b00n

Maybe this doesn't help for what you're trying to do, but can't you place the cannon as BLUFOR rather than empty and then it would be manned automatically?

Yep spawn might work for you here. But honestly, you're making things hard for yourself. If you just add the lines you posted to the bottom of init.sqf, which is in your mission folder anyway, it should work fine... except for: [100, BIS_ACM] call BIS_ACM_setIntensityFunc; Not sure what setting intensity to 100 would do. Valid values are between 0 (off) and 1 (max). [bIS_ACM, 1, 10] call BIS_ACM_setSpawnDistanceFunc; Are you sure you want stuff to spawn within 10 metres of the player?

I want to start by saying thanks for the agile, community inclusive patch development you guys are doing. I know I can speak for a lot of people when I say it's a refreshing change to the usual development cycles we have grown accustomed to. :) That said I would like to throw my support behind a post from yesterday: Turin is 100% on the mark here. This needs fixed as a priority. I understand that the AI is getting a lot of love, and that's great, but it seems to be only in response to the few people who post here pointing out how this formation or that squad mode needs tweaked a bit to be perfect. Meanwhile there are a large number of people, myself and the people from my gaming community who play ArmA2 included, who almost exclusively play player vs AI co-op missions. Judging by the number and popularity of servers playing such missions I know we're not alone. Many of us simply have no wish to ever command AI and so these changes aren't of much importance. IMHO of much higher priority should be the issues repeated again by Turin. I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying that these issues, particularly the omniscient AI, are potentially game ruining especially for new players. Arma2 has a reputation for having a steep learning curve, and that's fine (in fact it's part of what makes me like the game so much), but when you can be spotted and killed at night, while lying in knee-high grass, by AI that doesn't have nightvision, well that's the kind of nonsense that I believe simply drives people away. Again, sorry if this sounds like a whine, and I do think you're doing a great job! I just think that a reassessment of priorities may be in order.

I can confirm that this works. :) Having an AI unit stuck in your group constantly asking for sitreps is a little annoying, though. This didn't work, I'm guessing that if the unit doesn't spawn it isn't counted as 'alive' and so the ACM ignores it when deciding when it should exit. I also tried adding inanimate objects such as warfare buildings to the group to see if that would keep the ACM active, seems it does not. Seems like a properly scripted solution to keep the ACM refreshed would still be the best option... only problem is, I think that even if you can recreate the ACM when the group leader respawns, it will be a different ACM instance and the old instance will still clean up and exit, despawning all units it has created. Not very pretty. :( As suggested, syncing the ACM to a civ might also be a workaround but if you move far enough away from the civ I suspect you will see the units despawning as they move beyond the ACM's max range. :(

The most obvious example of the all-seeing AI I've seen was when I was simply messing about with the ambient combat module. I was OPFOR and a group of T90s had spawned. I got in one as gunner and had an AI commander and driver. I was surprised to discover that the AI would constantly order me to engage enemy units the moment they spawned, even if they spawned out of sight hundreds of metres into a forest, behind buildings, or behind hills. The AI would lock onto the target and track it until it was dead or went out of range of the ACM and despawned.

If the model is simply drawn lower than the actual bounding geometry, might that explain why the AI is still able to spot and kill prone players far too easily? I imagine the AI uses the bounding geometry for detection and in that regard it seems the grass layer hasn't changed anything. Regarding the feasibility/infeasibility of rendering 'real' grass discussed earlier in this thread: there is certainly no reason why such high quality rendering couldn't be done while in zoomed views, where there is a narrow viewing frustrum. The problem, as correctly stated, is that prone players would still be visible at distance while the grass is not rendered. The way to reconcile this seems pretty simple to me; just don't render players who are prone in grass at long distance. After all we're going for realism with these changes aren't we? You're never going to spot someone lying in foot-high (or higher) grass, barely moving or not moving at all, a couple of hundred metres away with the naked eye. You can still render muzzleflashes etc. which give their position away, and then the enemy would use their scopes/binoculars to locate and engage the hidden target. Thoughts?

I wondered about that too - maybe a static artillery on the other side of the map or something? I'll give it a shot tonight and see how the ACM reacts - not sure if it spawns units based on the leader's location or the location of any group member.

Well, I'd still like to find a solution to keep the ACM synced to a playable group, but thanks, your idea will work nicely for another mission I have in mind. :)

I've been looking into this too, I have the ACm working nicely and really want to keep it in my mission. The only thing I can think of is to check for/recreate the ACM whenever the group leader spawns. Haven't tested this though so I don't know how it'd work. I'll see if I can figure something out and post it here if I find anything.