charon productions

Hehe, never tried that. You dropped dead, because of one script peculiarity. To counter the script lag i have additionally attached a trigger to the player that checks for zeds in attack range and performs the attack. So inside the trigger the closest zed would be the player himself thus killing himself ;) Just a thought, maybe it`s not the main cause.

No syncing is needed as can be seen in the demo missions. The while that is takes for them to attack is the initialisation time for the module in which the whole map gets analyzed and the zeds assigned with the needed variable values, it is about 10-12 seconds. @That guy over there: The thing is that the hounds are too fast, so that they get out of attack range before the script lag allows the attack range to be checked. I have tried multiple approaches to counter that, but BI really prevented a solution by introducing their 3ms script execution restriction.

Since i can`t actually test how far of an MP functionality this has, i can only say that it should be brought to a point that you can place zeds in a MP-mission, kill them and have the infection going. I have not enough time to make sure that the full functionality this mod has in single player will be working in MP as this could require a couple of weeks time of development to modify the scripts accordingly.

To all the tossers here with that "unsatisfied customer attitude" towards a free product i seriously recommend you to Demand your money back !

The main scripts would have to run on the server. The local scripts would have to detect proximity and pubvar the variable. Its not only the proximity, there is many things that would have to be run on the client side i think. I really can`t tell

It all depends on what you consider "working in MP". The virtual infection system checks for proximity of the player to the infected town and if he is close enough a group of zeds will be spawned. For that to work in MP, proximity of ANY player character would have to be checked, which is currently not considered. The whole thing might work okay for people that just wanna gang up, enter a town and shoot some zeds, which is what would satisfy 99% of all MP-nuts anyway already. ;) Not sure about sound and particle fx script locality issues though. As someone here said earlier on, test made by you guys will show. ---------- Post added at 11:08 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:05 AM ---------- <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Np2XEECC8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Np2XEECC8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Exactly this is what i said. You can place zeds and shoot them but it wont have the full functionality icluding migration and virtual infection, but most people out there dont care anyway lol.

No it would not, because the group automatically is attributed to the side of the leader of that group of course. ---------- Post added at 09:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:27 PM ---------- So basically you put down the zombies yourself? If so then the amount you recommend would be 60-80? Does it depend on system or is it universal? It does of course depend on the system and how many other scripts are running. Zombies will only spawn if you use the Ambient Civilian module? The only way a village spawns zombies is with that module on too or does your module affect this? The zombie spawn is controlled by the undead module, the ACM controls civilians only. BI has unfortunately made their life easy by not hard-coding that but use scripting to realize it, which is very heavy on the system when using ACM. If it is the AC module then does that one also spawn civ's? That`s its main purposes, isn`t it`;) How long 'till villages respawn? A new infection/death needs to happen in that village for it to be reinfected. Thx for the quick answers. ---------- Post added at 03:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:21 PM ---------- Also Does the recommended 60-80 include other AI? The less AI the better, on my machine 60 zeds work okay Say if i want 80 zeds, how many Friendlies and Civ's can i put on the map also? Depends really on your machine. maybe 20 friendlies and 50 civs or so. really hard to say. Lag is your limit. Is there anyway to lose the infected? As in get away if your being chased? Or are they all knowing once you get spotted? They will stop chasing a target that is more far away than 800 meters. ---------- Post added at 03:34 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:24 PM ---------- Just to be CLEAR. When you said 60-80 you meant MAP-WIDE correct? yes, sure. the whole map Or 60-80 zed's in your VIEW? Or in 1 village? So there can ONLY be 80 zed's around the whole of Chernaraus without lag? kind of, depends on what they do, if they constantly migrate they are not so heavy. That`s why there is the virtual infection system, that simulates zeds that are not really existing yet as units. Friendlies eat up most resources, so do additional scripts. Nothing can be done about it, it`s BIs 3ms script execution limit. I stopped slating it, since it can`t be changed.

