Spooner

It got lost on...respawn? Admittedly, that wasn't something that I tested (there is nothing like knowing that something will have no effect to be able to blithely ignore it in your testing ;P). I've just tested it (drawing on my own map in MP as the host, then killing myself with a grenade) and it kept all items on the map. I'll test it in dedicated server MP tomorrow if you are sure this is what happened. Are you sure you don't mean on disconnect/reconnect or changing player slots without leaving the server (that is, JIP)? JIP support (getting updated with all current markers) is certainly possible, but I didn't get it quite working for this release so I disabled it entirely. So don't be surprised if you don't see the drawings/markers on JIP ;P

Well, I'm glad of anyone who can help me out with testing! I've not been able to test it myself under battle conditions and would be very interested to see if it...actually worked ;P Do keep me up to date on how that goes! I hope to get this script into an addon in the next major release, but didn't want to allow addons right away, since I didn't want the addon script and mission script to mess each other up if they we both being used. I realise that many people would prefer an addon, but I want everyone to have access to it in non-addon missions as well (all my scripts have no external requirements, except my own SPON Core, of course).

No idea who Woolridge is, but he went to the effort of recording himself using SPON Map (Youtube). Thanks! I greatly appreciate the interest and will gladly link to anyone else making videos (I just have the free version of fraps and I'm too busy scripting anyway ).

What Pufu said. My current plan is to add config options so you can limit write-access to "just current group leaders", "just within a list of soldier classes (Officer, for example)" or "Every noob in the world". Pufu did want a "To anyone with a name within this list" and that is a definite possibility too (though I'd prefer "anyone with specific ID" if I can get that working). Remember that the SPON Map system records who drew everything and it is easily queried by anyone. On the "old" map, someone could fill the screen with junk markers and you'd not have a clue who was doing it. Now you bring this up, I'll think about an "ignore player" system and a "spam filter" for it. These are definitely not high priority for me, since there are already plenty of features to work on, and I see dealing with spammers as more of a server admin task. I am, eventually, going to add a JIP system to this (you are updated with all drawings previously placed and not deleted - probably not "direct mode" things though). Am wondering if that might promote even more spamming on persistent missions (like Evo), but that is an issue for those that run the server.

Released: * SPON_viewVector v0.1.1 (direction the player's screen is "looking", rather than body or weapon facings) Quite a small function I wrote for SPON Map, but I thought it would be useful for other scripters.

Well, I could ask people to modify all their marker addons just for me, or I could wait a while until this really is a ubiquitous script and then try ;P I would be worried about having yet another combo to choose the icon group to look in though... Good idea though and definitely one to consider in the long term. I see your problem with using a particular key, like LSHIFT (rather than a definable key-type defined by ArmA, such as "move forward"). I have the same problem with other scripts and do need to tweak them too. This was just easier to do originally, since you get the shift/control/alt status whenever you get a key-event and as no-one used my scripts/complained about this, I never fixed it. Maybe I'd be better with something like "Freelook" + "Open Map" which couldn't conflict with anyone in the way LSHIFT does with you (which would default to alt+M). As I've said, though, I'd like to keep some consistency so that I don't have to relearn which keys to press in every mission I play with SPON Map in... One thing I am going to implement in the next version though, at the request of Mandoble, is to allow the mission maker to choose either/or of "Key combination" or "ArmA action" to access my map. Although SPON Core already allows multiple scripts to share the single available key event handler (SPON_addKeyEventHandler), I can't assume that anyone else's scripts will bother to be compatible with me! I also can't assume that the average mission maker will want to go to the effort of modifying other key-catching scripts to be compatible with me either. Anyway, worth including action option, and users can make the decision which method(s) to use. EDIT: Actually, thinking about it, I can't see that LSHIFT being run for you makes any more of a problem than any other does. Whatever key I choose will be will be used for something else. I can't get over that. That is why I have to use a combination of two keys in the first place (though, as I've said, using two arma key-names rather than specific key-codes would be better)!

