Stonehouse

Have a look through the CAP GCI script for examples of this kind of thing. Basically you can use an events and an event handler to check for aircraft that land or ones that crash (which is an actual logged event). There are a stack of different event codes for different things.

That Lancaster is a beautiful thing! I hope that it somehow ends up being allowed out into the wilds of DCS public life. Having an AI bomber to escort would make a huge difference to WW2 missions. Even static WW2 era aircraft would make a huge difference.

With the release of the Vietnam retexture of the standard map and being completely talentless in skinning I wondered if there was any chance of getting one or more of the very talented people here interested in a Hk-61 style skin for the 109K (yes I know only Es got sent to Japan for research but we have what we have) and a GM21 (Betty bomber) skin for the AN30? I was thinking these would serve for creating Burma style missions on the Vietnam retexture. Any interest? Cheers, Stonehouse

Did you realise you need to use summer for the mission to see the desert textures? Might be the reason you're not seeing the desert terrain if you have the wrong season. It definitely works with the current patch level - I was building a mission on it this morning.

Thank you!! I completely missed that - you just made my weekend! Now off to create some missions around that. S! Stonehouse

One thing that would be handy at least for WW2 era mission builders is replacement runway textures to use at the smaller airfields like Beslan to make it look like Marsden matting. Especially when coupled with this conversion you'd get closer to a North Africa look and feel. Thinking about the P40 that is getting closer............

Very nice Dooom I like the amount of detail you add to your briefings and background info.

Bit of a progress report to keep people in the loop. I've seemingly got despawn working at the unit level as well as the new version of the GCI handling. I took an executive decision to go with bullet point 1 from http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2325342&postcount=406 since I didn't get a response. Unfortunately this highlighted problems in the stuck aircraft routines which I hope I've now fixed but like pulling on the end of a string I've found a pre-existing problem which I'm scratching my head about still. That is, if a GCI gets stuck and so de-spawns their intercept target is still marked as being assigned to someone - which I think means it won't get reprocessed as an un-intercepted target until a reset task occurs. Not sure how to proceed yet but will let you know how it goes. Obviously will need a stack of testing to try to avoid letting more bugs out in the wild after the code changes are all done too.

CAPs are regarded as "in transit" (and not taskable by GCI) until they are "on station" when they enter their CAP zone. Once in their zone they will be tasked by GCI to intercept intruders. If they leave their zone to intercept or RTB then a new set of CAP planes is launched in an attempt to keep someone on station. You can fiddle this by making the airfields that launch CAP aircraft sit within the CAP zone. This way as soon as they are airborne they are "on station". How you configure radars, CAP zones and airfields makes a big difference to how a mission will play out and you can use this to "balance" a mission. Even which airfields you choose makes a difference as some will allow more aircraft to launch in a given time. Yeah I know about some of the issues with despawning and am already working on fixes. Some of it is because up to the current release version the despawn happens at the group level so you'll see one plane get stuck and the whole group will dissappear or one plane land and taxi in and park and despawn and at the same time take the other 3 that are trying to land. lol yeah know what you mean about watching the movie. Just add an observer and/or game master slot to your mission and then you can look at whatever and jump around to watch the show. If you keep the track you can even go back and watch the juiciest bits ;D of course if you add a game master slot you can even interfere in the action too.

Hi Hellfire, Had a quick look for you and noticed you have an old version of Mist. Please update to 3.5.37 and I think your problems will go away. I actually used to mention the minimum requirement for Mist version in the header of the GCI CAP script but when I cleaned it up ready for moving it to Git I must have taken that comment out. I will re-add it the header block of the script and also the user guide. Cheers, Stonehouse

Question for users of this script. I have been working on sorting out the GCI issue uboats discovered and as part of this have change the group:destroy to unit:destroy for stuck and landed aircraft. This is a fundamental change to how unit numbers are accounted in view of the logistics change introduced recently and the fact that instead of an entire group despawning on being stuck or landing only a single aircraft does and as a result I would some questions. Currently the script allows up to a max number of groups of GCI and when the reset task interval is reached allows another full set up to the max. I am thinking to change from a max number of GCI groups to a max number of GCI aircraft and this has the following impact: I can keep the scheme of things approximately the same with a set number of GCI aircraft allowed to be spawned and active with a minor addition in that whenever a GCI aircraft lands or is told to RTB I can "give back" an aircraft to the GCI pool allowing one more to spawn and then when a reset task occurs allow another full set to spawn. or I can strictly account for aircraft launched and landed against the max number of GCI aircraft allowed. The effect of this is when all the GCI aircraft are airborne you will get no more until some land. In some ways this creates a sub logistics pool for GCI and you may run out of GCI aircraft if you lose enough It is still very much a work in progress and I make no promises about how it may end up but thought I would ask how people might use the script if it changed. Cheers, Stoney

