cfrag

Simple mistake. They took the goal that Oli Kahn used to train with.

This is great news, and the plane looks terrific. Since I own each and every module on offer (a >>1K investment) I can't help noticing that a *lot* of the planes that you sold me as Early Access still haven't reached "Final Release" state after 5-6 years (F-16, WW2 Asset Pack). To encourage us often-burned-and-not-learning-the-lesson: do you have a tentative timeline when you envision the Final Release for this plane to occur? Thank you so much, -ch

I do not experience these issue, so in order to narrow down the possibilities, please allow me to ask some questions: - COLD or hot (standard) version of Expansion? - SP, ad-hoc hosted or dedicated server? - Which airfield are you taking off from? I'm assuming Nalchik. Is that airfield in your possession? - Please ensure that you are staring from a fresh mission, i.e. delete the Expansion (data) folder before you start the mission (after a long time, an old mission data file can wreak havoc on a newer version) I hope that we can straighten this out quickly

It irked me to not be able to provide a better solution. Here it is: as small script to cross-reference all flags that you are referencing in trigger rules (NOT in scripts!), and it will also tell you if a flag is used in a suspicious way (i. e. it is only read or written to, usually the result of a misspelled flag name). Run the script AT START, and you will see something like this: In that miz (see attached), the flags "1", "all is lost", "ghi", "abc", "def" and "jkl" are all only either read or written to (in the rules that are in square brackets"[","]"), while the flag named "123456" is both written and read, and is probably used correctly in that miz. There are a total of 7 flags used in the miz by the trigger rules (again, not inside scripts). Here's the script itself, run at start Demo miz below. Hope this helps. Enjoy, -ch flags in the log ruler.miz

Please be advised that what I say below is merely based on my experience, not a deeper knowledge of MSE's implementation They are nearly identical, with the second approach having a minuscule advantage since it requires fewer main loop cycles, but it really comes down to how triggers evaluate the OR clause. I do not think that either will have a noticeable advantage over the other. If you know how to do that, you would be better served with a script that does these checks. Since they are map objects, you can then change the periodicity of checks from once per second (as is done for triggers) to once every ten seconds (or longer), shoring up performance cycles. Checking if map objects are destroyed usually isn't a time critical task. I believe similar points apply to this. I strongly recommend that you define what you are trying to achieve with this before settling on the method of how to achieve that, lest you fall into the trap of premature optimization. Also, you may want to take into account serviceability: what is easier for you to maintain: 10 rules of one each, or one rule of 10 conditions? Neither is easy nor user-friendly, so your choices are always going to be bad. Not in ME. You could write a script that parses/analyses a miz file and then dumps all the flags that are referenced in the mission's trigger rules. You'd then also want to add a step to see which flags are only referenced once or one way (a good sign that a flag is used wrong is when a flag is only written to or read from). DML's debugger does this, but only for flags that are used/defined in DML's context, but not for flags that are read from or written to with trigger rules nor scripts. That would rather depend on how you placed the static. Using ME, statics are one-unit groups. Using scripts, you can place multi-objects statics. From a logic perspective, it's cleaner to go with UNIT, as it isn't guaranteed that ED will keep that single-unit group for statics, and you are relying on an implicit assumption that the static is in a single-unit group. Use UNIT to ensure that your mission is future-proof.

Agreed. The issue comes with numbers. Let's say we are using low-quality human models, with only 5k tris/3k verts per model, and pre-arranged poses (i.e. they do not move at all, are static). So, how many of these objects to populate a village? Let's say 50. So we add 250k polys (tris) to the scene. No sweat, even with shading, texturing, perhaps even some transparency you are fine. How many of these ultra-low quality models to populate a very small city? Say 500. How many small cities in your visual range? Maybe 10. We should still be OK-ish (2.5M tris added to each frame - not all drawn, but all transformed each frame) Now, how many of of these models would you need to put some semblance of life (none 'end of world' desert) into a city like Beirut, Adana or Tel Aviv on the Syria map? Adana is some 2000 square kilometres, and we put, say 10 people per sqKm (in reality its about 160 people/sqKm). So you need 20'000 models just for a mostly empty Adana, with the other population centers still requiring population as well (20k people at 5k tris = 100M tris). That will put a dampener on your GPU. Worse in VR. Without any tangible benefit (10 ppl per sqKm still looks reaaaaaally empty) So, it'll hopefully be small fry for the GPUs of the future. Right now, they'll drown.

