cfrag

That seems strange, as stopGaps should indeed do what you are looking for: replace player-spawnable slots with static stand-ins. What are you looking for?

It's good that you were able to resolve the issue. Please be advised that your script still contains at least one show-stopping bug: local EscortGroup = Unit.getByName("AI_BLUE_ESC_2-1") if not EscortUnit then env.info("ERROR: EscortUnit not found.") return end Your script should not progress past that point, and always end with the message "EscortUnit not found".

I think a bett question would be "what kind of error?"

Check your variable names, especially escortGROUP vs escortUNIT. Methinks EscortUnit isn't defined.

Hell yeah - it fit snugly into the code I crafted months and years before, the vector algebra, rotation and formation stuff was a joy to add, performance is great, and it took next to no effort to build. I'm almost disappointed that I'm done with this

And here we go, as promised: heloTroops.lua

Since the Bo-105 (hopefully soon) may become reality, I'd love to see Eurocopter Tiger (I've got a soft spot in my heart for the Bo-105, as that was the main attack chopper when I served in the (West-German) army and it was awesome to see them getting into the action during our dynamic exercises)

After some engineering pause (involving a short and salty, non-alcoholic!) Apero, I came up with a nice way to fit in this new ability, independent of how troops spawn: a deploy menu that pilots can use to set troop deployment formation when they leave the helicopter. And the formation is always relative to the helo's current heading to make it easier on everyone. null (<-- ED, please get some real HTML talent, and make your main discussion site behave professionally) Still working out the kinks, but it seems to integrate well, I should be able to pass out pre-release versions tonite before I go for the Apero's Encore (some "Bisteaka Fiorentina" - or similar. She's Italian, not I)

"DD_Friar isn't in many ballads, but he's still an important part of the DML band." - we do have the code for that in DML, and we sure can try. DCS, to keep with "Prince of thieves" our "Sheriff of Nuttingham" here, often isn't amendable to those exploits. A circle formation ensures that no unit comes too close to the helicopter to be killed on spawn, while no such guarantee can be made for other formations. I'll see what I can do. Few things are as gratifying as re-purposing existent code, so it's at least worth a shot.

Since AI needs to be able to do these tasks, I think it's a good feature (and since this is a wish list, it's perfectly placed): switch in AI and stay in the cockpit to see how AI does it - an instructor driving your plane, so to speak. It could also be the precursor to "buddy control", where another player takes control of your aircraft, and you watch to see how they do it. I envision a "Handoff to AI" menu that has sub-menus with "Continue straight and level", "Land on nearest friendly airfield/FARP/Carrier", "Fly to next waypoint", "Resume Control" (yeah, I omitted the obvious "Approach Tanker" and "Refuel" points for being less contentious). The downside for this of course is that right now, IMHO DCS's AI is nowhere near where it can do that - all AI approaches seem to be on rails, with stark disregard of procedures (especially radiotelephony), speeds and how physics should work, so it could take a while for this to materialize. But handing off to a selective AI whilst remaining in the seat would be a great didactic and convenience tool Why troll on such a beautiful day? Methinks "Git gud" is a toxic, juvenile comment, and our community is better than that. I personally wouldn't use such a feature often (except the 'fly me to waypoint' bit, which usually Otto can do fine except in helos) because most I do in DCS is landings, but that is my silly preference and entirely beside the point. Such a feature could be a godsend to many players.

Some really interesting stuff (CA upgrade? Nice!), and it's always good to hear (and now see) Wags. I'm really hoping that ED manage to attract some good UI talent for the all-important Dynamic Campaign UX - because, quite frankly, what we have seen in the past 12 months in this regard (MP join faction dialogs, CH 47 cargo interface and ME's band select feature) are UI disasters, veritable master-classes in how to violate or destroy every UI guideline, convention or expectation (looking at the MP join faction UX makes me wonder how they manage to violate more UI rules than there are interface elements). If the interface isn't up to snuff, people won't use it, and it'll be a terrible waste to create something this wonderful and important only to have it go to waste on usability grounds. So here's to hoping that ED manage to attract some top-notch UI people for DC! And a possible peek at the end of this year? Icing on the cake!

