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I wasn't aware that this still is a problem. That's a great idea, and I've taken it to the next logical step. Enclosed please find a small, light-weight script that you start at mission start. It watches ships that get killed, and places a fire and smoke effect on top of them. If they sit in the harbor and sink partly, the fire still marks them as dead. Then, after 5 minutes (or whatever you enter for value), the wreck is removed. Demo mission included. Here's the script Hope that this also helps @waterman Enclosed demo has a 'looker' unit sitting on the shore overlooking the harbor, so you can see the ships sink and settle. These would look nearly undamaged from above unless marked with fire. They then disappear when the "shallows" script removes them. Script is tested only superficially, so if you run into issues, please post here. -ch Not too shallow at all.miz

It now can. Enclosed please find demo mission and updated module williePete.lua Giving Gazelle the Willies.miz

It's not their fault that they never heard of Golf. But yes, variable difficulty in ranked multiplayer is standard even in real world recreational sports. In Golf, that 'cheat' is called 'handicap'. But this threat unfortunately has boiled down to 'haters gonna hate', with even me contributing some unkind comments which (although of course 10'000% correct and on point ) did not further the issue.

Usually with DML no Lua is required, so hopefully not. I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are trying to do, but to get SpawnZones to spawn on-demand from HeloTroops is indeed a built-in ability, I'm sure that we will get it to work quickly. Perhaps describe/show what you did, and what you expected to see, and then what you are currently seeing, maybe also show a screenshot of the trigger zone attributes that you are using. I'm working on it right now, that should be entirely doable

Well, we say 'negotiation begins at "no"', others say 'hope springs eternal'. What we agree on is probably that this is a topic that has people engaged

That's a nonsequitur. I already said that that I relish doing pointless things like flying a sim. Why would having a helper change this? I'm paying good money to do pointless things. It's called entertainment. And I want more, with more options for everyone.

OK, that I completely do not understand. It's a game. The entire reason to play is that it's pointless, it has no consequences. Don't you relish completing a pointless task like killing mock tanks? If not, then why play at all? everything you do in DCS is pointless, except to entertain you.

Why? You can still do it like you did before. Why is it taken away? And what purpose? Didn't you learn to AAR for your own satisfaction, to prove to yourself that you can do it? It's not your bragging rights that you are afraid to lose, how you think that you might look in other peoples eyes, right? Because that would totally go away, and I'm hoping that most people here are not that petty.

So it's a motivational issue for you? Let's look at Golf. There is a cheat called 'handicap'. It allows players to start playing at lower skill levels (proficiency handicap 36). Once they achieve 36 and are allowed on the course, most players strive to become better, to reduce their handicap. If everyone were as you describe your issue with an AAR helper, nobody (except perhaps professionals) would go for lower handicap, everyone would stop as soon as they have reached handicap 36. But even if - why should you care? You play for yourself. Yes, it would not be a challenge for you if you AAR by pressing a button. Again: you play for yourself. Only for yourself. Don't press the button! Unless you want to, that is. Who cares except yourself? Put differently: who's approval are you trying to win? Who are you trying to impress? Whose approval are you afraid to lose if anyone can AAR? Is that the problem? In my mind, the only person you can cheat here is yourself. Why would I care if you pressed the button and cheated yourself out of a terrific experience? I certainly wouldn't think less of you. My appreciation of others doesn't hinge on how they can AAR, and I suspect you feel similarly. So let people be people and let them have fun whichever way they like - as long as you can have fun together.

For the record: we are talking about optional helpers, and people who are against other people having this option. Agreed. Nobody talks about this. We are talking about helpers for those who want it It's envisioned as an option for the server admin/mission designer. Let's leave it up for discussion what the 'final challenge' in DCS would be. Different things for different people. That would only apply to people who are so arrogant that they believe that others should hold them in awe because they can AAR. I don't give a rats behind about what other people think of my skills. I play so I have fun. I recommend others to do likewise and care less about how other people play. For MP, we are talking about server options: have it available or not depends on the server owner. Like Map view etc. Seriously? I can vehemently argue be for equal opportunities although I already have a great job. I can argue for better tutorials at class even though I already have my degree. And I have no problem to tell religious nuts that they must not withhold live-saving treatment from their children even though I don't believe in gods nor require the treatment. It's called empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings and desires of others. It's an important social skill.

Definitely, and it's what makes DCS so attractive to you and me. We can get lost over the country with a simulated outage of our nav systems, then use skills to pinpoint our location and still make a good approach on a carrier or airfield. Fun. It could be no fun at all to other people. The ability to optionally have help has incredible value to me. Start the sim on long final, no traffic, no wind, good visibility, all systems fine, and to hell with proper radio telephony rules. Or be lost in IMC with a troubled plane and enough fuel for a single approach. The choice should be yours. And if someone wants to activate some optional help for AAR, why the hell not? Anything that helps them to have fun, to better enjoy one of the best games I know.