The Subject you chose for this thread still is "Proposal: Free modern onboarding and/or trainer module". This remains relevant, should you write something like this: When you extol a "shared experience [...] without pressure" in this context, be prepared that people think that you mean that the trainer as referenced in the thread's subject can facilitate that. If you were just rambling OT, that's OK. You may want to make that more clear. Sure, and their next question is "why do you think it's good?". I'm sure that you'll provide evidence to your friends. And then we'll be back at the iconic fighters: Falcon, Eagle, Hornet, Apache. Because nobody perks up when you say "they have a good trainer". Hmmm. I'm referring to this written by you (below), which I did read (emphasis mine): There's a world of difference between a crunchy "No binding. No setup" and a limp "manageable" "basic setup". The first is good and universally understood, the other depends entirely on one's interpretation of "manageable", and definitely does require bindings and setup. As an aside: if you want to have a real trainer aircraft in DCS, one that is built along a training experience, it requires gobs of bindings since the average training session revolves around setting frequencies, fiddling with dials and knobs: procedures - all the things that you can go without in an FC fighter. A trainer would require a lot more bindings than e.g. the FC A-10A. That plane has no radios to set. Imagine a trainer that can't train radio procedures: NDB, VOR, ADF, RT, ILS, IFF, the works. In HF (FM/AM), VHF, UHF. You really want to be able (optionally, of course) to bind those in a trainer. Which makes me think: you probably do not want a trainer aircraft - you want something to take someone along for a joyride, something that impresses, and hooks your friend to DCS. A trainer won't do that. That's why, in games, trainers are for enthusiasts, not neophytes. I'm with you on the "no bindings, no setup", btw. I just don't know how that can be implemented. And I want it for all aircraft in DCS. You glossed over that bit, and let us remember that this is a thread where you are advocating a trainer aircraft as means to attract significantly more people to DCS. So, how do you experience multiplayer DCS, and how would a trainer aircraft improve that? I would submit that currently, a trainer aircraft would make a worse experience, and 90% of the issues that people encounter can't be remedied with a trainer. And to add insult to injury: once your friend jumped through all the hoops, once he is inside the trainer, he can't even blow stuff up. "Lame!" -- I submit that it'll leave most people with the distinct impression of a procedures-focused (because that's what trainers are) mil sim. People don't go into DCS to ogle at the scenery, nor being bossed around by an instructor. You don't take driving lessons in a race car sim: Assetto Corsa doesn't give you an instructor mode, and you neither fly with an instructor in a combat flight sim. You can, but that's not the main attraction. The crowd pleasers are what draw the crowds, not the "plain Janes". I love the trainers in DCS - but I'm the odd one out. How do I know that? Because I tried. Only 3 instances, yet they have all been universally negative, they all wanted to fly a "real fighter", not a trainer, even if I offered to help them. Incidental evidence isn't proof, I agree. Maybe they simply didn't like me teaching them. Fair enough. Look, I get that you want to make DCS more accessible. That's what I desperately want as well. You may have to contend with the fact that a 2-seater trainer aircraft is not the solution for that.