Hi uboat, I haven't had time to do more work on the script to try to improve the GCI situation from a couple of weeks ago but I did find time to get your mission down and take a look. It seems to me that you've fallen foul of the situation where you made a change to the GCICAP script but then didn't remember to refresh the version actually in the miz file. I feel this is the case because I downloaded your mission attached a few posts up and unzipped it and then checked the config section of the GCICAP script and you have increased the reset task interval to 2400 (so you will only get new GCIs every 45 mins) and then also set the number of spawned and active interceptor groups for both sides to 2. So it sounds like it's working as it should for the current version (noting there is an issue still that when a GCI flight lands it doesn't mean that one becomes available again which is the thing I am working on) So if you want more GCI flights I would suggest that you make the number of spawned and active groups something like 6 or 10 (or match your number of intruder groups) and then lower the tasking interval to 600 (10 minutes) so you will see up to your limit of groups spawn (one GCI flight per intruder group) and then every 10 mins you will be allowed up to the limit again. Basically if this results in your mission being spammed with too many GCI flights then raise the tasking interval a little say 720 or 900 etc until you get as many intercepts generated as intruder flights and not too many left overs from one tasking interval cycle to the next. So to recap numberofspawnedandactiveinterceptorgroupsRED and numberofspawnedandactiveinterceptorgroupsBLUE is the number of interceptor (aka GCI) flights that will be spawned in a tasking interval. When the tasking interval has expired you get a complete new set regardless of the status (still fighting, RTB, dead) of the previous set of GCI flights. Each GCI flight will be assigned a single intruder group although the resettask function will also reassign a new target if the GCI flight is free and still airborne and an unassigned intruder group exists. Pretty much the script juggles around that set of instances trying to allocate GCI flights. Hope it helps you.

No criticism or insult intended as it may be a false positive but could an alternative filehost be used or someone mirror the file please? That one is coming up as a site with dangerous content according to my virus suite. Using ESET smart security 8.

Well really puzzled. Created a little test mission in a spare 10 mins with the IL76, Tu95 and Tu22 with open fire weapons free ROE as red and stuck a blue P51 behind each at about 100m with no ammo. End result the aircraft with tail guns completely ignored the P51s. Tried a couple of variations and if 10% ammo was added to the P51s the Tu22 did finally seem to fire back but the Tu95 was shot down while the IL76 had very minor damage. The only conclusion seems to be that the method being used for Tu95, IL76 and probably Tu142 doesn't currently work. Tu22 does seem to work under limited conditions ie if shot the plane fires back So this presumably means that new connectors are required (since this seems to be the difference between the Tu22 and the others) in the Tu95 IL76 Tu142 and therefore An26 and An30 to get tail guns to work. IE it seems that it needs someone with access to 3Dmax and skills to go with it in order to make tail guns work on anything other than the Tu22 which unfortunately means it isn't something I can do.

I guess the first thing is what is your numberofspawnedandactiveinterceptorgroups set like? You may be hitting your max so not spawning new GCIs Also I believe that getinterceptor airborne and generatetask are GCI related so if you take them out it won't work as I understand what you are trying to do. CAP stuff is CAPStatuscheck & spawnCAP. I won't have a lot of time this weekend unfortunately to work on the script so the other couple of GCI related items that have popped up in the last week are still WIP and ditto for that other issue you PM'ed me about. Hopefully get some time during the upcoming week although between work and trying to catch up on building missions for the virtual squadron I belong to it's a bit hard at present. Need another few weeks of leave to have time lol. That said I'll try to have a look for you. PS the GCI are tasked at the group level not individual aircraft. Does that help?

