meatball

Man, I'm banging my head on the wall with this one. I've searched all over and found 20 threads with people asking almost the same thing I'm asking for, but not exactly and I can't get it to work. Basically I need to do two things. First, put all players in a mission into the same group so I can call out the group name for scripts when I'm not 100% sure that all the player ID's will actually be in the game. I believe I've accomplished this by putting the following in every playable unit's init field, "this setGroupID ["demoteam"]" Next, I need a trigger to fire when a player from that group steps into it (or drives a vehicle into it), but not when other AI from the same team or players from other groups step into it. I've tried everything from thislist to count group and I can't for the life of me get it to work. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I've spent the last hour digging through posts to no avail. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Ah, I figured out another way to get basically the same effect and it works in a lot of cases where other setups weren't. ({_x in thisList} count [(vehicle man1),(vehicle man2),(vehicle man3),(vehicle man4),(vehicle man5),(vehicle man6)]) > 0 This appears to work regardless of whether the player is on foot, or in a vehicle and can be placed in a trigger condition. Only took me 6 hours of banging my head on the keyboard. :p

Hey Nomadd, if you're still about, I forgot I asked this as well. Can you clarify how the delay works?

Not sure how that'd work, but I'll give it a go. I'm using the militarize and ambient combat scripts from the AI spawn script pack. I've got certain areas I want to militarize when players get close to them, but I don't want to militarize when AI blufor that's roaming around due to ambient combat get close to them. ---------- Post added at 21:00 ---------- Previous post was at 20:35 ---------- Condition "playername in thislist;" works fine. Condition "playername in thislist or playername2 in thislist;" does not. :confused:

Sweet, I'll give that a shot. I do have a group defined for all the players, but some of the scripts I'm using was choking on them, so I created a cheese group by putting "this = playedPlayers" in the initialization string of all the playable units. This way no matter which units get played I can always use playedPlayers to point scripts at the players (or at least the last player that initialized.) Thanks!

I seem to be having an issue with getting the script to run as well. Want to set up a group of enemies that will spawn based on a trigger and hunt the players. Once that enemy is wiped out, another one starts hunting. I've copied the SLP folder into my mission folder and added "execVM "SLP\SLP_init.sqf"; to my init.sqf. I've left the SLP_init.sqf in it's default state (tried tweaking it a bit to make things work, but just went back to the base till I can figure this out). I placed 2 Rifleman units on the map (BluFor & OpFor) with 0% probability and I have a trigger on the map that is set to fire once on entry by the players with the following "On ACT:" hunters = ["huntspawn",[0,0,true],[huntSpawn1],[2,6],[1,2],[1,1],[1,1,"plane"],["hunt",playedPlayers]] spawn SLP_spawn; Unless I'm formatting this wrong, I thought this would spawn 2 groups of 6 infantry, 1 group of 2 vehicles, 1 group of 1 armored and 1 group of one heli (all Opfor) at the "huntSpawn1" marker and the groups would then go hunt the players (groupname playedPlayers). On mission load and in the briefing I get a "... (paramsarray |#| select 1) ; _Infgrp_size..." Error Zero divisor error pointing at Line 28 in the SLP_init.sqf. I can continue past, but on the firing of the trigger I get a ''Error 0 element provided, 3 expected' error on lines 43, 125 and a "Error Type Any, expected String" error on line 235 in SLP_fnc_spawn.sqf. I've looked through the demo mission (which seems to work fine) and I can't really find anywhere that I've got anything different than what's in there. One other quick question on the delay variable. I assume if I leave this empty or put a seconds value in there, the code would just keep churning out new units. But setting the value to True means "All the units must be killed for a new group to spawn." Is that all the units in each individual group, or all the groups spawned together? So if those 5 groups spawn in my above example and the armored group is destroyed, does the code immediately spawn a new armored unit, or does it wait till all the infantry, vehicles and aircraft are destroyed as well?

