thirith

I'm currently working on a coop mission that has up to six individual soldiers (i.e. not grouped) stuck in a city under siege and a Hummingbird with a pilot and co-pilot whose task is to rescue the survivors. In practice, the idea is that only the units that are actually played spawn, and the win condition is for all surviving units to return to base. Thing is, I'm not sure how to script this, due to the fact that not all of the available units might be spawned and some of the player units might be dead. How can I check that all players are in an area? Is it as easy as syncing all potential player units to the trigger, and the game takes care of any units that either haven't been spawned or are dead?

Ah, good to know. What programming skills I have mainly go back to the C64 and Basic, so I look at something like "_x" and my brain fails to accept that this might still be accepted as a variable.

I don't think the mission needs to allow for people joining later - although seeing how often it happens that someone briefly drops out due to connectivity issues, perhaps it should. Would your condition work with people who join late? As far as I can tell, it should. Another question about your code: if I checked correctly, isNil requires a string while alive requires an object. Is that taken care of by the curly brackets in !isNil {_x}? Or did I misunderstand the BIKI pages?

Okay, my idea is to have a Game Logic running a do... until loop that checks for each of the Heisenbergian survivors a) if they exist and, if so, b) if they are alive, and that then adds up all the existing survivors. Something along the following lines: while {_Heisenberg > 0} do { _Heisenberg = 6; { _xString = format ["%1", _x]; if (isNil _xString) then {_Heisenberg = _Heisenberg - 1} else { if (!alive _x) then {_Heisenberg = _Heisenberg - 1} } } forEach [b1, b2, b3, b4, b5, b6]; }; endMission "END1"; Does this make sense? Edit: Or am I making things much too complicated and I should just have a trigger condition along the lines of this? It's ugly but it might be easiest and have a lighter footprint than the loops. (isNil "b1" OR !alive b1) AND (isNil "b2" OR !alive b2) AND (isNil "b3" OR !alive b3) AND (isNil "b4" OR !alive b4) AND (isNil "b5" OR !alive b5) AND (isNil "b6" OR !alive b6)

I tried that latter one but got an immediate error that Arma expected a Boolean, not script. Not sure I understand why, since pierremgi's code looks like a true/false proposition to me, but then I'm pretty inexperienced with respect to Arma syntax. I've now used muzzleflash's most recent version and it seems to work well. Next win/lose condition I have to add: check whether the six survivors are still alive or if they're dead, excluding any that weren't spawned to begin with. (Even if the helicopter crew is still alive, as soon as the survivors are dead, the mission fails.) Is there a generally advisable way of handling triggers and units that may be alive, dead or simply not spawned?

Ah... looks like the culprit does indeed lie elsewhere. My apologies in the direction of Kronzky!

I've been running into error messages that I don't really know what to do with. For instance, I added the Urban Patrol System script to a mission of mine and now get the following error when I launch the mission: '_this setFeatureType (|#|parseNumber _value)' Error parsenumber: Type Number, expected Bool,String Number,Object,Side,Group,Text,Config entry, Display (dialog), Control,Network Object,Team member,Task,Location Now, if I understand the message correctly, the offender is the part of the script between '...', and the problem is that parseNumber returns a number, but the command expects one of the other types - although according to https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/setFeatureType, setFeatureType requires a number in that position. What do I do with an error like this? And, more generally: Is there a good resource on error messages and how they need to be read?

I'll have to check if it isn't some other script. I haven't added any others, but I am working with a mission framework, so perhaps that is the culprit or some interaction of different things. Will check. Thanks!

They've just become more accurate, or also smarter?

I'm currently working on a coop mission where up to six players are stuck in Kavala after an invasion gone horribly wrong, and one or two Hummingbird pilots are tasked with bringing the remaining survivors back to base. I've put roadblocks and fire teams at the entrances and exits to Kavala; there are another half-dozen enemy units guarding the castle. Mainly I've placed five fire teams patrolling various sections of Kavala (courtesy of UPS). The idea is that the survivors don't know beforehand where to meet up (the starting positions are randomised) nor does the helicopter crew know where best to pick them up. Since I'm not particularly experienced with respect to making missions, I wanted to ask if people here had any tips on the rough number of mobile enemy units that should be deployed throughout Kavala. I don't want to make survival too difficult and frustrating, but at the same time the city shouldn't feel deserted. As my group only plays every 2-3 weeks, I'd prefer to already have a solid basis ready that I can then tweak, rather than having them try out a very sketchy first draft. So, any tips on balancing? Is there a rule of thumb on how many enemy units work well? Or have any of you done similar urban missions and have suggestions?

