Ripcord

I suspect this is further up river.

That would be a cool idea. Then you'd have to really hustle to hit them before they got airborne.

Hmmm, I thought the AI nose-picking was broke in the last release. Will have to try this. Or maybe I am confusing it with something else. : )

So this is going to sound like a really stupid question, but after all these years messing with ME, I've never really found a spot on the Inguri River, south of the main bridge at Zugdidi, where units can cross. Or maybe there used to be some places and now it is no longer possible? Getting old -- might be imagining this but it did seem there was one real narrow point downriver where motorized troops could get across. Not finding that place now, and maybe it was never there. Anybody care to share some tribal knowledge on this subject? Is there basically no way to launch a major invasion south of that bridge? It looks like you have to want to launch a major offensive from Abkhazia in to the Samogrelo region of Georgia, then you have 3 options: * go over the bridge (easy if nobody is shooting at you), * go around up river, through Dzhvari, * Airmobile/airborne methods. Am I not assessing this accurately? If I am, then it presents an interesting tactical puzzle, does it not?

Spent most of yesterday getting up close and familiar with MOOSE scripts, particularly spawn scripts. One idea I has was to spawn a number of units using various other spawn functions, like scheduler and randomized route. Give these units one, max two waypoints to allow for the random route variation, and have them set up in a manner where they converge on a zone (call it a staging zone). This produces an effect of massing troops for a major offensive. Then later in the mission (give them a few minutes to arrive), we can run another script file to detect how many of these units actually arrived in that 'staging zone'. So I guess we can use some form of SET GROUPS to gather up all these units into a single group, which we can call RED_FORCE1 for this post. That should then allow us to use this little gem right here: Group_RED_FORCE1:TaskRouteToZone( ZONE:New( "Target Zone" ), true, 40, "Cone" ). I love this one -- takes your predefined GROUP and tells them to march straight for the objective. Doesn't matter where you are at on the map, they will go right there. LOTS of cool implications with this. So you can have multiple ground forces massing in three different staging zones, one on each size of a target objective zone. Get them there however you prefer as mission builder, using other spawn commands, then GROUP them once they get into staging areas. Then you trigger the attack, and wherever they are located at that instant, they turn and go right for the objective. Today I am going to try to implement this in my test missions, having learned bits and pieces of it. Basically I need to master the SET GROUP now, and I should be able to cobble it together.

Thank God for Grimes and the rest of you guys that are do dedicated and committed to making this thing better.

This is so true. About once a year I get the itch to build something worthwhile in the ME, and it usually lasts about 10-14 days until I realize that it just isn't worth the time and effort. Not that I cannot create something decent/good right now, but I know that it is only a matter of weeks/months before it will 'break' in the next DCS version. My creative impulse gets turned into a scientific bug tracking exercise. So here I am back again, hoping that now we are getting close enough to the BIG MERGE that the ME is being made more stable.

Yes, I have a thought. We can spawn AI ground units within a zone. This is their initial placement on the battlefield, or if you prefer, along the FLOT. How can we instruct those groups to move out of that zone and advance into another zone? Is there a way to do this without creating waypoints for each group?

Hmmm, OK I get it, sorta. The second question is perhaps more important then -- for the consumer of the end result, the player, do they require anything to run the mission, other than just the mission itself? Do they have to install any lua files or add-ons to play the mission? Or is it all nice and self-contained in the mission? This is important for me to understand. As designers we can use whatever kitchen equipment we want while we are doing the cooking. We can bake, we can shake, we can roast or toast or us a blender. But when it is ready to consume, we should be able to put it on a plate and serve it. The consumer should not have to choose between one set of utensils or another in order to eat it. Is MOOSE (or MIST) a scripting tool that we use while we are still in the kitchen only? Or does the consumer/player need to have it as well, in order to eat the meal?

I watched it again. I liked the way you used the smoke colors to illustrate the spawn behavior in game. What might be useful here is to give some interesting examples how this might be used. In my mind, I think it is an efficient way to deploy large groups of forces. Say we have a template of a regiment of forces, consisting or armor, motorized rife, artillery, air defenses, logistical support, and so on. Instead of manually arranging all these units on a map, we can instead set up a series of zones where we want them to spawn, and let the game place them dynamically/randomly inside those zones. Then do a separate set for reinforcements to spawn in another set of zones, as the mission progresses. You'd never have exactly the same mission twice, but yet as mission designer, you can still set up your FLOT by simply moving/adjusting your zones. Would save a LOT of time. Question -- Could you filter placement of objects within a zone by other variables, such as by altitude or elevation? For example, let's say I have several groups tanks and artillery that I want to spawn randomly in a large zone, but I do not want them on the side of a mountain. Foothills are fine, but only up to certain elevation. Could I use elevation as a filter or a limit?

Sven, simple question. Can a MIST user also run a mission that has MOOSE scripts embedded in it? Or vice versa? Do the MIST/MOOSE lua files have to be distributed along with missions when shared, or do all the scripts really and truly get fully embedded in the mission file itself (eg, with no need for additional files to distribute)?

Sven listen I am not offended now -- only slightly when I first read the post, but I realized that maybe I didn't understand what you meant to say. Forums are sometimes not the most clear and efficient way to communicate our ideas, so this happens. Again, I am still learning to crawl. When I make my first basic script I will report in. No need to waste time on me until I learn the basics at least. Your tutorials are awesome though. I am working with your first one now about how to load the lua scripts into the missions.

