AstroRetro

Based on this comment and seeing that there were a bunch of new and very interesting commits on GitHub, I build a new set of missions using the compile_local.py script (based on main branch 26/04/2020). I have run these for my team on a Windows standalone server. The new Chernarus 2020 mission with Contact assets worked flawlessly. Also the new Weferlingen terrain with Global Mobilization assets, or Weferlingen Winter with CUP assets worked great. So amazing to have these new terrains and assets in the mix. Great work to NeoArmageddon, ScruffyAT, Qerbas, Belkon, Dystopian and all the rest of the coding team. You guys rock!

Yes, that's exactly the issue for disappearing Group Indicators. We need a new way of selecting between the three new custom difficulty states (never,limited,always), perhaps with radio buttons. This also applies to other new situational and personal awareness options in server.Arma3Profile including: /* Situational awareness */ groupIndicators = 0; // Group indicators (0 = never, 1 = limited distance, 2 = always) friendlyTags = 0; // Friendly name tags (0 = never, 1 = limited distance, 2 = always) enemyTags = 0; // Enemy name tags (0 = never, 1 = limited distance, 2 = always) detectedMines = 0; // Detected mines (0 = never, 1 = limited distance, 2 = always) commands = 1; // Commands (0 = never, 1 = fade out, 2 = always) waypoints = 1; // Waypoints (0 = never, 1 = fade out, 2 = always) /* Personal awareness */ weaponInfo = 2; // Weapon info (0 = never, 1 = fade out, 2 = always) stanceIndicator = 2; // Stance indicator (0 = never, 1 = fade out, 2 = always) (snipped from BI's server.ArmaProfile page) My players keep shooting each other and spend too much time asking "where are you?" without groupIndicators = 2. :) I have tried manually editing a few 2's into server.Arma3Profile and setting it to read-only, but TADST throws an unhandled exception error when trying to launch the server. It obviously needs to save changes to server.Arma3Profile and cannot continue. For now, I simply use TADST to set up everything, then paste the Parameters line from it into a batch file to launch my server. That way, my write-protected server.Arma3Profile is read happily and all the other time-sucking trickiness is done in TADST. Many thanks for your hard work on this awesome utility and I look forward to any future updates.

Loving the new 1.7.4 release. Played Escape Chernarus Vanilla numerous times on the dedicated server with the new CUP Terrains and it works a treat! Also played Bornholm and Porto but did not manage to escape. I could not get Sahrani to work however, because I no longer have SMD_Sahrani or AiA Terrain installed, since CUP Terrains replace all that. To fix it I just: 1. Copied and renamed the mission file co10_escape.smd-sahrani-a3.pbo to co10_escape.sahrani.pbo 2. Unpacked the pbo and opened the mission.sqm file in an editor 3. Changed the addons required from: addOns[]= { "a3_characters_f_beta", "A3_Static_F_Mortar_01", "a3_uav_f_characters_f_gamma", "A3_Soft_F_Kart_Kart_01", "A3_Characters_F_Kart", "a3_weapons_f", "A3_Modules_F", "aia_misc3_config", "smd_sahrani_a3" }; addOnsAuto[]= { "A3_Modules_F", "A3_Static_F_Mortar_01", "aia_misc3_config", "smd_sahrani_a3" }; to: addOns[]= { "a3_characters_f_beta", "A3_Static_F_Mortar_01", "a3_uav_f_characters_f_gamma", "A3_Soft_F_Kart_Kart_01", "A3_Characters_F_Kart", "a3_weapons_f", "A3_Modules_F", "cup_sara_config" }; addOnsAuto[]= { "A3_Modules_F", "A3_Static_F_Mortar_01", "cup_sara_config" }; 4. Saved changes, repacked to pbo and played on dedicated server and all was good. It sure was nice to be back on Sahrani but with all the CUP goodness recently released we were wishing we could play all the CUP terrains with their matching units, weapons and vehicles. I see you have made CUP versions of Escape but you require LOP and CAF and LOP requires RHS, so it sets up quite a list of dependencies none of which automatically update through Steam Workshop so keeping all my players on the same version has become an ongoing nightmare. CUP adds so much with one Steam subscription and all my players are all on the same version every week without any of them thinking about it - it just means more play time. I also have some players that have difficulties with the very big downloads these mods require, so usually we wind up running vanilla. Every time we run RHS missions we have crashes and glitches and I hear too much griping so I gave up on it. I personally enjoy it, but only in solo. So the big question is can we get a CUP only version? We don't need insurgents because we are the insurgents. We would love to see the native units, weapons and vehicles for each terrain, or at least just units. I think it would bring a lot more flavour to the different escapes. Many thanks for your huge efforts on this mission, it gets played a lot by our team and I sure hundreds of others out there too.

