cfrag

It's unfortunately not coincidence, someone has at some point in time actively added a script for this, and it has affected submissions for years. Words like "update" (upd ate), "from" (fr om), "where" (wh ere), "set" (se t), "repeat" (rep eat), "limit" (lim it), etc. are affected. They are all keywords that are used in scripting languages, and they are much too specific and too deliberate to be an accident or user error. Strangely, keywords in missions don't always get mangled, but if they do, they consistently do throughout the entire mission description. I used to go over the descriptions of my missions and try to correct them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. It always angers me that this idiotic script hasn't been removed years ago, and implies (to me) that ED couldn't care less about their contributors. Very, very annoying, and completely pointless.

Thank you for your kind words. That mission's description made it through the site's filter intact. It's sister mission, "Angels over Germany" not so much: "people fr om all over split" "it the LZ wh ere some" I checked my original copy, the blanks where inserted by some silly bot that homes in on "from" and "where", reminiscent of the code-injection deny scripts of 1997. Why this is active, I have no idea, and it does bother me, since it makes me look bad, as if I did not spend time to carefully ready what I put in there. And the rest of User Files submission page presents similarly last-century: a (now updated to include Germany) 'map' popup that could get the info from the miz (so why ask for it), same for the aircraft type and single-/multiplayer mission, a max 1 MB image limit (really???), no drag and drop support for file attachments, and a new "User Votes" link that I have no idea what it is for. And, of course, no preview, nor formatted text etc. My granddad's Geocities page looked better, and he sadly passed a long time ago. To me the entire User Files region looks like the rundown, dying part of a city.

? You mean that I should not add a description to the mission I created? Because the stupid script gets to work on the description and sullies it when I submit the entire thing (mission, description, images, tags). Then again - yeah, not using ED's User Files seems indeed the smartest thing to to -- that section of the "DCS experience" seems dilapidated, unkempt, and hostile to all users.

Version 1.40 - 20250426 - DCS Bug hardening The past releases of DCS have not been smooth, and this update attempts to bridge the most egregious DCS bugs introduced in the past 6 months. And, whatever you do, DO NOT USE DCS' "SAVE MISSION" FEATURE. THAT WILL FUBAR THIS MISSION. Enjoy, -ch

Finally. And yet, the site still uses a braindead "F%ck you, content creator!" description-clobbering script from the 90s of the past century to filter for keywords and rips them apart, so any carefully crafted description of a mission looks like it was written by an orthographically challenged imbecile. Bravo. Makes the User Files really look classy...

Well, it's only been 3 and a half years since the last time this was discussed. ED seemingly is living up to their reputation. Then again, seeing how badly the Hook's cargo systems was fumbled, let's be happy that ED didn't screw this up further.

This is currently not implemented, and seems to be an edge case to me. Nevertheless, I'll see what I can do to add this to a scoreSafe zone in an easy-to use way. Note that if the safe zone is an ownedZone (e.g. airfield zone), this already works, provided that the zone's owner isn't NEUTRAL.

Version 2.4.8 - 20250425 - minor update A new patch, some hotfixes, and Germany! I've spent a lot of time exploring Germany (I'm Hamburg born and bred after all), and I took the time (and DML) to create two missions for the community: "Hamburg Tourist" and "Angels over Germany" ("Der Himmel über Berlin"). ED also released their first version of a mission state save API, but since there still is no credible use case for actually using DCS Sate Save API, I have not yet started to integrate the new API into DML. So, enjoy the two new missions if you have Germany, and there are some minor updates to DML as follows: Changes Documentation Manual QuickRef Demos Modules - civHelo 1.0.2 - improved verbosity - csarManager 4.5.1 - reduced verbosity - LZ 1.2.2 - re-enabled event processing - missionRestart 1.0.1 - sample time once per 30 seconds - reaper 1.3.1 - reduced verbosity - twn 1.0.2 - now supports Germany Cold War Map

