Macser

I figured this was the best place to ask about this, as it relates to addons. Some of the Star wars addons released by Acacyn used scripts for auto take off and landing, amongst other things. Does anyone know if he created these himself or was a third party involved? I'm not much of a scripter and have enough to do in other areas. So being able to use them as is, for my own work,or being able to make some modifications would be great. But it's hard to ask for permission, when you're not sure who the author is. Besides that, I believe he's hard to locate these days. Any help would be appreciated.

You're welcome. I'm glad to see people using it. :) And I hope it encourages modders to get into an area that's often overlooked.

No problem. I didn't realise the naming was different. :) I'll put that into the first post. Thanks for the info.

Hey Pufu. Thanks. It's not perfect. But I think it'll get anyone who's interested, off the ground. The case sensitivity caught me out once or twice too. I was working off the A3 sample character. The version I have uses upper case for "Weapon". So that's what I went with. :) I hope you get some use out of it. If for some reason anyone wants to add extra control bones, always make sure to prefix them with @. As in: @bonename. Al's exporter will know to disregard it on export. There's no point in having redundant bones in the rtm for the engine to process.

Sorry for the late reply. :) Which "red square" are you talking about? By default, the weapon bone is parented to the right hand. So if you move the right hand the weapon will continue to follow it. Even if you keyframe the weapon bone. The parent bone's transforms are still affecting the child bone. What kind of animation are you trying to do? Does it involve the weapon moving independently of the main rig? If so, you can change the parenting of the weapon bone to none, for that animation, then switch it back for general work. This can be a little fiddly for a big project. So i usually have 2 separate blend files. 1 for rifle anims( weapon parented to right hand). 1 for pistol.( Rifle parented to upper torso). Without this I would have to switch the parenting depending on the animation. Very tedious once you get past 50 or so sequences. I think a more flexible setup for prop type bones, like weapons, is to give them no parent. Then apply either a childof constraint, or copy location/rotation. Depending on the animation you can switch the target. Of course this is best done before you start animating. Trying to change this halfway through a set, would be .....Painful. :)

I'm not sure if it's what you mean. But it's possible to view any model in place of the default proxies, in buldozer. Modders have used it many times. It's especially handy for correct placement of a particular model. For example, missiles on a rack. So in buldozer, instead of say "proxy:a10pilot.001", I would temporarily change that to "proxy:\YourPBO\YourP3d". Then I would place the proxy itself until I'm happy with it. Then I usually switch back to the default and save. That's one way of dealing with custom objects and characters in buldozer. Obviously the p3d would have to be suitable. Like a pilot in the seated position.

Not with the toolbox unfortunately. But Al did describe one of his method's for setting up a reference. https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/145290-arma-toolbox-for-blender-arma-23-exporter-script/?p=2899784 Quote from Al: "The only thing that would be possible is to recreate a skeleton but this would not have any sort of control rig, and be practically useless." I'm just musing here, but if you mean the imported skeleton would be bereft of any controls, that's not much of an issue. As long as the rotations and locations of the "bones" are there, you can constrain a control rig to follow the imported skeleton. In much the same way as you would a BVH.

:D I can almost hear the imperial march playing in the background.

Hey Kenoxite. Just wanted to say thanks for the continued effort. And a big one at that. And also to Krzy, who's assistance obviously helped make it possible. Because of projects like this, and others, OFP/CWA should enjoy a little more time in the sun. I suppose It's like chess at this point or any other strategic board game. It's not much to look at, But it's still capable of providing a challenge. And cheap too. Very cheap. :)

Happy new year everyone. :)

It's possible to be honest without being obnoxious. :) You "expect" modders to provide tailor made content for people using different versions? If there is a majority using 1.96 do you have access to statistics to show this? I have it myself. But I don't use it any more.

I had high hopes for it, being a Star Wars fan. But I found it lacked any attempt to be original. I'd even go so far as to say it verges on plagiarism. It's use of nostalgia was really lazy too. I didn't find certain decisions, edgy or ballsy as some articles put it. I think arrogant and ignorant would be more suitable. I can't help feeling that people are viewing it through a lens made of hype. This movie and Disney telling everyone what is and isn't part of the Star Wars universe has really lost me. I'll decide for myself what's relevant. And right now the series still ends at The Return of the Jedi as far as I'm concerned. I view it the same way I viewed Jar Jar Abrams Star Trek outings. Interesting films in their own right. But a bit arrogant. I see them as separate entities. That's exactly how I feel about this movie.