Thanks NeoArmageddon and Scruffy for your hard work on this most awesome mission of all time! My team and I love it and have been testing all the beta versions as they came out. I must say that this release takes things to a new level and exceeded our expectations. Well done. It has also inspired us to try out RHS: Escalation and Leights OPFOR Pack. So far we have played Escape Altis Vanilla through one successful and several unsuccessful escapes. I hosted it from a listen server and even used a save game and apart from other players losing gear on reload and the respawn audio bug noted above everything went perfectly. We used the default settings for all parameters, except extraction points which were set to 'close'. I have also tested Escape Bornholm RHS LOP on my own (again using a multiplayer LAN listen server) in order to test it out with all three mods active. The action was intense and exciting and everything went well up until the end. After I successfully hacked the comms terminal the extraction marker did not appear on the map. I made my way around half the coast hoping to bump into it, but did not succeed. Possibly the extraction marker selection is bugged for this island? I will try again in Escape Bornholm Vanilla v1.7.1, with random extraction points on and see if it changes. Great work and many thanks!

I am eagerly looking forward to your next release. I agree version 1.7 Dev 17 has worked very well for some time and seems quite stable. Does Dev 18 include any changes to take advantage of the new firing from vehicles capability? I would like to see more light vehicles with troops in the back - they would pose a significant threat. Also, is there any way to add support for the new helicopters from the Helicopters DLC without making it a requirement?

My team has tried to play this mission unsuccessfully many times over the past month due to multiplayer bugs in Arma 3 as well as mod conflicts causing server crashes. Finally, after weeding out troublesome mods (inidbi and KHlowgrass in particular) and updating to main version 1.30 we have had a great session of Escape Chernarus with co10_Escape_Roy_v4_37.Chernarus.pbo run from a dedicated server. Everything seemed to play quite well and AI behaved in a challenging way without the excessive spawning around the comms base seen in an earlier version. The only bug we experienced was that we were unable to activate the satellite phone on the desk in the comms base. A quick search of this thread found Dystopian1's post. So while looking at the satellite phone, we pasted and executed the script: [cursorTarget, player, 9999] execVM "Scripts\Escape\Hijack.sqf" This worked perfectly, allowing us to continue the mission. The subsequent hot extraction was well worth the trouble. Very good work on this mission so far. Nice to see the automatic mod activation in the mission parameters. Parameter saving works on our listen server but not the dedicated, so I just edit params.hpp to suit our needs.

Hey Roy, Great idea to set up a new thread for your branch of this classic mission. My team and I have enjoyed testing your mission on Altis and Chernarus and look forward to expanding our testing to new islands. Thanks for setting up a stable branch version as we have one standalone server machine running the free Steam Tools version of Arma 3 server which can only run main branch updates. I also like the idea of having to explore a bit to find ammo dumps and comms. We will test some more and come back with our findings.