This would be very interesting, a big step toward 'saving progress' from one mission to the next. Even if only a certain limited number of ground objects can be catalogued and their locations saved and read by a following mission, this would be a really big step forward for campaign builders. Alternatively we could save flags. This is really what I was hoping ED would implement eventually (my own wishful thinking only), something similar to what they did years back in another sim that Matt Wagner produced. If a mission file, inside a campaign, could save a list of flags activated when a mission ends, then any average mission builder could call those up in the subsequent mission and use that to place units, etc. As I write this, I thought of a third alternative -- can we save zones from mission to mission? Meaning we have a dozen blue zones and a dozen red zones, spread along a FLOT -- when a mission ends, catalogue the coordinates of those zones, based on mission outcome, and then call that data up in a subsequent mission. Then we could use scripts to spawn units within all those zones. I think this 'spawn within zone' functionality already exists, does it not? Whatever the case I need to learn the basics first, so this is just interesting theoretical discussion at this point. Pretty sure it is, actually, looking at all the templates you are posting on your site, giving us all step-by-step instructions how to replicate! Just kidding -- to me all these how-to examples are like taking music lessons, like learning little guitar riffs and techniques. Just because you learn a 'hammer-on' technique and use it is a song, it does not mean you are trying emulate Mr. Van Halen. Or if you like another example, it is like learning a cooking technique, a little twist which can be modified and incorporated into your own dish. Maybe that is a better analogy? Seriously, this statement at first offended me when I read it, although I am sure that was not your intent. I think we can all agree Read/writing unit locations is not some amazing groundbreaking idea that nobody ever thought of before. I believe it has been discussed here on these forums for years. The fact is that I did not think it was possible. So it piqued my curiosity when Hijack or somebody in another thread pointed out that it is being done and in fact somebody is hosting these missions on a server somewhere. If we can use moose to figure out a better way, then that is what we should do! But again, I need to learn to crawl first, then walk. After we can begin to run!

I am not jealous as much as I am just thankful -- that all this stuff is being driven by people passionate about this sim and all the potential that it holds. So what's up with Tonopah? Why no NAS Fallon?

Sven, so far I have never been sufficiently motivated to try to self-teach myself lua scripting, but what you have done here is impressive. I love the documentation and the step-by-step videos. Thank you. I am going to apply myself now, finally, after all these years. Question: Is MOOSE able to write group data to a file, which can be read later by another mission (in a campaign for example)? For instance, I want to log the locations of active ground units and record that data someplace, and then use that data to spawn units in the same locations in a subsequent mission. I heard that there are some servers that are doing this now.

Not asking for MIST or any of these super cool addons to be totally incorporated, but some of the basic blocking and tackling features could certainly be added. And nobody would argue that these additions would in any way outweigh the very obvious shortcomings with AI unit behavior. Damn good discussion in this thread.

OK then this is huge and I am keen to understand it. Thank you for pointing this out. Something like this should be incorporated into the ME and documented. Indeed there are a lot of cool LUA scripts out there that should be 'built in', and looking through the ME in the Nevada theatre, I wonder if maybe some of them actually HAVE been added.

Here is a drum that I keep beating (sorry for those that have read it before): Give us a mechanism by which we can persistent values/flags that carry from one mission to the next. Then we can build a dynamic campaign based on what the results of the fighting that is happening on the ground. We can have what, 999 different flags in a mission? Just develop a mechanism to allow those values to carry over inside a campaign! That's it! Seems like it would be easy enough to do -- the flags are already there, just allow them to be read and written somewhere. Probably one of their Russian interns could do it in a week during his smoke breaks. No doubt it isn't that simple -- I am sure there are some security concerns here, in terms of maintaining data integrity, that are entering into the picture. But it is worth spending some time on this. I would love to hear where ED's collective head is at on this subject, to understand what the hazards are, because it would change the way we look at playing CA, I think. Your unit placement would be read off those flags, and that folks, would mean having something very close to a moving FLOT.

I guess job 1 for ED right now is getting these two theatres married up under version 2.5 or whatever it will be. Right now it almost like they are trying to support not two sims (let's not exaggerate) but one and a half, maybe. Then I think we'll start to see this whole platform move forward - and CA will hopefully be a big part of those plans.

http://f-14association.com/squadron/f-14-tomcat-squadrons.html Maybe somebody can confirm, I though VF-31 used the callsign 'Felix'. Could be wrong. Others were Lion, Hunter, Rage, Diamond, Sundowner, Camelot, Victory, Gunfighter.... you will see them in the link above. EDIT: Ah I see my link essentially leads to the same squadron pages that the link posted by Aginor does. So no new info here from me : )

Yeah, that will get you ready to taxi out. Thanks for posting

Thank you for this. The other thing I hate is when people 'loose' something when they really mean 'lose' something. If you have loose security standards in your hangar, then you could potentially lose all the valuable hangers in your closets inside your hangar, and thus your jackets would be piled up someplace in a disorderly fashion. Not good.

One day I would like to try RTS/Commander against an opponent playing the other side as RTS commander. Air AI is still really weak, as it stands now in its current state, but if that could be improved, this would be really something like playing a modern tactical warfare version of chess/checkers -- damn cool!

Where is it in Texas? EDIT: Ah I see, up in Addison TX (DFW). I might have to take a ride up there one of these days.

Yes, but we want DCS quality hi-fi 'inoperability'. The flight model has to be advanced, even if it doesn't really fly.