Stonehouse

No problems I'm still doing a lot of overtime at work at present so I'm sure you'll be ready before me

Still haven't had a chance to try the new version sorry Franky but did notice that your attached version is the one with all the comment lines etc so it's a lot bigger than the stripped down version. Is it easy to produce the stripped down one? Any chance you could provide that version when you have a spare sec? Thanks!

Have you seen the new shell in zone trigger action? It'd be interesting if you could use a script to make that happen instead of a trigger or use an irregular shaped zone

Tested again after hotfix 3. Issue still exists for the Samuel Chase, LST and LHA1 Tarawa. It looks like it is the same problem as with community mod ships where the AI for a shipping strike doesn't recognise these new ships as valid targets for a bomb attack. I saw the aircraft either turn and fly away when they reached the waypoint with the attack advanced waypoint action or simply over fly the target straight and level.

Something that may interest people in this discussion. This is a snip from the volume 1 of the 2nd TAF series of books. I've no idea of what quality of reference it is but from what I have seen and read of other peoples comments in various places in these forums and outside them it seems to be regarded highly and it is a pretty recent work. If you look you'll see that there appears to be only 3 Spit XIV squadrons in the D-Day OOB with the majority being Mk IX but still some Spit V and VII squadrons. 2 of the XIV squadrons were 2nd TAF the other was an 11 Group Home Defence squadron. The main element missing from the 2nd TAF point of view of DCS and fighters/fighter bombers seems to be Typhoon IBs, Mustang IIIs and mainly it's the Tiffie's that are missing really. To me it looks like Spit IXs and Typhoons were the backbone of the 2nd TAF. Note only 2 squadrons of Tempest Vs too. Anyway for your interest please see attached.

Possibly not new news? I came across this article from 2nd half of last year recently while doing some information searches. Apparently a forgotten cache of 22000+ engineering plans and drawings on aperture cards for the Mossie was found Sept 2017. Anyway the aircraft manufacturer (think it was Airbus) donated them to a charity which is restoring a Mosquito to flying condition. All the cards have been digitised already according to posts at http://www.peoplesmosquito.org.uk http://warbirdsnews.com/warbirds-news/cache-secret-wartime-plans-discovered.html Be nice to think of ED or a third party doing a full study sim of the Mosquito one day. Perhaps the stuff above would help.

Thanks Franky new features much appreciated. I'll download it now but it may take a while before I get a chance to try it out. Work is being a pain at the moment.

Multiple actions on the same trigger.

There is one thing representative maps would address. The real scenery maps are locked quite tightly to a specific era. For example the new Gulf map can really only be used for missions based on the era from the early 2000s onwards if you want any suspension of disbelief and creation of immersion because of the accurately depicted buildings. So DCS is now a lot of things to a lot of people and covers everything from WW2, the 1950s and 60s to roughly current. So for the people interested in say desert theatre missions for WW2 or some of the 1950,60,70s conflicts they pretty much won't be able to use this new map or even NTTR for similar reasons. Caucasus if you were careful about where you placed the action you could perhaps get away with it.....just. Modern missions on Normandy have the same problem and its really only suitable for missions up to about the late 1950s. Maybe there are sections of the map far enough from major towns to make it work - I'm not sure. Places like Nevada and Abu Dhabi however look radically different in these early eras and that makes them very hard to use outside the era the DCS map depicts. eg Abu Dhabi in the 1960s http://looklex.com/e.o/slides/abu_dhabi03.jpg Abu Dhabi city in the 1970s and ordinary houses in the 1970s https://i.pinimg.com/736x/35/65/04/3565049f0e85412a823dbfcf2b3b01bf--abu-dhabi-uae.jpg http://uaehistory.com/en/%d8%b5%d9%88%d8%b1%d8%a9-2/?tag=30 Everyone I am sure knows what the current image of Abu Dhabi looks like. It's not just the big buildings either. The airfields have changed in the way they look (not talking about number of runways etc but how the buildings look) and also just the normal everyday house looks very different in areas like the Persian Gulf across the era's. European towns while modernising over the years do tend to keep old buildings around. Other areas of the world tend to totally reinvent themselves. Representative maps would help address this issue and allow believable missions to be built regardless of era if the maps were designed carefully.

Noticed an issue with aircraft attacking ships with bombs. They just fly over the target and don't attack. Possibly an issue with bombing generally?

