_William

I've downloaded and played the mission. The problem is with the task info telling you to wait while expecting you to move another 50m forward to the forward position in the assembly area (another waypoint). For the moment, you can work around it by telling your group to move to the next waypoint (backspace, ~, 1, 9) when the first task update appears telling you to wait. Alternatively, don't play as a squad leader. I'll look into simplifying the form-up. William btw: for a 'cold war atmosphere', trying changing your mission's date to January or December.

Cimalex, Any chance you can obtain permission to use/modify Lennard's 19 backpack variants, so you can outfit Col Stagler's units with proper bergens? Like this: William

I occasionally run into this problem myself. Since I typically run missions with GCam or TroopMon active (these are camera tools, enabling you to view other units), I'm able to see what's happening. In the majority of cases, the attack is delayed by one or more units not arriving at the form-up position because (1) one or more vehicles gets stuck along the way, (2) mechanized infantry are hit by vehicles they are about to mount, resulting in one or more infantry crawling all the way, (3) vehicles being engaged and fleeing prior to form-up. In some cases, the group's don't trigger the form-up waypoint. Having to wait for indefinite time isn't that unrealistic for military movements. But it isn't fun when playing a game. I'll give it some more thoughts. In the meanwhile, try to whip up a mission on simple (flat) terrain such as Chernarus' Vybor, and try again. If that doesn't work, let me know your user name and the name of the mission, and I can take a look. When I tried your mission, I was able to fast-rope successfully when switching to another team and another heli. I forgot whether your mission made me a group leader or just a soldier; that's something that is relevant as well (please try both). PlannedAssault missions use Norrin's (and ADuke's) scripts in a slightly different way than their example missions. If you're up for a few more tries, try editing the fastrope_unload_vehicle.sqf script in planned_assault/scripts/mods/norrndbofastrope and set _debug to 1. The script will then write more info into the arma2oa.rpt file, which you can mail me together with the mission. William

@R0adki11: I'll write out some instructions tomorrow (also based on feedback from Pachira), then send you some samples. We'll find out how easy it is to add the Nogovan forces. @Pachira: USMC examples are in the mail. Yes, YAML is white space sensitive, so please use space instead of tabs. Notepad++ can convert tabs to spaces if necessary.

Since I'm squeezed for time and prefer adding 'real-world' military forces over fictitious ones, adding Arma2's Chernarnus Defence Forces never got priority. The CDF however were a priority for Pachira. He stepped in and quickly figured out the details of the unit definition files I'm using to feed the unit database. Pachira's help saved me considerable time, and hopefully becomes the start of more additions to the unit database. The Chernarus defence forces come with scripts to put up camo nets (defenders) if you have HcPookie's camo script installed. The other addition is the Dutch Armed Forces, a compilation of many vehicles from other add-ons and some quality touches. Being Dutch myself, I've tried hard to get the unit compositions right. Regards, William @Pachira: you were already on PlannedAssault's front-page (without your email, to save you some spam). @Sakowksi: I'm continuously working on adding or updating add-ons, but need to balance time between adding add-ons, adding new terrains and improving the planner. I'm aware my preferences don't always match yours (or anybody else's) - in particular, I favor mechanized large (old) units more than small SF units or "terrorists". A stand-alone .exe is technically very possible, but would require a local UI and would require effort and skills from the end-user to adding units and terrain (that's now being done for you "in the cloud"). I've prototyped this successfully for VBS2 with a 3rd party, but don't intend to offer and support for this for Arma.

Larsiano & team, great work compiling all these add-ons and adding quality touches to them. Looking good! To help people to create interesting* single player battles involving the Dutch armed forces, I've added support for the DAF add-on to my PlannedAssault web-based mission generator. I've defined ploegen, charlie-teams, PRTL sections, scripted camo'd faces and camo net placement. PlannedAssault already assists you in getting AI manned mortar teams, para drops or heli insertions, close-air support, large formations attacks in your mission for many other add-ons. I've ran into one bug and one minor issue issue while testing these generated missions: - the Hercules hides its cargo when seen from the outside, and when being a passenger (prior to a paradrop) the cargo door is always closed despite it being open (animated) from the outside - I really appreciate the texture detail on the CV9035NL, now showing the reflectors. However my understanding that these are masked with duct tape in exercises / combat conditions for obvious reasons. See for example this photo. Regards, William

