BatSpoggy

Does anybody know a way to set a group spawned with BIS_fnc_spawnGroup to playable? I've made a mission that allow you to select which side you play as and spawns in appropriate friendlies using that function. Although I have been able to make the player join one of the spawned groups, I need to be able to set the groups as playable to allow the player to teamswitch between them (ideally all units except the group leader as it's not meant as a squad-command mission and switching to the leader can break the waypoints). This has been bugging me for a couple of days now and the only way I can think of to do it would be to spawn the group as individual units and set each unit playable individually, but I'm sure that'd work either. Cheers.

I've managed to roll all the singleplayer vanilla missions into one. You can now select between the three sides at mission start and use the Virtual Arsenal to pick your gear. To start the missions you select the friendly and enemy sides via radio commands. The same thing will work for RHS so once I've finished testing this version I can quickly roll out an RHS one as well. It doesn't work in Co-Op though and I don't think I'll be able to make it work with the methods used, but it is more convenient for singleplayer. I'm going to knock out a few Co-Op versions using the original method as I've been able to properly test it with friends now. I'm still tweaking the integrated one but I hope to have it releasable in a few days once all the kinks are worked out, I'll include a larger-scale version as well because this method actually makes it very easy to do that.

@neofit: That's what I've put in now, all units except the group leader are playable, so you can switch between all the others if you want to rearm the AT guy or whatever. The only reason the group leaders aren't playable is that it can break the waypoints. I don't have the know-how to make it a domination mission or anything that big, but I can work on making it a larger-scale battle so that there's more going on. Only issue that might pose is that some of the terrain is too hilly and vehicles can spawn effectively stuck. I'll start messing with it and see what I can come up with, I'm sure I can make it larger than it is, anyway. The dialog menu wouldn't work with the current randomization method and I don't actually know how to do it, but if you know of a decent tutorial for in-game dialogs I can take a look at it and try to find a way. That is the way I'd prefer to do it, I'm just not sure how to go about it.

It's now listed on Armaholic at http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=28715 I've been trying to get it to work with respawning enemy waves for co-op but it's playing havoc with the marker movements, on one notable occasion it caused me to respawn a kilometer out to sea. I'll work on another method to do it over the next few days. Anybody have any requests for anything specific? Units or terrains, or even a larger-scale edition with more groups spread over a wider area?

I've updated with the changes Neofit suggested: The patrol now begins based on an option in the Action Menu accessed at the ammobox, so you have as long as you like to pick gear and weapons. The missions will now end either when all enemies are killed or the phase line is designated as seized, so it's not possible to rush it but full control of the area results in a victory. All units except the squad leaders are playable and can be switched with the teamswitch key. The squad leaders are not playable because switching to them and back to another causes the waypoints to break. I've added a playable CSAT version as well as a co-op version which is currently only for NATO vs CSAT but it works nicely and I will update the others with the option as well. Tomorrow I'll release a .zip with the SP versions and the one co-op one so far to see if anybody has any more ideas. In the meantime I'm working on adding multiple enemy waves to co-op as it's a little easy at the moment with the player having the ability to respawn. I'm toying with the idea of making the respawns infinite and it being a fight to seize the phase line, but if anybody has a reason not to I'm all ears. Armor frequency has been decreased as it was showing up far too often, it's supposed to be an occasional spanner in the works rather than a constant presence.

@neofit: 1) Mission is set to end when all enemies are killed. After this suggestion I will add a second trigger as a countdown on the objective if Blufor but not Opfor are present. Unless you can think of a better way to do it, of course? I didn't want just rushing to the objective to be a viable option. 2) I didn't do the "talk to team leader option" because of what you said, but thinking about it I could easily put it on a radio trigger to signal own readiness which would still be reasonably immersive. Or an actionmenu option on the crate. Will do that tomorrow. VAS is pretty quick if you have loadouts pre-set though, you can save them and reload them at any VAS box. I have presets set for vanilla, ACE, RHS, RHS+ACE etc and they work across all missions and mods in my game regardless of which mission or mod they were saved in (obviously RHS and ACE change the default equipment so vanilla to ACE won't work and RHS to vanilla won't either). 3) I'm going to tweak it for co-op as well, so better teamswitch will be coming along with that. Currently only one man per squad is playable, but you should be able to switch between them at will with the teamswitch key. I'm going to make all units playable anyway, both for co-op and also because the idea behind this mission is "shoot bad men quickly in any manner you please" so more freedom to choose roles and such is something that it needs. 4) Yeah, I'll be getting to that very soon with various units. I abhor the CSAT faction to be honest as the uniforms look stupid to me, but I'm more than happy to accommodate those who want to play as them. @Oktyabr: I don't like the Steam Workshop. It places mods and missions in stupid places that fuck up my categorization of them into convenient groups based on mod dependency or type, etc.

