cfrag

The mission requires a mod "WWII Armour and Technics". That would be my first suspect.

In that case I don't think that DML would do anything with anything in the miz.

Version 1.52 - 20240912 -- Maintenance Update • Fix for FARP slot accessibility edge case (single/multiplayer) • Added a single Su-25T (DCS free plane) Frogfoot to Nal, so everyone can start the mission. • Set all AAA infantry orders to “wait-guard” while all Assault set to “wait-captureAndHold” • Slightly upgraded the AI Cobra’s bite Enjoy, -ch

Interesting. How does DML interact with the flaks? In other words, what do you use DML for when it comes to making the flaks fire?

Version 2.3.2 - 20240912 Feature Update: Inferno, Airtank A couple of very busy weeks. I've put finishing touches on the two new modules airtank and inferno, and put them together in what I wanted to build for almost two years: a firefighting mission (please see here for details). The two new modules are now fully described and cross-referenced, and all that is left is to document the demo, which I put on my to-do list for the next update. Also part of this update are more bug-fixes for the damage that ED did to their great product, but for some modules I unfortunately can't undo all. It seems that the kind people at ED (unwittingly?) changed the way that DCS signals how and when a unit or object is destroyed. As a result, some modules (e.g. PlayerScore, objectDestructDetector) are diminished in what they can do. We'll have to wait and see how this develops in the future, and I hope that ED find the time to better communicate their intentions and improve their QA. Changes in Detail: Documentation Main Inferno (new) Airtank (new) Various updates & corrections Quickref Inferno (new) Airtank (new) Demos (none) Modules - airtank 1.0.0 - initial Release - inferno 1.0.0 - initial release - objectDestructDetector 2.0.4 - DCS bug hardening - playerScore - diminished services due to DCS bugs - sittingDucks 1.0.1 - DCS bug hardening - TDZ - 1.1.1 - now correctly sends a signal on touchDown Enjoy, -ch

HEROES OF FLAME - CAUCASUS ======================== V.20240909 Download: here (ED User Files) "Heroes of Flame" is an endless, entirely non-violent single/multiplayer helicopter fire-fighting mission. You are tasked with extinguishing large to very large fires with your helicopter. The more fires you extinguish, the better your reputation (if you enable persistence by de-sanitizing DCS, the mission remembers your past accomplishments). stupid null, ED, please fix your editor Summertime...! ... and living is easy? Not if you are one of Krasnodar's "Heroes of Flame", an elite helicopter firefighter corps. This summer is particularly hot and follows on the heels of a string of hot and dry months of spring. The ground is dry, the forest has become tinder waiting for a spark. The ground in and around Krasnodar's city proper is so parched that the municipal office has released orders that disallow citizens lighting fires outside of controlled environments. Last week, vacation season started, and people - along with tourists - stream outside to enjoy nature and recreation. If last year was any indication of things to come, there will be fires, caused by a myriad of things, most of them caused by human exuberance. The local fire brigades are prepared for smaller flare-ups. Due to the extreme heat and drought, this year the authorities have prepared well: they erected an Airtank Center that has few rivals worldwide. A veritable armada of Hinds, Hips, Hooks, Hueys and Kiowas, fitted for firefighting are stationed at Krasnodar-Pashkovsky and are staffed with the best. You are one of them, and ready to become one of the "Heroes of Flame". Jump into the cockpit, top off your retardant tanks, and lay claim to your title. Heroes of flame supports the following helicopters / carry capacities: Huey (1200kg) Hip (4000kg) Hind (2400kg) Hook (9000kg) Kiowa (500kg) To fight fires, you first top off your tanks with flame retardant (from Krasnodar refill zone, marked with white smoke) or water (from a lake/river), and then drop it into the blaze. Topping off your tanks: When inside a refill zone (white smoke): go to communications - Other - Firefighting and choose "Activate Intake" to fill up your flame-retardant tanks. Filling your tanks is instantaneous. When hovering over open water (lake/river), and at 10m AGL or less: go to communications - Other - Firefighting and choose "Activate Intake" to fill up your flame-retardant tanks. You’ll hear your intake pumps activate, and your chief starts giving you live updates. Your pumps can acquire 100 liters (kg) of water per second, so keep this in mind while hovering. Filling up the Huey (1200l) takes 12 seconds, while topping off the Hook at that rate takes 90 seconds. Once your tanks are topped off, your intake pumps disengage automatically Dropping Flame Retardant / Water into fire: Note: currently, there is no difference in efficacy between water and flame retardant (this may change in later versions) Move towards a fire cell and prepare to drop water. You can choose between two different methods: MANUAL: choose Comms - Other - Firefighting and select "Manual Release". This empties the contents of your tanks at 1000kg/sec until they are empty. The impact point is derived from your current speed and direction. While the tanks are emptied, you can hear the turbo-pumps pushing out the liquids. I recommend that you bind the F2 key for manual release using some appropriate software for greater precision. ALT-triggered: Go above 300 m AGL (900 ft), and then Comms-->Other-->Firefighting and choosing "Arm Autodrop Trigger". An aural soft tone blips once per second to remind you that the altitude trigger is armed. Once your altitude gets below 100m AGL (328ft), that triggers release. Note: Altitude-triggered release is more difficult, and intended for advanced pilots who can judge their approach. Once release has started, it ends after the entire contents has been emptied. The drop pumps are rated at 1000kg/sec, meaning that the Huey (1200l capacity) is empty after 1.2 seconds, while the Hook (9000l) has 9 seconds of water/retardant, and can therefore cover larger areas. After you successfully drop water/flame retardant into a cell, the amount of fuel left in that cell is reduced. Once all fuel in the cell is consumed, that fire cell dies out, and can't re-ignite. Dropping water around a burning cell can prevent the fire from spreading in that direction. If you succeed in extinguishing all fire cells in a blaze, all pilots that have successfully contributed to fighting that fire are awarded an number of points based on the size of the conflagration. The points accumulate any you can always query your status from Mountaintop. Initially, your Rank is "Probie", and that rank increases with the number and size of fires that you help to put out. Note: Refueling Keep in mind that in order to carry more flame retardant, your helicopter is only fueled to 50%. Keep an eye on your fuel gauge, and when you return to the airfield to refuel, do not top off your gas tanks. Fill them to 50% to avoid falling out of the sky. Since it's summer, and people are in a festive mood, there will never be a point where no fires require your attention. OTHER NOTES: “Heroes” supports persistence of features if your DCS installation is de-sanitized “Heroes” uses 'stopGap' for eye candy. On multiplayer, the server (only server) must run the 'stopGapGUI' script to fix a DCS synchronization bug. For stopGap, please see here: https://forum.dcs.world/topic/326213-stopgaps-script-to-fill-empty-player-slots-with-planes/ Created with DML

