Stonehouse

Flak script does something like that to check whether the target is above the min alt of the flak battery. Can't recall right now whether it uses Mist or native DCS scripting to do it. Also not in a position to open the script up and check right now sorry. It would be in the addtgt function and should derive the approx. future target position including it's height above land at that point and then check to see if it is above the min altitude and if it is then it adds it to the table of targets. https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/683612/

Isn't there a setting somewhere to allow or disallow saving views?

Nope all good for me thanks!

Will do thanks. Getting a 404 error on the download at the moment so I guess user files is still updating or something. Will try again in the next few days and see if my friend is available to fly with. Cheers!

OK very odd. In the P51 mission when we tried it we saw very little flak, couple of puffs of 88 was all. We cruised around over the Caen rail yards for quite a long while without flak and it was 109s bouncing us while we admired the new smoke effects that caught us out. Unfortunately the mission crashed before we could RTB with our damaged Mustangs to see if we'd forgotten how to land them. I did see in the editor that you'd spread each flak group out over the country side so each gun was quite distant from each other rather than grouping the guns in a group around a point you wanted to defend. Perhaps that had something to do with it? A typical 88 battery was 6 guns placed within a reasonably close distance of each other with the fire control unit located centrally (we don't have a specific unit to represent this in DCS) and I think light flak was pretty adhoc and self directed but still would have been grouped so that a light flak company covered the same area with some sort of command point co-ordinating things. Also a minor historical point but I'm pretty sure by the time of the landings and the battle around Caen that Carpiquet airfield was closed with the runway sabotaged by trenches and mines etc as were all airfields close to the Normandy beaches. Hence the Allies using ALGs until the fighting had moved further away from the coast and the engineers had time and peace behind the lines to make the airfields safe and restore them for use. It was more in Holland I think they tended to use captured airfields soon after they changed hands. Doesn't really matter for you but when the grass landing strips finally work you'd be better off basing Luftwaffe units on these in the south of the map (trying to represent temp landing grounds) and Evreux (which actually was a series of satellite airfields I believe rather than the single base shown in the DCS map). This doesn't impact the appeal of your mission though. Really more of a detail to think about for later on.

Good missions Reflected thank you for them. I tried the P51 mission with a friend a week or so back one evening and enjoyed it. Few passing thoughts for you which hopefully you find constructive. (1) Please consider a co-op version as well as the single player one. I edited your P51 mission to convert it to a co-op fairly easily although it has some obvious impacts on your triggers. (2) Not enough flak in my view. At this time of the war the Germans were already swinging over to flak being a major part of their air defences. Especially mobile light flak guns were heavily concentrated near important points or setup as flak traps to stop fighter bomber attacks or lure them to their destruction. (3) While editing to make it co-op I noticed that a lot of your vehicles seem to use a very complicated waypoint set to make them act as if on a patrol route. eg "atmosphere" vehicles and infantry around player start airfield. If you were to use Mist or Moose there are simple to implement methods of getting them to retrace their footsteps and then go back again or there is now the new adv waypoint action to get them to go to a waypoint of your choosing. The latter has an issue in that I think the unit goes directly straight path to the nominated waypoint which might cause traffic issues. I saw that you'd been careful to avoid taxiways etc so the mist/moose method would probably give you best results as they follow the same path back and forth. (4) You may want to consider switching off the AI when the players are far enough away using conditions, triggers and zones as this would allow you have more units overall in the mission or give better performance if you keep it the same size. So for example when player aircraft are say 20kms from the start base you could deactivate the vehicles and infantry -essentially they become like static objects- and then reactivate them when the players come back.

Think it has been suggested previously but in any case - it would be extremely helpful to be able to view the user files section by date of last update rather than date of creation. An example of this is reflected's excellent new P51 Caen mission which was created in user files about a week back but then updated on the 27/12/17. Except for him posting up an advisory there is no way for users to find out there has been an update unless they go and actually check the user file entry. Now expand this to the normal amount of downloads most users have from user files. I know I have probably 100's of skins and missions etc - while I check for new things in user files constantly I just don't have time to recheck entries for things I have downloaded to see if there is an update. It should just be a new database view made available to the web page and it is obvious the data already is held so I believe it would be a reasonably simple change to implement. Could ED please consider looking into this? Thanks, Stonehouse

Thanks Mbot. Looking forward to seeing it in action.

Ahh sorry! that usual site...apologies should have guessed.

Sorry don't know the usual site........so please provide a link? Thanks

Haven't got that far in my attempt yet, still trying to set up the squadrons and bases and get the right squadron at the right base type of thing as close as I can to the historical locations. Biggest handicaps to getting it correct are things like missing Spitfire fighter bomber load out, problems with B17 raids (large formations WW2 style), lack of german airbases and not being able to place grass airfields, setting the destruction level for the scenery/buildings in the editor so things look like they should after an invasion causing a huge delay on mission start etc. The current method for setting destruction levels needs some more work and you also need to be careful it doesn't interact with Mbot's script for ground object destruction too......not quite sure how to get around that at present. Already figured out that I've been much too ambitious and will have to cut things down to a specific region rather than trying to cover the whole invasion.

deadlyfishes, there seems to be a problem with the user files link that you might want to check. Clicking download for me opens a new web page and displays the cover jpeg instead of downloading the single player mission...... Cheers, Stonehouse

Very, very big step forward!