I've made another version that works with the vanilla game, it's NATO vs CSAT. Anybody have any ideas where I can host it? ---------- Post added at 21:34 ---------- Previous post was at 21:26 ---------- I've put them on Dropbox for now. NATO vs CSAT: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dsn335hehmsugf/Random%20Patrol%20NATO%20vs%20CSAT.Stratis.pbo?dl=0 US vs RU (RHS): https://www.dropbox.com/s/kxz6v7r3vtwsa42/Random%20Patrol%20RHS%20US%20vs%20RU.Stratis.pbo?dl=0 Hope they're of use to somebody, if anybody can think of any good changes or additions then post here and I'll see what I can do. There's nowhere near enough small-scale randomized mission for ArmA.

I have created an instant-action type randomized mission for singleplayer use. It is a straightfoward infantry patrol where you act as a line grunt in a two-squad advance to contact in a randomized location. The idea is to have an instant-action mode available for those times when you just want to jump into a quick firefight without spending ages slogging over ground to get there. The location is randomized each time and the enemy force composition is randomized as well, with a chance of larger or smaller numbers of enemy infantry as well as a chance to face enemy armor. A friendly tank has a random chance to assist as well. The view distance is set low to ensure that the firefight begins in relatively close quarters (no further than 500m) and it takes place on Stratis, this will ensure it is able to run on even lower end machines. It runs nicely with or without ACE3, and this version can use the RHS mod. It's a trivial matter for me to release versions with different units and on different terrains or with increased unit numbers and staggering if that was desired and I could probably work co-op in there as well if anybody wanted it. Now listed on Armaholic: http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=28715 Thanks to Big for that, he actually did all of it. I was just expecting a download link but he filled out everything and listed it in the news.

I seem to get hit with headshots more than anything, and I notice bodyshots as I have TPW Fall, so when I'm hit in the body I fall over. I've just tried it and I can kill a NATO soldier with one shot from the 9mm. As I said, I've turned weapon damage down by multiplying it by a factor of 0.1, at this it takes up to ten bodyshots to kill, or a single headshot.

Oh yeah, I used something like that ages ago but had forgotten about it. I've gotten my mission working almost exactly as intended now, just need to polish it up a little and add a briefing, thanks. Does this function work in ArmA 2 as well?

@cobra4v320: Brilliant, thanks for that! I fiddled with it a little to make it work in the init field and came up with this: pos = [position player, 100 , random 360] call BIS_fnc_relPos; this setPos (pos); It works perfectly and seems to allow me to basically copy-paste for simplicity, as I managed to move an empty helicopter to 25m away and an ammobox 5m away with them both using independent directions from the player (helicopter spawned in front, box behind). By naming the unit leaders I take it I can have other groups spawn relative to the moved groups by replacing "player" with "unit1" or whatever, presumably with a short wait command to ensure the group has already moved to its relative position? Is it possible to set the distance (100) in the above example to a random value within a range? I can set random 100 and it is random within 100m, but is it possible to set something like "random 100-200" to get a random distance between 100m and 200m. Thanks a lot, this has eluded me literally for months, I'm very grateful.

I've noticed that while the body armour changes have much improved on the previous issues with enemes taking an outrageous number of rounds before dropping, a new issue seems to have cropped up in its place: The AI seem to hit far too many headshots, especially at range. I have tested this by using a damage modifier to reduce bullet damage to almost nothing, from this I established that headshots are always a one-shot kill regardless of bullet damage and protection worn. I tried an actual scenario with these settings for a laugh, and promptly discovered that it makes no real difference to the difficulty of the scenario even if you reduce only the enemy weapons to 0.001% damage as the lack of bullet damage to other areas does not affect them when every shot is a miss or a headshot, never a center-mass shot. This seems like a problem to me as it makes engagements unrealistic, you rarely see wounded soldiers at all, they are either unharmed or dead. Is anybody else seeing a similar issue here?

That's what I was thinking, I only want to randomize the position of one thing and then have the others move to the same position relative to it. I know this works in some sense because if a group leader has a random placement set their subordinate units will spawn in formation at the leaders (random) position, what I'm trying to establish is how you was make a whole "system" of units (and markers, preferably) do the same thing. There's a huge amount of editing knowledge here, so I'm sure somebody must know a way.

Hi, I've been searching for an answer to this question for ages and haven't got anywhere, so I though it best to ask here. Is there any way to place units (say the player unit) with a certain placement radius, but retain the position of all other units relative to that one? So for example, place the player in the middle of the map with an enemy unit 100m north, and set the player placement radius to 1000m but keep the enemy unit always 100m north of wherever the player appears. The best thing would be the ability to then randomize the distance and bearing from the player within set parameters, but I'm guessing that isn't possible. I am interested in this for the purpose of creating randomized small-scale engagements, because while I enjoy the likes of DUWS, I'd really like to be able to make a "Random Instant Action" without having to place a framerate-killing number of OFPOR and then randomize the starting location, it's really crude and I'd like to polish my idea enough to eventually release for others to enjoy. Cheers

BCombat is excellent, so a huge thumbs up to Fabrizio et al. for it. What in-game AI skill and precision settings are best for use with it? The interaction between the in-mission settings and the menu settings make it awkward enough to figure out optimal settings, but a third layer of modification to the base level leaves me with no idea what to set everything to. This is for SP, so I need to balance enemy skill against the comparitively inept friendly AI, I can imagine this will be tricky now BIS have coupled the two together (why would you do that?) Cheers