WirtsLegs

Currently the gun cam looks fantastic, but it is hampered by only being able to display to the screen Would love to have an option for it to output to the screenshots folder (kinda how the F-15E does with the TPOD when you hit the record button)

think you missed the point of my post I am fully aware of the remote admin panel via the DCS website as I said in the post, that is not what I am looking for

So currently the dedicated server has the local admin panel which as far as I can tell there is no way to expose remotely, and then we have the admin panel via logging into the DCS website. I would love to have the ability to expose the local panel to the network, main use-case being running multiple DCS servers for a group and would like to be able to pull all of them into a dashboard that I can control access to. Would greatly simplify administration for myself and those I trust with access and be much cleaner that the current approach of sharing VPN configs and RDP credentials etc. A step further if the backend comms of the admin panel could be exposed in such a way that users can write their own apps to talk to it that would be even better

absolutely possible and not a overly difficult edit, check out line 1081 you will see where it checks for the name prefix, can change that to anything However note that current iteration will only function on units that exist when the initialization script is run (so late spawned via script wont work) also due to a DCS bug if the units in question are red or blue (not neutral) then they will ignore the stormtrooper orders if they detect a valid target within range, why I use neutral units for this usually

update on this, script is working fine, found small bug in debug/help functionality but core function is working (have DM'd you additional info). Ensure you use the correct munition names for ImpactInZone to work.

Parts of it are definitely working as I know people using it However I haven't had a chance to evaluate it against the most recent update, will check when I can and update if needed

is this still something thats tracked? the core flak-18s basically don't engage air contacts at all without the KDO unless that contact is diving on them and very close some way to get them to engage would be nice, otherwise no point having the 18s outside the asset pack (event he allies placeholder rangefinder is asset pack which seems wrong?)

Currently the view in the editor is bound by the defined map edge. This it turns out creates a lot of weird behaviour and annoyance when using a wider aspect ratio display, commonly jerking the view around when working at certain zoom levels or near the edge of the map, especially when opening/closing other panels. I would like to request a removal or significant increase of the map pan/zoom limits, would simply suggest that off-map space that would end up being in view as a result at times simply be blank (black, green, white, whatever) space.

Hey there, I love the assets but it seems none of them have any LODs whatsoever, is there any plan to add those? As is clients grind to a halt pretty quickly if you use even a moderate amount of them (especially apparent when building with sandbags, just murders the CPU render thread)

So this may be an unreasonable ask or may be not too bad depending on how maps are stored/loaded/defined Basic idea is inspired by how the lighting at night changes based on the date, where during wartime the city lights will be off outside wartime they are on I would love to see this idea expanded on and applied to airfields, specifically the ALGs built by allied forces post Normandy landings. The basic(if it can be called that) ask would be to have ALGs either be present or not based on the date of the mission, with ALGs that are not present not just be missing on the F10 view but actually be patched out in the terrain (ideally different terrain mesh etc to simulate that area before construction, but even just removal of the statics and make it all grass would be awesome) The bigger ask would be to let us toggle these airfields in the ME independent of mission date, more control for content creators is always better anyway loving the map but this just seemed like such an awesome improvement if possible to really let us simulate the progression of the invasion.

So I was surprised to find some wooden fences that are not removable at all and stop all manner of munitions and cannot be destroyed, mostly surprised since the trees on the map allow munitions to pass through etc, see image for the offending fences (and other scenery objects) This particular fence is at X-36471, Y-39746 Trying to build some CA content and its a bit jarring when these things are indestructible. Unlike trees I would argue it is likely appropriate to make smaller/flimsier scenery objects like this simply not collide with munitions or vehicles, or simply delete them if a vehicle runs into them. At a minimum I would hope to be able to clear them with scenery remove objects in zone triggers.

super small one, but would be real nice to have the ability to make vehicles travel in reverse, would allow to simulate some armoured tactics (jockeying) or otherwise have vehicles back away from a threat during a fighting retreat instead of turning around. basically hoping for a checkbox or something in the waypoint info that lets us stipulate they should travel in reverse to that waypoint (while still ideally respecting any formation they are set to)

So to be clear you load WirtsTools.lua with a do script file trigger sometime after mission start Then run that 1 liner in a do script later And then as a player in a blue coalition aircraft get within and stay within 2000 meters of units in the ai group called CONTADOR and flag10 doesn't increment? As for your overall goal playerNear won't help you check out the getPlayers() function (https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_func_getPlayers ) Can use this to get a list of all players in a coalition, then check the size of that list to see how many players are slotted in If you specifically want airborne you will want to loop through the list checking each players altitude, incrementing a counter if higher that ground