You know I always value your opinion. A simulation is "the modelling of a real or imagined process over time". That's it. You may be laboring under some misapprehensions here that I hope I helped to resolve. My apologies for being unclear. What I meant to say is that when you are playing a game, do not tell others how to play nor what effort they must put it to properly have fun. Of course, a literal look at what a living creature does while alive always requires energy, and happens over time: Time and effort. That was not what I meant, my apologies if that wasn't clear to you.

You couldn't be more wrong. It's a *game*, something you do for entertainment. You are supposed to have fun. Some have fun with challenges, others don't. If you have fun, fine. Don't tell others how to have fun. Example: Some play XCOM on max difficulty; others play normal difficulty or easy. The game developers put in multiple difficulty modes for a reason: to broaden appeal, to make the game more accessible, to allow more people to have fun. What's it to you if I play on easy? It doesn't in any way change the way you play, even though we both finish the game. Because you can finish XCOM on easy, no-one in earnest claims that you should not be able to complete the game unless they play on max difficulty. In games, there are always short-cuts. That's why they are called games. You may have noticed that in DCS you can fly a fighter jet without a valid medical, without wearing piddle-packs and gloves, and without holding a jet rating. Heck, I hear that they let people play DCS F/A-18 who don't have a complex rating, some players may not even have a pilot's license at all! Those are immense short cuts (no formal education in systems engineering, weather, flight dynamics, procedures, human factors, international law. Your body may not be suitable for air combat, and you may even be intoxicated while flying. Plus, you are likely not a member of a country's armed forces). So don't get picky about the small fry (accessibility) when you ignore the really big items. You are being handed the plane without the hard stuff. Don't pretend otherwise. You are playing a video game. Stop talking about "time and effort" unless you get paid.

Try this mission. You are hot on the ground in front of the Arc. Parc de Triomphe.miz

Just to be on the safe side: the mission is run as multiplayer, not single mission "Blocking" doesn't mean that the slot is not available, it means that when you select a blocked slot, you simply can't enter the game. If above is true, let's have a look at the mission to find out what went wrong and fix it

Can we please close this thread? It has run it's course.

This is because the "Airborne Troops" menu belongs to DCS which behaves a bit selfishly, and does not allow scripts to access it. The Helo Troops menu, and all other scripted menus are accessible via Communication-->Other-->Airlift Troops They will receive, yes - every player in the same coalition will receive the recon info so they can adjust to the tactical information. But they can't recon themselves. Or rather: they should not be able to start recon if they are excluded. If they can, please let me know, and I'll see if I can fix that

If you are not adverse to scripting, the autoCSAR module in DML does this: create a CSAR mission for every pilot who successfully ejects. The "Feats and autoCSAR" demo in DML shows this (and the 'feats' capability of the playerScore module. If you think this may be helpful for you, perhaps look at the Demo's description in the docs (DML's manual discusses each of the included demos in detail), csarManager and autoCSAR are drop-in modules for your mission, so there is very little learning curve involved. demo - feats and autoCSAR.miz

I think it's working (the last update was a couple of weeks ago). When you report that it doesn't do anything, maybe we can start tracking down a potential bug: what were you expecting that it does? Put differently: why is what you see happening not what you were expecting?

We have seen the answer first hand, just a few posts ago: there are people who believe that being able to AAR is a momentous feat, an accomplishment that they would (unironically) liken to that of life-long professional, elite sportsmen. This ostensibly serves to boost their ego; it allows them to look down on others who aren't, in their mind, "elite" enough; the sissies, who won't put in the hard work, or, as I assume, aren't "manly" enough to properly train AAR. You know: the Betas. Now, if you allowed just anyone to AAR, this feeling of superiority would crumble, dealing a blow to their self-esteem. I know - but that's why this AAR 'feat' is so jealously guarded.