Delta Hawk, that looks impressive. Especially the radio sets shown by the special ops guys. I'm very fond of cold-war era units, and will happily support these in my mission generator (as I am doing for the CWR2, BAOR and P85 units) with detailed TO&E, use of crew served weapons, para drops, air landings, artillery, use of camo ents, etc.. One question though: what is it that your add-on will provide and how will it use/combine with the CWR2, P85 and other units? Looking forward to your results, William

Cool. Leave me a PM with your email address, and I'll get back to you with an example. Wrt your heli fast-roping mission. There's no need to reduce the amount of helis. Just pick heli sections (sections of two helicopters, or even of four in case of Little Birds) so you have fewer groups and need fewer LZs. PlannedAssault is smart enough to put multiple infantry squads into a single group of multiple helicopters if cargo space allows it. I typically test large insertions (two Chinooks, four Little Birds) with as many groups as possible crammed into those helis. Arma2 can handle large fights; it's just the default mission editor that makes it too cumbersome to set up these large fights.

The CWR2 folks surprised me a few weeks ago with beautiful cold-war era British units, and Dutch marines. I had great fun researching squad compositions and equipment for Falklands War/Cold War era british and dutch units. I've added howitzer, mortar, Stinger, TOW crew served weapons (Dutch marines), camo'd faces and large bergen variants to the unit database. And an Argentinian Chinook... See this post for more info. In the coming weeks, I'll be adding the 'Dutch Armed Forces compilation' units to the unit database, and scratching the Dutch add-ons being superceded. I'm testing these units with an improved planner that is more robust in finding form-up positions and maneuver space. I expect to be able to roll-out this improved mission planner within a month. @gudman: I'm not satisfied with how defense combat units react, but it is the best I can do using vanilla waypoints and triggers. What goes on is the following: - the mission planner analyzes the defensive positions and units available, identifies the sectors around the objective to defend, and assigns units to these sectors (AT units to cover the road, infantry units to cover infantry, heavy armor in the back for a counter-attack) - each unit is given a guard waypoint in the sector (except counter-attack forces). In Arma1, there was 'findCover' command that functioned, and the unit was also asked to go into cover using a script. The findCover command is broken in Arma2. - a "guarded by" trigger is placed at the objective. - when the mission starts, the Arma2 AI will instruct at least one 'guarding' unit to move to the "guarded by" trigger position. The Arma2 AI will instruct another unit to move to the trigger position if the first unit is routed/taken out. So the guard commands and "guarded by" trigger make the defenders respond to hostile activity near the trigger and loss of friendly units. What you are seeing in your mission is one of the units being recalled to the objective by the Arma2 AI. The problem is that Arma2 doesn't provide any control of which unit is chosen to defend the trigger. Arma2 doesn't provide any control over the trigger (I would like to enable it once the attackers arrive, not earlier, or disable one trigger and enable a next trigger). Arma2 treats the "guarded by" trigger in a special way, and doesn't respond to the trigger being moved to a different position (something that might have enabled a fighting withdrawal). In short, Arma2 offers very little for a mission creator to set-up an interesting defense without doing extensive scripting. Compared to a product such as Steel Beasts (the simulator), Arma2 offers little control over a unit's defensive behavior from the editor. It's not better in VBS2 by the way. One work around for this would be to write a state-machine which monitors the defenders and attackers and issues orders on the fly. I don't want to go there since it would make editing generated missions harder. @ Pachira Myself, I don't have the time to add fictitious factions to the unit database (and if I would, I'd probably add RACS first). I already run out of time adding 'real' factions RHS's modern Russian Federation forces, Vilas' modern Polish forces, or Georgia's forces. If you or somebody else are willing to spend the time defining units in YAML file based on a few examples I can provide, I don't mind taking your input. I had a look at your mission (and ran it myself, switching squads, with logging enabled in the scriptings talking to Norrin's fast-rope add-on). I'm running the older fast-rope script and can reproduce your problem easily. For some reason, the fast-rope script immediately exits for the Delta team heli. Since the other helis successfully deploy their cargo using the ropes, and since I'm seeing the fast-rope script being invoked, the problem is with the fast-rope script or the conditions in which it is being used. I recommend moving the LZ to a different spot and regenerating the mission. William

Thanks for the demo 4 update! I really appreciate the cold war era Dutch Korps Mariniers and the British infantry, SAS, FV43x, Bedford and Challenger 1. I've updated my PlannedAssault mission generator to cover these new units, so all of you should be able to generate some interesting CWR single-player battles (see the screenshots below for results). I've added a few (init-line) additional configurations (camo'd faces, Stinger/GPMG variants, TOW/mortar/howitzer crewed weapons, larger bergens). The camo'd faces script simply switches the soldier's identity to one out of a matching set of Arma2 green/black camoflaged faces; the BAF faces don't come with camouflage. Please note that the SAS and Dutch Marines occasionally wear modern designer glasses due to the following configuration: identityTypes[] = {"Language_EN_EP1","Head_BAF","INS_Glasses"}; Wouldn't it be better to use 'No_Glasses' instead of 'INS_Glasses', at least for the Marines and SAS? I'm looking forward the next Demo! William

