cfrag

Will do, thank you BN - this thread it will be

I'm happy to see this important new feature make its appearance in DCS, @BIGNEWY, my congratulations to you and the team for this important milestone. As someone who writes many scripts for missions, and that can't yet take advantage of Mission Save State, I would love to share my own thoughts and ideas with everyone to in improve, and ultimately for ED to bring into DCS Mission Scripting Environment. Do you already have a section where I could go to, or do you have a recommendation where I could start a thread in this regard to get the ball rolling? Thank you and kind regards, -ch

DCS Pathing is not well. At all. But It's entirely possible that I could tell a spawner/cloner to pick a random point in a circle with range, and have the troops go there at some sedate pace. It won't be pretty, but it should work in some fashion. When they get there, what should they do then? Simply sit around, or despawn?

Huh. Full wipe on die, that's harsh. Certainly not difficult to implement. As @DD_Friar already asked, you want this ON TOP of deferred scoring, right? Although interesting as a concept, there are multiple questions that we need to resolve first: - How do we handle Helicopters that land in "enemy territory" to rescue someone or to insert troops? - What is enemy territory, and how would silly me discern that from neutral and friendly territory?

Well, Goldfishbrain I thought that it did. I think I even created a demo for that: 8.95 Yes you CAn score (CA and PlayerScore) Note: This demo requires the Combined Arms module 8.95.1 Demonstration Goals This demo shows how players who control ground units via “Combined Arms” can also receive score points using the PlayerScore module. The restriction is that CA scores are awarded immediately and can't be deferred. I'll try and amend the main doc itself to make this more clear.

Because those who play games on their 'daily work' machines happen to have a Win machine, and aren't going to get a second computer for gaming. Also few developers who today develop for Win are going to switch to a different OS and infrastructure on a chance. It's a chicken-and-egg issue. If and when (as was predicted for a decade) Linux overtakes Win for gaming, we may have a chance for our dreams come true. Until then it's just that - a dream.

Which is, IIRC, the original definition of the Touring Test. Today's generative AI systems (that generate the next word based on rules and some vector algebra derived from a big pool of words that their responses are conditioned with) can fool an amateur, yet are still a far cry from passing the test

In other words: Will there PLEASE be a "German Asset Pack" with some civ objects like Trabis, Mantas (there simply must be a Manta car) and Golfs? PLEASE PLEASE?

Version 1.72 - update: deploy formation for helo troops, bug hardening All Changes: - You now can set group formations when dropping troops - General updates to guard against DCS bugs - smoke from CSAR pilots vanish immediately - more DCS bug hardening in playerScore and autoCSAR - troop deployment player UI for helos

Two things can be true at the same time: ED can be awake and they can know that Linux is superior in many ways. Except one: DCS doesn't run on it. That's the killer. I'm a Unix/Linux (Ubuntu and Mach) head, and I'd love to see DCS (at least server) on both. I also accept the realities of business. Saying so doesn't make it so. Linux market share in gaming is minuscule. I remember when Red Hat started and people screamed the same. That was in 1993. Yeah. Boy do they look foolish now, don't they?

As someone born in Hamburg I can tell you that nobody needs the Bavarians (all we need is some of their beer, but only as ersatz-water)

It's called 'code engineering' -- these things seem easy when it's done right. Hopefully ED try it sometime.

Well, I didn't say so, but yeah, I'll take the Phantom to wake up my neighborhood and launch a missile into my elementary school, exactly as Calvin envisioned it in Watterson's seminal Comics. Spelling correct that, Frau Dröge!

Wow! Ugra's Syria convinced me, Normy 2 made me a believer. It's difficult for me to convey my feelings (and probably too high expectations) for this map. I was born and raised in cold war Hamburg, served in the cold war (western) military (in Neumünster, Hamburg and occasionally, during NATO exercises, in some other Truppenübungsplätze in West Germany), met a fantastic girl from West Berlin (and visited her often), protected our side from the 'lousy communists' on the Harz side, and now can't wait to take a plane ride to my past. Good luck, and Godspeed, Ugra!

