Evil_Echo

Given how many people complained about stamina feature in ACE1, do you really think adding bio needs like water, food, etc are really going to be that well received?

That introduced ranking to the game. And all the stat whores that obsess about such things too. Do that and kiss any hope of teamwork goodbye.

Dust, sparks, water splash are all fine ideas. Just not any gibbing - ugh. Body parts are for Mortal Kombat, not ArmA2 IMO.

Try using a negative value for your alpha channel numbers in the effect colors.

I just thump the mic and tell my partner to land. :)

I reported this on the CIT about a week ago - BI already knows about it.

Blur never bothered me. Leave it.

Given some of Russia's best snipers in WWII were women, does anyone doubt that ChenRuss might be crawling with female sharpshooters? Let's knock off the "in the kitchen" and "can't drive" trash talk and drop the nonsense about never in combat too. No one is going to force you to chose a female soldier type. Right now, the female gamers DO have to pick soldiers that don't match their gender. Just calm down and let people pick a body gender just like they can pick a face and voice. No big deal.

1. There are plenty of countries that allow women on the front lines. 2. Even in the US military, women did get caught in firefires. 3. The ArmA series is about combat situations that are not historical, but possible. So why get your undies in bunch if someone makes some female soldier models? I have three females in my clan playing ArmA. Not girls, women. Darn good shots every one of them too ( they love to kill guys, especially trash-talkers ). If I can pick a soldier with a beard, they should be able to pick a soldier with a some curves. Seriously, the no-women people need to chill out.

I'd be using it to make a single particle drop to replace an exististing particle on it's death. The compile time >> execute time in this case.

Thank you BIS!

Agree - could use a wrapper script - but that would kill any speed advantage of using the compiled function. :(

A question about the OnTimer/BeforeDestroy scripts. Are those sqf, sqs files, or can they be compiled functions?

Thank you for the info Matt. I did use the BI tools and found the images. Tried the negative alpha effect - very cool. I understand the "just fiddle around" part of your explaination too. That works for me because I also do a little bit of development work and have the BI toolset. But if I was just a regular schmuck doing mission editing, that's a pretty high bar to cross. It really would be better to have more information on the BI wiki - and at least update the existing info to reflect both ArmA and ArmA 2. I see on another thread that even Mando is having a hard time with locating the proper water effects for his project. Another issue right now for me is moving particle sources. I know you can tie a source to an object, but the details are pretty vague. So far, I haven't had a lot of luck with that, so more digging into scripts in the .pbo files - ugh. Again, some better documentation on the wiki would save people a lot of time here.

Thanks for the offer Matt, I know you are among the best for effects out there. Any help is welcome. I have dug through all function calls listed under the scripting section of the BI wiki before starting this thread. In fact I just double-checked the particle array link you mentioned in case it had been updated. The page still only contains info relating to the ArmA 1, no mention of the new .p3d layout. I even did a power search of the wiki for references to the new file. This is really bad for A2 coders, because I have good reason to believe that A2 supports 16 frames of animation for particles vs 8 for A1. Add the fact that the routine calls for particles are using an array index rather than descriptive names for parameters and a coder is reduced to a heck of a lot of guessing to figure out what and where the correct effect is located. So while the request is very broad, here are a couple of specifics. 1. List of what the elements on the new universal.p3d really are. For A1 there was the jpg image in http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Image:Particles.jpg to refer to, but even that was a bit limited because without some extra verbage it is difficult to visualize what changing particle parameters like size, rotation, color/alpha would do to the effect. And not much of a clue which effects are luminous. 2. Better documentation of the setParticle* routines. Just listing the parameters of complex routines like this is not enough - BI needs to explain what the arguments actually do in a non-opague manner. For example, what is setParticleRandom really randomizing - are the arguments ranges, masks, or what? Is setParticleCircle creating a disk or a ring? Particle velocities, rotation, etc - what do they really do to the effect? I could spend hours just changing one parameter at a time to guess what BI already knows and really should share with us. 3. I've heard about cloudlets being mentioned in some config files. How do they relate to particle sources and how to use them? 4. I see some configs have entries that have a keyname indicating a effect and a value of a quoted string. Logically this is a reference to script to drive the special effect. If so, a list of available effects would be very nice to have along with descriptions of what those scripts do and maybe a demonstration animation. I really don't want to sound like I'm bashing BI. Documenting a project like this is hard work and not very interesting to many programmers. But it makes the job a lot easier for third-party coders and that in turn brings more gamers into the community, which is income for BI. Hopefully they'll understand what I'm getting at and update the documents. :)