I think perhaps "fictional" maps should be more "representative" maps. A section of jungle with a few airfields and some villages could be anything from Burma, Malaya to Vietnam and similarly for desert areas or Pacific island chains. If you had the ability to alter location names and perhaps change buildings styles via the date of the mission to suit a particular era I think "representative" maps that were well done could be very useful to the community. I think Caucasus has been rebadged as many things over the years or else people have invented a fictional conflict to suit the region so there is a degree of "representative" maps already in play. Spin it around, if someone presented you with a satellite picture of desert terrain with some town names marked by hand with names of towns in North Africa and another one that looked similar with town names from say Afghanistan - not talking major cities here just small towns out in the open country side. Would you easily be able to say they were not what they seemed unless you were very familiar with the areas? Ditto Pacific Island chains. Of course the main premise is that these representational maps would be easier for ED to produce and so would give us new maps sooner and without significant delay to the accurate real world maps. If there is no difference in effort then the question is moot. It still would be nice to change building styles to suit era via the editor though and be able to change location names. If nothing else it means that suddenly the same real world map might be able to service several eras.

I've been revisiting one of my old missions intending to update it to 2.5 standards. Part of the old mission involved FW190s loaded with SC500s set up for an anti shipping strike against a convoy consisting of the old Russian civilian ships that have been in the game for ages. However after seeing the missing textures issues on them I switched these ships to the Samuel Chase from the WW2 asset pack and began testing the mission. I noticed very quickly that the FW190s now just overflew the convoy made up of 8 Samuel Chase ships and did not attack despite an attack group order. I tried several different things including eventually adding a Harrier to the mission with anti ship missiles. This worked and the Harrier happily killed the Samuel Chases. I changed the load out to pure bombs and found that the Harrier also refused to attack the Samuel Chase with bombs. I then added one of the old civilian ships back and added a FW190 with an SC500 and a shipping strike task and straight away the FW190 happily attacked the old ship. The aircraft missed by quite a bit but attacked without any issue or hesitation. Note this was on the new Caucasus map So there appears to be an issue with shipping strikes, bombs and the Samuel Chase and (while unlikely) possibly some interaction of these with the new map that needs to be investigated by the dev team. At the moment however aircraft do not seem to want to perform bombing attacks on the Samuel Chase even when properly tasked in the editor. It was very reproducible at my end. If I get time I will try a repeat experiment on Normandy but I'm guessing I will get the same results. <edit> checked and reproduced on Normandy so the issue is not map related. <edit2> rechecked after 7/2 patch and hotfix and still an issue. <edit3> rechecked after hotfix2 and the issue still exists One other funny AI thing I noticed, I discovered that the German truck from the WW2 asset pack will very cheekily drive over a HAS if it happens to be on it's path. Maybe not a bug really but was certainly surprising!

Curious, I know 3rd party devs can lock their missions so you cannot edit it with any useful result but not seen a description of the process of locking a mission. How do you do it?

Think that would be using a trigger zone somewhere out of visibility of the player as the departure point and player airfield as destination and setting the commute option or similar as well

Well as I said, quite willing to give it a shot. So hopefully it works out well. Didn't mean to suggest that you need to change anything, my original comment was just a passing remark to Pikey voicing a slight concern. My individual experience good or bad shouldn't influence where you guys do your discussion. It would only be an issue if there was an overall negative trend for people. I'm not a crucial person in the MOOSE group so it's up to me to just work around stuff to get what I need. It's ok really I'm not violently anti Discord or anything. I'll just take it as it comes.

I guess what I mean is that I believe Discord is more orientated to actual comms than a discussion forum/thread style medium and that due to the fact that I am out of sync time zone wise with (my guesstimate based on what I saw on Slack where I was awake when others were sleeping and vice versa) 90% of the people interested in Moose I think at present that Slack more suited a text message style discussion and that worked better for my situation. Happy to be proved wrong but past Discord experience make me think that most groups pick it up to use like TS2.

Thanks Pikey. I found the discord channel the other day but for me it seems less organised than slack so not sure how it will work for me. With the time zone difference to most of the people on slack the extra comms on discord doesn't mean much to me really as text messages worked the best from my point of view. Will give it a shot though.