Version 20250421 - initial release Download (here) Explore the sights of cold war Hamburg! Use the Tour Guide to mark POI for you for easier approach. The Germany Cold War Map is full of beautiful sights. I grew up in Hamburg, and I put together this "tourist map" so you can visit some of the sights. Not all of the sights I marked down currently exist or are fully modeled. If they should be there but aren't, they are in "Quotes", e.g. "Köhlbrandbrücke". All attractions are also marked on the map. CONSULT YOUR TOUR GUIDE! There's an interactive tour guide available that you can engage through Communications-->Other. The Tour Guide will - list the five closest attractions to your current location (the labelled locations on the F-10 Map view) - more importantly, guide you to the closest attraction by constantly giving you bearing, "clock directions" and distance. - if you still can't find the attraction (some are difficult to find), the tour guide can even mark the location with blue smoke for you. Use the tour guide to make sure that you don't miss any of the great attractions that the great people over at Ugra have put into this map. Remember that attractions that are listed on the map in "Quotes" are at this point in the real-world and do not (yet) have a representation on this map - but may at a later date. The map comes with a couple of aircraft added to Fuhlsbüttel, and you can simply add your own favorite aircraft - the mission will support any aircraft automatically. Put differently: your Tour Guide won't mind what aircraft you come in, they work with any player aircraft at any location. Likewise, there's even a CA drivable car parked at Hamburg Rathaus (City Hall) that you can use to drive through Hamburg IMPORTANT: Should you find an interesting or beautiful Hamburg detail, please post its location and perhaps name/description in this thread and I will try to include it into the tourist map as soon as possible. Please be advise that this map is for Hamburg only. There are myriads of other sights to explore on this map. This is a map for Hamburg only. Enjoy, -ch

OPEN STRESS TEST CLOSED - MISSION IS AVAILABLE AS DOWNLOAD Thank you all for helping me making this a better mission. It's now available from ED's User Files

ANGELS OVER GERMANY "Der Himmel über Berlin" === HELICOPTER MEDEVAC=== Version 20250602 - maintenance update Download: (here) You are an "Angel", a member of an elite non-governmental Air Rescue organization, chartered under MSF. Your task is to evacuate injured people fr om all over split Germany - in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin -- and deliver them to Hospitals in the area. There will always be more people requiring your assistance than you can provide - so bring a friend or two if you can: this mission is fully multiplayer capable, and keeps track of your accomplishments, even between mission restarts (and other "Angels" missions). There are multiple slots available (hot and cold) for Hueys, Hips, Gazelles, Kiowas, Hooks and Hinds, allowing for more than 20 pilots simultaneously per city. [There are also slots for the Apache and Black Shark, but those helicopters can't perform SAR] You perform SARs by flying towards the evacuee (they all have locator devices for your ADF). Pearly Gates, your Command Authority, can vector you towards your target. Once you get within 1km, help on the ground marks the spot with smoke, and you'll be guided by your chief for the last 100m. Land your helicopter sufficiently close to pick up the evacuee. If landing is not possible (too densely populated, roof-top rescues, open water, steep inclines or inaccessible ground or forest), you can winch-rescue by hovering within range and altitude for some 20 seconds. Once the evacuee is confirmed on board, you then transfer them to the closest Hospital. Which hospital you choose is your decision. All hospitals are marked with red smoke for easy identification, and Pearly Gates can vector you to the closest hospital on request. At all times please be mindful of other traffic, both fixed-wing, rotor wing, and - of course - other Angels. Be mindful when entering controlled airspace - although you have priority clearance, try to avoid those congested areas. Difficulty: The difficulty level of this mission is similar to, yet a bit more relaxed than "Angels of the Levant": metropolitan areas often require precise control of your helicopter, and big helicopters like the Hip may not always fit the LZ where some of your evacuees wait for your help. Use winch-rescue procedures in those cases. That being said, this map offers multiple areas of operation with varying levels of difficulty: Hamburg Flat like a pancake, quite accessible. Always fun. Hummel, Hummel! Frankfurt Area A conglomerate of multiple cities (Mainz, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt). Travel times are longer than in Hamburg, and there can be some inclines. Berlin The divided city. Luckily, as a MSF flight, you are protected as a registered neutral non-combatant and can fly over both parts of the city without escort. Don't let it get to your head, though. Berlin is big and beautiful. Some areas are claustrophobic, so choose your helicopter wisely. Evacuating a western or eastern citizen to the other side is generally frowned upon, but saving a life is more important to MSF, so no penalties apply. Other notes: This mission is entirely non-violent, flying-skills only If you also have some of the other "Angels" missions (e.g. "Angels of Caucasus") and persistence is enabled, the missions share all player's accomplishments. If run on a server, this mission auto-restarts every 8 hours. It's an endless SAR sandbox mission This mission can persist all your accomplishments (landings, time, rescues) per airframe if you have persistence enabled (this requires that your DCS is 'de-sanitized'). When run on a server, install 'stopGap GUI' on the server to allow static scenery occupy open player slots. If you are a fan of the Blackhawk, you can add it to the mission and it is immediately supported. mission auto-restarts after 9 hours Acknowledgements PearlyGates and other voice acting by ElevenLabs Mission by CFrag Created with DML Uses StopGap - server owners be advised: requires the stopGapGUI server script