Oh joyful news. Yes, the kind people at ED also have changed the events sent when a map object is destroyed to "dead" and no longer invoke "Kill". As a result, killing a map object can no longer be tied to a player. I'll look into it to see if I can change this to attribute the kill to a faction instead. Thank you so much for setting up a test miz. TBH, it feels to me as if DCS's API is rapidly going down the tubes quality-wise.

It seems a recent change has done away with kill events for map objects, doing away with the ability to attribute a map object kill to a player. Now only dead events are invoked for the map objects, making it impossible to tie a map object kill to a player. This change makes it much harder to write engaging missions, please bring the KILL event back (and while you are at it, please also restore it to the scenery objects that have dropped invoking the Kill event in favor of Dead/Unit Lost).

Thank you for the heads-up. How did you configure PlayerScore to recognize the object kill? Can you please show that trigger zone as well? [EDIT: silly me, the blueScore attribute is there, thank you]

Unfortunately, I see no reaction from ED, which I find disappointing, and it makes me question why this entire forum chapter exists. @NineLine - is anyone from ED monitoring this? I see far too few (if any) tags from you and your kind colleagues, and I am wondering if there might be a better way to spend my time than posting here. My understanding is that we (customers) post here to help you (ED) to make a good product even better. I hope that your views are somewhat aligned with mine. In any event, here's some copy from a very nice and helpful submission from a fellow contributor, who I am absolutely sure did not include the blanks, and had the silly ED bot mangle their thoughtful contribution: To begin using the DCS Mod Manager, you'll first need to sel ect the main directory where your DCS mods are stored. This is usually located at: [...] Reload: Refresh the list of mods fr om the selected directory. Use this if you've added or removed mods manually and want to update the list.  Please, please, please turn this silly feature off.

Thank you. It's difficult to predict if a bug in DCS that affects one item (missing kill event for some static objects) will affect others (map objects). Thank you for taking the time to investigate.

Have you tried it?

Until ED restore the expected functionality of the KILL event I see no other way, yes. I have filed a bug report in the relevant forum, so let us hope that someone sees it and reacts.

Thank you for sticking with this issue. A few more questions and comments: What do you mean by 'commented out the two lines'? Did you remove the DOACTION for persistence and unitPersistence? That will indeed remove persistence from the mission entirely. I followed your kind advice and re-created this. I was unable to observe any crashes. That is about what is to be expected, DML (the foundation the Expansion is built upon) works that way. It will automatically also shut down the 'income' and 'camp' modules. Net result should be that your side starts without funds, and no longer can work with any funds. Just like you state, it leads to an error dialog from the xpStrat module at start. The main mission script shuts down, and no AI is scheduled (you'll receive no objectives, no enemies are launched, no allies launch). Expansion has become a shell, no units are spawned by the mission. While I can't 100% rule out a bug in bank nor income, I'm currently leaning against that hypothesis after extensive testing. The persistence modules have no open issues, and neither do 'bank' nor 'income'. A stress test over the week-end I conducted cannot reproduce the issue that you kindly reported. To try and make this issue go away, can I ask you to ensure that you have removed all mods run a full repair on DCS The pattern and symptoms of the issue that you are describing (isolated nature of occurrence, crash to desktop instead of an error dialog) IMHO points to a cause outside of the mission's scripting. It can't be ruled out, but I have been unable to re-produce your issues. After a full repair of your DCS installation, and removing all mods, what do you observe?

