jtgibson

Great work! I keep glazing over this one in the list of mod updates, but the gas masks are gorgeous. If someone doesn't make a Half-Life-styled mission with these gas masks, I will be deeply disappointed. =)

Worse, there can be issues with premature downloading.

Did anyone else notice them slip analog steering into the January 30th devbranch update? I just gave it a whirl on my Logitech G27 and it is flat !&$%ing awesome. Kudos, Bohemia.

Seems so! First random vehicle I tried it on in the editor was an HEMTT Fuel Truck, second was a hatchback in the Great Altis Highway Race.

This is going to be the tiniest mote of a suggestion, but could "Ambient Life" be renamed to "Ambient Combat" in the difficulty dialog? When I first started playing WLS back in Alpha I was turned off by the intense difficulty, because I had always tuned up the Ambient "Life" slider to maximum, thinking that what it was doing was increasing civilians and animals! Heh.

You mean when ? If so, that's a bug in the campaign itself -- the mission may not progress even without any mods at all. Or are you referring to ? If so I haven't had any trouble, but I always turn off ragdolls (and keep TPW FALL enabled in all the other respects) because it makes the enemies jitter too much for my tastes -- it's much more rewarding watching an enemy fall over when you shoot them than watching them ragdoll while still alive.

Hi Kibot! There's a lot of code repetition going on in the request_vehicle.sqf file, so I broke down the logic and compacted the code quite a bit. Instead of the switch-do performing the same branches over and over again, all the switch-do does is assign variables, and then the very bottom of the script handles the execution. As a bonus feature, because the vehicles list was getting a bit long, I sorted it in order of cost and added "dummy" lines to the selection box that help organise the information (and do nothing when clicked). Note that I hacked it a bit to include a couple new unit types -- specifically both the open and covered HEMTT trucks (the covered truck has a nice cloth canopy over it), as well as the Warfare-style repair/refuel/ammo trucks (I wanted to salvage one of our MBTs that lost a track in the field but was otherwise fine, but couldn't because there's no repair functionality built into the scenario for recovering vehicles (only vehicle refit at a base)). Since the repair trucks in particular are rather gamey, if you didn't want them you'd have to remove that part of the request.sqf and adjust the switch-do order as normal to accommodate the new "case" numbers in request_vehicle.sqf, but the new format is so much cleaner and more compact in my not-so-humble opinion, so it shouldn't be too difficult to make the switch -- or to add new vehicles anytime you like, in case they introduce a few more vehicles during the Fight and Win episodes. =) Next on my list is coming up with the simple ammo drops request I specified earlier -- where you get a single ammo box containing a single package of necessary items, such as Titan AT rockets since the only way to get more of those presently is to abuse the Armory system. request.sqf: request_vehicle.sqf:

Might be getting a smidgeon off topic here, but I've found permanent death infinitely more enjoyable -- it helps the game trigger your fight-or-flight and fear of death reflexes. I mostly have experience with ArmA 1 multiplayer, though -- ARMA 2 just didn't have the right community for me (considerably higher hostility to "newbies" and a more elitist attitude), and I haven't even tested the waters of Arma 3 multiplayer since the single-player/sandbox experience is a lot more fun in Arma 3 than it was in the other two. But I love watching Kilroy's and Dslyexci's videos. The problem with limb removal is a genuine one, however. If someone is Purple Hearted, they're not fighting again. They become a logistical burden on their comrades, which in reality is part of the duty of any soldier to his fellows -- as long as it has a pulse it's your buddy, not a body -- but in game we don't like to deal with the harsher realities of friends dying, especially when we know that the person on the other end of the terminal is alive and well, so there's absolutely no point to keep them alive other than "roleplay". If limbs aren't removed and there's a combat medical system in place that allows you to pull them back from the brink of death as long as they don't slip over the edge, then it remains enjoyable to die and heal. But if you can "die" without being dead, it's just a pointless waste of time. Heck, for the grand first-person strategy mission I've been "ideas-guy-ing" and failing to work on, I've internal-monologued for a goodly portion of over an hour now on whether it'd be a good feature or a bad feature to require the player to order his fallen troops to be collected, body-bagged, and shipped back to the intangible home country or else they lose points, because while it scores very high on the realism and duty categories, it scores very low on the fun category. These are faceless AI and headless clients, not real people you need to give proper burials to.