Vilas has dutch troops (bagpack capable), decent YPR (PRI and ambulance), SRAT (PzF3) and MRAT (Spike), a CV9035 which is closer to the CV9030 than to the CV9035NL (rear deck is 10cm lower than CV9035NL). See this link. I suggest asking him for help; Vilas' vehicles are powering many mods here. William

Last week, I rolled out a design change to the PlannedAssault website giving us 800x600 pixel map graphics to position our units instead of the previous 640x480. That should allow more precise positioning of units. Just keep in mind that the mission planner assigns new positions to attackers (duh) and defenders. For defenders, the mission planner analyzes the threat avenues of approach (vehicles and infantry separately) and allocates its defenders accordingly. Support units and anti-air units are kept in the back. One (heavy) armor unit, if possible, is kept back for a counter-attack against deployed hostile forces See this post for more info. Along with the map graphics increase, support for browsers other than Firefox has improved. I don't intend to bump the map graphics to larger than 800x600 anytime soon; I want to have the option to use the site from a tablet (currently not possible since touch events aren't properly supported). Earlier this week, on request of Phaeden (MCAGCC Twentynine Palm's map creator), I've added two areas of the MCAGCC map (Arma2CO only). The map is special in being large (10x10km) and being optimized for large view distances, as you can see in the screen shot below. Also new are Binkowski's US Marines (as shown in the screen shot). The two areas supported are the MOUT villages in the southeastern part of the base, and Pullerville in the center. William @Delta99: see above. @the chief: I haven't picked up Iron Front yet. Reviews sound good, and the units do look good. However, I've understood it doesn't allow mods which complicates debugging mission/script problems for me (I depend on Troopmon/GCam to find and follow AI units). And it would be yet another Arma variant with its own AI quircks. In short, I dunno. @Dragon01: wrt female units, you're better off generating a mission, loading it into the editor and replacing male soldiers by female ones. I don't have data on which I can redesign current army/marine squads to include a woman.

For those of you in need of single-player battles at MCAGCC, I've added two areas of this map to PlannedAssault's mission generator. PlannedAssault allows you to generate large missions from your browser. It generates instructions for all AI groups to perform ground maneuvers, artillery missions, defense, air support, and air landings. PlannedAssault allows you to pick the group and role of your choice in the resulting large battle. Here is some combat footage (and a first screenshot illustrating mission creation). The two areas supported are the MOUT villages in the southeastern part of the base, and Pullerville in the center. William

Thanks a lot for reporting this. Indeed, I'm having problems with the site. Working on it... And fixed... Mission creation works again. You may want to delete the empty mission for which you couldn't select the game. William

Waypoints (with default settings). I typically test whether the AI can handle a map by sending a platoon of tanks and a platoon of LAVs across the map, given them several waypoints to make them traverse the critical points on the map (bridges, steep hills, town centers). The menu you see in the screenshot is from Gcam, a camera.sqf alternative.

Hi Jakerod, these images indicate two locations where tanks get stuck (when an AI platoon of M1's crosses the city and bridges following waypoints). traffic lights: miroslavl_stuck_on_traffic_light.jpg graveyard miroslavl_stuck_on_graveyard.jpg The screenshots contain a map identifying the exact location. The traffic light was mentioned earlier. This screenshot is from a new run; the tanks get stuck there consistently. William

Check the documentation on setdir here: http://resources.bisimulations.com/wiki/setDir

I could improve unit placement in two ways. First, I could use 800x600 images for the map instead of the 640x480 which gives a bit more control over unit placement. Second, I could take a bit of freedom to move units to better positions as part of generating the mission. I'll look into bigger maps. If you can tell me exactly what kind of units get misplaced and why that is important to you, I might be able to fix some of that as part of mission generation. My aim is to have amphibious assaults before Arma III arrives as a product. I'd love to create landings, with air support, with smoke screens, with ships firing guns, etc. I don't have a clue how hard the 'arma' part of that will be, since I haven't handcrafted some test missions yet. From a planning perspective, one tricky thing will be to identify those sea/land borders that allow infantry and vehicles to make it inland with sufficient maneuver space to mount a successful attack.

