anfieldroad

My 2c based on my experiences with mission designing recently: When creating training exercise scenarios such as NTTR based missions you need Nellis to be able to host aircraft from both sides. As it stands with a blue or red ownership both red and blue AI aircraft can takeoff from Nellis but only one side can land. With Neutral ownership, both sides can takeoff and now both sides can land. HOWEVER, the problem with neutral ownership is with aircraft requiring ground support to operate such as the F-5E which requires the crew chief menu to provide ground power and air to be started by a human player. If I have a blue or neutral Nellis and my human player is playing an F-5E aggressor role on the red team that player now cannot start their aircraft. If I have a blue Nellis red aircraft can takeoff but cannot come back and land. The solution I believe is to change the behaviour of Neutral airbases. Perhaps allow an optional switch in the airbase configuration where you select coalition. Something like "Allow all coalitions to use ground support facilities" enabling the crew chief for red and blue alike. Another approach could be an alternative to Neutral called "Shared" which is essentially an airbase such as Nellis which will be used by both sides in the mission. In the end it comes down to the mission designer to ensure that the AIs behave in this shared environment. In my first attempts red aircraft would take off from Nellis and then make an about turn and start strafing blue aircraft on the ground :lol: In this mission I also set up a mock top-gun style dogfight over the coyote bravo and charlie airspace where aircraft will repeatedly engage each other until a kill was made then disengage, return to their start point and go again. In order to accomplish this I have to make all combatants immortal as they engage, detect a hit and then make all of them weapons hold and, with a small delay, mortal again (to allow for in-flight missiles to be resolved - I found without a delay the aircraft would go mortal once a hit was recorded only for a real kill to occur a second later because there were still missiles or gun rounds in the air). Could it be possible to simplify such mock dogfight situations without needing mods like missile trainers etc to simply set a switch for aircraft to disable damage from weapons. Hit still gets recorded but no need to mess around with stuff like immortal etc. It can really ruin the experience when you see two aircraft collide and bounce off each other or one hits the ground and bounces up in the air. I resolved the latter with a hard deck - go below 3048m (10,000ft) and it calls a knock it off and makes everyone mortal again. Oops, hit the ground mr AI? Tough! For added realism my engagement simulation makes all combatants circle the area the plane went down as if a training accident has occurred. I really believe that with the NTTR map we really also needed some features in DCS that are more training oriented to create missions that are like real world training and exercise scenarios. It really ruins the illusion that you are taking part in training when you see real missiles and bullets flying. The capability needs to be there to have simulated weapons. I mean how hard would it be to have the missile simulated rather than actually fired? Really it would just be a matter of the missile firing and it's physics calculated - flight path etc - but not actually being rendered or having a live warhead. Some way to flag that a simulated hit occurred would also be needed of course. I most definately second the call for non-circular trigger zones, but I call your non-circular trigger zone and raise you an "airspace" that can also act as a trigger zone. Make a shape using points that must end on the first point and then give it a minimum and maximum altitude ASL. Now you can also enable and disable what is allowed in that zone. You can also use that zone as a trigger zone except now it works in 3 dimensions. Aircraft can avoid the trigger zone by flying below it or above it. In restricting access the AI will avoid it like the plague. They simply steer to avoid it. The first thing that comes to mind here is the Container in the NTTR. I have had my AI flights in my missions overfly it and it does my head in. Now they can't do so and it now looks more realistic. Using a container airspace definition with no minimum or maximum set it as a trigger zone you could use it to enforce it on the player that baaaad things happen to them in the scenario if they enter it. Here is food for thought, what would happen if a military aircraft did overfly the container by accident? Are there air defences there that might engage? CAP aircraft that would immediately intercept or a scramble from Groom Lake? Does it have fighter aircraft? Or is it simply "enter at your own peril to your career/freedom"?

I think this mission works because Nellis is neutral. In my situation though this cannot work because the F-5E requires ground power and air to start the engines meaning that to fly as a red aggressor at a blue airbase you simply won't be able to start the aircraft. I'm testing making Nellis a contested airbase by putting both blue and red AI aircraft parked on the aprons. I wish they would allow the feature to be controlled by mission designers like a tickbox in the airbase coalition settings to allow aircraft from other coalitions to use the facilities such as crew chief etc. Or allow an alternative "shared" airbase ownership similar to neutral but designed for airbases like Nellis hosting training exercises.

*BUMP* Anyone? I am really stuck on my mission. I have red-team aggressors taking off from Nellis with their blue-team opponents, fighting and then RTB except the red-team get to the final waypoint and turn around and fly away because Nellis is a blue airbase. I can make it Neutral but then the human player on blue team can't take off because the crew-chief is not available to provide ground power and air.

Thanks Shagrat. I think the time since option sounds better since I am setting a flag on hit detected. I tested it and it works a treat

Hi, I have a set of triggers set up to automate a bunch of AIs in a Top Gun style training dogfight scenario whereby when both flights check in at their start points they all have trigger actions to become immortal and weapons free. This allows them to fire at each other without damage and a trigger on "first blood" based on a hit event handler executes a "knock it off" where the trigger actions are reversed to weapons hold. I also have functionality in there to implement a hard deck. However, I keep finding that in the engagement units are mysteriously getting blown out of the sky as if immortal was not set. I believe this is because multiple missiles might be in flight and so the first one hits, triggers the "knock it off" and immortality is turned off and then the second missile hits and before you know it someone is knocking on the door of some poor AI pilot's family with a sad letter from the secretary of the Air Force :P I'd also imagine that in a guns scenario the first round to hit might disable immortal and the subsequent rounds then kill the unit. So what I want to do is put in a 10 second or so delay in the actions in between the knock it off/weapons free and the units switching off immortality to allow for any other in-flight missiles to be resolved. Any suggestions? This mission uses MOOSE btw. Also is there any way to restrict how many AAMs get fired by a unit at one target? That would also solve it if they cannot fire more than one missile at a time which is kinda wasteful given it's a training scenario.