I love the idea of this mod, but I'm inclined to think that it will have to support third-party mods itself (maybe with support sourced from the community rather than directly by the author), rather than having third-party mods support it. The reality of the ARMA modding situation is that the drama around modding and the "NEVER OPEN OR REPACK OUR MOD HISS" mentality that a lot of addon creators have would unfortunately make it likely that very few mod authors would go out of their way to support this, even knowing the community benefits it would offer.

Huh. Road segments do have IDs on the map when you toggle IDs on -- so they're just intangible "yep, there's a road here" and the rest is somehow compiled into the WRP? That seems awfully short-sighted on BIS' part. Also makes one of my planned mods (a city traffic system, not far removed from the one in Take On Helicopters) to be far less practical or even impossible. Now I are sad. Emoticon.

"Area clear" is like the number one priority target of every AI modder. Unfortunately I think it's buried deep in the AI FSMs. Like, really deep. Need-latex-gloves-and-a-vacuum deep.

It's fascinating how many people missed the gist of what you were saying and simply thought you were saying "there's too many cars!" rather than seeing it for the excellent feature request that it is. I'm glad someone else understood you, though, because now it's more or less moot for me to +1 this. ;-) tl;dr -- Different spawn frequencies by road type? Very yes. ts;dr -- Cars on roads. Ungh.

I for one get the next closest thing to a hard-on whenever I see logistical support units or civil units added to the ARMA series of engines. The full-fidelity battlefield is fun, but so is the full-fidelity environment surrounding the battlefield. (So long as you don't have some fifteen-year-old barking in your ear about how you're on latrine duty or how you're not scrubbing the memorial statue hard enough to let him see himself reflected in the horse's buttocks.) The biggest problem with the ARMA engines and ARMA 2 in particular is that attachTo is a horrible, horrible substitute for an actual physics engine that has 2-axis/3-axis ball-and-socket/fifth-wheel connections between units -- i.e., the trailer will behave erratically even on single player and only gets worse when you try to sync it up in multiplayer. My ideal scenario for the Arma engine would be something like kibot's DUWS with full logistical support (AI delivered, but the player can do it too), and realistic unit repair and refuel times thrown in for good measure -- with the ability to skip time in the game, of course, so you don't have to play the mission for 20 hours just to have a Humvee brought back into operation. I've been working on such a scenario, but I'm more of a designer than an implementer (I'll admit that can also be read as "dreamer instead of actually useful" or "lazy instead of, you know, not lazy" -- nosce te ipsum =P) -- I've got a design document a mile long and only a few bits of bytes to show for it.

Fidel approves! Highly recommended next is to add a version that has the shoulder stock attached (i.e., a static version of the gun with "detachable" stock that is not actually detachable in-game), since that's the only way you can control the pistol in reality -- and once you do, the pistol becomes disturbingly controllable, to the point that you can put ridiculous numbers of rounds in a group with almost no perceptible recoil. I would suggest the stock-extended variant of the model would have the forward folding grip down, and would be treated as a primary weapon instead of a secondary weapon -- with grip positions adjusted using the new Arma 3 features. Neither adding the stock or adjusting the grip would be easy, but it'd help show off this amazing gun. It could've been the NATO standard if it wasn't so bloody expensive. ;-)

Heh. I was going to request the same thing. I read the changelog and I was like, "WHAT?! NO!!!" MOUT in Whole Lotta Altis is so much more terrifying when I'm hunting down the last two OPFOR units in a town with civilians running all over the place, since the AI is so much better at discerning hostile targets than the player is (but on the other hand, the AI is also far more limited in reaction and aiming speed, so it balances out nicely). I find myself hesitating on the trigger over and over, and nearly [vulgar-past-tense-of-defecated] myself when one of my own AI teammates ran past the hole in a fence I was slowly sweeping around, and his gun more or less literally ended up in my face. (I still didn't fire, though! Just say no to fratricide, yo.) If all of the civilians could find better hiding spots (i.e., despawn or not spawn in the first place) it just wouldn't have that same feel. Nor would it have given me the same massive pangs of regret when I found out that the grenade I lobbed over a fence after hearing Iranian voices on the other side had resulted in a very mangled civilian body on the other side -- missed the soldiers, hit the civilian. I felt awful. P.S., just to proselytise a bit, TPW MODS definitely makes ARMA 3 for me. It is, literally, the best series of immersion mods out there at this time.