Well, I know everyone else who's tested it hasn't had a problem. Not that that helps, but I can't see why there would be anything fubar. One likely option is that you are using a script in an addon that captures key-presses which is "stealing" them from my script. If you think that is a possibility, then try running ArmA without that addon (or with no addons if you don't know of one specific addon that is responding to key-presses). If that doesn't work, I am not sure what the problem is at all

Well, I purposely only used the 6 standard ArmA colours, even though I could easily, as you suggest, read the available colours from the config. This way, however, I can get away with using a simple row of large colour selection radio buttons. You cannot guarantee that everyone has all the colours that everone else has from addons (yes, you could just have unknown colours default to black, or even the "nearest colour", since, after all, I default unrecognised icon markers to "?", but I'd rather not have to do that with colours as well). If I read all the colours from config, people could have any number of colours defined by addons, so I'd need to define a large number of buttons on the possibility that they might get used. The alternative is to use a combo box, but that is sort of clunky and I'd want to have a separate coloured box to show the current choice since text isn't as easy for my mind to parse (I had this in 0.2.0, but decided I didn't like it). I don't think colour conveys the amount of info that an icon does though, so I don't think it is as important to give people a large amount of choice. Otherwise, I could get away with just offering 10 icon markers in radio buttons, rather than the full drop down menu. On a more bandwidth thrifty note, by having just a set of 6 known colours, I can transfer data referring to colour 0..5, rather than "Aquamarine" or "ABC_Lightish_Blue" strings. Admittedly, the rest of the script is relatively greedy of network resources, so this can't be a pivotal point. Well, that sounded like a rather defensive answer from me; Sorry! Still, I felt it to my benefit to re-evaluate the reasons for limiting myself to a small set of colours. I haven't had a lot of experience in designing GUIs, so I'm feeling my way along on this, knowing that a lot of people make gaffs in this area.

Thanks, Q! You got into the swing of my keen aim of not only adding features but streamlining the GUI as much as possible ~ Maybe make sub groups for icons or the ability to filter the list with character input Well, it isn't easy to group up the icons, since you can't tell where they were defined (I just read the config to work out which to use). They are thus appearing in the combo box in the order that they were seen by ArmA. I did try sorting them alphabetically, but then you don't get similar icons together (or icons from a specific mod together). Having the list filtered by pressing the first letter of a marker's name might be a good idea though! ~ Separate file to assign different keys to the actions (only to make it easier) I'm not sure what exactly you mean here regarding a "separate file". You can tab through the buttons, but that isn't ideal. I have considered adding keyboard short-cuts ((Q)uery, (E)raser, (P)en, Pen©il, (E)llipse, ®ectangle perhaps?), but haven't got around to it yet. I wouldn't really want the keys configurable, however, since I don't really want different missions all using different sets of shortcuts for the same thing! ~ Make click, preview marker, click again to place (instead of enter) I don't quite understand what you mean. I agree that having a second click to place the marker would streamline things (rather than making you go to the keyboard to press enter), but I don't see why it should be instead of enter. One thing I have considered is having the text entered in the tool window and then drag the marker to size and rotate like a circle/square is now (consistency is a very good thing). This way, even less clicks when, most of the time, you are just placing a marker without text. I'd definitely put in min and max sizes for markers though, since otherwise you'd have to be very careful placing them (need to implement minimums for ellipses and rectangles too). The other things you suggest have been considered and are definitely on my to-do list. As far as traffic, I haven't measured it or been able to test with anything more than 3 players in the demo, but can see that, especially for curves, it could be considerable. There are still a number of optimisations that I can make (e.g. circles are sent as 36 points, just reusing the send-line code to save development time, not just as the more simple height/width values as they should be), but still, sending long curves will always be costly. In speaking to IC-ArmA devs, they have suggested that only leaders could have write-access in order to limit bandwidth usage. Still, depending on the traffic produced, I'm not sure this is going to be usable for in-game use by the huge tourneys...