It's always great to see such high quality work still being done for the original game. :)

Generally companies aren't as aggressive as you seem to be implying. Especially where there's no exchange of currency or attempts at misrepresentation. It's not in their best interest. Legally speaking they own copyright/ip or whatever the proper terminology is. So they can take action if they choose to. And there's not much anyone can do about it. But they have to balance that against the fact that the people creating mods, are part of the demographic funding the franchise. Given the speed of communication these days it's not something they can digitally sweep under the carpet. It's not surprising that scapegaming was attacked though. They involved financial transactions. Which seems an incredibly silly mistake to make. I think a life server based on SW would indeed attract legal attention given the way they operate. The mere mention of cash changing hands would put blood in the water. Without any official endorsement from the owner of the copyrights/ip I doubt it would last long. :)

It's pretty much the same as O2light. So any tutorials for that apply here. The B key would apply the loaded texture with planar mapping. Which is the only way it can do it. I need to make a correction in my previous post. Although it doesn't like subfolders when dealing with textures, this seems to be for existing projects that were done with another app. If you apply the textures in GB they appear to display.

Hey Mirek. You can't apply emission textures in A2. Instead you apply an rvmat to the red dot mesh. The rvmat will effectively be set to "shadeless". Basically it's the same as the old method in OFP. Where the points in a mesh were marked as "shining". Emission rvmat: I think that should do it. If there's any inaccuracies, it's because my mind is on other things. What you're doing is telling the engine not to apply any shading at all to the parts marked. I think the effect would be increased with post processing on and the texture has more white in it. Presumably the "bloom" effect would exaggerate the intensity. Giving it the appearance of glow.

:D I was only joking around about the bag of tenners. Although......... The Ofpec tag system has been around a while now. It's basically a small identifier that you put before any new models, classes and such. It marks them as yours and helps prevent conflicts between mods and addons that otherwise have similar naming. Mine is "MCSR_" for example. If two authors decide to create rifles using the class name XM8, then that may cause problems when someone uses both at the same time. If the authors use tags that limits the chances of a conflict. JIMI_XM8 or TONI_XM8 would differentiate them. Tags aren't official. Ofpec just maintains a database that you can register with. So people can quickly check if another author is using their choice of tag. DXT refers to S3 texture compression. Here's a small bit of info on the subject. If you stick to using PAA for your own stuff it should keep things simpler. Try that one: http://www.gamefront.com/files/25362817/cz805acog_cqbsight_ca.7z And yes. There's plenty of tutorials about editing transparent images out there. Most of which would probably do a better job than me.

I didn't notice the last part of your post earlier. Maybe you edited it? Just put in a "picture" entry in the CfgWeapons section, pointing to an image. Have a look through any of the official weapon pbos to get an idea of what type of textures you're aiming for. They're in the "Equip" folders. Example: class CfgWeapons { class M16a4; class CZ805_A1_ACOG_ACR : M16a4 { displayName = "STR_MREK_CZ805"; model = "\CorePatch_CZ805_A1_ACOG\CZ_805_A1_ACOG"; modelOptics = "\Ca\weapons_E\SCAR\ACOG_TA31_optic_4x.p3d"; >>>>> picture = "\CorePatch_CZ805_A1_ACOG\YourWeaponPic.paa"; class OpticsModes { You can do the same for magazines. As for the name appearing. I've had problems working with XML. Although the engine prefers it, it will also accept CSV. For a project like this it works fine. Besides that it's an alpha numeric model rather than a name. So translations aren't that important. In that case you could just input the model directly into the "displayname" entry. Here's the Stringtable I used anyway: Stringtable.CSV "LANGUAGE","English","French","Italian","Spanish","German","Czech" "STR_MREK_CZ805" ,"EN CZ 805","FRN CZ 805","ITL CZ 805" ,"ESP CZ 805", "GRM CZ 805" , "CZ 805" Now when "STR_MREK_CZ805" is found in the config the appropriate language will be displayed. Obviously you can make that string anything you like. Use one or the other, XML or CSV. Having both in the folder might have the XML take precedence. I'm not sure. (By the way, the tag "MREK_" doesn't appear to be taken on Ofpec, if you don't already have one)

No problem. Just send me a bag of 10 euro notes. :D Just keep this in mind. The engine works with DXT compressed textures. PAA/PAC. Ideally work with those in your addons. Just colour the image as you would with any other texture. Then fill the alpha channel at the right percentage. I set the fill tool to about 70%. 100% will make using a texture pointless. There's the edited Paa if you want it: https://www.sendspace.com/file/q1rfr8 ( Click the blue coloured "Download" button in the center of the page. Above "Save to my account". ) You could put that into the folder as it is, with the path change above, and it will work.