The conceptual wall I ran into with this was that an external application has no idea whether you have any units selected or not, and therefore doesn't know when to press the tilde/grave key to select all units prior to issuing the command (e.g., if you had already selected everyone and then said "Regroup", it would press the tilde key, deselecting everyone, and then do a bunch of useless phantom keypresses). There would need to be a direct plugin to the game to be able to have this behaviour work reliably in all cases, unless everyone is comfortable with the "known issue". If it helps, I was trying to write a GlovePIE script for voice commands (and getting very frustrated by the fact that GlovePIE doesn't process scripts linearly -- and inner "if" blocks are often ignored entirely), and came up with the following aliases that could conceivably be used for most commands. I went ahead and trimmed out the stuff that relied on my never-to-see-the-light-of-day AI commands plugin, so there are a couple mentions of "vanilla" in there. ;-)

The one thing that strikes me, having just discovered this now, is the fact that "stealth taken-down" enemies react to the blow and sort of stand around for a second before then they pull a Mortal Kombat "this is the part where you're supposed to fall down" and then an overly dramatic rag doll. It could sort of be justified as like having had been stabbed from behind in the heart and having a precious few seconds of consciousness which you waste on being dazed and confused, but since it's a stroke with the rifle butt that's obviously not what's happening. ;-) In the event that it counts as a stealth takedown, I'd suggest that you forego the animation for the enemy and just go straight to the ragdoll!

You know, giving the "DCS mouse" some thought, I wonder if it'd be possible to press a key to open a completely invisible full-screen GUI and then register clicks on that, or whether the RV4 engine is locked into the Button mentality. It'd require some pretty fancy math to project the coordinates of the cockpit points from their XYZ rotation vectors onto the 2D plane that is the player's view, but it seems like you've already done that as far as being able to render the locations of the icons anyway. I haven't worked with the GUIs more than trying to rig up a faithful recreation of the Mercenaries 2 satellite-guided bomb, but there must be a way to position GUI elements anywhere on screen and update it every frame. If so, even if you can't get away with a fully-transparent system, you could still put the buttons over top of the respective areas where cockpit controls are, and then set a keybind to open this GUI -- presumably locking your view, although TrackIR would still require working around -- so that you could click anywhere. It wouldn't be full-fidelity like DCS because the 2D buttons would be bigger than the 3D interactive switches of DCS (skimming the surface of the fact that it'd be foolish to try for full-fidelity simulation in Arma anyway), but it seems like it'd be doable!

I've been using this since Update 1 and love it, but my only complaint is how slow the glasses get raindrops on them. Would there be a way to externalise a modifier into the .hpp file so we can specify a multiplier for the rate of accumulation? (To answer the "but then you'd have to wipe them more often", in reality, if your goggles are getting covered in water, the normal solution is to take them off instead of continuously wiping them off -- your eyes are more than sufficient at clearing water on their own. This also, of course, has a tactical side effect of reduced eye protection...)

Okay, after playing this a bit more, I have a request! Supply drops contain ammo for the "most common equipment", but the problem here is when your team is not using the most common equipment, they have no means of reloading or rearming themselves. In particular, I had an AT soldier complaining in my ear every three minutes that he doesn't have any ammo for his Titan launcher (after a particularly scary "wait, what?!" moment when one of my AI team members suddenly shouted out "enemy tank, 200 metres, due north", I ordered the AT guy to take it out, and he spammed rockets like mad to finally take it out, several missing or splashing against the armour uselessly). The default supply drops do nothing to help since they only contain PCML ammo. The only way to solve this problem and get him the Titan AT rockets he needed was to unlock Armory support and then acquire free AT missiles using the virtual ammobox, create a stockpile of rockets on the ground (two agonising rockets at a time), and then order the AT soldier to rearm at the location using WW_AIMenu. This is needlessly painful for something that should be simple, particularly because it's not like I equipped the soldier with the Titan Launcher manually -- I simply recruited the AT soldier directly through the base officer. So even though the soldier is a part of the mission and not something I snuck in through Canadian subterfuge, he has no way of rearming as part of the mission and therefore, by a certain interpretation, is "broken". To solve this problem, it might also be interesting to go for 1-CP Mercenaries-style drop crates where you can custom-order a drop of a single specialised "kit" in the field that would have everything you need to outfit yourself as a given soldier class -- so there would be an AT Soldier Kit, a Team Leader Kit, a Squad Leader Kit, a Sniper Kit, a Spotter Kit, etc. This would correspond nicely with special 1-CP drops of ammunition of a certain type -- e.g., a "Titan Rocket Pack" would drop a kitbag containing 2 Titan AT rockets, an "MX Ammo Pack" would drop a kitbag loaded with 6.5mm STANAG magazines, etc.

