WirtsLegs

Happy to look at whatever you come up with, just keep in mind to make that work your vectors will have to be adjusted based on unit orientation with each pulse As for built in ir strobes, that would be a per-module thing no idea which have it and which don't but again I made this with infantry and generally ground units in mind, of which none have it

hey i wrote the script, it was tuned for infantry and to be somewhat simple The way it works is it creates and destroys short vertical IR lasers on the unit in question, the lasers go from the center of the unit to a offset point. The offset is a point somewhere above the center (im writing this without the code infront of me so cant remember off top of my head the values used). If you look real close at infantry using it youll see it sticks a fair distance above their head as well, though looks decent unless you are really looking super close. This is because it needed to stick out "enough" to be bright enough to actually be noticeable. The offset can be changed easily as could the start point (eg to go from offset A to offset B), BUT the point of the unit is in the game's XYZ coordinate system, so if you say offset along the X axis when the unit is faced one way that will be their left, faced the other way their right, and so on. To do it right you would need to incorporate the unit orientation vectors, do some fancy matrix/vector math and recompute the points constantly to keep it say on the side or tail or front or wherever you want it of a given unit. You would also then have to figure out appropriate offsets for each unit you want to use it for. All doable, but a bit past reasonable for the original usecase of infantry I had. You will also notice it looks bad on anything that moves very fast, since the laser's coordinate doesn't update while its on, so a fast enough unit can sorta outrun the laser, not noticeable with infantry, definitely noticeable with jets, not sure about most helis and so on.

haha well done then? But just glad you're enjoying it, always happy to see others using my work, helps justify the time spent haha feel free to hit me up if you have any other issues/questions/requests

LOL! woops that'll teach me to update via my phone browser and not test YES should be WT. infront of those, ill get a new update pushed later today

hey so i cant get on DCS to test right now but I was able to spend some time looking at the code and think i found the issue anyway. I have pushed a new release on gitlab, give it a try!

Interesting, I'll give it a look when I can, possible a recent patch broke that

I am very aware it's EA, but there is nothing wrong with reviewing its current state both as a way to provide feedback to ED in what we like or don't like, and as a way to inform others that are considering buying into EA Also I hate the attitude that some have of being EA makes all criticism moot/pointless.

overall impressions on the map so far: Pros: map is huge, lots of space to setup longer missions the higher detail textures for the most part look pretty good map looks great from up high Cons: Down low anywhere without a high res texture looks terrible, very muddy zoomed in sat imagery, can literally see the square pixels in some places places where high res meets low res look especially bad as they meet at a razor sharp line many of the roads and waterways have height issues (roads with mile high veritcal canyon walls on either side for example), and some major roads are missing rendering some areas impossible to reach by road some layout issues where two tiles of high res meet in a way they shouldnt, creates visible 'lines' through some areas the DCS standard everything burns is especially strange on this map as you drop a mk82 and stone/mud walls start burning the mountains are for lack of a better term ugly when even somewhat low, look like extruded playdoh with no texture or roughness, I get that some is a general DCS limit with no overhangs and vertical surfaces not texturing well but look at Sinai for how to make them look decent anyway Overall impressions: Map is generally pretty bad in its current state, however there are some areas that do look decent and can work well for some content already. Some of the biggest issues are likely also the easiest to solve and by doing that the map will go from 2/10 to 7/10 easily. The map is also unfortunately severely limited by the DCS core in that for it to really work well we need ground AI improvements, especially Infantry as the current behaviour just doesnt work. Additionally we need some ANA, Insurgent, and civilian units that fit the area. Finally another DCS limitation of map scenery not rotating in all 3 axis is especially apparent in the map anywhere where scenery structures or vehicles are placed on the steeper slopes. Easy Wins: Some easier wins (maybe not in amount of time but in complexity) would be to... generate a set of medium res textures to take the place of the satellite imagery when down low, idea being these can be pretty plain but should blend better into the proper high res areas and get rid of the blocky pixel-looking splotches and hide the buildings baked into that satellite imagery Do a manual pass on the larger high res areas and fix some of the major alignment issues make vehicles kick up dust on the dirt roads Long term though for this map to really shine we need to see some core game improvements, like fixing the above-mentioned scenery issues, improving ground AI, at the very least fix some of the more glaring bugs like the infantry chicken run, and add more relevant assets to the game

And why are you obligated to follow these third party demands exactly?