Done. It's now a config item menuName Name of the menu that heloTroops puts in the players UI to allow them to access heloTroops functionality. Defaults to “Airlift Troops” Enjoy, -ch heloTroops.lua

I could try and make it a config choice. Watch this space

Thank you so much for taking the time and making the effort to track down some bugs. Uh. Nice catch! This is a strange one as it only applies to dynamically spawned players, and Expansion (I think) doesn't yet support it (because DCS's mission API is so crude). Nevertheless, I hope I'll be able to patch this quickly. Sigh. DCS's API is the gift that keeps on giving, isn't it? Again, my thanks for documenting this! I should be able to guard against that quickly. Root cause is DCS passing out nonsensical/erroneous information (pointing to a deallocated unit), and DCS then stumbles when the script asks 'tell me more about that unit'. I don't think that they are connected, but you never know. I'll try and remove the bugs that you kindly documented. and we'll see what happens. From what I've experienced, the bugs that the scripts throw are all recoverable and should not cause the server to disco anyone nor restart. That being said, DCS itself resides on a terribly unstable core that dates back to the late 90s of last millennium, with libraries that are 32 bit code. DCS should be fully restarted (better yet, the entire server) once every 24 hours because it can corrupt your main memory and cause crashes for no apparent reason. My dedi servers (managed by the kind people at Fox3) restart once daily for exactly that reason. I hope I'll have a n update ready soon.

Simply use the method of spawning that you prefer, and better fits into your design flow. Both methods use coalition.addGroup() to create the units, there is no performance benefit for either. There is a marginal overhead at mission creation when 2 (sides) x 5 Spawn Points x 20 Units = 10 Groups and a total of 200 units are deallocated and DCS must perform its (not very good) garbage collection. Since it happens at mission start, I believe it to be insignificant.

And time accel doesn't? DCS is a game, and the object is to have fun. I don't mind when people say that for their enjoyment they want some arbitrary process simulated - it's a wish forum after all. And some 'realistic' inventory management is something that may be fun - "warriors win skirmishes, logistics wins the war". DCS's warehouses can do this, and - ironically - only in multiplayer: you can use warehouse inventory to limit the amount of aircraft that can spawn from an airfield. Let's try and keep off the 'realism' argument and focus on 'good experience' instead. I'm looking forward to see if and how ED bring this aspect of supply/demand/reinforcements to a dynamic campaign. Any undamaged modern aircraft that has seen action should realistically be out of the game for a day at least (maybe less for warbirds), a damaged one for a month at least. Same for pilots, so we are disregarding realism anyway. Let's focus on fun.

While indeed an interesting detail, that may rule out multiplayer - because time acceleration for a player simply doesn't work for for multiple. Most modern planes also have repair times measuring in months, not hours, so a plane damaged past a (very low) threshold may as well be counted as lost.

Indeed. To me it's both frustrating and heartbreaking that my favorite game as such an abysmal API. We all know that the data is there, it's just not (yet) accessible.

Unfortunately, no. Callsigns can be assigned via tasks, and there currently no (published) API for accessing a unit's current callsign.

Not yet. I'll see if it is accessible from within MSE.

Version 2.4.5 - 20250313: Feature update: csarFX, heloToops drop formation One of the little nagging things about DML's csarManager was that it, well, didn't really manage CSARs, just SAR. Putting the "C" in CSAR was something I did some time ago with a small add-on that not only adds enemies around the evacuee, but it also significantly dials up the visual candy and arranges nice debris, and in the case of SAR adds accidents on roads. The module csarFX exists separately, and transparently adds all these features to existing missions with little to no effort. If you have seen one of "Angels" or "CESAR" missions, you have seen csarFX in action. I've now merely brought csarFX to DML standard, and added a significant new feature to csarManager itself: the venerable autoCSAR module now can trigger true CSAR missions for any pilot that ejects and touches down inside a CSAR zone, auto-generating hot LZ, debris and everything. Other than that, DML has received a number of smaller bugfixes and enhancements, with DML's "crown jewel" heloTroops receiving a significant polish: players now can choose how the formation in which troops that they deploy form up around the helicopter: the classic circle around the helo, and now a line to the left and right, or a gaggle behind the aircraft. All this via commuinications, so merely updating the module brings this feature to your mission. All Changes: Documentation Main - csarFX (new) - heloTroops (new drop formations) QuickRef - csarFX (new) Demos - follow me (update) - SAR and CSAR, sitting in a Tree (new) Modules - airTank 1.0.2 - better integration with fireCtrl.enabled - csarFX 2.0.5 - Initial version (yeah, don't ask) - csarManager 4.4.0 - integration with autoCSAR: trigger CSAR zones - integrtaion with csarFX - fireCtrl 1.2.0 - new onStart attribute - new ctrOn? attribute - new ctrOff? attribute - heloTroops 5.0.0 - drop formation options via UI - playerScore 5.2.2 - removed type in feat - sitting ducks standalone 1.0.1 - hardening against DCS bugs - smokeZone 3.0.1 - removed bug during data load - unitZone 2.0.1 - removed deprecated 'coalition' and 'uzcoalition' Enjoy, -ch

Perhaps some day later. The issue here is that with radioMainMenu you can (and people do) build large structures, and mainMenu IMHO is a cute hack that isn't well engineered to support this (DCS's menu structure isn't at all, so I would need to build a system to manage that, and resolve issues where DCS's menu structure simply fails).