I had something like this on the old BISCUIT (Bohemia Interactive Studios CommUnity Issue Tracker -- much better than "CIT" in my admittedly-less-than-humble opinion ;-)) with regards to the Arma 2 SILVIE. I feel it's important to make sure it's a throw with several randoms. Say random 0.5 + random 0.25 + random 0.25? https://dev-heaven.net/issues/4118 -- In this case, I'm referring to vehicle damage rather than fuel, but the concept is the same.

Having finally had a chance to play this fairly religiously over a few hours tonight (I laid up an awesome stealth attack with my 8-man team (plus myself) against a recon outpost that had a good 16 soldiers in total and totally decimated them), I've found it extraordinarily enjoyable. However, I'm getting some weird behaviour with these squads that I've added to my own control. They behave normally, but if I order them to mount a vehicle that I am not aboard, the game does something wonky with assigning them to a different group. Then when they dismount, they form a distinctive group that no longer behaves as if I am a part of the squad -- if I order them to return to formation, the command line will instead say something like "All - Join Group - 3" or some such. At this point I normally have to return them to High Command control, since while I can give them orders, they will not follow me anywhere, behaving exactly as if they were already under High Command control. This is most readily reproducible with an HEMTT if I order one of my squad to mount up as the driver, to (try to) take advantage of my leaderly (read: lazy) ability to order them to chauffeur me somewhere. He will drive briefly and then stop going anywhere, and at this point I can't order him to move anywhere. I can however still order them to dismount and proceed on foot. I'm going to try disabling WW_AICover and TPW_MODS to see if that has any influence and I'll report back shortly. This might be another of those "tell BIS" things. [edit] Okay, after some further testing, it definitely seems like a "tell BIS" thing. The bug only happens if I order the driver to go somewhere and he halts, and then I order him to get out and I take over the driver's seat. At this point he becomes his own separate group and I become the vehicle's group and I have essentially ordered myself to Move to the location -- the waypoint now shows up on the map as if I am the one who has been ordered to go there. To solve the problem, I have to order everyone to dismount and spam the "regroup" function on the All menu as they are getting out of the vehicle, which forces them to join my team instead of being under a separate group, and clears my waypoint. Rotor insta-killing is a symptom of an older version of TPW Engine Based Suppression, if you're using that. The collision spheres of the suppression system collide with... dramatic... results against the rotors.

True that, but Pw6 is something I generally try to avoid. It's got the clunkiest Windows-Eightish interface I've ever had the displeasure of working with. Perfect for casual computer users, but for people who have experience working with existing UIs it's needlessly oversimplified and the options that the power users want are buried deeply to keep the casual users away from them. I personally symlink the crap out of my hard drives and much prefer the hands-on control I get with a manual installation and occasional PBO merges. =)

Hey, I never had an opportunity to try this out way back when, but now I'm finding that the pracs subdomain on Rock's website doesn't have the downloads for PRACS, since March if I'm reading correctly. Is there anywhere that mirrors the November version? I can see the October 31 version on Armaholic but given that the subdomain mentions the new version on November 02 I'm wondering if there were any changes since then. [edit]Oh, hah, disregard. The version on Armaholic is posted as of November 04 even though the files are versioned for the 31st and 30th. Never mind. ;-)

Fantastic scripting work. I'm always thrilled when I see really creative scripts -- none of this "move squad into helicopter" example nonsense that anyone can figure out with 20 minutes' work, but rather well-thought out solutions to problems that people might not have even really conceived of before: like this. Well done!