This is possibly more an issue with default DCS behaviour, in that vehicles make dust trails off road but not on road and I'm not sure if roads have a surface type tracked to use for this currently However as it is the lack of dust trails even on roads that are sparsely used dirt roads on the Afghanistan map is a bit odd

good find, yes this looks much better in terms of quantity of foliage realistically the portions of the desert that are moving dunes shouldn't have any foliage at all id think, this would be good for the areas like in the picture I shared above where there was some light scrub

would love to get some civilians to add to missions especially with Afghanistan, making it so not every person on a roof etc is a valid target would be great

I feel like they should be able to pick an area and say don't generate grass/scrub here, and if not maybe that's a point to improve I'm not realistically expecting proper looking sand dunes as cool as that would be

not what i expect at all, however it is reasonable to expect them to have a different ground texture down low in these areas that isn't a low res sat image so that there arent 2D building images baked into the terrain.

Another example

The various small bushes etc on the map seem to be scenery objects instead of grass or forest, this means the grass/clutter slider has no effect on them. Additionally the LOD switch factor slider also seems to have no effect on the LODs used by these bushes.

Basically the title, the desert region south of Kandahar generates way too much foliage, additionally it would nice if we could get a proper sand texture when down low even if simple and repeating for space reasons Picture of area in sat map How it looks down low in DCS everywhere (might also mention some of those bush LODs need work, they are cardboard cutouts until way too close) And some sample images from the desert in real life, note there is some scrub in some areas but generally its a proper desert of sand dunes and dirt

In a variety of places the roads are fractured, randomly stopping then continuing and don't align with the F10 map A good example: here is the zoomed out F10 view: and how it looks once you zoom in: You will notice that the road indicated when zoomed out is missing, and the roads that are present don't connect Finally here is a view of that area in free-cam, you can see the road that's in right now, and a line in the ground texture that is clearly meant to be a road of sorts (seems to allign with the missing road) This issue is present in a few places on the map

picture speaks for itself i think

yeah that should do it just know that if you get fancy and do it later in the mission if you try to set life on a unit thats dead and burning (not fully gone yet) it will revive it but break the groups AI and it will just stop working

yeah basically you can set a units life to a percentage of its max, essentially let you apply damage (or remove it) on the fly to AI units without needing to actually hit them with a weapon

Pretty simple request, currently there is a trigger action called "UNIT AI SET LIFE" if this function could be exposed to the LUA api that would be incredibly useful for a variety of scripts/scenarios

Not to derail things here but my report is nothing to do with the "goto waypoint" task that would be more appropriate in another unique bug report

I havent tested goto waypoint at all recently, but given that just regular waypoints seem to have issues now the goto waypoint feature being unreliable as well would make sense

Ok so I'm cramming a few issues into this report since they all seem kinda related, but please let me know if I should make separate reports. Building a mission on Afghanistan and ran into a pile of ground AI issues including 1) Troops refuse to move after disembarking, pay attention to the south-inf-1 group, they embark fine but after disembarking refuse to move, I've left in a trigger i tried to use to get them going. 2) More seriously it seems ground groups are having issues with formations, check out the group named Line Abreast, you'll see it ignores its entire path and goes straight to its last waypoint, interestingly it will follow waypoints if i reduce the group size to 4, there is with that group a group with similar waypoints but off road and you will see it behaves as expected 3) Next possibly more of a map bug I'm not sure, but pay attention to the 4 lavs after the infantry group disembarks and how they choose to path through that small village (note all their waypoints in that area are on road) 4) Finally later on the group of 4 lavs gets a line abreast waypoint for a short stretch, they ignore it and stay in column BuggedAI.miz