meatball

Wondering if anyone has run into an issue with empty vehicles? I'm using militarize with simplecache, as well as ambient combat on it's own. I'm wondering simplecache is caching vehicles/crews but the crew isn't getting back into the vehicle on respawn.

Has anyone run into a problem where occasionally a player that goes unconscious and is revived by another player gets removed from the group and can no longer revive/be revived? It only happens on rare occasions, so I'm not sure what is causing it.

I'm working to improve the performance of one of my missions on a 'Dedicated' server I'm using occasionally to play / test with friends. Finding we're all having FPS issues, often times dropping down to the 10's/single digits which leads me to believe it's the server itself. I know my mission are pretty hefty and there's a lot going on, but was hoping someone could help me pick apart my .rpt file and see if I can clean up some issues before I attempt to rip the mission apart and add in Headless Client support. Here's some of the background info. Dedicated Server Specs: ASRock H77M Mobo, Core i5-3570K CPU (3.4-3.8GhzTurbo), 16 GB RAM, A3/Server Software installed on a RAID 5 HD Spindle Drive (Read speeds ~ 198 MB/s). Using the latest Dedicated Server software (updated to the Steam ID 233780 package) with Tophe's Server Tool. Have 50 MB Down/5 MB Up Internet service. Never have more than 8-10 people on the server. With my main mission (Altis Force Recon: West) I am using a caching script to cache the bulk of the AI running around, but there's still usually 100+ AI. I decided to run a test with some debug info and ran through about 45 minutes of a mission on my own. Tons of random errors about items missing, not found or empty, but I'm not 100% sure what to do about any of it or any of them are having any impact. Here's the .rpt file if anyone wants to poke through it. Any suggestions/info would be much appreciated!

Yes, tried with both -cpuCount=4 and -exThreads=7 Update: Looks like it might have been the combination of having both those params set. Using just -cpuCount=4 seems to spread the workload over all 4 cores.

Yeah, I pulled my original info using Resource Monitor/CPU. Total CPU usuage bounces around 29-35%, Core 0 hovers right around 90-100% and the 3 other cores (1-3) hover below 5-10%.

Can you explain what you mean by 'locked' cores? Only the first core is pegged at 100%, and I assume that's b/c Arma doesn't multithread.

Dwarden and others...is there _any way_ to force a server to multithread? I'm having lag/FPS issues on a small dedicated server (i5-3570K CPU w/16 GB Ram) even with the new dedicated server package. Even with -cpuCount=4, -exThreads=7 and -maxMem=8192 parameters set, the executable takes up 100% of Core0 on a 4 core CPU while Cores1-3 sit at 5-10% and performance in mission is awful.

Well, I've figured out the root cause is the CPU. Even with server flags set to -cpuCount=4 and -exThreads=7 on the i5-3570K, Core 0 on the CPU is pegged at 100% while the other 3 CPU's hover around 5-10%. I may have to investigate using a Headless Client unless someone else knows of any other way to force the other cores to pick up some of the workload.

Another thought I had, I have a _lot_ of triggers that are checking for various things. I know triggers check a bunch of times each second, but most of mine don't need to check that often. There any way to maybe lower the frequency of trigger checks? Maybe dropping most of them down to only check each second or two would ease things up as well. ---------- Post added at 18:33 ---------- Previous post was at 18:31 ---------- 99% of my AI are created using the AI Spawn Script pack by spunFin, mainly with the Ambient Combat/Militarize scripts. I'm using spunFin's simpleCache script that comes in the pack to cache all the militarize units until the players are within 1250m of the target location.Also have it set so Ambient combat will not run and will stop anytime any of the militarize units are alive. To make sure dead units aren't an issue, I'm also running Aeroson's repetitiveCleanup script that nukes dead bodies/vehicles etc within 10-20 minutes.

Question on a related topic. There an easy way to count all alive AI in a game, regardless of what group they are in?

Civilian driven vehicles please :)

Thanks! If you really want the other weapons and such, just pull apart the pbo file and edit the config.sqf in the VAS folder. You can add/remove whatever weapons and gear you'd like.

Love the script zealot, any chance we'll see it be able to see repair of vehicles spawned after mission start at some point?

Where do we get this special performance server binary, or is it just the default arma3server.exe that gets installed with the 1.08 patch?

Correct, I've pulled just about all of the non-NATO gear out of the VAS boxes to simulate what the Force Recon team would actually have access to prior to mission start.

v 0.8 Released! Changelog - New starting location of "Central Altis" available for an inland drop. Be warned that choosing this starting location (from the flagpoles) is a ONE WAY TRIP and you cannot return the island starting locations once you are dropped inland. - Added in win conditions if someone completes all the tasks. - Added in new random events that occur during the mission. - Updated to VAS 2.2 and tweaked the VAS box contents. - Continued work to tweak AI balance and server FPS issues. - Various task and mission fixes and tweaks. Known Issues - Mission still not fully tested in MP/Dedicated and some tasks may not work as intended. Please let me know if you find any problems! See initial post for download link.