ACE people are fully aware of the expansion pack. We are still on the same timetable as before the announcement came out. We know people are antsy about a release. Have patience, cool stuff is on the way and we want to do our best to make sure it works right.

Working on some ideas for arty with others. Sounds for incoming are definitely part of the discussion. I've managed to make a simplistic model for incoming rounds ( mortars in this case ) via pure mission scripting. Having it as part of the actual ammunition would be far better - but it does involve a far bigger can of worms being opened. All I can say for now is let us know whether this is a major win for you or not so the effort can be prioritized properly.

Any thoughts of upgrading the scripts to sqf and using spawn for some of the effects? Might help the frame rates. Keep up the good work Gigan!!

Some controllers let you merge multiple joysticks and rudder pedals into a larger virtual controller that ArmA can see. Very handy. Like most aspects of ArmA - flying is a skill you just don't start out with as an expert. ArmA is not some nerfed gun-n-run game, so don't expect choppers to be very forgiving of mistakes. One essential task to do is configure your flight controls properly. You can either set up the controls for classic pitch/roll/yaw or use a simplified ( ? ) turn mode that auto-coordinates for you. Don't enable both modes or you'll go insane fighting the controls. I prefer to disable the mouse alternative to the flight controls, leaving that for other actions and using either joystick or keyboard for flight operations. Do go through the training missions for choppers. And look at the armory missions for helos as well. They provide reasonably safe ways to get your core skills down and controller configured the way you like. Practice slow and simple moves and then worry about speed and weapons later. With a little work it you'll get better. I put together a training mission, Rahmadi Airshow, for training on various aircraft as well as having more than a bit of friendly intra-clan competition. Everyone in our team enjoys the mission and we've all gotten much better as pilots. Even a novice in the ArmA mission editor can make a simple single-player mission to train on with little effort. Concider doing that too.

1. You'd lose the weapons load-outs and probably access to some items like first-aid supplies. Depending on the mission, using ACE with non-ACE items can prove troublesome, especially AI commanded helos. 2. Nothing with ACE, AFAIK. 3. Take mags, then select one and "pack" it. Use "unpack" to get it out. Don't go overboard on ammo - if you carry too much gear the odds of fatigue kicking in will make you suffer badly. Stay under 25kg to be safe.

You should be running either patch 1.14 or 1.16beta. ArmA models a bit more ballastics than most games, elevation and range come much more into play. You'll find that just like IRL, you have to account for that at anything beyond short range - typically when you would like to use that scope. There are mods and add-ons for scope recticle adjustment to re-zero your sights. Being a member of the ACE team I recomend that naturally. :) You can also find a guide to markmanship using ACE on the BI Wiki.

The ACE folks did take this complaint seriously and welcomed the trouble ticket afp posted about it. In the end it did seem not to be an ACE issue. The patch levels of ArmA and ACE should be mentioned and in the case of custom missions, the add-ons and mods used and hopefully the mission itself go a long way in determining the problem. After all - our hands are tied if we can't duplicate the problem.

I use Vista and can get cpbo to work. But don't bother with file associations etc, just run it from the command line.

There could be number of reasons you saw troops where there apparently had not seen them before. But to explain this would need more detail from the OP about the mission, the server and such.

It seems reliable in 1.14 and the 1.16beta patch that have been out for some time.