thirith

We'll probably try out the first of your missions today, djotacon. Most likely I'll be making heavy use of Dynamic Recon Ops, but I like a good handcrafted mission every now and then.

I wonder if there's a general dearth of information for people running sessions. There are great guides for people just starting to play Arma, and there are tutorials on how to launch a MP game, but how to run a good game for a group? Not so much.

I've been playing the games themselves since Operation Flashpoint, I've occasionally played MP with groups (though usually 20+ people), and I've run the occasional small Arma 2 group, but I'm now starting Arma 3 with a small group of mostly newbies. I've found lots of tips on playing Arma, but nothing on how to run enjoyable sessions. Are there any webpages, videos or other things I could look at? Or do people here have tips on how to run a fun session: the kind of things you would've liked to know when you started out yourselves? As always, any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks, these look good. I'll definitely check them out. I'm shying away from Zeus because we're a pretty small group (often it's just four or five of us) and I'd rather be playing alongside them, but of course this limits us somewhat. Edit: Is ASR_AI something that only needs to be installed on the server, or does it also need to be used by every player? And does it work okay with non-dedicated servers?

Quick follow-up: do I understand correctly that MCC and Dynamic Combat Generator can be used to generate missions for any size of group? Can they be used to do so on the fly, during a session, or would I need to use them beforehand to create a mission, save that, and then we play the saved mission? I've heard good things about either, but nothing specific to what I'd like to use them for, i.e. creating varied missions for a group of 4-8 players.

Yup, that's me. -) Thanks, I'll check out the podcasts!

True, but it's not just about *easier* missions. There's a difference between a well designed mission that is challenging but fair and a badly designed mission with the difficulty turned down.

Thanks. Would this (especially the former) also affect direct chat?

Brilliant, thanks. Two more newbie questions: what are pre- and post-mix volumes (is pre-mix direct chat and post-mix radio chat?) and are these set for each client, or does the server set them for everyone?

I just ran the first session for some friends of Arma 3 with ACRE2. I know A2/OA fairly well but have never been a hardcore player, and the others are pretty new to the game. We got ACRE2 to work, but in-game the radio functionality was a bit hit and miss - I suspect not because of anything wrong with ACRE2 but because we're newbies and not used to the mod's level of realism. I'd like to keep using ACRE2 (I love the positional audio and like distinguishing between direct chat and radio chat - I find these considerably more immersive than one-size-fits-all VOIP), but I suspect the others might not want to, unless there are 'beginners' settings I can use for now. In that respect, I had some questions about the server-side settings: what do the following do? I've done a Google search for them combined with Arma 3 and ACRE2 but haven't found anything. - Unmute clients - Model interference - Terrain loss coefficient I'm suspecting/hoping that some of these server settings might help me set up a sort of 'ACRE2 light' for our sessions. Edit: I have found some info in the documentation in the meantime. Do I understand correctly that by turning down the latter two of the values mentioned above, I can make the radios easier to use and rely on for a bunch of beginners?

Thanks a lot for this list, which should come in handy, as I'm about to start small coop sessions with some friends (we've still been playing Arma 2/Operation Arrowhead to date). I've found with some of the highly rated missions on the Steam Workshop that they produce error messages with the most recent A3 build. It seems that many of these could be corrected by opening the missions in the Eden editor, but I've yet to find out how I can edit missions that I've found on Steam. In general, can you tell me if this should work with missions downloaded from the CiA server?

Quick update just to say that after I uninstalled everything to do with tobii's eyetracker, everything worked. Which sucks in terms of me not being able to use tobii as well as ACRE2, but still, at least I know what the issue is. Here's hoping tobii will address this at some point.

To elaborate on my problem (quoted below): the .rpt file for each of the instances where I had ACRE2 active and tried to launch an MP mission ends with a line that says: "Unable to get file version size: E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Arma 3\!Workshop\@ACRE2\ACRE2Arma.dll" Does this ring a bell with anyone? Edit: Ah, the plot thickens! I've found a post here that suggests it might be my tobii eyetracker. Which would suck, since I pretty much got that one for Arma (since it does both eye and head tracking and makes for a good TrackIR replacement otherwise), but hey, if that solves the issue... Will be back to say whether it did ASAP!

In reply to magnetar: I'm using a bunch of other mods (mainly maps and the CUP mods, as well as some sound mods); I've yet to try with ACRE2+CBA but without them. I'm not using a dedicated server; is that a requirement with ACRE2?

I'm currently trying to set up my machine so I can host small-scale coop games, and I'd love to use ACRE2. However, what I've found is that whenever I have ACRE2 activated and try to start a MP mission, I get an infinite loading screen - the loading bar just stops and nothing more happens. The only thing I can do is open the Task Manager and end the Arma 3 process. I've found a bunch of mentions of the infinite loading screen, but not in connection with ACRE2, and I've yet to find any threads that mention a (general or specific) solution. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any tips on how I might resolve this? For the record, I'm using TS3 64bit and have the mod installed via the Steam workshop.

It definitely is; I've been using it. I think it wasn't in the first version of the software, but it's been in there for at least two weeks.

