cfrag

Holy CRAP! You did not do anything wrong. There appears to have been an internal, unannounced change to the way that DCS stores mission data. While it used to store numerical zone data as numbers , e.g. ["radius"] = 213.36, it now (for reasons unknown) has changed to store some of these numbers as strings, e.g. ["radius"] = "800", (note the quotes around 800) which throws a big spanner into any method that doesn't guard for this silliness. Goodness, what a mess. Luckily, few methods in DML access zone radius directly, and the LZ module is the first to fall victim to this (and only if the LZ is circular). It's still staggeringly incomprehensible why this happens. I'll have an updated module ready asap.

Except that pushing it forward meant increase path inclination during descent, and pushing it forward during docking meant increase yaw. Yeah, you are trolling. Thank you for engaging with me.

That is very difficult to diagnose from here, as you are using DOSCRIPTFILE instead of DOSCRIPT (DCS makes debugging script files really difficult). From what I see you seem to not have included a pulser nor random module, but that should not generate the error. An error in cfxZones is a rather rare occurance (zones and common are the most battle-tested modules), but still possible. If possible, please remove all mods from the miz, and either PM the miz for analysis to me, or post it here. I'm quite confident that we can resolve this mystery quickly.

Huh. Funny you should say that. And I now posit that unless you use VR and a 4+DOF motion platform, we cannot simulate a flight-like reality, and you must stay on arcade games or, better yet, look at images of flight - bacause that is all you can ever have in non-VR, unmoving space. Some people seem to like flying with keyboard and mouse. More power to them. I certainly don't. But imposing arbitrary standards what constitutes 'proper' flight simming doesn't help. My neighbor is vegan and runs 10 miles each day. She claims to like both. I have no reason to disbelieve her and would never tell her that true taste requires meat and only little exercise, although it seems true to me.

Except, of course, for a joystick in flight sim mode (as opposed to 2D navigation mode as it's used in CAT scanners or many other medical and engineering appliances that I know). Or an Apple Mouse wheel. "Natural Response" isn't natural at all, just what the predominant culture where you grew up in conditioned you to accept as 'normal'. Drive in England when you are conditioned to drive on the right side of the road, and see that your "natural" response is simply wrong (glancing left first when crossing the street can kill you there). Work with people who naturally read and write from right to left (and who use their left hand "naturally" to write) and then re-evaluate what you just thought of as "natural". It's not. It's just your conditioning. You (as I) probably grew up in a western-culture dominated society, and are conditioned to those norms. There is nothing natural nor innate about it. It just cultural convention. And: Remember Ender's "The enemy gate is down" ("Ender's Game"). Directionality is merely a point of view. In he cultural sphere where you are, probably. Except when it's not (Apple Mouse Wheel). But usually all the things that you mentioned above are produced, marketed and sold for your cultural sphere. And in different set-ups for other, ... in that market, perhaps. And because you can get an upsell premium for devices that do allow customization, so there is a business impetus to upsell. I wish you would assert less and reflect more. Maybe you really can't change your conditioning, and that would be that. I have no trouble switching between forward = down and forward = up in different (very similar) contexts when I go from my Windows machine to my Mac (multiple times each day). Humans can effortlessly train muscle memory, especially if it is accompanied by aural and visual stimuli. Motorcyclists know that they have to invert left/right steering when they exceed some 10 mph. It happens 'naturally' (automatically), you do it without thinking. I highly recommend that you read up or research these things instead of (what I think you are doing) extrapolating from your beliefs how things may work. I recommend that you add the occasional "IMHO" or "I believe" to your writings. It softens your assertions of fact into what I surmise they are: statements of belief. I think that "Its too frustrating to me, and I see no reason" would have been a much more accurate reflection of your thoughts. There was nothing wrong with the Apollo controller. The problem was that it was constructed for landing vertically, so looking forward and down was 'forward', and the controls where calibrated for that. When docking, however, the Lunar Module moved in the opposite direction, and the pilots looked up as their forward, cycling all control directions. Yeah, they trained for that. No, nothing about that was natural. All was convention. And human adaptability.

Currently, static objects ignore the tail number unless it's part of the livery. When SG allocates the static object it passes exactly the same information at it would for the real thing, so any differences are part of DCS's inner workings that are currently undocumented.

Why put any effort into anything? Some people - who obviously aren't you - have different preferences, different from yours. Please believe me when I tell you that there is variety out there, and not everyone agrees with your proclivities. Theirs are as valid or invalid as yours. If a vendor decides to cater to more than one, that's valid too. Somehow I feel like feeding a troll. Hopefully I'm not.