Ah, perfect, seems like it's working fine in my tests. Thanks!

Can you expand on this a bit? In my case, I want to do the same thing. If all players are unconscious I want the mission to end. Since I'm not positive if every player slot is filled, I need to check if that player is in game or unconscious. I tried a trigger with the following in the Condition. ((!alive player1) or (player1 getVariable "BTC_need_revive" == "1")) and ((!alive player2) or (player2 getVariable "BTC_need_revive" == "1")) and and ((!alive player3) or (player3 getVariable "BTC_need_revive" == "1")); Doesn't seem to work, but I'm new to scripting, so I'm sure it's me.

Let me explain what I'm trying to do and what I've tried and hopefully someone can help me out here. I'm creating a mission (and still learning what the heck I'm doing) where the players need to run around and destroy some buildings. I'd like to keep a running tally of the buildings that are destroyed and present the number destroyed with hints and then when they get to a certain number of destroyed buildings, it fires off a trigger. So for example, let's say the missions need the players destroy both lighthouses on the island and once they get both, they'll finish the mission. I know I need to set a global variable "lighthousedest = 0;" somewhere as the mission initializes, but I'm not sure where. I tried putting it in init.sqf, but I think this might reset it to 0 any any JIP connections. Second, I tried to set a trigger with a bounding box on the lighthouses object, grouped the trigger to the lighthouse ID so it's activated on "Static Object" with the "Not Present" condition. Then I put "lighthousedest = lighthousedest + 1;hint format ["Lighthouses Destroyed: %1",lighthousedest];" in the On Act in the hope it would increment the total count from 0 to 1 on the first lighthouse going down and 1 - 2 on the 2nd. I also set a hint on my player init so I can check the lighthousedest value. Finally, I added an End #1 trigger with the condition "lighthousedest = 2;". There's more to it than that, but that's the basics. Problem I'm finding is that when I connect, the hint is popping up telling me 3 lighthouses are destroyed, and if I blow up the other lighthouses, I see the hint popup, but the variable isn't incrementing. I dug around to try to find more info on global type variables and incrementing, but got lost in public, local and special variables. :) Anyone have any thoughts?

Have dived into mission making and basic scripting in Arma 3 and having a blast, but have come up with a few questions and was hoping someone could assist. 1) How does one sec the mission picture that shows up when you are in the "Create Game" screen? 2) I'm using the Create Diary Record modules for Diary Entries in the briefing. Is there any way to add Carriage returns in the Description field? 3) I've created a bunch of Create Tasks/Update Task Status modules that are applied to "Groups of synchronized object" and then linked them to the player team lead. In a MP coop mission, if noone chooses the team lead, noone sees the tasks. Anyway around that? Or if not, is there any way to force it so someone has to pick the Team Lead Playable char slot? 4) Occasionally individuals from Opfor groups I've set up will run away when the group is down to one or two left. Any way to stop that? 5) I've got some Opfor vehicles set to come in from another location based on triggers. I set a move waypoint really close to the starting location and then another where I want them to move to after a trigger. I've linked the trigger to the first close waypoint and it all works fine, but I'd like the vehicles to shut down their engine and not waste the gas idling. On that first waypoint I set the "ON ACT" to veh1 engineon off; but they move up to that close move waypoint right away, but never shut the engines off. Any ideas? 6) Is there any way to turn off autogrouping of units/items in the editor by default? For the one or two times it's actually useful, there's 98 times I have to take an extra step to ungroup things. Thanks in advance and sorry if these are answered elsewhere. My quick searches couldn't turn up anything specific.

Random question. Is there any way to get a dump or search through the all the Names/Object ID's on Stratis? For example, if someone wanted to find where every transmitter tower, or solar transformer, or whatever is on the entire map, there a simple way to do that?