I must say, I'm finding the gaze tracking - in moderation, and as a complement to the head tracking - quite useful. I'll still have to tune my settings, for both kinds of settings, but I am definitely positively surprised by how well it already works.

If it was only the eye tracking, I'd probably agree with you, but it's the head tracking that got me interested in this. In Arma 2 at least, this feels at least equal to if not better than TrackIR, and since my favourite part of Arma is flying helicopters, some sort of headtracking is a vast improvement over looking around using the Alt key. When I play infantry units, I tend to deactivate the head tracking. I'm mainly surprised that I got Arma 2 to work well with minimal fiddling, but Arma 3 with tracking seems a more complicated beast.

I've got a pretty large collection of good small-scale coop missions, but I'm wondering: are there any good small-scale adversarial missions for groups of 6-10 players people here can recommend? We mainly play coop, but every now and then it might be fun to play against each other.

I've run into problems with scripts running in parallel that use SLEEP, and I'm wondering whether it's due to the way scripts use variables. In particular, I'd scripted a function that's called with one parameter - something along these lines: variable = this select 0; [] spawn { sleep 10; do something with variable; } My question is this: is the <do something with variable> set at the moment the spawn command is run, and it doesn't matter if the variable is changed afterwards? Or does Arma basically wait those ten seconds and only then check the variable and act accordingly, i.e. if the variable were to change in the meantime it'll use the changed value? The latter might explain the problems I've had, with only the first part of the script firing but not the one after the sleep command.

Nah, the mission itself is pretty simple and shaping up to be pretty good fun: four teams (pilot, co-pilot) have to pick up four passengers each and return to base. Whoever does so first wins. There are a couple of wrinkles, mostly to do with issues of locality and/or the possibility that some units may be deactivated, i.e. they don't exist and therefore return nil when I least expect it, but generally it's nothing fancy. :D

Thanks. I've been looking at those explanations, but I'm not sure they're the key to my specific problem here: I've had the same issue with the script working some times but not others regardless of whether I've used variable or _variable. The reason might be elsewhere, of course - and, to be honest, I don't really know if each time I run the function it basically counts as its own script. I'm not at home right now, so I can't paste the actual function, but basically it works like this: when a helicopter enters a trigger area, it calls the function with two parameters, namely the helicopter in question (helired, heliblue, heliyellow, heligreen) and the passenger in question (red_a, red_b, red_c, red_d, blue_a etc.). The function creates a smoke grenade at the position of the passenger, and ten seconds later the passenger is told to board the helicopter. (Without the ten-second wait, the smoke grenade becomes pointless, as the passenger immediately starts running towards where the helicopter is.) The smoke grenade is always created as needed, but the passenger doesn't always run to board the helicopter - and I'm thinking that the reason is this: there are four helicopters (red, blue, yellow, green) and four sets of passengers. Let's say helired triggers the function, which results in red_a dropping that smoke grenade, but during the ten-second wait heliblue also triggers the function, which changes the parameters from helired and red_a to heliblue and blue_a. Passenger red_a is never told to board helired. As I've mentioned, this happened whether I used _variable or variable. I've now changed the function in that I created four different functions (for each colour) with their own variables, though I'll still have to test this. In any case, I only have a hunch concerning what happened and why the function didn't always complete, but just elaborating on it does make it clearer to me.

I'm running informal biweekly coop sessions for a small group on Saturdays, 4-6pm UK time, which we're running on a server (Arma 2 and Teamspeak 3) based in Switzerland. Since our group is fairly small to begin with, I wanted to ask if there's anyone on the forums who might be interested in joining. There are no attendance requirements, although I'd usually like a heads-up if people are joining or not. The modset we're working with is basically a combination of Cold War Rearmed 2 (though we also play on Chernarus, Takistan and the other Arma 2 maps) and ACRE, though we're okay with client-side mods like sthud, sound mods etc. The server has a large number of small-scale coop missions (anything from 2-16 slots); many of the ones we play come from Sander's magnificent coop packs. Our playing style is not overly serious; we try to play well, but we don't get hung up on things like realism or milsim roleplaying, and mainly we're in it to have a good time, i.e. singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the back of the jeep while we're en route to Montignac is absolutely okay (if not actually enforced). Most of the people in the group have played with other groups regularly, for what it's worth. So, to repeat the main points: Biweekly sessions on Saturday 4pm UK time Fun and informal (no attendance requirements), though we still play to win Main mods: CWR2, ACRE Language: English I'm happy to answer any questions either via PM or on the thread. If you're interested in joining, please send me a PM. Thanks! Our next session will be on Saturday, 25 October, from 4-6pm UK time. P.S.: I've checked with MadDogX that it's okay to post this here rather than on the Clans & Fanpages subforum, since we're a very small, informal group.

I just spent an hour or two trying to fix a script that didn't fire when I thought it should only to realise that it all came down to this: I used if ((player == red1) or (player == red2)) then {...}; in a situation where it's possible that red1 and/or red2 are undefined. I've now used the following workaround: if (player == red1) then {redCheck = true}; if (player == red2) then {redCheck = true}; if (redCheck) then {...; redCheck = false } Is this a good way of handling boolean operations where one or both of the conditions might be undefined? Or is there a better way?

Got it now, thanks.