Stonehouse

Klem, Just wondered how you are setting up the B17s in your campaign. I was thinking to base them on the airfields in England but as someone else mentioned and I saw in a quick 10 minute test today they barely have room to take off with a full load (which perhaps is the workaround as you could reduce their fuel load a lot for hitting targets in coastal France) - do you have them set up as air starts or ground starts? <edit> Also what did you mean by B17s needing to be edited in? Would they not be (apart from formations and the bombing style) be similar to the other bombers used in the existing campaigns? Or do you mean exactly the difference in formations and bombing style is the issue? Cheers, Stonehouse

Thanks Klem especially for sharing the document. I already know I am going to try this in between items in what is a pretty busy life at present. So I expect my progress to be very slow. If I come across anything of interest in the process I'll put up a post or maybe better add things to your document and post up the revision. I flew the F15 campaign with a couple of mates the other night, first time in DCS for a very long time so the results weren't stellar but it was fun and the campaign engine was impressive. Kind of a super DCG (IL2 campaign generator) for DCS. Most of the people I tend to fly with are more WW2 orientated so I figured it would be a good idea to start working on a WW2 campaign even if it takes until Christmas to get anywhere with it lol.

If I was to take the route of trying to create a WW2 dynamic campaign using Mbot's DCE is there any gotcha's I should be aware of that might not have made it into this thread? I'm guessing that probably the WW2 specific things like large bomber formations may not work for instance? Is there any doco to support campaign authors floating about yet? Anything else come to mind? Thanks, Stonehouse

Very impressive indeed

Updating the EWR units to 556Gs seems to cause the error: "Scripts/ATO_ThreatEvaluation.lua:461: attempt to index field 'ERW' (a nil value)" updating line 461 in the above lua from: GCI.ERW[side][unit.name] = true to be: GCI.EWR[side][unit.name] = true fixes the error. Looks like a simple typo error. Cheers, Stonehouse

Ok it seems to be having trouble with a table somewhere in that it is trying to use an index that has been set to null for some reason. Looks like perhaps (and it may be something completely different) that you have a blue intruder aircraft that is going in and then out of red airspace so it is launching a red GCI and then trying to clean it up because there is no intruder and via a bug failing. You would have to systematically debug the script to find the actual root cause and then figure out a code patch. Honestly you are better off advising FC of whatever you feel is the shortcomings of MOOSE's GCICAP as he is quite keen to give the community a well maintained replacement. If you really want to stay with the old script I can try to look at the problem but I make no guarantees I can fix it and it will take me a long time to do what is required as life is very busy and I have little time for DCS beyond the time I read the forums to keep in touch. If you can log your issues here https://github.com/FlightControl-Master/MOOSE/issues He'll look into them I am sure and I'm guessing it will be reasonably soon after he gets back from vacation. Try to give as much detail as you can to help him and make it plain that it is a GCICAP feature/enhancement you are requesting. You made need to create a github account if you don't have one already.

No idea. Logs ? Some of this sort of stuff is situational too in that a particular set of events causes a problem. Any alpha bort numbers? Lukrop's version only handles numeric so if one of the templates has alpha and eventually gets picked it will crash.

Pics not working from my end. Are you using a hosting site that requires a log in or something similar Hawkeye?

Yep got them thanks Strut. Beautiful job!

Are the last two generic skins a separate upload? Can't see them yet if they are.

Curly brackets around your string entries? They are actually tables those parameters I believe. So should be like: GCICAP_Red = AI_A2A_GCICAP:New( { "EWR Red" }, { "Squadron Red" } ) Also think you need an empty set of curly brackets after { "Squadron Red" } to represent no CAP and then also perhaps a number although since you have no CAPs then perhaps it isn't needed and gets defaulted. Haven't had time to really catch up with everything you guys and FC are doing with this but I think the statement should be something like below: GCICAP_Red = AI_A2A_GCICAP:New( { "EWR Red" }, { "Squadron Red" }, {}) or if that doesn't work then perhaps: GCICAP_Red = AI_A2A_GCICAP:New( { "EWR Red" }, { "Squadron Red" }, {},1) Anyway pretty sure you need the { and } around things.

There was a mod recently on user files that converted Beslan to a WW2 esque airfield by using empty EDM files or something - I'm not a graphic artist so not sure of the technicalities. Anyway I assume something similar could be done to remove buildings from NTTR. Could be a large job though. WW2 mod https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/2641486/

Thanks Johnny, haven't had time to do what you have done. So from your tests it would appear that the DCS coalition.addGroup function has changed somehow and either has a bug or the usage has changed and so doesn't work with the current version of mist.dynAdd Hoping Grimes has seen these posts.