Ok. If I have both a PAA and the original TGA image it was created from, then the model will use the PAA. Even if the faces are assigned a TGA texture when you view it in O2. As you can see in the image below, the faces are assigned your texture. Note the path too. It points directly to the addon folder. Buldozer will always convert TGA to PAA as soon as you preview the model. Presumably it uses PAL2PACe. Anyway.When I remove the TGA buldozer continues to display correctly. As you can see the TGA is gone: The model may have TGAs assigned to the faces. But the same process applies. In the actual ACR PBOs I'm sure there are only PAA files. The engine sees the TGA extension listed and presumably searches for the PAA equivalent. Which it finds. That's why the files from the ACR dlc appear to have no problem displaying. ======================================================================================== If you want to use resources from your addon, you've got to point directly to it. Your alpha texture is in P:\CorePatch_CZ805_A1_ACOG. Not P:\Ca\CorePatch_CZ805_A1_ACOG. ( If you were manually editing the path, you would drop P:\ ) So the engine expects to find a file with the same naming, but a PAA extension. Obviously, on your side, it's not there. The error message is displayed. CA\ typically points to official game resources. ======================================================================================== I BinPBO directly to the addon folder of the appropriate mod. "steamapps\common\Arma2 operation Arowhead\@CZ805\addons" in your case.

Hey Mirek. I don't recall the engine being able to deal with TGAs directly. Try converting your file to PAA using Texview2. Or go into O2PE and run buldozer when in the view pilot lod, to initiate the conversion. The PAA will appear in the folder. Even if you have problems saving the model you'll still have the texture.. It's possible you may be getting a false impression of what's happening. The textures contained in the actual ACR dlc would be PAAs. These would override the TGA assignments in the sample model. Which I assume is what you're using. Making it look like you're viewing TGAs in game. The engine is bypassing those and rendering PAAs. This is the format the engine is expecting. But it's not there.I don't remember seeing anything about the engine doing run-time conversions. Besides that, if you need the file in your addon folder to be used, then you need to correct the path. Ca\ will point to installed game files. CA\CorePatch_CZ805_A1_ACOG\CZ805ACOG_CQBsight_CA.paa Should read: CorePatch_CZ805_A1_ACOG\CZ805ACOG_CQBsight_CA.paa The left image is what I see with the path as it is. The right is after the path is changed. (I added the green tint myself) That should do it. But as I'm a little rusty, I remain open to correction. :)

All the reasons mentioned above. And the fact that while most of us appreciate a good looking game, it's not always enough. Bear in mind that many of the people still modding for OFP/CWA are fairly experienced. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's a lack of ability that keeps us all here. I can only speak for myself, but I have no problem dealing with high resolution sub-d modelling and sculpting. Or the process of baking those details down to low poly models. I'm also quite comfortable with texturing, animating and sound editing. There's always been snobbery where gaming is concerned. Particularly involving hardware. There are many people who simply don't have the funds to buy high end machines, for a variety of reasons. That's just the way it is. This and other older titles can cater for that. What I don't get is why that's an issue for some folks. If there's one thing you won't see me doing, it's being apologetic about playing/modding for this game. :) One more thing. As the community has shrunk, so the level of respect has generally increased between existing members. Even where opinion differs. This obviously isn't limited to this game, as that happens with many communities. That has it's own appeal.

I suppose that'll depend on what they are. :)

Hey guys. This is the Arma: Cold war assault section. :)

There are 2 methods. Either Use O2PE or Blender with Alwarren's toolbox addon. If you need O2PE to run with the viewer, then you will need to buy a copy of Arma 2. However O2PE can still open the A2 samples and export them to the older P3d format. From there you will obviously have a bit of work to do. :)