Thanks for these Roy. I have tested the Chernarus version on my dedicated server last week running Dev branch 1.25 and it seemed to work quite well and provided a nice challenge in familiar old terrain. Enemy patrols, and vehicle encounters seemed to work well and we had several failed escapes as usual. In one of our more successful attempts we got on a roll and took the enemy comms base. Once there we could not find any way of hijacking the communications tower to call our ride. We tried the laptop on the desk, the base of the tower and the top of the tower (up the ladder) and couldn't find where to activate it. Did we miss something? We spent quite a while there searching around and enemy infantry squads kept spawning-in within view about 400m from the base, almost always on the same point which was a bit unrealistic. There was also a couple of Ifrits and troop transports showing up but these were more realistic in such a remote location. Thanks for sharing your early work on these. Looking forward to playing more on all the different islands.

Hey Chains, It may be that you are running Arma3 on main branch updates. It loads up fine on my two server machines running Dev branch either 1.25 or 1.27. Note that Neo specified that the latest test release (1.7dev17) of this mission requires Dev branch, and will not work on Main version 1.24. My testing confirmed this to be true.

Just thought I would provide feedback from my testing of the new DevBuild (1.7 Dev16). My group has had many play-throughs of this mission (both successful and unsuccessful) on two different dedicated servers (i7 920 @ 3.4GHz and i7 3770k @ 4.4GHz, running Main and Dev branch Arma 3 updates) and it runs perfectly. The mission start bug is fixed and bodies do not disappear. Join in progress happens close to the team as expected and it all runs quite smoothly on our machines. The default enemy frequency seems good and extractions are often hot and quite a lot of fun. Mission starts can be very hard at times but we like it that way. The "keep moving or die" gameplay of this mission makes perfect sense to us, provides a real challenge and encourages tactical teamwork which is what we really want from a co-op mission. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Arma 3 that causes the patrol boats to get beached and be unable to back off the beach: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=6663 http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=4636 Since patrol boats are kind of important to this mission (to stop players sneaking along the coastline all the time), it would be great if everyone could up-vote the problems linked above to encourage their resolution by Bohemia. As a workaround, I have seen a couple of missions that have a 'push back' script so at least players can push a boat back into the water and re-use it. It's just a small script. Some examples I found are available on this forum: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?167502-Push-boat-script http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?150008-Boat-get-stuck Love the ideas you listed in your roadmap - very exciting. Looking forward to that Chernarus version!

Well after many rounds of Beta testing on v1.7 dev12 I can say that it seems to be working pretty well for our team. We play it with all the standard default parameters except weather (because on Random, the fog is too frequent and too thick). It is tough, but very enjoyable and a real challenge every time. So thanks for all your work on this mission as it has become our favourite. It is a real winner. One thing that has come up as an issue for us is the new way of starting the mission. In version 1.6 and prior where weapons were taken from the sick guard, the players would all begin the mission as unarmed, neutral non-combatants. This worked well as it gave all team members time to join the server and everything to sync-up before the action started. It also allowed the team leader (with tactical view) to survey the surrounding patrols and choose the best time to begin the ambush. With the new mission start, the prison guards identify the players as hostile even when unarmed and inside the prison. This means all players have to join the server together to start right at the beginning because things get fierce very quickly. This can also lead to significant lag for the first minute or so until all objects are loaded and synced. I like the concept of the smuggled weapons and the ability for more players to join in the initial shoot-out, but feel that players should not be identified as hostile until they have a weapon.

Hey NeoArmageddon, thanks a lot for the new release. My team has just tested it on a our Windows dedicated server for two hours and played it through to a successful completion. Only a couple of issues arose: 1. On our first start none of us could get a weapon from the backpack and we each tried putting the backpack on and getting them from each other but no luck. We restarted the mission and it worked fine the second time, so no idea what was going on there. 2. We had one late player join-in-progress when the squad had moved 500m from the prison and he started in the prison instead of close to the team leader like we were used to (we had holed up in a house to allow him a safe spawn point). We had not gone far so it was not a big deal. Not sure if it was because we were so close to start point. The rest of the mission played very well and gave us the usual mix of nervous caution, suspenseful anticipation and sudden surprises. Great fun as always. Next we might try playing it on Chernarus. Well done, I think we are close to a stable release here.

