oktyabr

Heyo, Thinking about trying my hand at mission making (again), either for SP or ideally for SP/COOP, and it got me thinking about a problem I hope someone here can help me solve. I want the players to have to move across the map fairly quickly which means having to steal a car. I know it's easy to place a car and let the player(s) get into it but I'm also interested in the realistic possibility of carjacking... standing in the road, with weapons ready, forcing the civilian (AI) vehicle to stop, get the civvie out of the vehicle and take it, preferably without shooting them. I've been away from ARMA for awhile and my memory is a bit dusty. I remember one addon that had civilian population and worked like this for stealing cars, but I seem to remember it only being for single player (at the time). I know some other addons have civilian interaction but I'm not sure if any of them would work well for this particular case. ALiVE, AGM, etc. are all within the realm of possibility, if needed. Thanks in advance for any help, tips or suggestions! (Yes, I did search first)

Many thanks! I'll give that a go!

Panda AV identifies this (just downloaded LPManager today) as hosting Exploit.gen in the binary. I know it's not uncommon for such applications to conflict with AV software but I also see this thread hasn't been touched in awhile. I'd rather be safe than sorry!

I'm looking for a modern day force to use in a middle eastern setting with ALiVE. Both Sparfell's work and CUP looks like the ticket. I hope you guys can get together (ideally with the CUP guys) to bring something to fruition. Ideally for ALiVE, we need full faction name as well as class names for individuals and groups, on foot and perhaps in vehicles. Guidelines here (and then of course, it's handy for the mission maker if you include a list on your forum post): http://alivemod.com/wiki/index.php/Unit_Mod_Config_Standardisation

Wow! Work takes me away from A3 for most of the year and this is what I find when I get back? Christmas is in a couple of weeks, or is it.... TODAY? :D Awesome work, .kju! When I scratch up a few spare shillings after the holidays I'll be making a donation.

I didn't notice, but were motorcycles in the samples release? Quads are fun but I sure miss my two wheel civs :D

Your welcome! :) The Xonar cards are great cards but just because it can do 192k doesn't mean you should do it. Sound samples in most games are usually 24bit/44.1KHz *at best*! Often, for sounds that don't need the higher fidelity they can actually be much lower quality. Forcing the hardware to try and sample at a higher rate will do *nothing* to improve the sound quality and may cause buffer lag as a sound sample is repeated very quickly (like MGs, etc.) and even over all system lag as the CPU, GPU and sound chip all try to stay synced to the same thing. Now you *might* try and turn up the number of simultaneous samples used in the game under audio settings for a fun tweak. I run mine maxed out at 128 (M-Audio Delta 44 sound card) and it's great!

No, your mod is *fine*. :) There is realistically nothing you could do to change these factors anyway, and no good reason to do so even if you wanted to. *MY* recommendations for any sound card/chip is to go into your window's sound settings and: 2 Channel 44.1 KHz Dolby garbage off. DSPs off. On the Xonar cards in particular turning on Hi-Fi DSP supposedly disabled all other DSPs, so you can use that if you want. If your using the headphones, leave it on headphones. If your using the SPDIF out or the RCA Line Outs, it's probably best to put it on "2 Speaker". (I don't see a reason to have the onboard headphone amp on if your not using it.)

Have you considered lowering the sample rate on the hardware to something realistic for gaming, like 44100 Hz? No game made to date yet (as far as I know) is designed to take advantage of such high sample rates in hardware.

I like that MUCH better!

In my opinion the first second of the blast should coincide with the radius that damage is taken. If someone can take damage from 15m away from the center of the blast then the dust/smoke/shrapnel "cloud" should almost instantly encompass this distance as well. After that it could rise slowly and/or spread further outwards with momentum.

And even in that video example what I said remains true. The force of the explosion is in part directed by the physical constraints around it. Ground is harder than air so the force of the blast moves up, more or less. If you bury a charge in the ground, like in that video clip, you get a form of directed blast, the deeper the hole the more directed (straight up) it will be. i.e. the shape of the dust/smoke/blast cone isn't so much reliant on the size of the explosive as it is on what is found around it when it detonates. Of course that is relative to the size of the charge. If you bury a small charge one foot in the ground it will be directed much more than a charge 10x it's size at the same depth. I personally prefer a blast "cloud" that coincides with the damage radius. http://usoonpatrol.org/assets/mc/legacy/blog/originals/2010/03/hurt-locker.jpg (2958 kB)

It's a matter of finding what houses are enterable or not. TPW used an expanded list of house definitions in his ambient civ script that is compatible with Altis and Stratis and many A2 maps as well. See spoiler: This list may not be 100% comprehensive but it's a pretty good start. If you think a building is missing you could create a short script like "checkhouse.sqf" and call it from an addaction: house = nearestBuilding player; m=0; while { format ["%1", (house) buildingPos m] != "[0,0,0]" } do {m=m+1}; m=m-1; player globalchat format["%1 \npositions: %2", typeof house, m+1]; sleep 2; copytoclipboard str([typeof house, m+1]); Find a house you don't think is on that list, enter it (making sure it's enterable!), run the addaction and this script will hint you the house class name as well as paste it to the clipboard.

Nice to see you release! Downloading for a try now :) Does this system still include drag/carry? This I think should be optional? Or with a slight chance of instant death? "Never" is too definite. Things like large explosions should *definitely* kill a unit, in fact I'm looking at a way to instantly remove a corpse in the case of large IED explosions, suicide bombers, etc.