Assuming you have the standard ArmA keys defined, you should be holding down <left-shift>+a or <left-shift>+d or <left-shift>+<left-arrow> or <left-shift>+<right-arrow> (regardless of what movement keys you have configured, it will use any of those, but it will always use <left-shift> with it). Someone has recently pointed out to me that using shift is a bit...foolish...since shift is used to give a "turbo boost" when you are driving. Thus, people who drive fast will keep accidentally looking in the mirror. You also have the issue that you can't turn left while looking in the left mirror or turn right while looking in the right mirror. I really need to change the keys, but there aren't a lot of options available that don't interfere with something or are too far away from where you'll have your hands while driving. Anyone have any ideas? EDIT: I hope you weren't trying to use the mirrors in the broken Humvee (shattered windows), since mirrors don't work if the vehicle is too badly damaged. You also can't use them in the Strykers unless you are turned out.

Thanks! @Mr. Burns: This isn't an addon; it is a mission-based script. I do plan to addonise this eventually, which would allow a number of improvements not available outside an addon environment, but there are significant issues I'd like to address before doing that (mainly in SPON Core). @Opteryx: I haven't tested it with a tablet, since I don't have one, but I've found it perfectly fine to draw with the mouse. The only difficulty is that if you are drawing freehand when zoomed in then the minimum length of individual line segments can make drawing difficult and ugly. Maybe I should scale the minimum length based on the zoom level while you are drawing? This would also have the side-effect of reducing the bandwidth of massively long lines drawn at minimum zoom! EDIT: You may have noticed that the drawing modes have text rather than icons on. This is because I cannot draw with a mouse to save my life (you can tell from the screenshot, can't you?). If anyone wants to volunteer their icon-making skills to make icons for me which are consistent in style with ArmA, then please contact me.

Well, I took a...little...break from ArmA, but I'm back, hopefully for a while ;P Thanks to everyone who has downloaded my scripts in the last six months! Hope you like SPON Map, which people will hopefully find innovative enough to forgive me having some slack time! Well, my plan to just keep my script releases in one thread hasn't been very successful. It might have saved me some effort and got a few more hits over at the OFPEC forums, but it lead to me getting few downloads and very little feedback from users. As I make new releases and updates from now, I'm going to put them into their own threads, so that people can discuss them here rather than having to hike over to OFPEC...

Although I've been out of the game for quite a while, I have updated SPON Core for ArmA 1.14 (basically, it now uses publicVariable events rather than init-commands for all of its internal communications). All existing SPON components should still work and some of them I'll re-release to take advantage of the improvements in the Core. The main advantage, to you lot, is that now I've finally released SPON Map which was easier to get working with the newer functionality. EDIT: Sorry, I hadn't properly uploaded the new files for SPON Core earlier, but since they were included in the demo for SPON Map, I hope noone had real problems. Anyway, all the right files are now available from OFPEC.

It is interesting to know that SPON Recognise measurably stresses the server. I'd not done any load testing of my script, though ironically, it doesn't actually need any extra processing on the server to run that particular script, it just happens to use a functionality of SPON Core on every machine, rather than just where it is needed (clients). Not terribly worried though, since Loyalguard's script is more appropriate for most people's needs.

Your waiting scheme is incorrect and should be: <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">#begin hint format ["You will be paid in 2 minutes"] ~60 hint format ["You will be paid in 1 minute"] ~60 hint format ["You will be paid in 30 seconds"] ~30 hint format ["You will be paid in 15 seconds"] ~15 You don't want to check (_unit == player) each time the script runs around, otherwise when you respawn, the value of player will change relative to _unit and the script will stop working. In fact, you should never use _unit at all or even pass it to the file, since it is unnecessary. Instead, run the script from init.sqs rather than from every player init field and have, at the top of the script: <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">? isServer and (isNull player) : exit Which will only run the script once on each client without the faff (that is, don't run it on the dedicated server, but do run on dedicated client, hosted MP server/client or in SP). To check the distances, just: <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">? (player distance factory) < 47 : goto "factory" ? (player distance fish) < 100 : goto "fish" Not sure if that fixes all your problems, but should move you on. I think the question you are asking is probably associated with fish and factory being markers rather than objects. In this case, you need to do: <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">? (player distance (getMarkerPos "factory")) < 47 : goto "factory" ? (player distance (getMarkerPos "fish")) < 100 : goto "fish" I think you also want to add the money to SPON_playerBankBalance, which is a global variable, since SPON_playerCashBalance isn't actually a global and isn't used by SPON Money any more (I moved it to being an object variable on the current player object, which made it teamswitch-compatible). Pay usually goes into the bank in such situations anyway, rather than directly into your pockets. @DaChevs: Sorry you found SPON Money confusing! The problem with making something that is very generic is that it can be difficult to configure to your liking and I'm also fully aware that the documentation I provided was very poor. If you have any problems installing it, don't hesitate to ask in the OFPEC release thread or directly to me (my email is in every one of my released files).