The message signals that reaper's target scan did not find an initial target and will try again soon. It's part of an optimization code that is still experimental.

OPEN STRESS TEST CLOSED - MISSION IS AVAILABLE AS DOWNLOAD After three INTENSE days (well, nights, actually) of work (don't you love Easter!) I've brought "Angels Caucasus" to Germany. I'm now putting the final touches on "Angels Over Germany", and I want you to help stress-test the mission before I release it to the community. So if you can fly a helicopter, own the new Germany map, and feel like you are up to the challenge of rescuing hordes of medical evacuees in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt, head over to "cfrag's Flight Line" (no password, a Fox3 server, 40 players max) and help save the cold world. My plan is to release "Angels over Germany" in the next few days, and I appreciate your help stress-testing the mission. And yes, this map integrates with the other Angels maps, so if you have a history of rescuing people there, your past achievements are shown. Please add all feedback to this thread. Known issues - extremely ugly z-fighting on Finkenwerder ground objects. This is a map bug.

Indeed. My players told me that they prefer to crash a plane rather than to take a 4 minute (or longer) hit for shutting down, repair and restarting the plane. I then implemented an enforced 3 minute wait for a player after plane loss. People yelled at me and taught me new, creative epithets of disgust in relations to me. It drove home the point that people (in my group at least) value, and have very little, free time, and when they are playing DCS they want to enjoy themselves, not watch others have fun or sit around twiddling their thumbs. A few even kindly directed me to a study that humans are really bad at waiting, driving up their adrenaline levels. Yeah, intentionally making players wait is a terrible idea. If I could, I'd set DCS's wait period for repairs to 1 second, as 3 minutes is as ridiculous as 1 second.

Check your main DCS folder, Mods/Terrain - there should be a GermanyColdWar folder null

I wish my frame rate was that bad to allow that - congratulations on your refined taste. Also: Paulaner is known for some time dilation effects when consumed enthusiastically, so no matter what frame rate, I'm sure it was an excellent experience For a less ethereal experience I recommend Flaschbier from Flensburg, though... My frame rates currently are fine until I switch cockpits, which leads me to believe some bad VRAM resource management in the DCS app itself rather than the map that merely gobbles up VRAM like my godson does Easter eggs.

I think that is universally understood. The best approach here seems to me to have a gentleman's agreement to not violate commonly accepted rules of usage -- instead of using software to enforce them. And should a squadron unexpectedly show in full strength, and for whatever reasons you are short a slot, the agreement can be made to utilize a plane that would - per agreement - not be available. If enforced by software, that squadron member is out; for them the evening of a common fun experience is gone. That's IMHO a worst case scenario for a group of friends who want to experience something together. That is the reason I'm not enthusiastic about restrictions enforced by software: inflexibility and exclusion. An agreement among friends is much simpler. If you can't get your sqn to agree and adhere to some simple rules, methinks you should address that first. To me, It's not a lack of motivation, it's a lack of trust in your squad mates that they will to stick to agreed-upon rules. To me you are attempting to provide a technical solution for a cultural challenge. The solution won't be elegant, the results can be ugly. A bad match.