WirtsTools - LUA Library for Mission Makers So I have been considering posting this for a while, figured it was time to finally do it. I have been slowly building out a collection of features written in lua, almost entirely from running into various things that either cannot be done or are incredibly arduous to accomplish through normal triggers etc while building missions. The entire library is designed to be loaded and then have the individual features enabled/triggered with a one-liner function call, so while you technically have to 'write' lua to use it, it is quite trivial to do. Indeed within the group I fly with there are now several people using it regularly to various extents that otherwise have no programming or scripting background or knowledge. so WirtsTools, you can find it here: https://gitlab.com/b4802/mission-tools/ The info you need to use all the features is there as the readme, but I will quickly go over the various functions here as well FEATURES: popFlare: This gives your players radio options for popping signal flares, great substitute for aircraft that should have a flare gun and don't, or just as a easy aid if you are flying with new players and want a nice visual option to help them find you impactInZone: This lets you pick a zone and give a flag name, that flag will be incremented whenever a weapon (you can define specific munitions or all bombs/rockets) impacts the ground within that zone. This exists because the only weapon in zone trigger options don't have any way to detect impacts, will trigger from a weapon flying through the zone at 20k feet, also it works with quad point zones impactNear: Similar to impactInZone, increment a flag when a weapon impacts within a defined range of a specific unit or any unit in a specific group playerNear: Will increment a flag for every second that a player (any player or specific groups) is within a defined range of a target unit or any unit in a target group, great for triggers detecting intercepts etc coverMe: Sets the players invisible if there are AI near them so if you have ai following or escorting the players close the AI will focus fire the AI first before engaging the player invisAlt: Toggles players invisible if they are below a defined altitude (AGL), this works great with the later stormtrooperAA feature for warbirds and helicopters suppression: A basic suppression mechanic, hits on units in a group will set them to hold fire for a moment, more hits extends the time and kills extend it further, will always be quite short and there is a limit so you cant permanently suppress a group missileDeath: Ensures hits from missiles are kills every time, good for time travel missions as warbirds are weirdly resilient to missiles, or any situation where you want any hit to be a for sure kill killSwitch: This one is for larger PvE missions with many players, it allows you to define radio items that are attached to a player name, idea being that regardless of what slot you take only your group will see them, that way backup radio options for when triggers break or a flight fails or other issues that you may have wont be seen and accidentally (or deliberately) used before they should tasking: lets you define 'taskings' as late activated groups then you can give that groups mission (all its waypoints) to another group on demand, waypoints can be given relative or absolute stormtrooperAA: Im a fan of this one in my missions, it takes control of the units you designate and tasks them with fire at point every few seconds based on location and velocity and a basic lead calc for blue players nearby, this way you can get some decent volume of fire, players feel like they are being shot at and indeed it can hit if they really fly straight and lazy, but doesn't slaughter the players, can mix some of these with some that do their own thing to up the threat, or couple with invisAlt to make it so when the players are super low the AA shoots but has a hard time hitting them, as they climb it becomes more dangerous shelling: Simple alternative version to the base-game shelling zone, no quad zones yet unfortunately (if anyone has a performant way to generate random points in a polygon let me know), but it lets you pick a zone and define a rate, once started it will persistently shell that zone in random places, can go a long way to giving the appearance of a war going on without needing piles of units etc, also supports safe zones where it will not drop any explosions. MLRS: We all love seeing them shoot we all hate the lag spike when they strike, this allows you to have MLRS rockets deleted mid-flight (after the smoke trail has stopped), so you can get the cinematic effect without murdering FPS percentAlive: Will persistently update a flag with the percentage of units that are alive in any number of groups(you give it a list of groups) ejectionCleanup: Pretty simple one, just deletes 50% of pilots that eject immediately and all others after a minute, this is specifically targeted at missions with large bombers etc where you end up with 10+ pilots in the sky for every one of them downed and can really hurt framerate IRStrobe: This places a blinking IR strobe on units in a group, can do it(turn them on or off) in a normal trigger or easily as a advanced waypoint action Anyway that's what I have for now, always more coming and sometimes existing features are revisited and enhanced, just please note I am not a developer type, im confident in this script thats why I am sharing it but im sure plenty of people could find "better" ways to do it that are more in line with LUA standards or whatever, im not too worried about that....but if anyone wants to steal this and run with it making some new thing go for it you have my blessing. Also no promises but feel free to voice feature requests here, I'll happily include any that make sense to me, are viable, and that I have the time to develop, and love taking a stab at new and crazy ideas. Finally the user community so far is fairly small so its not uncommon for some features to go unused for several DCS patches, this means there is definitely a chance there are some bugs I've not seen and squashed yet, so please let me know if you run into issues using any of these features thanks, Wirts