I find this to be a fascinating topic, and the prospect of having the whole world to fly in is tantalizing indeed. We should make sure, though, that in our excitement we don't jump to too many conclusions. First, the 'spherical model' wrt to DCS as a flight sim has two very distinct applications that we need to keep separate. There is using the spherical model while the simulator is running. So instead of a flat earth that has all terrain surface points on a 2D map, these points are transformed to fit on curved surface, a sphere. Except for some edge cases (flying *very* high so you can see the curvature of earth, or sitting on water with LOS to distant objects which should have dropped under the horizon) such a change would have negligible impact on average game play: when you fly a jet to approach a carrier, your elevation (6000 feet or more) usually resolves LOS issues, and few planes regularly fly high enough so that we can theoretically see earth's curvature - 35'000 ft and more. Gaming impact would be minimal. That being said, though, we should note that DCS today already has all required transformations from its 2D map to a spherical model in place: it can transform any 2D map co-ordinate into Lat/Lon - which is a spherical model. It's a linear transformation. Gaming-wise, there will be very little change, aside from some edge cases. The other point is map streaming, i.e. a map that is so big that it does not fit into memory. For example the whole world. Spherical considerations only figure into this when we want to determine which chunk to load as we move from A to B. As you noted, the problem here isn't so much to figure out what to load, and to develop the technology to seamlessly integrate loading really huge amounts of data into an action game. It's difficult, but not insurmountable. Neither is getting global mesh data. Nor sat imagery. The big problem is - as you mentioned yourself - filling the gigantic void with meaningful, engaging and interesting data. For a glimpse of how big a task that is, load up the Falklands (South Atlantic) map and fly over Argentina or Chile. It's empty. Really, really empty - even after Raz have invested ungodly amounts of work. And for SA they use sat imagery to base their map generation on. It's a Herculean task even if you have terrain mesh, sat image and road data. And this is, unfortunately, where we need to face a hard truth: ED and their partners are businesses: they exist to make money. Their business is to sell, among other things, maps. While it would only take a second to convince me - a customer - how great it would be if we could fly the whole world; or even better - from map to map (say: Take off from Kairo on the Sinai map to fly over Jerusalem to Beirut on the Syria map), you'll have a much harder time to convince ED's partners that they should relinquish their 'exclusive' rights to an area to the general public. Today, if you want to fly in Haifa, you need Syria. With a new streamed world tech, that would no longer be true. I know that there will be many people who feel that 'streamed real-world' Beirut is good enough for them. The map makers would need some form of guarantee that they still have a business. Raz, Ugra and the others have - or are in the process of - investing significant funds into map content design. They won't take kindly to having that pulled out from under them, they would want and need assurances that their business remains viable. That, I believe, would be one of the biggest challenges to master. It's definitely solvable, but I think we won't see any progress with a streamed world until that is resolved. It's most probably a result from how we can get to a populated game map: take sat imagery for a region, and then, based on what we see on those images. we create map objects: roads, buildings, land marks, forests, cities etc. In populated areas, WW II maps were very, very different from today: cities were smaller, roads less pronounced (few highways if at all), with some significant changes to today (airfields that did or did not exist, industrial zones that were built in the 50s or that declined after the war). If you want to have any chance of creating a more-or-less interesting (not realistic) streamed world, you'd most probably resort to sat imagery that is populated by AI, based on the sat imagery. Since we don't have WW II based sat images, only modern maps have a chance to be auto-generated that way. And then there is the performance issue: There are flight sims available today that use a streamed world with large stretches of high-detail areas, populated mostly by AI. Try them, and then decide if you would want that in your combat flight sim. I live in an area that is available as "high res" for two such sims. I took a helicopter, and 'went home' in the two sims that I own. Compared with unrealistic-but-hand-crafted Caucasus, these high-res areas are are ugly, chunky, obviously not real - but hit my system much harder performance-wise. That's the secret of these hand-crafted maps: they take an unholy amount of work to assemble objects, and then and even greater amount of work to optimize. Yes, ideally suited for community work, agreed. But if you, on your way to build a greater world map destroy the business model that is the underlying foundation of DCS, that victory would be pyrrhic. So there are business questions that need to be answered before the artisan challenge can begin.

I believe this is what people mean when they say "gatekeeping" - and it's difficult to see it yourself when you are the gatekeeper. In your analogy you see yourself as Modric, the hero who has invested time and effort: and you do implicitly look down on others who sit around in bars stuffing their lazy faces, as you seem to think. You see yourself as someone who has accomplished AAR, and if other people want to do do that, by god they'll have to get off their lazy asses and put in the hard work; there should be no shortcuts to your lofty position. Now, you may not really think that - I don't think that you do - but you very much come across like someone who thinks that. DCS is a game, and different people have fun differently. You revel in the difficult task of AAR. But that's not everyone's cup of tea. I often enjoy shooting precision approaches (in the confines of DCS 'sorta-precision', but I digress. Everyone else in my group can't be bothered. Yet DCS allows anyone easy landings, ignore all procedures without any consequences. That is good. So instead of denying an experience (be it landings or AAR) to everyone who doesn't want to do just like you and I ("only the tough can do it"), I would argue that we allow people a softer approach. It may look like driving the car on the back seat with a fake steering wheel - but that shouldn't be mine nor your problem - as long as they enjoy it.

Last year I was involved with reviewing if and how AI can help with a (big) bank's employee hiring process. The idea was that AI would not be prejudiced and give equal opportunity to every applicant based on their merits and history alone: their CV. These hires would not be tainted by racism, misogyny, prejudice, nepotism or other influences. The problem was that the AI was trained on the bank's history from past 10 years of applications and hiring, which was. Badly. Even worse, because nobody understood the 'black box' of decision making inside the AI, we could not devise a good strategy how to de-contaminate it, and the project is now on hold. Which I find somewhat disappointing because I feel that the project itself is sound, it gets punished for what people did wrong in the past. But that's currently where we are: a system that we don't sufficiently understand that is fed questionable sustenance. We need to control both before we can make significant progress in AI.

... just to conclude that the only way to win is not to play at all. How fun is that? No, we need better game AI than that I think that yes, AI can have a great deal of input to make games better: suggest fun yet realistic responses to the current situation, make it balanced and challenging (instead of crushing you with unrelenting logic) - in short: make sure that the game remains fun. That would be a great help - people tend to enjoy engaging games over pure realism, and since AI can take into account so many more items in a short time span than humans can, taking the fun route versus the logical could be a boon (as always, this should be an option). Just don't name it 'Joshua'.

Come, on, don't hassle them. This is the DCS experience after all. Two years is nothing Only 8 more years to go...