mecharius

Yeah wasn't that impressed. Installed, spent about twenty minutes trying to work out how to join a server with some friends, played about ten minutes, gave up and uninstalled. Back to ArmA for me!

The second mission has shipped for the "Tactical Advance" campaign made using the Anvil Framework and editor. This uses a preview version of the framework, v5.4. This mission is a "prequel" to the campaign as NATO tries to destabilise CSAT forces on Stratis and push them from the island. Check out the Campaign collection / subscribe on steam here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=297242670 Or download the mission file here: http://www.anvilproject.com/downloads/files/missions/CO62_AngelFire_0504a.Stratis.pbo If you like it please support on Make Arma not War! FEATURES Battle across the entire island of Stratis against hundreds of CSAT infantry, armour and air assets Complete objectives assigned by Anvil Command to destabilise the CSAT forces and win the day Each mission plays through in a different order (random objective order) Unlock a full arsenal of air and land weaponry to crush your enemies 62 player slots (a tacticalgamer.com platoon) Vehicle service, logistics and respawn Revive / Respawn / JIP Supports optional use of Task Force Radio (auto-detected - use the ammobox in infantry resupply area to equip radios if the mod is enabled)

I'd like to announce my entry into the Make ArmA Not War competition. Tactical Advance is a showcase campaign for the Anvil Framework which will come in three parts. The first mission, "NIGHT ASSAULT" has just been released on Steam Workshop. In reality, I'm not really sure whether my entry is a campaign or a new ArmA mission editor, its a bit of both I suppose! The idea of the campaign is to showcase what is possible using the editor, from small missions to large. Situation NATO forces have been pushed entirely off Altis, and have spent the last few months on Stratis licking their wounds. We can't sit here forever though, and let the CSAT forces on Altis get more and more entrenched. Command has decided its time to act. They have identified almost 200 objectives on Altis that must be captured, and Charlie Company will be just a small part of the massive amphibious invasion force that is being put together. The Mission: Our first objective is to gain a foothold on Altis. We will do this through a NIGHT ASSAULT which will aim to disrupt CSAT forces on the South Western tip of Altis sufficiently so that the main force can be landed the following morning. Secondly, the main force will come ashore and "ADVANCE" across the island in a methodical way. As more terrain and facilities are captured, more assets will be unlocked for use. Thirdly, once we are able to get our armoured vehicles ashore we will use them as a "SPEARHEAD" to smash open a hole in the CSAT lines. Progress All missions are being made almost entirely in the Anvil Editor. As new features are becoming available in the editor, they find their way into the missions! The first mission has just been released on to the Steam Workshop (see link above). The second mission, "Advance" is MASSIVE. I have laid out 192 objectives and have linked them together in a logical way. I'm now in the process of occupying the objectives with enemy infantry and adding some descriptions to objectives so they are a bit more interesting so far I have probably spent 3-4 hours on it - try creating this many objectives in 3 hours with the official editor :). You can see a timelapse of the objectives being placed on the MANW page (possible spoilers, but not really).

Looks great. Love the interior of the VM90 Commando!

Bangabob I've gotten around similar issues before by using BIS_fnc_MP and setting the isPersistent parameter to true. Not sure if that will suit your case by worth a try!

I've released my editor using your maps 10T - thanks!

Its included in the A3 Digital Deluxe version. I've just upgraded to it through Steam so I can use the map and I'll be providing the coordinates but not the files for the map in the next update.

I can agree with headphones being a great upgrade... I changed from a half broken 10 year old set of stereo headphones to a pretty cheap 25 quid Plantronics 5.1 Virtual set off ebay and what a revolution it was! I don't have the cash to compare it to a real 5.1 surround sound system so can't comment on that debate, but the headphones I have are brilliant for the money. I can often hear vehicle noises long before other players and can tell the direction of sounds with a good degree of accuracy.

Awesome! Thanks!