Firstly just to say I know very little about the process of modelling and creating new units however................. A lot of servers are using these planes as substitute B26 and He111 aircraft but obviously they have no defences. I noticed that aircraft_guns.lua has a section for the rear mounted 23mm turret on the Tu95, Tu22 and IL76. Looking at the EDM for these in the model view I can see the Tu22 has connectors for the left and right 23mm cannon and the position listed matches the one in aircraft_guns.lua. The Tu95 and IL76 has the gun shown in the model although the Tu95 is very rudimentary but both have no connectors. Talking to a friend who is a bit more knowledgeable he reckons they should have connectors to act as gun mounts to get the thing to shoot. So some questions, does the Tu95 and IL76 guns actually work and do they need connectors defined like the Tu22? If not how does it work? How hard would it be to add connectors to the An26 and AN30 model and add the appropriate lines to aircraft_guns.lua (as per lines 189 -192) and get it to fire at attacking planes? Looking at the Tu95 and IL76 is it necessary to add connectors or can you just do it through the lua scripts for the aircraft. If it is an easy mod then the ersatz B26 and He111 would be that much more useful as a placeholder until the real thing comes along Thanks, Stonehouse

Ok issue with incorrect country spawns solved KewlerMouh.. I should have seen it but didn't it so a big thank you to Grimes for taking the time to check through your mission. It turns out you have used an old version of Mist - if you update to the latest version here https://github.com/mrSkortch/MissionScriptingTools/releases/tag/3.5.37 your issue should be resolved. Cheers, Stonehouse

Doh sorry Grimes I should have checked the Mist version before posting but yes definitely easier when the file name gives the info rather than having to actually open it to see. Thanks for looking at it. Apologies for taking a chunk of your day without real cause. Cheers, Stonehouse

Thanks Grimes!

I didn't really change anything by the way, I just copied and renamed the fireobject.edm to firelarge.edm etc and then made three copies of the lua with appropriate name and pointed each to the appropriate edm file and change the firesize parameter in the medium and large one. It'd be nice to have a few different colour smokes and what have you but even this is a big help for putting atmosphere into missions without it seems too much fps hit

Lilkiki, I was mucking about with your mod trying to catch up on building a mission for my group for this evening and discovered that the fire and smoke scales according to firesize in the lua. Which you probably already knew lol but it led me to the below which I thought may be useful. It would be nice if mission builders had a collection of fire and smoke objects (can you do smoke without fire?) of different sizes and types and colours of smoke. Unfortunately I don't have access to the graphics software DCS needs to do something like and even if I did I have no clue how to use it :dunno: Anyway slight change to your mod which seems to work for me but I'm sure you could improve on a lot. So now Small, Medium and Large listed under static/structures as FireLarge, FireMedium and FireSmall in JSGME format forestfire.zip

One tip which is sometimes overlooked is if (think you need to own the CA module???) you can is to add observer and gamemaster slots to your mission for both sides so you can check things out - it's better than adding a client plane as then you may need to fiddle with fog of war settings and remove the client aircraft etc before releasing a mission and I always forget whereas it is pretty easy remember to remove as well as actually removing the observer and gamemaster slots. Additionally it means you can add test flights/vehicles/ships etc to your mission essentially waiting/orbiting/holding and then use gamemaster to order them around to test the way your mission responds.

Did a very quick debug and was very surprised to find the results. It looks like there may be an issue below the GCICAP script so I have asked for some help from Grimes to check if it is Mist causing the problem. http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2310939&postcount=704

Hi Grimes, I'm happy to be wrong and be told it's my lack of scripting skill in the GCICAP script at fault but it is starting to look like there is an issue with mist.getGroupData or perhaps something wrong in DCS that is sometimes causing getGroupData to return the wrong value. I had a report (http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2310757&postcount=396) that red template aircraft were chosen as Russian but spawning as Turkish. The user uploaded their mission and I've done a debug run and found that the table returned from getGroupData is bringing back countryId = 3 which is Turkey as far as I know but checking the mission in the editor the red template aircraft are all Russian so I expected getGroupData to bring back countryId = 0. Funnily it seems to work ok for the blue side and you can see the country name returned is "russia" even though id =3 It may be my paranoia but Turkey is after Russia in the red coalition countries and the only other user of the particular airframes chosen in this mission. Could there be a bug somewhere in getGroupData or below in DCS that is looping through the countries for a given mission coalition for a particular aircraft and not getting a match on whatever the condition is and so returning the last country? The relevant bit of the GCICAP code is lines 2684-2701: cap_country is eventually passed to coalition.addGroup debug entry in dcs.log: The mission is available at the forum post link above and the issue seems to be 100% reproducible. Thanks, Stonehouse

OK gave it a run and can see the red planes spawning as Turkish. Blue is ok apparently. I am suspicious of the fact that alphabetically Turkey is the last country in red coalition that uses the template aircraft you have chosen. I will have to dig out the country IDs and see if Turkey is after Russia ID wise too. Anyway there is an issue but I don't know at this point whether it's a CAPGCI problem or a Mist problem or a DCS bug. Fortunately it doesn't break your mission as it may take a bit to sort out as there are a few other things I am already chasing up for the script plus the usual real life chaos.