lms_oid triggered me to take another look at para drops. How hard could it be to add this, with support for helicopter insertions already in the planner, and some experimental scripts already on my hard drive from a year ago. To cut a long story short, we now have para drops, and I've learned few things the hard way about stubborn/uncontrollable fixed wing AI pilots (*). The paradrops implemented are the 'classic' massive combat jumps, with troopers jumping with two man per second from the aircraft at low altitude (at least 100m/300ft for small aircraft, and higher for large aircraft such as the Il-76, An-72). The combat jumps are announced with a count-down, the ramps/doors are opened, and if the pilot stays on course, all cargo units jump above the drop zone and the doors close again. If the pilot changes course, the drop might be aborted, and the pilot may try another run; you'll be informed with a new count-down. Especially when the DZ is near hostile forces, things are likely to go FUBAR, for the para troopers and the hostiles alike. As usual, Arma2 makes these situations look pretty: See for more images and background info this update. The only thing I'm not perfectly happy with is the automatic selection of drop zones. I've been working on a more general mechanism that should make picking drop zones easy, but I'm not yet done. For now, I'm reusing heli insertion locations as drop zones, while allowing you to manually place DZs if you want to. And I didn't get to testing these for ACE, where units probably are not given a parachute. Now, it is time for me to get back to better (mounted) ground attack planning. Meanwhile, if you have feedback on the para jumps, let me know. William *: AI pilots don't look ahead to the next-next waypoint, so they fail to fly a simple (hermite-spline) curve through upcoming waypoints. They routinely start flying through all waypoints again when arriving at the final waypoint, despite the final waypoint being a HOLD waypoint. They can try for hours to hit a 700m 'radius' waypoint but fail doing some due to elevation differences in the terrain...

Missing closing bracket at: _player3 attachto [_holder,[0,0,0]; You really should run Arma2 with 'show script errors' enables (command line option: -showScriptErrors ), so you'll get a warning when something is wrong with your script.

Great map, Jakerod. I did run into one problem though: I had an M1 Abrams getting stuck on one of 'your' traffic lights. If you're able to make these traffic lights offer less resistance to vehicles, that would be great. William

Another update, to cover BI's newly released Arma2: Army of the Czech Republic downloadable content. I've covered both maps: the small airstrip map (Bukoniva) is available in its full size, and for the Bystrica I'm covering the southwest 6x4.5km (out of 8x8km). Bukoniva is suitable for every kind of vehicle. Bystrica is better suited to tracked vehicles, due to its dense forests and steeps hills (wheeled vehicles are more likely to become stuck, and lack the weight and wits to get 'unstuck'). The Czech armed forces units have been added to unit database, with the exception of the RM-70 rocket launcher vehicle. I'm a big fan of large, combined arms, battles, and artillery is a key part of that. However, the ACR DLC RM-70 vehicle currently is not compatible with the Arma2 artillery module (it lacks three lines of config data), unlike its elder brother, Arma2's BM-21 rocket launcher. As long as the RM-70 isn't compatible with the artillery module, myself and other mission makers won't be able to order AI groups to fire artillery missions with the RM-70 (and it won't work with the support module either). I've submitted a bug for this, and you can do me a favor voting the bug up here. William

Hi, lms_oid. Welcome to this forum and thanks for your feedback. Paradrops aren't supported yet. I'm currently working on adding the Czech Army DLC (maps and units). In the background, I'm reworking attack planning so the 'cannot find maneuver space' planning failures become rare, and mounted attacks become a possibility. William

Vilas has created the 2S5 and 2S7 (as well as the 2S1): start with http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=15863 William

Small update, with a big chunk (6km x 4.5km) of Chernarus available now for mission generation: Gorka. More open than Chernogorsk's surroundings, more cover than near Vybor, and larger. This should be handy since most of you generate missions for the default Arma2 and Arma2OA maps. Also added are the East German (DDR) National Volksarmee units from Vilas' P85 Germany add-on. I had already added the BDR Bundeswehr units; the NVA are nice as well with characteristic uniforms. Staying within the cold war era, I've added Trouble's BAOR FV438 Swingfire and Bedford trucks. The Swingfire isn't perfect, but it finally gives the British a long-range anti-tank capability. In one of my test missions, an NVA platoon of BMP-1s ran into a FV438 platoons which was backed by another FV438 platoon at the next hill; the result was amusing with both sides launching a bunch of ATGMs (AT-3's from the BMP-1s, Swingfires from the FV438) at each other. William