Hi, I am having an issue with a mission based at Nellis which is set as blue with red aggressors and blue opponents both taking off from Nellis but red air, even though the waypoints are set to land at Nellis, are landing at Groom Lake which is set as red air. I need Nellis to be blue otherwise crew chief functionality doesn't work and I can't start the aircraft without that (F-5E) How can I change that behaviour so they red air units return to Nellis correctly?

Tried AI task push method also. I will test a blue unit transmitting and see if I receive it. The good news is my hit event handler works now that I realised that the template I based my mission on includes MOOSE and that changes how event handlers work.

Hi ChillNG, as I said in my post: "with a radio sound and subtitles" :smilewink: I used just a radio sound sample to get attention to the fact a message had been transmitted. None of it works though

Hi, I have been tearing my hair out trying to get a mission with radio comms happening using the Advanced Waypoint commands to set frequency and to transmit message as well as setting triggered actions. I have both blue and red aggressor teams taking off from Nellis (blue as player F-5E is blue and without that the F8 ground crew menu won't work). Here is what I did: On Red aggressor AI flight waypoint 0 Set advanced waypoint 0: 1) Added command to Set Frequency to 327000 (Nellis Tower) 2) Added command to Transmit message requesting clearance as if talking to clearance delivery. Stop transmission with a radio sound and subtitles 3) Added command to Stop Transmission None of the above seemed to happen, no transmission occurred. Another thing I tried: 1) Set up trigger zone near hold short point 2) Created Set Frequency 327000 triggerable action 3) Created Transmit Message to tower requesting takeoff 4) Set up run once trigger action on entering hold short point to execute actions above. That did not run either. What am I doing wrong here? Originally I set up message to all to transmit these messages at the appropriate times which works but is not realistic since you should not hear tower comms once you are tuned elsewhere. I thought this should be straightforward but seems nothing in DCS mission editor works as it should. I am willing to bet I am doing it right and this is yet another bugf*cked feature in DCS. I've also been desperately trying to set up a run once at mission start trigger on 10 seconds to run a do script action with an event handler to turn on a flag when a hit occurs. That doesn't work either.

*BUMP* I've also tried to get this to work with no success. I set up a once trigger with a condition time more than 30s and a do script which had the lua within it and it did not execute. I added a putText action in to the script so it would notify if a hit occurs and I never see it. In fact, I put a putText action at the beginning of the lua code above to say it was executing the lua and that never printed either. Only if I put the ONLY code in the do script being a putText saying "test" did it execute. So the issue is the lua somehow. Even though the putText is above the code provided in this thread it did not execute which suggests it checks the code before executing it and if it is no good it runs nothing. I'm new to this lua DCS mission scripting and I can't find any great info for getting started and understanding how to put a lua script into a DO SCRIPT action. I also tried adding a second knock-it-off switched condition trigger for a hard deck which had a condition logic of: unit <pilot> in trigger zone <engagement zone> unit <pilot> altitude below 10000 or ...and the list of other pilots in the AI only engagement scenario doing the same as above. I seem to have assumed wrongly that if no "OR" is specified, that it is an implied AND above? Because it seemed as soon as the AI flight entered the zone at 16000ft the hard deck knock it off triggered. Does it cater for such logic as [ [ condition 1] && [ condition 2 ] || [ [ condition 3 ] && [ condition 4 ] ] I've used bash style notation above so hope it makes sense. Otherwise I guess I will need several knock it off statements, one per AI pilot unit in the engagement, not ideal :(

If you are given a radial 287 23nm and you are 15nm from the carrier first set up the TACAN, turn on TACAN mode on your HSI and change CSEL to 287 degrees radial. Now you can see the radial from the TACAN climb to the marshall height and set autopilot to heading mode and baro alt to hold the marshall altitude and to take up a heading to intercept the outbound radial before 23nm. You want to be on radial 287 a couple of nm before the marshall point. Now on crossing the 23nm 287nm point you can call Marshall and advise you are established. Now comes the holding pattern sector entry aspect of the marshall. Take a look at the diagram of a holding pattern: https://i2.wp.com/flightcrewguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Entry-into-the-holding.jpg Make all these turns using autopilot heading mode. You are entering as a left hand sector 2 offset so make a right turn 30 degrees to 317 degrees and hold it for 2 minutes. Then make a left hand turn to the reciprocal course of 107 degrees. You may need to adjust heading to roll out on the 107 radial. Now change the CSEL to 107 degrees which is the inbound radial - you should always select a radial TO not FROM as you want to be in COMMAND guidance to the Aid. You should be making 1 minute 180 degree turns at each end of the hold and 2 x 2 minute legs = 6 mins per hold. You may need to be creative to arrive at the 287 degree/23nm marshall bang on to your push time to depart the hold and descend 4000ft/min to platform height of 5000ft then 2000ft/min to 1200ft. Depending on whether you are on the straight-in radial of the carrier heading or not you may need to enter a DME arc at 12nm to then intercept the final approach course.