First-off this touches on a variety of combined arms and core game elements, so i opted to stick it here if it would be better in the CA section or elsewhere please move it or let me know and ill re-post there. Ok now that's out of the way, I have been working on some scripting to try and improve the Combined Arms experience, in doing so I have been looking at gameplay and general immersion, I have written two core scripts that improve these aspects (in my opinion) and I would like to ask for one of them to serve as a 'proof of concept' for what I would love to see added to Combined Arms specifically However in the shorter term there are some much simpler asks that are a mix of new functionality and bug fixes that will allow for my demo scripts to be greatly enhanced, and by extensions similar scripting options that can add a lot to a mission. So the two features are: CREW COMMANDS: This is a mix of immersion and better situational awareness, lets the player benefit from magic AI vision and just generally get help finding their targets. Inspired by GHPC (and my own armoured experience) this generates calls to targets instructing the player of the target type and guiding them to the target with traverse calls. The version in the attached demo miz is still what I would call indev, has some edgecase issues and target prioritization is very basic at the moment and could use a few more features (radio items to adjust priority of targets and shut it up etc), but its stable and I think quite a bit better than the current vanilla experience. Note a few vehicles (mostly modern ones) will call "Target Cease Fire" when you kill a target but i don't remember hearing any other commands/callouts VEHICLE ACCURACY: This topic has been done to death in discord etc but the other big script feature in the demo miz is my stormtrooper function, basically it aims enemies manually using fire at point, in the demo miz this unfortunately manifests as them mostly ignoring the player entirely until the player is the only one they can see, once you get too close it (currently) makes the player visible so they will engage naturally. The primary issues here stem from a few bugs that severely limit how much it can be used, when it does fully work its a good way to have decent volume of fire without the players being instantly killed. ALL THE WISHES: So what would I love to see added beyond a full crew command system ... Each title is hyperlinked to a related thread Unit Description Enhancements: This will allow both crew commands and things like stormtrooper to function better, having quick programmatic access to the rough max range a unit can shoot will generally simplify a lot of potential scripts well beyond what I have mentioned here Fire at Point Options: This would enable much finer control over the AI in DCS, being able to specify to any increased degree the weapons units should use when given fire at point (or attack unit/group), and being able to shortcut the aim delay would enable simulating a lot more tactical scenarios easily AI LOS Respect Trees: I'm linking a bug report on this issue, but basically would love to see AI detection factor in foliage and forests for obvious reasons Ground Unit Follow Command: Pretty simple, for some scripting due to the nature of things like ROEs, Alert State, and invis/immortal etc being group-wide its often necessary to use individual units (1 unit groups) for certain effects to be feasible, but them moving them around together is a nightmare, a simple follow command would help immensely. This would also be great in normal mission making, allowing 2 groups to move together easily before splitting up at some point Dead Vehicle Fire/Smoke Randomization: Would love to see just some randomness here so they dont all always spawn the exact-same size fire and smoke effect Ok so these next ones I have heard rumours are tracked internally already but im not sure.... LUA LOS Access: Allow us to check LOS between 2 points using whatever the back end method of doing so is (expose it through lua), somethign that factors in buildings etc instead of the current land.isVisible() which only considers the ground. Get Detected Targets/Is Target Detected: Change to Return detected units that are of the same or neutral coalition instead of just "enemies", same for is detected, allow us to query if a specific unit has detected another regardless of coalition. BUGS: Ok Final thing before I talk demo mission, there are a variety of bugs that are really directly hindering the ability to accomplish some really interesting effects (can tell you without these both my above-mentioned scripts would be a lot better) or generally hurting CA gameplay a lot, Some of these are fully reported, some not yet acknowledged but id like to highlight them: Restrict Target breaks Fire at Point: Cant stop units from shooting at the air or the ground whichever if I plan to use any fire at points Fire at Point vs ROEs: This one is a major pain and why I need to have the players be invis or neutral or have the enemies neutral to use stormtrooper scripts, as it stands if you give a fire at point, regardless of their ROEs they will immediately ignore the fire at point to engage any valid target they have detected and is in range Aiming in CA has some issues: Makes aiming at close range a nightmare at times Tank Engagement Range: Pretty obvious why this would impact CA stuff I think Infantry Chickens: Running like their heads cut off, makes them hard to include if the players will be looking at them for any amount of time Sherman FF HE shells: They dont explode, less important than the issues above but worth mentioning (the standard sherman's shells do explode) DEMO TIME: Ok Thanks for reading, ive been enjoying using LUA to force DCS to do interesting things, and used it a lot to enable experiences that cant exist without it, sometimes its to make something that should someday hopefully end up in the base-game, other times not so much but either way it can suck when a weird bug renders something impossible or overly complicated. Please check out the demo miz ive attached: DesertFox_demo_nomods.miz(its on Sinai and will require the WW2 asset pack) This has just a single blue JTAC/Operator slot, grab that, let the miz run atleast 2 seconds and then there are a handful of shermans called driveme that are in singleton groups with the rest of the shermans and drive (or feel free to advance time until the shermans are making contact with the enemy) Regardless play until you've faced off against the enemy tanks and please remember this meant to be a proof of concept, this is not meant to be a completed mission, feel free to reach out if you want more info on the scripts I am always happy to share.