Pretty amazing video of 43 grupo at work

Actually met Bobby Gibbes and Ted Sly at a Temora air show once. Both very nice blokes and patient with all the dumb questions aircraft enthusiasts (like me) tend to ask at air shows. Very easy to talk to. Ended up with an autographed copy of Ted Sly's book "Luck of the Draw" (Ted's autobiography and wartime service in 457) Not fighters but this might interest you as well http://www.454-459squadrons.org.au/downloads.html ebook "Alamein to the Alps" which is the operational history of 454 SQD who carried out a pretty important and unusual role in the Med and later Italy. Not the average WW2 aircraft flown too so I find it quite interesting.

Pretty much it looks like a scripting engine change broke mist.dynAdd which is what lukrop changed to use to spawn the groups of aircraft. I did post something over in the Mist thread but Grimes hasn't responded to it so far.

It would be a nice enhancement eventually to have this folder be configurable so you could have it somewhere else than your C: drive as I keep that for system stuff as much as possible. Although I guess a symbolic link would work?

You could try the vecflak form Pikey. It's a bit less expensive for frames than the burst of 4 times however many gun batteries you get for the addtgt variety. Also tends to be more survivable when the first lot arrive, I've often seen the first shots of the addtgt (which is in groups of 4 explosions) take out half the aircraft. Which is kind of realistic as you don't know the first shots are coming until they arrive so if they are accurate they are deadly. After that you can take avoidance action. Anyway I guess what I was trying to say is the vecflak is somewhat kinder for those first shots. Particularly if instead of setting up vecflak with large numbers of guns you set up multiple vecflak calls with small numbers of guns on the same trigger. So instead of Do vecflak('blue' 'redflak1' 'low', 6) End You might do say 3 vecflak calls for 2 guns all on the same zone's trigger action or some combination that suits rather than a single call. If you do it all on the one call then that is the number of explosions you get chasing 1 target. Doing a lower number will more likely get a few explosions and spread across multiple targets. Same idea also does hold true for addtgt but I tend to end up using vecflak in preference for the very reasons you state.

A GCICAP user may have fallen over a post 1.5.7 Mist bug. Not really sure and as mentioned here https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3192919&postcount=1040 along with the snippet of dcs.log I don't have time to investigate for the next few days. However this morning I did notice 1 obvious thing - the logger message re "Spawning fighter group...." and I did a quick string search through the GCICAP lua. The only instance of this logger message immediately precedes a call to mist.dynAdd to create the group in mission. So potentially the 1.5.7 update has caused a problem for this mist function. Whatever the error is caused a memory access violation on DCS.exe.

Possibly a moot point after the recent MOOSE release (congrats FC by the way!) but I am getting reports of missions using the GCICAP script that worked under 1.5.6 crashing under 1.5.7. I'm away for the next couple of days but wanted to post a log snippet here in case someone else gets a similar issue and it helps highlight a possible bug in the 1.5.7 build. Of course it may be the mission setup too but just haven't time to look at it until my Sunday afternoon at the earliest.

Re the smoke time question. Does adjusting the fire time, size and agony values in the lua increase the length of time for the fire and smoke. Thinking the agony time (which is 180 secs) might do something for the smoke.

That is good to know. Wonder if the AI does as well.

Some editors like pycharm and LDT have lua plugins that allow you to check syntax.

Possibly the endurance is still to be tweaked for the final version of the Spitfire. Looking at the lua, the av fuel consumption in the Spitty is 0.302 kg/s so for 247 kgs of fuel I believe it's too high. Not sure if this number is only for the AI or just a mission planning number for the editor. I understood Spitfire IXs had about an hour and a half on internal fuel at cruising speeds of about 400 kph for a range of around 600-700 kms. The lua actually quotes 1015km for max range for the Spitfire for the ai which sounds about right for when drop tanks are used or perhaps the ferry range. So based on about 90 mins endurance on internal tanks I would have thought this would mean an average fuel consumption of about 0.04-0.06 kg/s instead. No expert for sure so probably someone will correct me and there is likely much more to the calculation or this number in the lua doesn't have any real effect and it is one of the engine numbers instead that dictates range. The 247 kgs of fuel is correct based on http://www.streamline-ops.com/en/info/fuel_weight_conversion_tables/ and a factor of 0.72 to convert from litres to kg for avgas and what I have seen for Spitfire IXe fuel capacities and so maybe it's just that the consumption numbers are too high at the moment. I know if I build a mission where an AI takes off from the coast in England and tries to reach the beach head area they turn back when they get about 3/4 of the way there which I believe happens because they think they don't have the range. I don't that this was the case in r/l but again I could easily be wrong about that too.

Late to the conversation, had internet problems on top of a few other real life issues. The idea of starting the planes as uncontrolled essentially static objects was actually done by another old GCI script by RagnarDa. As people have pointed out it did have some nice things about it as it meant that destroying the aircraft on the ground had an immediate in game effect. For what the new MOOSE functionality is doing you'd have to despawn aircraft on shutdown after landing and then respawn them as uncontrolled. Is there much difference between a static object and an uncontrolled aircraft from a performance point of view? Might also simplify logistics for you FC when you get to it.