How many zombies will we be fighting on average? 10-15 or more? Depends entirely on the mission that the mission maker is making I recommend a zed-count of around 60-80 without usage of the ambient civilian module. Otherwise the lag becomes too big. How many zombies per village? Will it be easy. A village spawns a group of 12 zeds Im pretty sure I can take out 10-15 zombies no problem on my own. Will there be a challenge? You can take out 15 slow zeds, but 15 fast ones only if you have a long distance between you and them and have enough time to make aimed shots. The challenge lies in your ammo running out and CQB-situations when you don`t see all zeds.

I have a few questions... Will civilians pick up weapons in ammo crates if they are close (simulare to how they will pick them off dead soldiers)? No. I think you said that this will have a public beta release this weekend... is that true? It is. Can you make another video? I watching the older ones and seeing all their features. No time. will zombies be hostile to everyone? (ex. resistance fighters will attack them too)? They are enemies to west and east, they need to have a side, the rating system does not work satisfyingly.So it is disadvised to use any resistance units While in game, is it at all likley that you will be attacked when walking between town? I never want to feel safe :D When an undead group spots you while migrating they will attack and then go back to their migration scheme after the kill. Have you tried seeing how the Infection will handle with armed forces present? Will Zombies be able to make it pass a blockade with, lets say, 10 soldiers? Or is that really hard to do for them? Watch the vids. depends on slow or fast zeds and skill of the AI soldiers. Will soldiers try to move back if zombies get to close? (That would make it a lot more realistic) No, the lag forbids any further AI scripting like that. If you avoid lag in this mod, it works fine. If your mission is too big and lags, animations won`t play properly and collision issues occur.

Read through this thread, because this is how this works ;)

EXACTLY. An attentive reader. Long term tests look good now, only minor .rpt errors show up occasionally. So the infection functionality is working. People will hazzle anyway, but i don`t care. I said all along that this is an impossible mod and that critical minds are better of playing resident evil if they have a problem with minor bugs. I just wanted to make sure that there is no bugs left that disturb the overall functionality. So when i don`t get any bug reports from the testers, a release on the weekend is likely, because i won`t have any time in the following weeks to work on it anyway. Of course i have picked beta testers, who do you think do i relate to when i talk about beta testers lol?

The infected are seeming to be working fine now and will be finally checked by the beta testers. Now the whole script apparatus is being modified for the slow zeds and the resulting errors are being fixed. (like mixed slow fast zed groups). The custom animation disturb the movement that for some reason they end up in "unitready"-state in the middle of the field and do nothing. EDIT: Good news, one whole day of searching for the bug and it turned out to be an overlooked undefined variable in the initialization script just for the slow zeds. Now they do migrate just as the fast zeds.

Even every nearest-command in Arma cycles through ALL vehicles itself, which slows it down. There is no way to get around that ALL vehicles will be checked. Before i modified TroopMon2 to work with ALICE, it was not even able to put down enough map markers on the map display, because it mistaked the doors for cars. On Chernarus there is probably a couple of hundred door vehicles spawned. Sometimes like 3 for one building, now think of Chernogorsk ... I have a pretty complex, but promising work-around in mind though, that hopefully reduces the update time while still checking for vehicles. Lol, like this whole mod isn`t already ONE BIG WORK-AROUND of Arma2-Limitations and bugs. EDIT: Okay the workaround seems to give the best results of 4-6 seconds update time with extreme values of sometimes 10 seconds. That is probably the best that can be expected given the circumstances. So this is nice, from initally some scripts executing at above one minute per cycle down to 3-10 seconds for each individual script running in parallel.

It does not matter. As i said, even the near-xxx scripting commands DO cycle through ALL vehicles spawned on the map if applied to vehicle types. An allunits-check relates only to soldiers, not to vehicles. But it is slow. I highly recommend not to use ALICE for this, because it is simply overkill.