Not any longer: heloTroops.lua

Oh yes, "1 073 741 823" in decimal equals "0x3FFFFFFF" in hex, a sure sign that some inexperienced coder use that constant (a 31 bit (?wtf?) maxInt) instead of using a bool in the data structure to denote unlimited supply. A rookie (or cheap talent) mistake. A slightly more experienced amateur would probably have used "-1" as "infinite".

Thank you for that sleuth work. Another fact to add to the bin "evidence for cartoonishly bad code engineering" in DCS's Warehouse API. Sigh.

Ouch, a classic logic blunder: I forgot an 'else' to properly handle the default case. On it now.

Thank you so much, I'll have a look asap

Indeed. Do you have a miz for me (no mods please) that shows this erratic bahvior? I guess that is easy to determine: remove WHpersistence. If you have a demo miz to force the issue, that would help. -ch

Not "vanilla" DCS. When you add one of the many frameworks available, it becomes trivial. See sample below (sample uses DML). spawn random loc inside zone.miz

Huh. Indeed. That's odd, and after I successfully regression tested. Here's a corrected version: Thank you for the quick report smokeZones.lua

It’s RGBA. The last value is Opacity. 0 is fully transparent, 128 means half transparent, 255 is fully opaque.

I usually place a couple of Tigrs (the car) on the ground. They have sufficiently bright lights for most uses. They simply look silly in others.

I believe the green arrow refers to ME's "play mission" button. Dynamic spawns are only available in multiplayer, so you must start a local (or ad-hoc) multiplayer game (the performance impact is small, and it's a great way to play single-player missions).

Version 2.4.4 - Update - works around show-stopping DCS bug - 20250227 It was a splinter in my mind. Although I never experienced the bug myself I knew that people had run into it. And it was bad - literally show-stopping. It escaped me (and as a result bugged many others) for months. And still I never caught even a fleeting glimpse of it. And then, luckily, I received a mission that could re-produce the issue - so my thanks go to @DD_Friar who supplied me with a Miz that forced the bug out in the open. It turns out that the performance-killing bug is caused by a bug in DCS's trigger.action.removeMark() when invoked too soon after drawing a mark. Yeah, I'd never have found that by myself. So now Expansion (hopefully) runs full throttle on all servers and single-player machines like it always did on mine. I used the the past few weeks to upgrade the odd module (yes, cloneZones now sports a "maxCycles" attribute, as requested) -- and to finally bring "CESAR" to Syria. It's a lot meaner than CESAR Caucasus - so if you're a glutton for punishment, you'll love it. And if you want to study how I use DML to create missions, they are good study objects. All Changes: Documentation Main - Many changes and updates QuickRef - Many changes and updates Demos - smoke'em (update smoke zones) - colored smoke switcher (new) - Random Glory (update) - Reaper, man (update) Modules - cfxZones 4.5.3 - supports names for smoke colors - better support for random smoke color - cloneZones 2.6.0 - new "maxCycles" attribute - csarManager 4.3.0 - smoke extinguishes as soon pilot is evacuated - new 'keepSmoke' option to leave smoke on - dcsCommon 3.2.1 - markPointWithSmoke() supports smoke names - FARPZones 2.4.0 - work-around for killing DCS bug in removeMark() - heloTroops 4.2.3 - new "keepWait" attribute to manage orders in dropzone - new "setWait" attribute to manage orders in dropzone - ownedZones 2.5.0 - work-around for killing DCS bug in removeMark() - persistence 3.1.0 - new "validFor" attribute for better memory management - pulseFlags 2.0.4 - corrected a silly typo - reaper 1.3.0 - new "invisible" attribute that makes drone invisible to AI - smokeZones 3.0.0 - smoke can now be stopped immediately - suppors persistence Enjoy, -ch

Try this. New 'invisible' attribute for the zone, module still has some debug verbosity built in invisible When set to true, the drone is invisible to enemy AI so it won’t be attacked by SAM nor enemy units. Does that work for you? reaper.lua

Unfortunately, you do not show when and how above code is invoked, nor how those templates work. There's one thing, however, that makes me very uncomfortable. It's simply not there yet, and tends to make things worse for people trying to learn. Don't use chatGPT for mission scripting. Also What is that?