Working up a mission that starts off with the team on board an AI speedboat which has waypoints to move to shore and do a "Transport Unload". Everything works fine, the boat comes up to shore, gets close and everyone gets booted out of the boat. Problem is, the boat never leaves. It has another waypoint to move out to sea after the Transport unload, but that never seems to fire and I can't figure out what the deal is. Any thoughts?

Alright, I figured this out, basically what's happening is the AI pathing for the boat isn't smart enough to actually back up off the shore before trying to make the turn and heading back out to see at the next waypoint, so it sits there, stuck. I was able to figure out a way around that, but it's a giant kludge to say the least. In my example, I have a bunch of AI troops that I'm loading into a boat that I've named 'boat1'. First thing to do is to use both a 'movincargo' and 'assignascargo' for any units you want to start in the boat. In the initialization field for each of those units, put the following, "this moveincargo boat1;this assignascargo boat1;" Apparently if you don't use 'assignascargo' in addition to the 'moveincargo' the AI in the boat/troops does not actually recognize the units are actually on board and need to get out at the 'transport unload' waypoint. Next, set up your move waypoints to get towards shore and put a Transport Unload waypoint near the shore and then a move waypoint back out at sea for the boat to take off after unloading to. You need to be careful with two things on the Transport Unload waypoint though. First, make sure the boat is coming in slow with 'Limited' speed for the Transport Unload waypoint so it doesn't ground itself too far up on the shore. Second, try to have the boat come in as perpendicular to the shore as possible so it can be pushed directly backwards in the next step without crashing into anything. Finally, set the Timeout of the Transport Unload waypoint to 5 for Min/Mid/Max, and in the "ON ACT" field put "boat1 setVelocity [15,0,0];" This will give the units 5 seconds after the boat unloads to get out of the way and then shoves the boat back off shore directly backwards the direction it came in. Now free of the shore and with no passengers, the boat will move on to the waypoint you set out at sea. (If you want to see something funny, set the velocity to [100,0,0] or better yet [-100,0,0] :)) Looks kinda cheesy to be honest, but it works. You may need to experiment with the direction/angles of your waypoints coming into shore and setVelocity value depending on the formation of the coast the boat will be unloading on. Not pretty, but it's the only way I could figure out how to make it work. Edit: One other quick comment. You may want to set the boat's Vehicle Lock to "Locked" so the players can't take over the helm or any of the other spots. Edit 2: I figured something out just recently that set velocity may not actually work for you depending on the cost, the setVelocity takes [x, y, z] coordinates. x will be East/West, y will be North/South and z will be up down. So if you're coming in to a coast with the bow of the boat facing due south, you're going to want your setVelocity to be [0,10,0], if it's facing north, it'd be [0,-10,0], facing east, [10,0,0], west, [-10,0,0]. I'm sure there's a way to calculate that based on the direction of the boat, just a matter of experimenting and figuring it out.

Awesome! Thanks again for all the hard work. The mission is a lot of fun! Appreciate the responses too, looking forward to new versions! Yeah, I can imagine. Check <a href="http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=21243">this tool out</a>, might do all the hard work for you... Totally understood, but I expect most people going in Coop mode are going to go independent and team up so they can fight against Blufor/Opfor. It's not a big deal either way, setting up a squad takes next to no time. :)

So, can someone point me to some basic tutorials, etc., on how to dynamically spawn AI units/groups? I know there's some mods/scripts out there, but none of them appear to be updated for Beta, and most of the tutorials I've been finding are pointing to modules that don't appear to be in the Beta editor. Now that I've got my hands dirty, I want to try building something with a bit more randomness and dynamic spawns as opposed to static stuff I'm placing with waypoints linked to triggers.