RoyWheels, hey it sounds pretty awesome if you have a working Escape Chernarus with the v1.6 code. My team plays Escape Altis v1.6 almost every week and it is still our go-to mission when our other weekly downloads are too bug-ridden, boring or downright silly. Perhaps you can join the development team and it can be released as an informal Alpha/Beta release on this forum to give us old Chernarus junkies the fix we so desperately crave. We would be happy to test it further and let you know of any bugs. It may also give Neo & Vorm the time they need to work their wizardry on the new code so that it can be more easily ported to the many islands they have planned. My team and I are big fans of the work being done here as this is more than just a mission. It creates a fully-occupied enemy island that does not take kindly to the appearance of intruders and sends out an appropriately hostile and persistent reaction to deal with it. We believe the mission has enormous further potential as the basis for many other behind-enemy-lines scenarios.

Hey Vormulac and HyperZ, my team and I have played version 1.5 of this mission about six times on both Stratis and Altis and really enjoyed it. The mission is working very well and creates the perfect 'behind enemy lines' atmosphere that forces you to stay on the move. Vormulac, with regard to the server difficulty settings, the precision and skill settings in TADST are essentially irrelevant as they are overridden by the more specific settings in \Scripts\Escape\AIskills.sqf. Getting the right balance of skill levels in this file is very tricky. We prefer the AI to be very savvy and use good tactics (ie. 0.85 for the 'commanding' and 'general' skills) but have lower accuracy (ie. 0.33 for the 'aimingAccuracy' and 'aimingShake'). The default setting for Normal difficulty are pretty close to this, but the other difficulty levels are either too easy or too hard because the Enemy Skill parameter multiplier spread seems too large (0.2, 0.5, 1.0, 1.4, 1.8). I would recommend to bunch them closer together to make the skill parameter more useful (0.5, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2, 1.4). Another thing that we noticed was that AI have pretty good fog vision (like all versions of Arma so far) such that they can target us easily at ranges where we can barely see them with thermal. Helicopters seem especially good at seeing through fog. As such, fog missions are much more difficult. At the moment, there is too high a probability of fog with the random weather setting. I think it should be lowered so that fog (and other weather types) occur at frequencies in line with the Mediterranean setting. Lemnos gets 1 to 5 fog days per month on average. It is also pretty dry with rain falling only 2-12 days per month (mostly in winter). It would be great if the script adjusted weather based on time of day and year (fog in the morning followed by light cloud in autumn, clear skies in the summer, overcast all day with drizzly rain in winter). Perhaps we should get Meatball to look at it. In the meantime, I would like to see random fog reduced from: forecastFog = random(.70) to: forecastFog = floor(random(2))*random(.80)^2 Many thanks for your hard work so far.

Hey Vormulac, I just played the Stratis version of this on my Dev build server and it was great fun. This is a classic mission so it definitely is a good choice to convert for Arma 3. As you said in notes, there were numerous script errors coming up. Fortunately, it seems that most of these can be easily fixed. Firstly, you need to declare the _group variable in \Scripts\DRM\SearchGroup\SearchGroup.sqf. Just move the quoted declaration from position 8 of the array (line 15), to position 0 (line 14). i.e. Lines 14 and 15: private ["_group", "_searchAreaMarkerName", "_firstPos", "_debug"]; private ["_position", "_side", "_state", "_moveCompleted", "_moveToFirstPos", "_exitScript", "_soldiers", "_garbageGroup", "_enemyPos", "_firstUnit", "_enemyUnit"]; The first four private variables are called by their array position (0 to 3) and assigned to internal variables in lines 20-23. Now they will be in the correct order and this script should work, making enemy searching much more effective. Secondly, in ServerInitialization.sqf the _useRoadBlocks variable is numeric and so it causes a boolean error in line 526. I just changed the line to: if (_useRoadBlocks==1) then { You can also remove the forced ==1 from line 18 and just have: _useRoadBlocks = (paramsArray select 6); I made these changes (and also just generally cleaned up the code as I read it, but I don't recall anything else important) and after a couple of test runs had no errors coming up and everything seemed to work. I worked on the Stratis version as it was quicker to play-test.