That is always a good idea. I have a no mods DCS install, and Germany does run on my decidedly low end system.

Indeed. Looking at the map with a mission designer's eye, my mind is already envisioning logistics as one of the prime missions objectives 'down there' (as viewed from Hamburg, of course ) in the Fulda Gap. If/when the Herc rolls around (and some decent scripting support in DCS for cargo), it's going to be "Hog Waiter's Heaven".

Oh, and of course, as @DD_Friar kindly chimed in, there's the matter of wasting a player's quality time through enforced wait states. That of course ranks even higher than the others in the book of "unforgivable mission creation sins"

I think that's a Bad Idea, you'd get more and better traction if you did it alone, without AI. This may change in a couple of years, but today with mission scripting, the AI results are bad indeed. They might give you an idea where to look, but only if you are already good at mission scripting (which you may well be, dear @Panthir, since, as I know, you have a lot of experience with mission building ) That's easy enough accomplished, and using zones you can put in checks to ensure that the aircraft must also be close enough to a base's maintenance shop. Using a slot blocking mechanism, you can then boot the pilot and (unless it is dynamically spawned) block the plane's slot. Implementing that isn't too difficult, merely some busywork. The real issue lies somewhere entirely different: I discovered (and this is confirmed by other server owners) that players positively loathe missions that try to impose rules on the availability of aircraft/slots. As a result, players won't return to the server, and the mission gains a reputation as 'not fun' or 'player hell'. The mission is kicked off the server's rotation. Not for being a bad mission, but because it tries to assert control over the players who come to play, not bossed around. DML has some modules that can do similar things: "ungrief" punishes fratricide, "taxipolice" punishes speeding on taxi ways, "limitedAirframes" limits the number of losses per slot. While the ungrief module is accepted (antisocial behavior should be dealt with swiftly), "limitedAirframes" is begrudgingly accepted by roughly half of the players, "taxi police" has almost universally been deemed excessive. There are some players who appreciate enforced order. The majority does not, however, and they avoid missions that are known for imposing (what players deem to be) restrictions on their playstyle. Since server owners want their servers to be popular, they eschew missions that players dislike. Mission creators (like I) want their mission to be popular, and so we would not add a module that is known to cut the potential popularity by 90%. Long story short: it's not that difficult an idea to put into reality, and it's currently not a direction (rule enforcements) that I want DML to take.

Unlike hobby planes, Combat Aircraft are being maintained. And bugs, dirt, sand etc. are removed meticulously. For each flight hour, a modern (combat) jet spends some 40 hours in maintenance. Yeah, they'll have time to clean it. Put differently: few pilots are suicidal enough to fly a badly maintained aircraft, much less a badly maintained aircraft designed to carry weapons. So it wouldn't be immersive at all. It would be completely unrealistic - but perhaps a nice visual gadget, like lens flare.

nullSee the vehicle and others flash between red and white. Miz included. Simply enter huey, look straight ahead nullnull z-fighter in finkenwerder].miz

The Finkenwerder ("MBB") airfield south of the Elbe in Hamburg has a lot of nice objects placed on the ground around the hangars. Unfortunately, many of them exhibit strong z-fighting, their surfaces alternating between green and other colors.