Got a chance to play with a few friends tonight for about an hour. Had fun for sure! Great upgrade and a lot more fun, thanks! Couple of comments from our first playthrough. 1) The point scrolling looks great with the Opfor/Blufor/Guerilla scores, but any way to make the BG behind it a bit more opaque so they stand out a bit more? 2) I was playing the game in a window and it chopped off the bottom half of the money I had in the bottom right hand corner for some reason. Seems alright in full screen though, so it might be my window. Any chance you can bump it up a bit higher in the corner and maybe make it stand out a bit more too. You could just add it to the score ticker in the top right, 3 scores, your money, repeat... 3) On load and when vehicles and stuff were spawning, there was some config.bin error popups that I think were just related to changes in object/class names in Beta. There's a great tool over in Armaholic someone put together to update missions from Alpha to Beta that might fix any of those errors. 4) Spawning is just wonky. When you die, you might be able to spawn in 5 seconds, other times it's 60, but I'm not sure what's the trigger between the two. Also, sometimes I try to spawn on a teammate, and it'll countdown 3 or 4 seconds and then reset like I haven't tried to respawn yet and I have to do it again. 5) Speaking of respawns, any chance teams can respawn at the flagpole of any points they own? 6) This might be a bug in general with Arma, b/c I think I've seen it elsewhere, but some people seem to have trouble pulling weapons out of the back of trucks or off corpses and dragging/adding to their inventory. Yet, they can drag it and drop it to the ground and then pick it up. 7) Doesn't seem to be any randomness to where people spawn. If I pick the same medic slot, I always spawn in the same location. Might be more interesting to have it be randomized if it's not a ton of codework to deal with. 8) Usually when I'm going in with friends we play Independant, but squad up immediately. Maybe maybe one or two squads in Independent as well as solo slots so people can just start in the same squad if they want. 9) AI sort of seems to capture spots? We played for about an hour, ran around and grabbed up three of the spots pretty easily and OpFor/BluFor never tried to grab them back even though they had people all over the place near some of them. (We got trapped in the Marina for about 30 minutes, surrounding by both sides and had a blast!) Blufor did grab one point, but I think it had to do with one of the side missions forcing them to do it. 10) Speaking of captures, someone could total cheese, set the AI to spawn in 10 minutes and then go with a few friends and grab every point b/f the AI even spawns getting a pretty big leg up. Maybe no matter what people set for delay, as soon as the first flag is capped, AI spawns regardless? 11) Side missions - To be honest, we haven't really done many of them since we're too busy defending ourselves. :) But it seems like they're a lot of "Team is capturing, go wipe them out!" That's fine, but when we're already surrounded by 20 or 30 or that team, it doesn't seem like a priority. Also, what if players are on that team? That mission really wouldn't be something they wanted to do. Might make sense to make the side missions something that all teams would want to go get because they have a big reward, ($1000?) and it's a generic thing that everyone would want. Things like there's a random supply drop, first team to get it wins the side mission or there's a High value target at a random location and the first team kill them wins the side mission. All in all, we had a lot of fun and can't wait to play some more. Thanks again for all the hard work!

Woot! Busy the next couple of days, but can't wait to try it out!

Thanks for all the help/feedback, great stuff! One other quick question. Occasionally next to a waypoint I'll see a red square and that waypoint becomes a pain to deal with (can't click/drag it). This a bug, or anyone know what it is?

Thanks! Appreciate the help.

Hey Norrin, any chance you'll be updating the revive script for Beta? Trying to load the demo mission or merging the mission in the new Beta editor kicks out a "You cannot play/edit this mission; it is dependent on downloadable content that has been deleted." error.

Ah...my bad, thanks for the redirect and update to the heading! :)

Sorry, thought I was in the right section. I'm still using Alpha, thought Beta wasn't out till tomorrow though Steam.