I think that this is likely to be the well-known bug in ArmA which means that more complex missions won't restore properly from a save. If you use ArmA 1.09 beta (or the new 1.11 beta) you should have no problems.

I'd guess that not having the weapons addon (RH Pistols) loaded when you were in the editor would cause the shop menu to get into a state (since it is trying to read non-existant config). If it isn't that, I can't see that running it in the editor preview would be any different. But then again, I assume you don't have this problem when playing the game normally rather than in the editor? (I'm assuming this is a problem with my SPON Money script, which is used by the mission for the shopping and banking. Otherwise, I'd leave it to the author ;P).

nearestObject and triggers only detects objects that are actually in the area, not their respective contents. Easy enough to deal with, though; just iterate though "crew _object" when you iterate through the list of objects given by the detector...

I'm keeping Quarantine on our (RGG) server. We mostly run 1.09 beta, but sometimes run in 1.08 for compatibility. The server is persistent which is good for longer missions like this, but it could mean that you are stuck playing Sahrani Life or something if that was what was last played. ArmA Server: uk1.squadserver.com:2850 TeamSpeak Server: ts2.squadserver.co.uk:8781

Hmm, I know I have considered the idea of the shops being item-limited, but it is not something that could easily be added to the shops as they are. To have shop limits in SP wouldn't be too hard, but there are a number of complexities involved with keeping shops synchronised between clients (currently, it is kept simple by the shops all having unlimited stock). Since, as D.murphy man will have noticed, my new version of shopping is already way behind schedule, I can't promise whether that will be added any time soon, but it is something I'd like to add some day.

I wouldn't worry too much about a lite version of that kind. Either you want an addon-free mission (impossible if you want decent zombies) or one that uses addons. If using addons, 3 addons isn't really any more effort for people than just one. As long as you aren't just adding addons for the sake of it, I'm sure people would be quite happy as long as it didn't get out of hand - and, of course, it was very clear which addons were required.

Thanks for beta testing SPON Money for me! Been out for a while, but people never bother to actually tell me when things are broken! * The issue with not being able to get into newly purchased vehicles is a general problem with newly created vehicles in ArmA. For now, just wait a little while after purchase and they'll sort themselves out (problem worked around in the current unreleased version). * I don't have immediate plans to allow people to transfer money between themselves (either directly, or via the bank), but it is definitely going to be implemented when I get time. It just probably won't get into the next release version. * Regarding use of flagpoles rather than shopkeepers: Actually, there is nothing stopping you using actual people as shopkeepers, even if you fear that smacktards will shoot them. You just need to use the SIX editor upgrade addon which unlocks the indestructible anchorman character (a man in a dark suit, which has two versions, one that can die and one that doesn't die). In fact, one of the shopkeepers or bankers in the SPON Money demo already is one of these. Note: The Six editor upgrade is only required to edit the mission and the character is still available for clients without the addon. I'm working with D.murphy man to resolve these issues and more regarding SPON Money (as I say, this is the first "serious" test for these scripts).

Updated: - SPON Status v0.3.0 Fixed a CTD problem and added some minor functionality. Note: Everything I've released so far should work just as well with ArmA 1.09, but I will be re-releasing most things ASAP in the new year, since the new publicVariable event handlers are a lot better than the system of SPON events I developed and used within SPON Core. This will then mean that all new releases of SPON components will require 1.09+.

Get no sound whatsoever when used with FDF sounds 1.3, regardless of volume levels (fine when I don't load FDF sounds). I'm not suggesting this is BIS's fault, more so that people realise that there is an incompatibility there. Thanks BIS for some very nice new scripter commands!

Updated: - SPON Kits v0.1.1 (Standardised equipment kits). Removed a file that shouldn't have still been in the pack and references to it in the documentation.