Preamble: I was born and raised in cold-war Hamburg; when I was 16, Nena published "99 Luftballons" and I met Barbara. I lived in Hamburg, served in the western military in Northern Germany, and left Germany for University a few days before the "Mauer" fell. In other words: I lived and breathed what this map intends to re-create. Summary: It's a great map to explore: beautiful, great color palette, green(!), a gazilion objects to look at, and performance is well contained even when flying in VR on low-end rigs like mine. Strategically, this map looks like it is begging for the A-10 (any version) to wallow in the mud; in the real world, it's of course the other way around: the Hog was made to live here. The map is filled with small airfields and enough objects to create a veritable smorgasboard of missions. The map has some short comings, but as a background (and - importantly - a Non-Dust Map) for missions, it seems really, really promising to me. The Long Form The map is great as a backdrop for combat missions with a veneer of authenticity, very much like Normandy II and Syria: there are landmarks rendered in beautiful detail that can help put you, your aircraft and your mission into context of some larger history. The visuals are exquisite, and performance is good even on my decidedly low-end rig (in VR!). The arrangement of airfields, military bases and points of interest on this map makes my 'mission creator' sense tingle, and I hope that it also encourages other content creators similarly (I'm aware that my initial feelings for the Sinai map were similar, but somewhere along the way, ORT dropped the ball, and long neglect of the map made people drop it from their "future project" list, making Sinai, beautiful as it is, a fading map). Now, as someone born and raised in Hamburg, is it worth investment based purely on accuracy? No. The good thing is that flying over Hamburg in a Jet, any local can instantly place themselves: dead reckoning is easy -- Hamburg is flat, and there are enough landmarks visible at all times to immediately know where you are if you were raised here. Look for the "Fernsehturm" (TV Tower), look for the "Michel" and by their relative locations you know where you are. The river Elbe makes this even easier should you get disoriented. But... You also instantly know that you are not in Hamburg: the building's colors and style are wrong. Most buildings in Hamburg are made from red bricks, and that color (in dark shades) permeates Hamburg; occasionally buildings may have whitewashed walls, but Hamburg is not nearly as colorful as the map makes it out to be. The Rathaus, Michel, Nikolaikirche and Fernehturm are fantastically made objects. They are, unfortunately, surrounded by too much generic stuff. And then, there are big, HUGE gaps: every kid knowns that moving up Mönkebergstrasse from Rathaus, you get to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (Main Station), an imposing building that served half a million passengers on a daily basis even in 1980. Not on this map. There's a dinky rail, and a bridge. Following the rail west, every Hamburg-bred kid knows that you reach Dammtor, Sternschanze and Holstenstrasse, before you reach Altona. All really, really big, imposing buildings with vaulted roofs, built for steam locomotives. Not on this map. Altona is unrecognizable, the other stations are better ignored. The Süllberg, Hamburg's famous picturesque rich people quarter, is empty, and the less I speak of Hamburg's Harbor in the current state, the better. And no Köhlbrand Bridge. So, don't get this map for accuracy reasons. It's a GAME map, and although initially disappointed, the amount of beauty, compromises made and love invested in details, to make the compromises not too jarring, recaptured my interest. I've only occasionally been to Berlin and Frankfurt, and as someone who isn't native to either, those cities seem incredibly realistic from the air even in a helicopter. Knowing that they probably are as unrealistic as Hamburg does NOT diminish my enjoyment, so I'm thinking that my misgivings about Hamburg is a "me" problem. Simply don't fly (a Helicopter) in the city you grew up in, and the rest of the map is fantastic. Berlin's Wall area is drop-dead beautiful. Frankfurt is fantastic (mostly). Airfields abound on the map, and the Fulda gap beckons my Hog in a frankly disquieting way. Sure, Kiel is currently missing (never liked it much, but it is where the Bundesmarine is home), as are some other important cities. But Helgoland is there! (sans airfield, yet grinned when I discovered it). So, do I like it? Yes, even though Hamburg disappointed this kid from Hamburg. I doubt that this will bother anyone not born and raised there, listening to Neue Deutsche Welle while walking through Altona's streets, courting Barbara and trying to coax a smile from her icy blue eyes. Outside of that, a green map (the trees could use some more Birch, though), some fantastic (and truly deadly) topography (evading missiles in flat northern Germany is difficult), lots of POI, military objectives and well-rounded performance make this a promising map. It remains to be seen how content creators pick it up; I'm already thinking about creating a version of "Angels" (SAR) for this map; and yes, it's begging for "Der Himmel über Berlin" as title (a 1987 Wim Wenders film, "Wings of desire" in English, cheaply remade later as "City of Angels"). My personal verdict So: good/bad? I like it. YMMV. Let's see how other people enjoy it and it it gets picked up by the multiplayer community. Hummel, Hummel!