Thanks Abshire... I haven't tried it with any mods but in theory it should be possible. Once Anvil has created a mission it tries to only touch the sections of the mission.sqm it needs. If you try any let me know! (and don't forget to keep lots of backups of the whole mission folder)

Ah, ok - yeah that map was from an older version and unfortunately I don't have the license to release it publicly. I'll consider adding the config data for it in the next version so that people who have the map legally can use it. The current Altis map is not ideal due to the resolution (see the last FAQ question for the editor) although I haven't had an issue with the other maps. I'm hoping to improve the maps over time. As far as my workflow goes, I tend to run the official and Anvil editor side by side so I can block out a mission in Anvil then "micro-position" the markers in the A3 editor. The process runs as follows: 1) Place markers and link them together in Anvil 2) CTRL+S, CTRL+E (Save and export) 3) Open the mission in ArmA editor 4) Enter marker mode 5) Move OBJ_* markers exactly where I want them 6) Save in ArmA editor 7) Alt+Tab back to Anvil 8) CTRL+U (or EDIT >> Update from SQM) 9) CTRL+S, CTRL+E (Save and export) 10) Repeat from step 1 until you are happy Its a bit of a fiddle but you can see it working fine in the timelapse video linked in the first post where I pretty quickly positioned a couple of hundred markers. The two linked videos above show the same UI as your version has. I think in version 2 of the editor the old UI buttons were a lot larger, but now they are on a "toolbar" on the top left or in the menus as you can see in the videos on the first post above ^^. Good luck and let me know if you have any more feedback :)

Hi katipo, I can't see any (major) issues with the screenshot - the title bar says you are on version 4.3 and you have debug logging which 3.2 didn't have. The top right little blue menu bar just let's you search for properties, its not required to use the editor. To be honest this may be a silly suggestion but it looks like you are just zoomed all the way in on the NE of the island! You can use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out and click and drag on the map to pan around. Does that help or there are other things not working properly? As and aside your app title bar says (Framework v2) what happens if you "Apply manual framework update" from the file menu? Does it change to v3? I may have forgotten to update that before the last build but it shouldn't be causing issues.

Thanks Foxhound and Katipo66... Foxhound I am on Armaholic, what is the easiest way to link this to my profile? The installation section as it is currently written is not correct - there is no installer, the application is bundled in a zip file and maps need to be downloaded and installed separately. Thanks for providing a mirror :)

I held back release another couple of weeks to make a lot of stability fixes and implement some new features, but the editor is now released as an "open Alpha"... see http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?180268-Release-Anvil-Mission-Editor-and-Framework

I've found a few high resolution Altis maps around the internet, however the license of these files is a bit unclear. As I would like to distribute the map publicly with something open source I'm putting together, does anybody know of a freely licensed, very high resolution PDF/JPG Altis map?

http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ is a great resource for some of the programming behind hexes. I had a go at this mission the other day and it looked amazing... thanks.

Sounds interesting squeeze, downloading to have a go :)

For my soon-to-be-released Anvil Editor I've built an SQM parser in C# which can read in an SQM file and query it. This could be used to write out SQF from an SQM object pretty easily. Being able to do this would also fit in nicely for some features I have secretly started working on for the next version (4.x) of the editor. :D What is an example of the type of conversion you want? E.g. can you post the code for a single SQM object and what SQF code you would want generated?

Nice work LAxemann!

Hey Jack. Thanks for your interest :) I'm not adding any new features to the current version (v 3.2) so from that perspective it's ready for release now. However I'd like to find and address any hidden critical bugs before subjecting everybody to it! The main reason I've chosen closed testing is because I want to make sure people who use it know its "early access" and are willing to provide some feedback. I've done a fair bit of testing on my own but there is nothing like getting "real" users to break your software in new and exciting ways. The ETA is "soon", or to be a bit more precise hopefully by the end of this week.

Hey thanks Burt. Yeah I found the "cheats" page but wasn't having much luck getting anything out. I'll have another go when I get the time because the maps linked above are great for smaller islands but not ideal for Altis due to the huge scale. At a reasonable image size things get pretty pixellated when you zoom in. Either way I'm now sharing the editor with a few people for them to test it and hope to make it available more widely soon even if the map isn't 100% perfect. (EDIT) oh and for suiside, I've set it up so that you can start a new mission on any of the maps provided by 10T in the link above - Altis, Chernarus, Stratis, Takistan and Zargabad. If 10T provides any more maps I'll include them :)

Do you mean the show script errors startup parameter? -showScriptErrors EDIT: sorry just read your edit, my eyes assumed it was the signature :)

Yeah I saw montage but couldn't work out how to get it working :) One comment - its quite difficult to see the runways in a lot of the maps unless you are completely zoomed in. Have you considered shading them in?

Ok, this was surprisingly easy to do using Python/PIL (through Anaconda) https://gist.github.com/will-hart/133814e92cf45745e9d1

Hi 10T, thanks for these amazing images and letting me use them in my editor :) I'm looking to get a single PNG / JPG at a particular zoom level (I don't need the lowest zoom levels - I've previously been working with map images around 4000px width/height). Are you aware of an easy way to do this? If necessary I can write a script in Python using ImageMagick or something like that?