Ah, the wonderful world of dreams and wishful thinking, where ambrosia springs eternal, and everything arranges itself to my wishes. Please describe how DCS can become this, as it is lightyears away from that, and I am genuinely interested in ideas how ED can achieve that. A trainer will not magically erase the friction of setting up bindings, an abysmal UX, terrible missions etc. I'm all in with a frictionless experience, sign me up now. How on earth will a trainer aircraft/module magically erase the fact that you still have to bind controls, go online, find the mission where your instructor is, and join their aircraft (I'm assuming that the student is spared having to create a training mission and host it). There's no magic wand you can wave these issues away. Not with a trainer, anyway. Fair enough. Then why would they come to DCS? In five seconds or less, please summarise what DCS does well as a game, why I should try it. It's the Hornet, Tomcat, Viper, and Apache. Blow stuff up, with a dash of realism. Ah, magic tech. I see. So student sits at home, connects their new $20 Joystick generic brand "Funstick" with 5 axes, 10 buttons to their computer; magically joins you (let's not sweat details, we are in a dream). You control the aircraft for a while, then you tell him "You have controls", and by magic DCS knows that that the values read from HID Device A, analogue input 3 at the remote computer should be interpreted as a Yoke's pitch. Axis Inverted, of course, with a 20% curve. Sure. Say, what's the colour of the sky in your world? That kind of tech does not yet exist. For any game. Maybe when AI gets more advanced. And heck, yeah, if DCS could do that, I'll be incredibly happy too. You do realize that this "modern, ride-along" system requires the neophyte to be on-line and connected with you, creating a catch-22, right? To ride with you, they need to be on-line, and to learn how to fly on-line, they need to ride with you. Or is this, too, solved by magic? DCS' on-line experience is terrible, yes, and should be massively improved to make the entire experience more user-friendly. How do you suggest that ED overcome this? With a trainer module that requires going on-line? Are you trolling?

Please check out the demo I included before. It is using the "empty!" output that fires when all objects from the last clone cycle are destroyed, and it seems that was what you are looking for. Below is an updated demo that also uses radioMenus and groundexplosion to force destruction. The empty signal "boom" is sent when any of the combines is destroyed. Random Tech Combine.miz

Use cloners. Random Tech Combine.miz

This had me stumped for a while. I finally found the issue related to a dangling 'else' in csarManager that I unfortunately misplaced when I introduced the "autoTrigger" attribute, and the issue is much more likely to happen if persistence is added to the mix. It is not a persistence issue, it's a plain stupid bug I added to csarManager. Below please find the updated module. csarManager2.lua

I disagree. [many good points removed] More simply put: any savvy dealer will give you the first fix for free.

Hmmm. Compliance wise, there is no difference between a civilian-dying and a soldier-dying animation. Humans dying may impose some age restrictions for games in some countries, and DCS is already including humans dying, so that bridge is crossed. No regulator would impose a different age restriction for a game that features killing animations for objects that wear jeans versus those that wear green or 'insurgent' uniforms. It usually is the only issue in for-profit games, and DCS is a for-profit business. I surely hope so. We already have some civ objects (cars and structures), just no civ humans. The resulting emptiness in built-up areas to me indeed is distracting. Then again, to add enough people to make a city look convincing can be a terrifyingly complex task. I'm looking at Cyberpunk 77, and even that stellar game's streets seem a bit 'empty' to me. It'll be a challenge, yes, and I hope that soon ED deign to include a few civ human objects to test the waters and allow mission creators to use them in creative ways to improve ambience and immersion.

My apologies for being obscure. Although there may be some performance hit, I do not think that this is what is keeping ED from including them. IMHO it is the financial investment into creating these. Which I think is really sad, as I agree it could make missions so much more lifelike.

You must be new here (only 20 years, young whippersnapper!) ED moves in geological timelines. Let's hope for an update (i.e. concepts of plans) at the DCS centennial celebration.

I think the entire on-line experience in DCS exhibits a decidedly mySpace-esque mid 1990's vibe that is unbecoming to a vaguely modern game. Not only would it be good to see friends if/when they are online, join their missions when they host, and chat with them directly. ED are sitting on a treasure trove of missions in their User Files, the place where contributors upload their missions. I believe DCS's experience could be made so much better if ED integrated that into DCS, allow players to discover missions for their planes and directly download (and update once downloaded) them. And ED should (IMHO) go one step further and integrate upload to User Files into mission editor. As it is right now, DCS's online UX is one of things that I try to skip when I rave about the game. IMHO, it's an embarrassment.