The servers are back! At least they were today. And if you head over to my "cfrag's DML Testbed" (dedicated server hosted by the kind people at Fox3) you can help stress-test a firefighting (alas, not bambi-bucket) miz -- my own imagination of helicopter firefighting.

It seems that some static objects, when killed DO receive a KILL event (that allows tying a unit to an object's kill), while other objects, on being killed only receive a DEAD and UNIT LOST event, but no kill event. Worse, there is no usable HIT event that would allow a script to connect a DEAD/LOST event to the launching unit because the HIT event does not carry the relevant information. From what I can gather, this seems to be connected to the category of the killed object: Ground Vehicles seem to receive a KILL event, while at least some structures and warehouses do NOT receive a kill event. Not being able to trace a kill to a unit is a severe impediment for creating many interesting missions. In the attached demo, destroying the static vehicle on the runways does create a kill event, while destroying the other three structures/warehouses does not. All hit events return nil targets (why?) object scoring test plain.miz

It looks as if there is no way that you can tie SOME kills back to the aircraft that originated the weapon because inexplicably, for some objects there is no 'KILL' event when they are killed. Worse, even though the API documentation CLAIMS that you should be able to tie a hit of an object to a unit via the HIT event, unfortunately that is not true. If it did, I could try to thread the needle and tie a weapons hit back to whoever dropped the weapon. So it looks like for the time being, destroying SOME objects with bombs cannot be tied back to who killed them - the KILL event isn't invoked for SOME objects (it is invoked for others, very strange -- it may depend on the killed object's category: ground vehicles seemingly receive a kill event, structures and warehouses seemingly do not). We get two generic 'DEAD' and 'UNIT LOST' events for those objects that do not carry the required data to tie a kill to the killing unit. Very disappointing; very, very inexplicable why ED would overlook something as fundamental as that. Here's to hoping that ED can arrest DCS's API quality decline soon.

You mean that the displayed text is too large in VR? I think (but I'm not sure) that this can be set in your options screen. This is not something that a mission can change.

My apologies, there must be something lost in translation. I do not understand the question.

Either disable stopGap in the miz, or run 'stopGapGUI' on the server (need only be run on the server). The exploding and dropping aircraft are a result from a DCS synchronization bug.

I'm afraid that you'll have to be more specific than that - this is a great topic, and very, very broad: Kill count - for players only, or also count AI kills, count kills per side, per (aircraft) type (flown and killed), do killed ground units count as well, pvp only, pve only? Persistence - Should the count be saved to disk so that next time that you run the mission the past kills are loaded and then amended Display - what do you display, and what do you aggregate? Scoring/Weighting: Does killing a Su-27 with a Kiowa count more than killing a Huey with an Eagle? If so, by how much? Balancing: In a similar vein to above, does killing an ace (with many kills to their name) count more than killing a noob? Does killing an aircraft that's still on the ground count (thereby incentivising airfield camping)? Does the weapon used for killing make a difference? Gun kills vs. Missile? Does it matter if there are many more blue players vs only few red, and if so, how? Cross-mission - Should the kill count extend past a running mission to other missions? Other considerations that may be good to clear up - how do you count fratricide? - what if a player changes sides? Oh - and finally: be advised that no matter how you implement your score board, there will be others who don't like it

Agreed. So it was just an inflationary use of words to replace 'nice'.

Apologies, but I can find nothing wrong with how it works. When I kill the static car on the runway cross, I get 100 points just as intended. object scoring test.miz

While I agree that it would be a nice gimmick that I'd probably use once, maybe even twice, I'd like to know what makes a nice-to-have side show such as walking to your aircraft prior to a flight an "extremely awesome epic thing". It's not that we would find something wrong with the plane. It's not essential for the simulation. IMHO it is likely going to be something that most (99.9% of all casual pilots who start hot) will skip after they did it a couple of times. I get into the plane to fly it, not to spend a couple of minutes to walk to it. Sure, wish list and all, and I will support the idea, the more the merrier. But when I think of "extremely awesome epic things" that are perhaps ornamental, I'm thinking along the lines of tarmac/ground/tower/ATC control, smart AI ground and airfield traffic etc.

ED have changed a lot stuff surrounding the "dead" event. I'll see if I can track this down, thank you!