Well, i have tried nearobjects and nearentities, but it was slow in my early tests. These functions are known to be slow. The problem would be also that the door vehicles are of the "cAR" type, so lets say in Chernarus you will get lots of cars even within a small radius. What i have done now is to check only the allunits array and not the vehicles array anymore. That way the target update lag is 10 seconds in towns and 20 seconds in Chernarus, thats the best i can do. It all depends on how many units are on the map and the use of ALICE. I will however give nearentities another try and time the scripts out if they perform better. It basically does the same thing but should be faster due to being hardcoded. EDIT: Just checked it with and i stopped the test when it took more than a minute to update and that not even near Chernarus(!) Too bad these hard-coded functions are that slow. They probably cycle through the vehicles-array too and get killed by ALICE then.

There is a major problem with the lag, especially when using the Ambient civilian module, which most folks will probably use to save the time to script civilian spawns. That module generates a couple of hundred (!) door vehicles, that the zombie scripts need to check through to exclude them from chasing civilians that sit inside their door vehicle. The lag that results from checking every zed group for proximity to a vehicle, so that they won`t ignore players in cars/ choppers can sometimes be up to a minute ! That means they would run right past you for a minute until they notice that you are a target. I am sure everybody agrees that this is so lame, that it is not worth to consider it to be released in that state. Excluding vehicle crews as targets is lame too. I am out of ideas how to cut that down. Most likely i will have to restructure the whole thing to put each car/chopper in a custom array which is the only one to be checked. That is something i wanted to avoid, because custom arrays are messy. Unfortunately i have too many RL jobs now to dedicate the necessary time of several hours a day to solve that problem. That`s all i can say.

The scripts were suffering a huge lag of up to a minute in certain situations for the main script as the scripts have to fulfil the role of a 2nd engine inside the game. The is the final phase to make the scripts run in a reasonable timeframe which is hard to achieve, turned out that {alive _x}-checks have in this case eaten a lot of time and had to be reduced to an absolute minimum, so that the execution time is now much smaller than it used to be.

You need to add: and you have not defined (at least not in your config shown here) "COTDClass" vehicle class anywhere I would say you have an easier life, if you inherit the damsel which has all female attributes including animations, skeleton etc. and then just add You would also get more help here : Arma2 Editing configs and scripting

Anything related to animation is not sufficiently supported to really come up with something convincing due to there being no official software that directly allows new animation for the male and female skeleton and it sounds like what you intend to do necessites MoCap data or otherwise it would look cartoonish compared to the vanilla animations. The movement speeds of existing animations can be easily tweaked in the animation config. Just have a look at anims.pbo (with dePBO or similar) and you don`t need any special compilers, just binPBO and something like notepad+ or similar to enter the code.

You forget one important thing: There is not enough sides in the game to realize that apart from the lag you would get running all of that simultaneously. You can`t even have resistance fighting zombies. And a little brief scientific remark, the earth is cooling since 9 years with record low temperatures in many countries right now. ;)

Lol,there is pretty no knowledge to share. Use Arma2 Anim viewer, choose the animation suited and put it in, finished. That`s all there is to it. Nothing custom about it. And if you care about "scratch" 2D effects, then just wait for that mod.

Nothing. Such a case should be excluded by the mission designer. The female slow zeds are disabled to not crash Arma, simple as that. Arma1 zed mods also didnt have females ;)

That`s bad timing on the patch, now it needs to be thoroughly tested if the patch introduces AI changes that disrupt the functionality of the module. In the long run it is of course good that BI fixed the AI much more (at least that`s what they say, it remains to be seen if it is indeed the case) EDIT: ok in its core, the functionality is not harmed. Zed groups stay closer together which makes them more effective while attacking or moving inbetween towns where until now the leader always was way ahead.

Try adding: west setFriend [civilian, 1]; No-one can keep you from writing the code in your init.sqf and apply it to all civilians, which is the elegant way for the experienced scripter. Yes, because these animations were made for Arma1, which did not have female models. They have been created with a rigged male skeleton only. The female skeleton has different joints and applying the animations to the female model crashes Arma2 instantly. As i said many times before, BI failed to provide a proper tool to create .rtms, there has been only unofficial tools for Arma1 for the male skeleton only and i am for sure not writing MEL-scripts now to work around that omission.