That's what I usually do anyway; I prefer AI that acts in interesting ways even if it's not a great shot to ultra-accurate marksmen that don't actually need to act in (seemingly) strategic ways. The latter side of Arma has never appealed much to me. How well does VCOM play with others? I use ASR AI for our coop sessions.

In this case, I'm hoping not to adjust the number and/or skill of enemies dynamically. To some extent the mission is more about avoiding contact than about having a chance in combat; to begin with, the survivors are scattered across the city, and while they're apart, they're better served avoiding enemy patrols. Once they have found others, they've automatically got more of a chance against the fire teams patrolling the city. When they get towards the outskirts of Kavala, I don't want them to have much of a chance against the checkpoints and roadblocks, so they have to find a place within the city where they can be evacuated. What I'm thinking, though, is to add a sense of urgency by having reinforcements brought in to clear the city after 15-30 minutes.

For the record, I'm not planning to allow respawning in this mission, so this doesn't have to be taken into consideration. Similarly, one player won't work for this mission, as the idea is to have at least one evac helicopter and at least one survivor.

We're definitely still at the potato-head stage. Still, setting things somewhere between 3:1 and 5:1 sounds like a good starting point. Now I'll just have to find a way to keep the guards atop the walls of Kavala Castle from throwing themselves off the side. Apparently the HOLD waypoint wasn't enough of a hint to them...

In this particular case, I don't know. I just use UPS as it comes (see here: http://kronzky.info/ups/).

Thanks, good to know. Does a HC register as alive, though, i.e. would pierremgi's script work?

Quick question about this: I've usually got a Headless client running. Does this interfere with the player count? And can spectator scripts screw things up? (I would assume that spectators don't register as players, but it's not like I know how they work.)

Cool, I'll try that when I get home. Any idea why the script posted earlier produces a generic error? Edit: While I'm at it, is there some good resource on how to read Arma's error messages?

Here's the error message I get: '_this setFeatureType (|#|parseNumber _value)' Error parsenumber: Type Number, expected Bool,String Number,Object,Side,Group,Text,Config entry, Display (dialog), Control,Network Object,Team member,Task,Location

I've just tried the code, and it generates a generic error. The first and second lines are okay, so it's something to do with the following lines. Will have to revisit when I get back from work, but I just wanted to post this in case you see what the problem is. Edit: I've had a quick look around for others with similar errors, and I found one case where it had something to do with grouped units. In this case, perhaps I need to mention that the pilot and co-pilot are grouped together, while the six survivors that need to be rescued aren't.

Cool, thanks. I guess this means that regardless of the error message I've been getting, UPS is still being used and should work. (Knowing which error messages to heed and which to ignore is something I'm finding pretty much impossible as a scripting beginner.)

Is there a patrol script out there that is favoured by the mission making community? I'm asking because I've just added UPS to a mission I'm working on, and while it seems to be working at a first glance, the mission does start with a long error message now, so I'm wondering to what extent scripts that are a couple of years old are no longer working properly because of updates to Arma 3. (It's also something I find a bit of a problem with the otherwise helpful thread on commonly used scripts: for someone who's still a beginner at this, it's almost impossible to know whether a script that was the best of its kind in 2013 or 2014 still works as intended or whether it's been superseded by later, more up-to-date scripts.)

Brilliant, thanks! That's exactly what I need.

Not sure how active this still is, but is UPS still one of the go-to patrol scripts? I'm mainly asking because I've just added it to a coop mission I'm working on, and while the fire teams whose leaders I've added the required command to seem to be moving as intended, I do get a long error message when I start the mission. (I couldn't copy it this morning when I added UPS, but I should be able to post it later today.) As far as I can tell, everything is as it should be: I've got five named rectangular markers, one fire team in each area, ups.sqf in the mission folder and nul=[this,"<marker name>"] execVM "ups.sqf" in the team leaders' init field.

Does UPS still work well for you? I've just put it in a mission I'm working on, but when I launch the mission I get an error message. When checking out the fire teams in-mission, they seem to go about their patrols okay, but I'm always wary when I get an error up front.