Timeout and triggers problem

Hi all

In my new mission the final task is destroy helicopters before they landing, using timeout for moving helicopters from sea to Stratis Air Base after 1 hour from mission start.

But, if players reach the objective 30 minutes before (for example), i don't want they must wait all this time! so, i thought in this case to do a fade to black screen (simulating the passage of time and standby time) and forced to start the movement of helicopters. But how?

Time skip in MP can be tricky. What happens if one guy lone wolfs out to where your helicopters are coming in triggering the time skip while the rest of your guys are in a firefight somewhere else and get dumped to a black screen? You could force detect that the whole group is in one spot before doing that, but I dunno, seems cheesy and unrealistic to me. :) Besides how often do you have everyone online in the same spot at once during a mission?

I'd probably instead just adjust the time of the helicopters arrival to be more reasonable or have it triggered off some event that players can partially control. Something like "As soon as we assault the villa they are bound to send choppers in to get the general so lets make sure we're ready for that!"

That said, you can place a Trigger down where you want the players to be. BLUFOR PRESENT ONCE. Under Effects button choose TYPE = Text, EFFECT = Black In, TEXT = At four o'clock...

Then synchronize that with a module INTEL -> SKIP TIME +1 hour or EVENTS -> DATE and just change the HOUR value to by whatever time your helos are coming in.

Thx for advice!

Yes, you say right, it's not a perfect solution, but is very important for mission quality doing like this. Maybe i can activate trigger with 2 conditions: all player in trigger-zone, radio activation. But, again...how? :D

Take my example above and simple change it from BLUFOR to Radio Alpha. Just gotta worry about people triggering it sooner. Or have two triggers, or spawn the radio trigger after the first trigger is activated. Lots of ways. :)

A way to active first trigger only with all team in area?

Group the trigger with the group leader and change Activation to be Whole Group

Ok, i have another problem. :D

I set the timeout for the landing of helicopters at 5400 seconds (= 90 minutes). I set the trigger so that it set the time to 1 hour and a half later. That the movement does not work, because I think the timeout take account of "real" seconds passed in game.

What's the condition of this 5400 second trigger? If it's simply a timer for 5400 seconds from the start of the game set the condition to:

true

That way it'll go off for sure. If you have it set to something else like BLUFOR PRESENT and for some reason blufor leaves the area a timeout would reset.

It's not a trigger, it's a move-waypoint timeout. :/

They're gonna run out of fuel just sitting somewhere. I believe you really need to rethink this idea and simply spawn the vehicles once your team is ready and in place to meet them. There's just no reason to have a vehicle hanging out for an hour and a half. :)

Yes, but the "dynamic spawn" is dissapear from editor. :(

Dynamic spawn just means "spawn via scripting". Here's a demo mission for you: simpleWeKillTheKajman.Stratis.

You start out next to the runway. The Kajman will spawn in one of two ways. If you do nothing at all for 20 seconds, it'll spawn. This represents your hour and a half wait. Change 20 to 5400 if you want. Now, if you step onto the runway before that time the Kajman will spawn in 60 seconds. Adjust that time to however long you want your players to wait. In this case it gives you time to run back for cover. In your situation it means that as soon as the players get to "the end" they can trigger the action within a few minutes instead of waiting for the full hour and a half.

Either way once it's triggers a group of infantry is spawned on the other side of the runway. A moment later a Kajman, black and evil looking, is spawned into existence out over the water. The suddenly alive OPFOR infantry are instantly whisked away into the cargo of this Kajman. Normally the helo would just sit there doing nothing, BUT we'd placed a rifleman out in the water before the game started and gave him waypoints to land and let out troops. Since this is a silly thing for a Rifleman to do, we instantly deleted him but not before capturing his group name so that we could later copy his group's waypoints to the Kajman who by now you might have noticed is flying directly at the control tower and slowing down!

After spawning the units and helicopter we also assigned you a task. The task is simple, we kill the Kajman. At this point the script is waiting to see if you manage this feat. If you do, BLUFOR wins the day! If however the infantry get onto the tarmac... OPFOR wins! Either way you get a success or fail and a pretty end of mission.

Each line of the included script is commented and all the triggers have descriptions about what they do. Let me know if you have questions about how any of this worked.