count_roland

fabrizio: It appears to work, at least with the addition of a ) before then to close the if statement. Tested with M16 on foot, AH6J's M134, AH64's M230, and M1A1's M2 and M240.

I can second that - vehicle guns suppress very well now. Heh. 'Littlebird' plays much differently with that change.

I think the problem is in line 167 of bdetect073.sqf: && ( assignedVehicleRole _unit) select 0 == "Turret" ) then { ...but I don't know enough about turrets and vehicle roles to suggest a fix.

Ah, you're going to hate me, but...3.03's broken. I think it's bdetect, though. Some vehicle guns are incapable of suppressing fire - namely, any guns that do not fire from turrets, anything operated directly by a pilot. Thus, for instance, the AH-64's M230 suppresses just fine, the UH-60's M134s suppress just fine, but the AH-6J's M134s do not and the A-10's GAU8 does not. If it's any consolation, the change in post 770 appears to work perfectly.

My original thought was just a fixed percent chance of suppression per bullet, no formula required. (The formula I gave was just the statistical odds of the occurrence of at least one event of a given probability in a given number of repeated independent trials.) But yes, I don't think random is as random as they say, though I found it out from the other direction. Using the snippet I posted earlier, with a 15% chance per round, the average was a little over 5, but the right tail of the distribution had way too many extreme outliers (meaning enemybulletcount > 20, which was at least 3 standard deviations from mean) to be normal. Not sure what to do. Ollem's solution is by far the simplest, if there's no reason why enemybulletcount needs to reflect the actual number of bullets.

Toying around further, I don't think the p(suppress) system as given will do. A 15% chance of suppression seems to pan out to suppression after an average of a little over six shots, but the average is skewed by some very high shot counts (a couple that were well over twenty!) - throwing out the outliers, it's more like four. That seems to make soldiers a bit too sensitive, but dropping the suppression chance makes another problem much worse: it looks ridiculous when one of the outliers stands there tempting fate long after all his friends have decided that discretion is the better part of valor. Two possible solutions stand out: probability tiers, e.g. 5% for <5 shots, 15% for 5-10 shots, 50% for >10 shots, and bookending, e.g. no suppression before (say) three shots, guaranteed suppression after ten.

I wouldn't say it's illogical for enemies not to hit the deck at 25m - at that range, you're really better off just opening fire where you are, because in the second or two it's going to take to get on the ground, your opponent is going to get off several free shots, at a range where they're unlikely to miss. I would, however, think that close-range fire should affect skills. I know if someone shot at me from 25m, I'd be too busy soiling myself to worry about proper sight picture and trigger discipline as I tried to return fire.

Looking at tpwcas_supstate.sqf, it might actually simplify things a little. No need to count bullets - just check against a random number whenever an enemy bullet passes, and if the check fails, set tpwcas_supstate to 3 the same as it's done now, and game on. Line 41 is the suppress/no suppress decision, correct? If I'm reading right, changing line 41 to something like if ((random 1) < 0.15) then //brown trousers would do the trick. (0.15 being the chance of suppression; any number, of course, would do.) edited to add: ah, not quite - I see it's assigning tpwcas_supstate anew each round, which means that if only line 41 is changed, they'll only flicker into tpwcas_supstate 3, not stay in it. But what if lines 24-44 (give or take) were replaced by the aforementioned, then the rest of the 41-44 if block? edited again to add: Appears to be working. I commented out line 24, then lines 36-44, then below that, inserted: if ((random 1) < 0.15) then { //0.15 = chance of being suppressed each shot _unit setvariable ["tpwcas_supstate",3]; } else { if ((_unit getvariable "tpwcas_supstate") != 3) then { //because if we're already suppressed, we should stay that way until it's safe if (_enemybulletcount > 0) then { _unit setvariable ["tpwcas_supstate",2]; } else { _unit setvariable ["tpwcas_supstate",1]; }; }; }; Testing with a pair of opposed riflemen and text debugging suggests that it's working. Fire away next to the poor chap's head, and he'll take a knee, and the numbers beneath him will turn yellow and increment with (mostly) each shot (which appears to be a bullet speed issue - removing the mp5 ammo from the prohibited list and using that works unfailingly), and at some random point, they'll turn red and the soldier will promptly hit the deck. Wait several seconds, and the numbers will reset to a white zero, and the soldier will stand up and wait for the next round of experiments. Anyway, just a thought and a thank-you for an indispensable mod.

Idle question, and possibly one that's already been answered: instead of soldiers going prone after x nearby shots, might it be better to handle suppression probabilistically? I wot not how much overhead that would introduce, but it would make the behavior that much more realistic. If I remember right, the formula for 'at least one success in n trials' is 1-(fn), where f is the probability of failure. Thus, a 25% chance of suppression per round would mean a 76% chance after 5 rounds and a 94% chance of suppression after 10 rounds; a 15% chance per round would mean a 55% chance after 5 rounds and an 80% chance after 10 rounds; so on and so forth.

Possible bug in 1.01: The readme says it doesn't suppress units in vehicles in modes 2 and 3, but I don't think it's working to suppress units fired at from vehicles in any mode. With debug mode active, setting up an AI squad and shooting at them from a vehicle doesn't make the suppression indicators appear, and the units behave, as best I can tell, normally. I first noticed it when strafing with an AH-6J, but I've tested it with HMMWV M2s and M1A1s and the behavior (or lack thereof) is consistent. No suppressive effects from vehicle guns; hop out of the vehicle and fire a few shots over their heads, however, and everything works as expected: indicators appear and the units hit the deck. This is, as I said, true of all modes. ...but otherwise, this is the way the game should've worked from the beginning. Excellent job.