Alright, maybe I'm confused. I thought the point of having the 'Standalone Dedicated Server' package was to allow us to setup/run a dedicated server on another box without Steam running. I just downloaded the server software through tools in Steam, went to start it up and it immediately asked me to login into Steam. Am I doing something wrong, or is that a requirement to run the Server? Edit: Alright, looks like I was doing something wrong. You can still run the .exe without logging in, but the shortcut created on the desktop requires a login to Steam and then opens up a text file telling you to run the .exe :)

Have an interesting challenge I'm trying to work out for a mission. I'm currently using an AI script that will spawn and despawn AI groups based on the location of the players. Those AI groups always have the group name "LVgroup##" where the ## will be an ID number. Is there a simple way for me to set up a trigger to check to see if there are _any_ groups currently alive that have "LVgroup" as the first part of their name? I'd like to have one trigger that will fire when there are no "LVgroup" groups currently spawned, and another trigger that fires as soon as 1 "LVgroup" has spawned.

Thanks for all the help/feedback. I think I hit upon something that works last night and is pretty easy. Since the militarize scripts allow me to set custom init fields for the units I simply added a "miliTroops = group this;" to the custom init field in the militarize call which adds every unit that is spawned (or respawned) to that group. I then simply set up two triggers, one watching for alive units in that group == 0 that spawns the ambient combat and another watching for alive units in that group >= 1 that despawns ambient combat. ({alive _x} count (units miliTroops)) == 0; // Condition for trigger that spawns ambient combat. ({alive _x} count (units miliTroops)) >= 1; // Condition for trigger that despawns ambient combat. Seems to work great. As soon as the players get near a zone that was cached and the cache script respawns those militarize units, the trigger sees it and kills off the ambient combat and when the players leave the area or kill off all the enemy AI that were respawned, the other trigger sees it and starts ambient combat back up.

Yeah, the other thing I was thinking was digging into the simplecache script and every time it spawns a group, increment a variable by 1 and every time it despawns a group, decrease a variable by 1. Then I can trigger against that variable being 0 or 1 to spawn/despawn ambient combat respectively.

Yeah, I don't think that will work just b/c there's multiple objectives and it's impossible to tell just what objective a player might be near. I really think the best way to handle is to do a check on whether or not at least one of those "LVgroups" is alive or !isnil or something to that effect, I'm just not sure how to check against part of a group name or a groupname but use wildcards. If it was possible to do something like (count (units LVgroup**)) == 0) in a condition, where the ** were wildcards that would work I would think.

Here's the Script Pack's Armaholic page. They're some hefty scripts with a lot of embedded functions. The one script probably would just lead you to want to see the others :)

Maybe I should clarify a bit more. I'm currently using spunFin's AI Spawn Script pack, and three of his scripts there. I'm using 'militarize' to spawn defenders around certain objectives and 'simpleCache' to cache those militarize groups since there's a lot of objectives/groups. Each group is named "LVgroup##" where the ## is an ID number I can set in each militarize call. Then using simpleCache it will de-spawn/re-spawn those militarize groups based on how close the players are to the objectives. This all works fine. Additionally, I'm using his 'ambientcombat' script which will spawn a certain number of 'ambient' enemy groups around the players location at all times. This let's me give the players the feeling like there's patrols in most areas. Sometimes they'll run into the ambient groups, sometimes they don't since I have ambient groups ranging out to over 1000m from the players. You can create markers and force the ambient combat groups to avoid certain areas, but I don't believe they actually despawn, they just range outside the 'avoid' marker area. You can also run a script to remove the ambient combat. The problem occurs when players hit a major objective that has a good sized 'militarize' group there. The cache script will respawn that militarize group based there and between those AI, and the ambient AI that are floating around for ambientcombat, server FPS just tanks to the 10-15 FPS range and it almost becomes unplayable. What I'd like to do is figure out a way that once I start running ambientcombat a trigger will watch for anytime the players get near an objective that has one of the militarize groups, (which I should be able to tell because the cache script will respawn that militarize group and there will now be groups in game named "LVgroup##"). When that trigger fires, it will run the script to remove the ambient combat. And then once the players clear the area (killing all the AI in that group) or move outside of the area (and the cache script de-spawns that militarize group), I can call the ambientcombat script again.

One thing I've noticed in the briefing is if you have any tasks with longer names they get chopped off because the tasks window is too narrow. There any way to adjust the size of that window so you can see the whole name of each task?

I've been trying to figure out the damage power of the explosive charge and the satchel and not getting very far and just leading me to more questions. 1) I can't seem to see much of a difference in the power of satchels vs. charges. For example the wind turbines on Altis take 3-4 satchels or charges to come down. 2) Does anyone know if placement of the explosives has any bearing on what it does to an object? 3) Does anyone know if there's any type of force multiplier for multiple charges at once vs. single charges multiple times? As in, if you blow up two at once, will it deliver the same as one by itself, and then another one by itself? 4) Damage has definitely been dropped on them or object damage soaking has gone up. You used to be able to knock down radio towers with 1-2 charges, now they take 3-5.