Expansion already uses DML modules for that, and they are in DML - just not officially documented, and announced. They are still undergoing testing. If you feel lucky, and are a glutton for punishment, try and experiment with the milHelo, milWings, launchPlatform, camp (and some other I don't remember) modules. They provide the services for flights, missile attacks etc, but currently do not have their own bank nor menu integration. Once I get around to doing that, they'll become official DML modules.

Well, I guess it would be easier to simply have 'tunnel' zones that send signals if aircraft break floor or ceiling. The next request will be for zones that detect when planes are below or above some arbitrary speed, the next would want a signal when a unit deviates from a certain heading, as less than 50% fuel etc. Yes, all that can be done. The checks are computationally expensive, though. Each and every aircraft in the mission must be checked regularly against all zones, so performance can quickly tank for such a feature -- which is why I'm so hesitant to implement it. Maybe limit this to player aircraft, and we could cut down on the impact. But before we talk about solutions, let's talk about requirements: What do you want to achieve in your mission? Force players to remain below a ceiling in certain areas?

Well, they didn't call it "Warmland". Even Erik the Red (who wasn't squeamish when it came to the truth by a long shot) knew that people wouldn't let that slide (on top of his banishment for murder). So in a bit of shrewd middle-age marketing, he called it "Greenland". Which also makes a nice contrast to his previous home, Iceland. None of this is relevant to DCS (until we get a GIUK map, that is), so I'll now shut up. You are welcome

Version 2.4.2 -- 20250129 -- functional update Quite unexpectedly (and a day early) -- and definitely not a result of planning -- this update to DML turns out to be much more significant than I anticipated. It all started, innocently enough, with a request to add a small boost to PlayerScore's functionality: allow players in Combined Arms roles to score. This resulted in a major re-write of the entire kill-tracking mechanism, now includes a full 're-threading of the needle' ability to attribute last-hit when the unit is lost later (required because of a breaking, unannounced change in DCS from a couple of months ago) and other, minor additions (including to PlayerScoreUI). So now, PlayerScore not only supports CA players (even though I still think that the CA module is one of ED's low points in terms of quality and fidelity), but it now again correctly attributes 'indirect' kills, i.e. hits that result in the 'cooking-off' of vehicles. Then there was a comment I received that sparked an idea for additional abilities in GuardianAngel that has been marinating in the back of my mind ever since I watched 'Shirtless in the Navy' AKA 'Top Gun II' with my godson: the ability to place 'SAM safe' zones - zones where aircraft are safe from SAMs as long as they are inside the zone, and observe floor and ceiling. So you now can have a tunnel through the danger zone in your missions, just like Geriatrick. If that wasn't enough, I got hit up on a gloomy Sunday morning (well, I was gloomy and a bit hung over, the weather, admittedly, was fine) with a request from 61st Griff's @bitboy to help ease the suffering of mission creators when they want to embellish a mission with helicopters on plane guard duty. Anyone who has ever done this knows just how hostile Mission Editor's already lamentably inadequate UX becomes in this case, especially if the naval unit is a) not the first in the group or b) doesn't travel due North (0°). Some Alka-Seltzers and a re-read of an (elementary) 2D vector algebra chapter later, DML now puts a stop to your suffering: drop a trigger zone near any naval unit, tell it which helicopter is on duty, and presto! plane guard. It makes you wonder why this is so hard in vanilla DCS, as the difficulty is purely some busy-work math that could be entirely hidden from mission creators with a 'plane guard' waypoint action and a link to the target unit. And as always, there are some modules that received code hardening and some outright bug fixes (I kind of goofed last time I updated the pulser module). To top it off, I also updated some old demo mission, plus added a couple of new one, all documented fully, pushing the shock block over the 900 pages mark. Last time, I took out 200 pages and tried to simplify DML by dropping Lua support. This time, you won't be so lucky. All changes: Documentation Main - Playerscore (update) - Guardian Angel (update) - PlaneGuard (new) - Many small changes and updates QuickRef - PlaneGuard (new) Demos - follow me! (update) - Guardian Angel Reloaded (update) - Guardians and Sanctuaries (new) - missile evasion (update) - yes you CAn (new) - bottled messages (update) - Plane Guard (new) Modules - cfxMX 3.0.1 - new getClosestUnitToPoint() - delayFlags 2.1.0 - deprecated old attributes - guardianAngel 4.0.0 - New sanctuary zones - heloTroops 4.2.1 - fixed typo in attribute - planeGuard 1.0.0 - Initial version - playerScore 5.1.0 - CA immediate scoring - threading the needle (cooking off) - playerScoreUI 3.1.0 - support for config zones - support for 'attachTo:' - pulseFlag 2.0.2 - fixed a bug in persistence code - spawnZones 3.0.1 - increased verbosity - unitZone 2.0.1 - code hardening Enjoy, -ch