One does not necessarily follow the other. Creating models costs money: you need a skeleton, animate it, synch the animation to world movement, usually also implement some (performance costly) inverse kinematics, and then skin it with usually more than one skin. Since investing into the DCS core sells very few additional models, ED does it very, very sparingly. So it's not that ED want to avoid some 'controversial' content created by an ego-obsessed a&&hole looking for clicks, I believe they merely are frugal to a fault. I'd LOVE to see some civ skins for some of the (mil) "Personnel" static objects. Just give them some jeans, a civ jacket (similar to the air show crowd object), and I'd be happy. Just think how much better a civ medevac mission can be made if we didn't have to place that friggin G4 soldier and could instead replace it with a 'civ dude'.

That is your assertion. Considering that some 90% of DCS players do not play multiplayer (as evidenced by ED), and that for this to work you must set up some common time for neophytes to link up with you, and you must be able to teach flying in an interesting way, that tiny 10% sliver shrinks down to a (I assert, no hard numbers available) less than 1%. From personal experience I can tell you that in my group, there was no interest in flying a trainer, much less with me . That is merely incidental evidence, agreed. Can you put a number on "many", and more importantly, can you see a way how that would dramatically increase (in actual numbers please) sales of DCS modules? ED have the numbers on trainer modules sold. As a business they did not, in the past 10 years move on this, so I daresay that that business case (creating a free trainer for all) is not sufficiently attractive. Please explain. Which entry barrier, and what does "dramatically" mean in concrete terms? IMHO, you replace one problem with another, more complex one: Instead of trial and error by trying it yourself, you now need to find a good trainer. Because, lets be honest, I'd wager that (please do not take offense) 99.9% of the DCS community aren't qualified to teach flying. I certainly am not, and I am certified to fly. So if you want to learn how to bank'n'yank a trainer from my godson who taught himself by trial and error, sure, go ahead. How that makes it a better experience I do not have the faintest idea. I'm almost certain, though, that it won't lower any barriers. While that may be some people's sentiment, to me that seems almost wilful misrepresentation of what was written here to almost a straight-out lie. The sentiment is that it would be welcome, but the concept of a trainer simply isn't practical in a game where there are no disadvantages attached to train on the 'real' plane instead of using a trainer first. Put differently, the prevailing sentiment is that trainers in DCS, do not provide a sufficient advantage. I won't directly call BS on this, coincidental evidence does exist. Here's a thought: get yourself a trainer (Albatross, C-101 or MB, I personally think that the C-101 is best suited, the MB is much too pretty), and have your friend(s) check out the 101 on a 14 day trial. Schedule 2 hour sessions with them every other day during those two weeks, maybe more. Tip: make sure that you have a syllabus ready before they join, maybe talk them through the lessons before you join. When complete, bring your experience here, because that is tangible, worthwhile feedback that can help improve the experience for neophyte DCS users (because, I'm sure everyone agrees that that experience sucks big hairy ones). It may also help to illustrate many other DCS-specific shortcomings in the MP arena (DCS's online experience IMHO is terrible) That is because DCS' main draw is that it allows people to fly overbearing, overpowered, threatening beast of war, armed to the teeth. Few people come to DCS to fly timid ducks. People fly DCS to blow stuff up. There are other flight sims that cover the non-threating space to a T, with much better support for procedures and, e.g. ATC than DCS. If you are here, it's because you want to place fuzed ordnance on someone's ass. I assert that >99% of all DCS players come to DCS because of planes like the Eagle, Tomcat or Hornet, maybe Apache. None of those are non-threating planes, and since you can use those as trainers as well, I think your proposal is exceedingly weak. I think that only a dwindling minority would be interested in flying those non-threatening planes, even if they were free. TBH, it's one of the biggest complaints I hear about the (free) Su-25T: it doesn't pack a large enough punch. While control binding is indeed a sorely bad point in DCS, I am not sure how a trainer could solve this. Doesn't the DCS neophyte have to bind all controls before they join their trainer online? Ahem. How do you get to join your instructor's game (or ad-hoc host your own) without understanding the interface? More to the point: how does a trainer solve this? We all know that this is entirely possible, from millions of players who have successfully done this alone, in other flights sims over the past decades. If memory servers right, the Wright Brothers managed this IRL, so let's not pretend that this a real barrier. Also, let's not kid ourselves: you can't shoot a correct precision approach with ATC in DCS even if you know how, and most players don't. That does not prevent anyone from picking up the bits that are important to do this, and they use their own methods of locating, and approaching, a VORTAC or NDB. This, btw, will also what they will teach their students which immediately brings up the question: who and what controls the quality of what is being taught with trainers? If the trainers and syllabus are as bad as the tutorials, I think it would be better if we skip trainers altogether, because they would infect the students with bad habits that need to be unlearned first. Please be more specific about those psychological or social barriers, and how a trainer could help to break those down. I think that enumerating those barriers - independently if a trainer would indeed lower them - will help to make DCS a better product. I agree that there are many barriers to enjoy playing DCS; that many of them indeed make DCS inaccessible (terrible UI, worse UX, unnecessary complexity, you-gotta-be-kidding-me bad tutorials) to many a potential player. Identifying them can be the first step in removing them - the second step could be identifying ways to overcome those barriers (e.g. by adding a trainer); so let's take these one step at the time.