I like how the second smoke seems to be more chaotic in appearance and has a better size ratio between horizontal and vertical. The first one looks ok but seems more vertical, like a geyser of smoke, or as if the IED had detonated in the bottom of a deep hole in the ground.

For the first part try what I did here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?166602-Virtual-Vehicle-Spawner-(VVS)&p=2633050&viewfull=1#post2633050 For the second it should be as simple as including a _counter with an if/else before the body of the script runs. You could even use different counters for different vehicle types.

Interesting work! Thanks for sharing. :)

Heh! Try and take a HEMTT convoy over that road! I'm working on a fairly elaborate mission for A3/Clafghan but I haven't felt it was up to snuff to release it yet. If you want a go on it sometime drop me a PM. I've got IEDs and roadside ambushes of insurgents up those hills too so you really need a car running point with a VERY good spotter on the gun. I'm working on a fairly elaborate mission for A3/Clafghan but I haven't felt it was up to snuff to release it yet. If you want a go on it sometime drop me a PM. :)

Yup. I'm excited to see the ALiVE civ module be released too. I discovered I could reduce the amount of time for ALiVE to initialize by *not* hand placing any more units than necessary. I'm still not sure why it creates "lag" on mission start up but if you need to place them I would suggest using ALIVE_spawnProfileGroup rather than manually placing them and syncing them to the profile manager (which should achieve the same results). Further experiments with MP/MCPs, the TAORs they utilize and how many actual objectives are contained in a single TAOR can also improve initialization time. As an example in my mission I have an ALiVE force count of around 2400 AI with a profile count of around 360 profiles (between both blufor and opfor), a high rate of CQB, around a dozen custom priority objectives (until they release the re-indexing of my beloved Clafghan), and EOS handles another 1200 AI spread over about 40 area markers. My mission intro is around 60 seconds long and everything is initialized by the time the player puts boots on the ground.

I'm actually working on a similarly complex mission as yours and have ran into some of the same issues. The CQB module has always *seemed* a bit slow to react to player's presence. Teleporting in to test it as the mission designer can sometimes require minutes (not seconds) before all the CQB spawns are active so it requires some very careful fine tuning to get working adequately in regards to spawn distance (since players won't be teleporting). As for ALiVE breaking your own civilian spawn script I didn't think the profile manager picked up on units created after mission start time. If it's the case that it does I think I would try to figure out how to tune my mission with the ALiVE profile manager set to "Profile only synced units". FWIW I've used both CAF_AG and Drongo69's Irregulars and have had both opfor and civilian units on the same CQB faction line. Works fine, outside of the aforementioned problem. In a nutshell I believe that ALiVE's CQB deals with some relatively intensive processing and I'm not sure I'd be so quick to blame your own scripts, incompatibility, etc. It's one of the reasons my mission makes extensive use of BangaBob's EOS script working in tandem with ALiVE placements now... in part as a placeholder until ALiVE releases it's own civilian solution. The added benefit is that civilians *will* use vehicles with EOS, albeit it does nothing to improve their driving ability ;)

I *think* "verticle_ponds.pbo" is an attempted work around that the map makers used to get ponds ABOVE the level of the sea. By removing it you will be removing this water, but mind you it's only water found at a certain elevation, hence why the "water line" bug shows up at a certain elevation. It will not affect the rivers, etc. Rather than delete it just move it out of the "addons" folder so you can experiment. And yes, Clafghan is my #1 favorite map :)

Still baffled by this one. I'm trying to script together a set of tasks that require placement in the *wilderness*, to be defined as any random location not in the water and a _mindist minimum distance from any buildings or roads. It's the roads part I'm struggling with. I've looked at the shk_pos thread for a solution (and posted there) but it still eludes me. Something like selectBestPlaces will use "houses" as a calculation modifier but I can't seem to find anything similar with road segments? I can use the center of the map (preferable) or any sort of whitelist/blacklist marker arrangement... The real challenge seems to not only to find the roads, then find a spot a _mindist away from any of them, but also to do it efficiently so it doesn't grind the whole mission down while it tries to find such a location. I could use a predefined array of such locations I find myself but would really like a truly random system for replayability, etc. Currently I'm considering using quite large marker areas that I know do not have any buildings or roads but I think this is a stop gap measure as eventually, as my mission evolves, I'd also like to be able to make the wilderness position oriented from a particular location (task complete, village center, building, etc.) as well. Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Thanks Grumpy. I'll have to revisit those again. If I was to try and rephrase my desired outcome it would be to pick a village/cluster of buildings (already have markers for such for other purposes that might be re-used) and then find a random location between 500-1500m away from that markers center that does not contain any buildings or roads, and does not have any roads or buildings closer than 500m. Still trying to wrap my head around the fastest way to do this: If I use selectBestPlaces to detect for buildings in a 500m radius is there a way to stop the search after it finds one building (and then either adjust marker position away from building or pick a new location entirely) rather than wait for it to find any and all buildings?

I think he means like ALiVE system has a "maximum number of profiles" that controls how many can be spawned into game at any one time. This way if you have it on a dedicated server with 40 players, for instance, and the players are moving all over different parts of the map, it keeps the maximum number of AI down to a reasonable number. Else you might have 40 players x 10 man insurgent squads = 400 AI on the map all at the same time. If you set "maximum number" (groups or individual units or whatever) down to say 100 units then 40 players x 10 man insurgent squads = 400 100 max. I'm assuming this module is dedi compatible?

Alduric, it sounds like the PlayWithSix guys are waiting for your uploads ;) https://withsix.wetransfer.com/