It is neither, and can be trained. Remember the Lunar Lander? For docking, the axes were reversed from the pilot’s point of view. On a Mac, the scroll wheel works opposite to Windows. When I use a trackball, I have set it to reverse Y (roll down to move up, and left to move left). UX studies have shown that humans can train this in hours, same as different keyboard layouts (Dvorak vs English). If you can’t relearn simple motoric responses to thought stimuli, that would be a you problem.

Your players might

I'm sure that I can find a way. In the mean time, you could try and use the group name as a stopgap Hmmm. Obviously, should we add wildcarded names that should be trivial. Let me see what I can come up with.

Maybe also read the mic. The louder you scream, the further the deflection? May not be the brightest idea, but I'd pay good money to see people try to use it...

Indeed. More importantly, how many of us WANT an accurate simulation? There are so many annoyances and RL restrictions that I do not want in a game. DCS is for entertainment. I can do without restrooms being installed at the start and end of a flight. Same for restaurants. hour-long METAR briefings and debriefings Bottle-to-Throttle 8 hours (yikes! -- 8 inches in DCS for me) Demotions/demerits for not following procedures Flights cancelled because the bird wasn't flightworthy Bad weather when I wanted good weather Waiting 2 hours for a slot. In a hot cockpit. With the engine off (no A/C) because some jerk decreed that we want to be more environmental friendly. Getting yelled at because being at an unfamiliar airfield -- and Junior found your Jeppesens last night and took them to bed with him Failing a medical and being grounded for 4 months Getting too old for g-loads, and just sitting in the cramped cockpit hurts Knowing that out there are Jerks who want to kill you. Literally. With missiles and stuff. Luckily we are so far removed from reality in DCS that flying again is a joyous event. We don't want reality. We want entertainment. With some semblance (a veneer, really) of reality. I don't bother so much whether the experience is realistic. It shouldn't be. It mustn't be. It should be fun. So yeah. Hit me with a fantasy Fat Amy or Superflank. And make it fun!

I don't think that that will create any issues with the miz.

It's certainly possible, but I think it'll mess with the GUI. I'll see what I can do for a simple solution.

Version 1.70 - 20250128 -- Major Update, Support for CA I recommend that you delete old save files before starting an updated mission. All Changes: major DML core update support for CA added 4 operators droppable CA-controllable units (AA) blue convoys now contain CA-drivable enabled ground unit control for all pilots added lase units to Nal, Moz, Bes and all FARP for infantry helicopter deployments added jtac status report added AA troops to Beslan plane guard upgrade (carrier) Enjoy, -ch

Ooops. Try this please: pulseFlags.lua

Ah. This is one of the most heartfelt wishes of many of us mission creators. Alas, we should be so lucky. DCS MIssion Editor lamentably is 2D only, and generally hates you. There is an independently created "Web Editor" (see here, no affiliation except being a happy user) that plans a 3D feature.

I'm not sure that I understand the question. When you launch Mission Editor, you choose which map to work on, or open an existing mission which tells Mission Editor which map to load. What is your question?

There's a manual that comes with DML, with detailed information for each attribute for each zone.

Based on the persistence data (and modules that load after persistence), DCS allocates all units/groups that were alive when the last successful save was made. DML tries to match some units (in unitPersistence) with groups placed with ME. Other modules (especially cloners and spawners) record all their surviving spawns to persistence to allow re-spawning their units later. Upon mission start, persistence can (if at the point of save the mission had spawned many groups) create a lot of groups/units. If persistence saved some units that require mods and that were subsequently removed from the mission, the results are undefined, as persistence passes allocation and handling of these groups/units to DCS. What DCS does with such spawn requests is anyone's guess, especially if removal of the mods was only partial. IMHO, when you edit a mission, I recommend that you remove the entire (data) folder before you start the mission anew so that persistence can start with a clean slate.

Not with loading world textures, no. Your computer may be running into memory issues, though. IIRC the new fog and enabling wind will greatly kick up memory requirements, especially in Syria. Textures not loading, or loading very slowly is very often related to tight memory conditions.