Typically you would only have a single mission start trigger with multiple actions. ie for your situation you have two do script file actions. First Moose and then your mission script. Only reason you would have more than a single mission start trigger is if the condition to activate it was different for each trigger. That goes true for other triggers as well as there is a performance cost to each trigger being evaluated and fired. eg if you have two triggers with the same condition and an action on each that is more expensive than a single trigger with two actions.

I don't recall any other things like that except you can also do a cut (cntrl X) and paste too. As you say rubber banding a collection of units would be much more preferable along with a 3d window to aid placement. lol that said though I can remember what is was like before you could cut/copy and paste very early in the DCS A10 life cycle......

You can save it as a mission and then try to use the copy and paste on multiple units but it is a bit clunky. ie save mission with farp objects for later use. Then when you want that set of objects in another mission, open the "template" mission. Select all the objects using shift and double left click(this is the clunky bit) on each static object, do a control C. Then open the new mission and do control V where you want the group of objects.

Ah ok sorry. Only other thing maybe at a long shot would be something like here https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=178895 where call back is used to load an lua at mission startup. Still probably not what you want though by the sound of it.

Could you put it on a trigger with a condition that will never be true as a do script action? Probably any lua not referred to by something in the mission gets scraped off by the editor when you open it.

Very nice module which will be really useful to a lot of people. Thanks for adding it to Moose. Just a passing thought, wouldn't it be better practice to do a single mission start trigger with two actions; the first to load moose and the second to load the random airtraffic script? I realise the end result is the same but a once trigger fires after the mission starts while as I understand things the mission start trigger fires at the start before anything else happens internally from a DCS point of view. So players won't notice any impact from the script running for instance because it happens before they get to see the cockpit I believe. For some reason people don't use mission start triggers for mist and moose type stuff and I've never understood why.

If you can make it to Wanaka in NZ this Easter you can see the real thing flying.

Sorry to read your news Klem but I can understand it. My group flies very little these days due to combinations of real life sticking it's oar in and also for at least half the guys the WW2 side is still in progress so they don't really get keen. They like the potential but it's a while off yet. Me building a campaign was literally aimed at trying to convince friends to fly it around Christmas while people have a few days free from work. So my comment about how long it will take me was only semi tongue in cheek.

Mostly @Klem but also anyone else using the Normandy db_airbases.lua file which was kindly posted up a page or so back. Please note that the ATC freq's in the file are above the range of WW2 radios which seem to peak at around the 156ish Mhz level. So for a WW2 campaign I believe the file needs to be adjusted by checking each airfield and getting the suitable freq and editing the section of the file. <edit> did a very quick update and thought I'd try to help out by attaching results. Hopefully no typos Freq's now in the 118-119 MHz range db_airbases.lua

Not sure if this is old news or not but it looks like in the alpha that LoGetAngleOfAttack is returning degrees and not radians anymore. I noticed that in flight the AOA was always pegged at 50 degrees so on a hunch I removed the 57.3 multiplier and straight the helios reading matched the in game one allowing for the different instrument divisions (in game shows 1 deg increments where as the helios version of the instrument shows about 1.45 degree increments).

Couldn't you just have a table with entries indexed by coalition and airbase and perhaps squadron with the data item being the number of queued aircraft? The dispatcher just adds this value to the ones physically in the game to decide whether to launch more? The actual spawn event of an aircraft would decrement the number in the table representing that a queued aircraft had been spawned. You could use this approach for all take off methods really I think just the ramp and airborne spawns would tend to always have a zero or low queued number as the aircraft tend to spawn without delay. eg red, beslan, 4 to represent 4 queued aircraft at beslan. May want also to include the sqd id as an index too I guess. A bit of pipe dreaming and you might be able to hook this into logistics and also a base level of efficiency for launching and turning around aircraft that land. So the germ of an idea is the queued table would become a coalition/base and perhaps squadron level system something like below. Assuming in mission time is about 091500 hrs and the aircraft rearming have just landed. coalition, base, sqd id, status, time, number of aircraft red, beslan, A, available, 0, 14 red, beslan, A, queued, 0, 2 red, beslan, A, rearm, 100000, 2 red, beslan, A, repair, 151500, 4 etc Don't know how accurate time needs to be but presumably at the second would suffice. Beslan might have a repair rating of +6 hrs or some formula based on % damage times a number for example, a rearm/refuel rating of 45 mins. Could even have an ATC rating that makes queued aircraft be delayed slightly so flights take longer to launch and in which case the queued entry would have a non zero time. If the enemy damaged Beslan then these ratings might be degraded to represent lose of command and control. Elapsed time and events are used to move aircraft between buckets and remove/reset table entries. I guess for it to work you'd have a single available and multiple repair, rearm and perhaps queued table entries if an ATC delay was part of it. So when you need to spawn aircraft you reduce available, create/update a queued entry. When the spawn event occurs update/reset the queued entry. Dispatcher looks at available and queued plus active in game aircraft to decide whether it can (are there enough airframes available?) and should launch more aircraft (queued plus active < number required for intercept). Landing aircraft go to the rearm or repair bucket as per your logic looking at % health along with a time stamp for when they will be moved to available. Potentially by having it at coalition level and allowing both red and blue squadrons to be assigned to Beslan and using the controlling coalition to choose which is used for tracking you have the basis of base capture. Don't know if the above is of any use or not. I'm not really keeping up with MOOSE news at the moment as real life is not behaving well so you may already have something similar or better in which case apologies for taking up people's time. Was just a passing thought. Probably full of holes big enough to drive a truck through.

Does placing the scenery destruction % triggers that were introduced for the Normandy map into the first mission have an adverse effect on the campaign? Anyone know? Thanks, Stonehouse