Happy to help. Actually spent a good chunk of the day myself finally jumping in and getting my hands dirty with the Editor. Really just doing basic stuff like placing units, triggers, waypoints, and just a smidge with modules, but I'm having fun. I'll get to scripting eventually and maybe be able to help you out. :)

Ah...I see. Gotta be a way to do it without worrying about AI trying to capture bases and the only way I can think of is you really have 2 win/lose conditions. First would be if any team gets to X 'points', whether points are the dollars the players get or some sort of points/resources that build up for the team as they hold points (holding more points generates your points faster). The second piece that could make it work is that a team automatically loses (can no longer spawn maybe?) if they go below a certain threshold of some value. Maybe so many deaths, loss of points or something. That would require penalties to teams to be doled out on player deaths, loss of bases, etc., though. Another option is you could just create say 3 bases, one for each team, that they start off as 'holding' at the start of the game. Then toss in 3 or 4 other bases that are unowned and can be captured by anyone. All the bases generate a certain amount of points over time and the first team to a certain amount of points (settable as an option?), wins. If any team no longer holds any bases they can no longer spawn and 'lose' unless a player still alive from the team can capture one before he dies. That would probably work for both games where there are players on the opposite teams as well games where the players are all on one team and playing against AI. The only downside I could see with that is players jump on as Indie, hightail it to the two AI team spawns before they spawn and grab them at the beginning of the game and cheese out a win. Maybe bases revert back to 'noone' owning if there aren't any of those teams players in the area after a set period of time? He's pretty good, but he's not Stupendous... :)---------- Post added at 21:20 ---------- Previous post was at 21:04 ---------- We tried running it "Normal" last night and there were flipping guys and trucks everywhere. :) Was great, but after about two hours of us defending the airfield the game started to bog down a bit. I was hosting for 5 of us, so I'm not sure if it was my machine, my ISP (30 MB Down/5 MB Up), or the mission just choking on all the units, bodies, destroyed vehicles and AI. I never saw the game pull more than 50% of my CPU though.

Awesome! I jumped in for a few minutes this morning and messed around for a while and it looks like a lot of fun with the additions. I did have a few questions and comments after messing with it for a bit. 1) Do you capture areas just by being in them a certain time? What flips the switch so someone else 'owns' it? I camped by myself for about 20 minutes at Air Station Mike (by myself) and I captured it after a bit (think about 10'ish minutes), but I never lost it, even though I was getting overrun (and killed) constantly. Another thing about capturing I noticed is that the AI would never go try to capture the other points, so if I'm playing co-op with friends on the same side against all AI the AI is never going to try to capture the other bases, they'll only spawn around you, trying to kill you. Put that together with you never seeming to lose ownership of the base if you stay there and you're going to win no matter what at some point. 2) Is there any way to check, or show how much money a player has? Maybe put it in the inventory or even show it on the HUD in one of the corners. 3) Now that there's stores, you can probably turn down the amount of guns/ammo that spawn in buildings and vehicles. Getting money/using the vendors really isn't all that important when there's free weapons and ammo lying around in all the buildings and vehicles. 4) Speaking of vendors. Might want to move them inside buildings or something. In that battle I was having at Air Station Mike, swarms of enemy were running all around, shooting by (and through) the vendor NPC. Now that's dedication to making a dollar... :) 5) Can you set the default respawn faction to 'Side'? Seems to work the best with the least confusion. 6) I've noticed the start of the missions when vehicles spawn in, occasionally some of them will blow up. Not sure if they're too close to each other or what the deal is, but just something I saw a couple of times. 7) Maybe I just didn't see it, but I found a repair/rearm pad at Air Station Mike, and I think one at Camp Rogain, but I never found one at the airstrip. Think it'd make more sense for there to be one there as opposed to anywhere else. 8) $10 seems a lot to get every time you shoot someone. (I had over $700 in a couple minutes of a firefight). Maybe only give it when you kill someone, or drop it down to $1/hit. You could also toss in some sort of 'death' penalty that you lose a ton of $ (or all of it) when you die/respawn unless revived by a teammate. 9) How about adding in a vendor at the airstrip that will actually sell Heli's/Vehicles (for crazy prices)? 10) What does "AI Suppression" actually do? Edits: Added more thoughts as I played more :)