed Assault. It may help some of you guys get started! Then you will know as much as me, which isn't very much! RR http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=1157

This weirdness of choppers and mp is what turned me off to editing for Arma I. Glad to see it has been cleaned up and greatly simplified for Arma II. ;) RR

The battlefield has always been too silent. When these guys go down wounded, there should be some screaming/moaning/calling out to help appreciate the gravity of the situation. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just have the design team yell 5-6 random screams or wimpers into a mike at the end of every day for two weeks and you would have it. I can just hear it now: "I'm Hit! I'm hit! Oh my God! ARRGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!" "Oh no...1 is hit... 2 goto 1...and...put him out...of his misery." "This is 2 going to 1." Blam. I seriously hope the whole 2 and 1 thing is gone. Give the guys names, they don't have to be consistant, you can even use the same ten names over and over again, it will still sound more immersive than: "This is 1...taking command." Rick

Well, unless they are simulating Battle Bots, it has never worked for me! Â RR

Also, keep in mind, if you are planning on using this for a multiplayer mission this simple waypoint setup can behave, well, erratically!

Suggestion: A GUI drop down window for any placable unit to select loadout. Implementation: A window pops up for each placed unit to select loadout and status. For people, you would be able to select equipment just like on the gear tab in a mission from drop down menus for each class, in addition to stuff like health and skill and morale; for vehicles, you can specify exact quantities of fuel and ammo, as well as occupants ( each with their own loadouts) and for ammo crates you could specify exactly what is in each one, again with drop down menus. For static structures you could specify ammo or amount of "medicine" for field hospitals, for example. Underneath each window would be a "DEFAULT" key which gives you the loadout you get now. Benefit: Less scripting and fussing over every unit, cleaner and clearer init fields. Much time-saving for the hunt-and-peck crowd (me, you don't want to know how long it took to type this post!

Nice! Â I will try that! Salut! Rick

Hey, ilovebeer, I'm revisiting a mission similar to this that I started about a year ago and never finished. You may want to consider not having the mission end at the moment the general dies, but instead have that as a condition for success. You can then have your sniper make it to the extraction point but only successfully end the mission if he has terminated the general. Just a thought  Rick

Hey Kronzky, I am revisiting a mission I gave up on a while ago with this very same situation and I tried setting the probability to zero and even tried deleting the leader at the start of the mission but then I noticed my other blufor "civilians" would stop following my orders after a while and just kind of "get lost". Does this seem like it is a related issue or has anyone else used this method without problem? Thanks for the feedback! Rick

Hey sickboy, glad to see this is getting attention. I wrote a tutorial for the very beginner who wanted to try their hand at mission editing tutorial but I had some good mission ideas that died on the vine a long time ago just because of the frustration factor of getting the hang of all the elements of the game with a wife and kids and a job to suck up my time. I tried a mission where you have to sneak in disguised as civilians to Ortego to assasinate an enemy officer. Well, trying to get the bus to wait for everyone in your squad (during multiplayer) to board at Geraldo was a pain, your A.I. buddies stopped following your orders after a while, and the speak animation never worked for me. It's enough to make a guy go play months of Team Fortress 2. A good co-ordinated resource effort will make it easier for people who have good mission/mod ideas to get them realized, and that is good for everyone! Rick

The only thing I really fear on the battlefield are my idiot teammates who think they are "covering" the flag and waste me in the back from the radiostation as I am racing to take the support station flag on the airfield map. "Whoops, sorry, you didn't have a nametag..." Also, I am deeply afraid of the crash bug that has shown up since the 1.08 patch. I never know where or when my game session will be over due to a crash...