Running into another problem with the military background traffic. Especially WW2 again sorry. EG USAF FS had a 2 character squadron code like WZ and aircraft letter and a 3 digit tail number like 218 so the equivalent bort number would be WZI218 in the editor for an 84th FS aircraft (Big Beautiful Doll I believe). For a RAF SpitfireIX you might have squadron code 5J and then the aircraft letter K and a three digit serial number so the bort might look like 5JK814 (126 SQD). So I am trying to use the RAT.onboard_num parameter to set these codes for the spawned RAT aircraft. However it doesn't seem to like multiple aircraft in the spawned group. Tried a table of bort numbers but that just stops those aircraft spawning so I am guessing it is only set up to handle single aircraft although it is hard to tell as the doco for this one is very light. Could this be picked up from the template aircraft directly instead? (it definitely is not now) Or if it was a parameter based thing then ideally you would want to designate the squadron code eg WZ and then have a table of possible aircraft codes {A, B, C.........etc} and then a table of 3 digit tail/serial numbers. RAT would then use the squadron code, pick a random aircraft code for each aircraft in the group and do the same for the tail number ensuring there are no duplicates of aircraft code or tail number in the group. If I'm completely off course and there is a way to do this already could someone give me a hint please? Thanks, Stonehouse

Apologies gromit, didn't realise you'd kept it pure DCS.

Thanks Franky, the formation is set on an adv waypoint option so thinking about it this evening I realised you probably don't grab that when you get the template group info although you could I believe. I seem to recall I had added it as an option to one the last WIP versions of GCICAP using that method but it's a long time back now so it's kind of hazy. As you say you could also do it as a RAT:SetFormation type thing and set the formation on waypoint 0 when you build the route. Anyway much appreciated if you can find time and method to add it in. Cheers!

I've tried to do a search on this thread without finding any info about what I would like to do, so again on the military background idea, got the flights taking off with more than a single aircraft via the template group as suggested but I don't seem to be able to set the formation used by the spawned traffic? Particularly for WW2 there were distinctive formations used at various points in the war so I would like B17s to use the WW2 bomber element for example and Luftwaffe to use finger four while Allied fighters use a mixture of formations. Any pointers as to how to do this? At present everyone defaults to echelon right, tried setting the formation on the template but it doesn't seem to be brought through to the spawned group. Thanks PS Almost forgot - it's generating lots (and lots) of messages in dcs.log........anyway to suppress these to improve performance? From the doco it seems debug is defaulted to off so assume there might be another thing to set off somewhere?

Sorry WreckingCrew not quite right, I finally had a moment to recheck the script. It uses zones but not for checking the min altitude. It uses the zones to identify the target aircraft whereas you know this already. As per Chump's example the flak script does: local _targetpos = inZoneUnits:getPosition().p You'd just substitute the unit you want to check instead of inZoneUnits in the above and then the altitude is the y component which is referenced as per Chump using _targetpos.y The table entry inZoneUnits is identical to the concept of Chump's table aircraftClientBlueNames except that instead of being populated with unit names it is already populated with the unit reference that is given by Unit.getByName() Anyway as usual with these things there are 100 different ways to get to the same result. However if you want AGL rather than ASL altitude then you need also need to consider the land height at the target's position. This is done using the x and z components of the target position. So something like: local _landht = land.getHeight{x=_targetpos.x, y = _targetpos.z} So the AGL alt is _targetpos.y - _landht You can then compare this to your desired check altitude eg local _targetAGLAlt = _targetpos.y - _landht if _targetAGLAlt >= your desired check alt then ..blah ..blah end

MOOSE and MIST are toolboxes/frameworks to help build things like CTLD and AGFT. The latter are basically plug in applications that provide the mission builder with a gameplay aspect of the mission. So it depends on whether you want to create stuff anew or simply use the features of one of the plug ins.

Cool! I did wonder if the template would give you that but wasn't sure. Thanks!

Quick question hoping someone knows off the top of their head.....reading through doco it implies (to my reading anyway) when the RAT group spawns it contains only a single aircraft. Is there a parameter that allows more than one aircraft to be spawned in a group eg so essentially xyz:Spawn(5) might spawn 5 groups with more than a single aircraft in each group rather than just 5 aircraft? It's just pretty rare for military aircraft to fly in less than pairs unless they are a transport or something. So if wanting to add believable background military air traffic it would be good to be able to spawn groups of more than a single aircraft. Thanks