Perhaps you can isolate the issue into a simple miz: add only the required modules, and use radioMenu to generate the CSAR flag event. If the issue continues to appear on a dedi, we can try and look into this deeper. Else, if the mission isn't too bit, and you remove all mods, I could have a look if you want me to.

Yes, that line merely ensures that all required modules for csarManager have loaded, and csarManager will bitterly complain if not: if not dcsCommon.libCheck("cfx CSAR", csarManager.requiredLibs) then trigger.action.outText("cf/x CSAR aborted: missing libraries", 30) return false end That block is complete.

Ah, the NF-2 Lights On "flood candles" -- let's hope that the LUV's get fixed soon. Massun's objects are fantastic, and their emissive lights is nowhere near where I need them for the purpose of directing night flights. Thank you for the hint, @razo+r, much appreciated.

I'm sure that I'm late to this party - I just started a night miz that I wrote some time ago. In it, I'm using the LUV Tigr to provide active light sources at a make-shift FARP to land helicopters. Running the miz today, the Tigr's lights are gone, everything's dark, only some passive (non-emissive) lights are present. What did I do wrong?

A really nice utility. Be sure that you amend this by e.g. patching coalition.addGroup() to include all new, dynamically spawned units if your mission supports dynamic spawns, else the new units will not be included in getByID.

Version 2.4.9 - 20250508 - Update Another DCS patch, another hot mess. Somehow, the kind people at ED managed to FU a longstanding method that chugged along nicely for a decade, and broke with the last release. As I spent time to conduct more testing, it seems to mostly affect single-player, with at least local hosted missions being in the clear, and dedicated server hopefully also being unaffected (I'm still running tests on that, but testing dedicated server can be tricky). Bug Description: DCS currently cannot correctly ascertain the name of the mission that is running. The bug makes DCS always return "tempMission" as the name of the running mission. I've reported this bug to ED. Upshot: the bug affects at least the 'persistence' module in single-player, and if you are using persistence with SP currently, you MUST use the "saveDir" and "saveFileName" attributes. If you do not, persistence will not fail in SP, but it will silently write all information into a folder named "tempMission (data)" and inside that foldeer a file called "tempMission Data.txt", potentially overwriting another mission's data that wrote to this folder because it, too, believes that its name is "tempMission". I've spent a lot of time updating some of my more popular missions on UserFiles to work around the bug, yet, judging from my inbox, a lot of damage is already done (meaning: some save games got overwritten). The updated version help avoid this happening in the future, and may allow some servers to revert to an older version that was saved before the bug hit. Other than that, there was very little time to work on DML. All changes: Changes Documentation Manual - general persistence note and how persistence relates to "save state" QuickRef Demos - CSAR of Georgia: update Modules - airtank 1.0.3 - new 'chatty' attribute - CSAR Manager 4.5.2 - remove smoke when mission times out - FARP Zones 2.4.1 - better zone redaw on start-up - Reaper 1.3.2 - corrected typo in code (bug) - SSBClient 5.0.1 - reduced verbosity - valet 2.0.0 - new 'groundonly' attribute - migration to dmlZones Enjoy, -ch

Watch out for the pitchforks and torches. That's how my squad tells me that they aren't amused when I accidentally zero their scores.