WirtsLegs

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://github.com/WirtsLegs/WirtsTools/ 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 with name or characteristics) 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 weaponNear:Updates a flag to be equal to the count of weapons that are currently near a given target (eg missile flying by), weapons that count are set based on your criteria weaponInZone: Like weapon Near but in zones, works for quad point or circular zones weaponHit: increment a flag for each time a given target is hit with a weapon that meets your filter criteria (note this one can have issues in multiplayer read the readme for full details) 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 Fire at point aim delay bypass: This would allow much more nuanced control over the AI and how they engage, enable things like rolling barrages and fire adjustment etc 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.

Seems the HE rounds for the firefly are not exploding as they should, see picture: To reproduce just toss a firefly in a mission, load the HE rounds and shoot things, no explosion. This does not seem to be only a visual issue as it will only hurt targets that it hits directly, even infantry nearby are left standing fine.

Seems my issue was some residual mod files from mods that I thought I had removed or more specifically a pack of mods and left behind HDS which conflicts with the vanilla launchers, thanks for sanity checking me Not a big will mark thread resolved

Oh interesting, I placed them just by dropping one of the provided sa-10 site templates, I'll take another look at them today.

Since the update the SA-10 missiles seem to be larger than their launch tubes and misaligned, see picture

didnt that bomb bounce up through the helicopter deck, not go entirely through the ship one side to the other? but yes penetration is possible to varying degrees depending on the specific bomb, the bombs impact velocity and angle, and the nature of the target, so not asking for it to be just removed, however I expect the amount of ships a 500lb GP MkV could go through starting at maybe 250 miles per hour would be a short list haha (and certainly not a supercarrier as I had in my example)

I think that is a separate issue, and likely both will need fixing for it to feel "right" But if you watch the track my target ship is not moving, the bombs enter one side of the carrier and exit the other, much more penetration than they should have, that is separate from what should happen after the bombs velocity reaches 0. In essence if say this issue were fixed but not the issue of bombs being unable to move with the ship I would expect the bombs to end up in the water either under the ship or on the side of the ship they were dropped from (not passing entirely through to the other side)

Definitely support this one

Oh hey yeah I didn't see that thread, exactly!

So started noticing this issue back when fuse options were first brought to DCS WW2, basically it seems that the bombs phase right through units that they hit, the collision with the unit seems to start their fuse (so instant fuses detonate when they should) and it does slow the bombs down but penetration seems way too extreme, with bombs punching in one side of a ship and out the other without much difficulty when ideally they should be 'stuck' in the ship or bounce off landing in the water on the side they were released from depending on the specific bomb, ship, bomb velocity and impact angle. I would expect it would be quite rare for most of these bombs to go in one side and out the other on the vast majority of the ships we have in the game. See the attached track for an example(BombCollision.trk), I'm using a mossie with the GP mkV (30 min fuse) to make it extra apparent, and using a supercarrier as my target as it is very easy to demonstrate the issue, however the problem seems to apply to all ships.

Pretty simple ask, would enable a lot more control for mission makers if ground units could have access to this ROE option.

Currently in order to use the escort task the unit must have the escort mission, however the escort mission restricts access to other A2A tasks (specifically search and engage tasks). I would propose the removal of the escort mission and making the escort task available to all A2A mission types (or even ALL mission types). This would allow task switching, doing things like escorting a friendly to a point then shifting to set up a CAP patrol in an area. Or being on CAP but then moving to escort a friendly, both of these examples I can think of a lot of situations where they would make sense and accomplishing it in DCS currently is a pain due to these task restrictions. I would ideally expand this wish to be more broad and say make more tasks available to more missions in general as there are many that are 'mission locked' but there is no logical reason a aircraft performing some other mission could not be given those tasks

I feel like this must have come up before but i couldn't find any threads so here it is The ability to tell ground units(groups) to follow other ground units would be incredibly useful as it would allow moving as a large group but then splitting up to go in different directions etc, essentially enabling a suite of options for more convincing ground unit behaviour for mission makers.

Yeah as stated above there are some workarounds, which makes the limit purely related to the mission editor. I would love to see this limitation removed

that does smoke though, just you cant then link it to a unit

yeah exactly thats what I thought as well but StaticObject.getByName() returns nil, and SearchObjects() turns up no objects in that area seems like the static object in the editor is just a proxy for starting the effect and doesnt result in a static object in game

not quite, the only way to link a smoke effect to a unit is when placed in the editor (and then it works fine) but you cant remove those other methods of getting the smoke effect just don't have the option to link them at all

So if you use the EFFECT - SMOKE option to create the smoke then SMOKE STOP works, problem is when you create the smoke that way it cannot be linked to a moving unit

So currently there is a editor placed static proxy for the smoke/fire effects, there are also lua functions for creating and destroying them on an adhoc basis. However both methods of producing these effects lack a critical feature to allow certain desirable usecases. The usecase i will focus on is smoke attached to a moving object (specifically a ship), to simulate damage or simply to add smoke stack smoke on older ships. The editor placed static object can be linked to a unit like other statics, resulting in a nice effect as the ship sails: However when smoke is placed this way there is seemingly no way to ever turn it off, resulting in this appearance lasting indefinitely if the ship is sunk: If however you place the smoke via the lua function trigger.action.effectSmokeBig() while you can then remove it with effectSmokeStop() it cannot be linked to an object and so does not work with a moving unit. Suggested improvement: I would like to suggest that either we get the ability to deactivate the static object placed effects(either through a traditional triggered action or maybe through the effectSmokeStop() function), or ideally the effectSmokeBig() function be enhanced to allow linking to units.

If a ground unit is set to restrict target to ground or air units only the fire at point task does not work. please see the attached mission: FireATPoint_Bug.miz In this miz i have 4 tanks set up with a fire at point, 2 set to restrict targets to air only and 2 to ground only. In each pair one has a fire at point with a alt set, the other has no alt value None of the tanks will fire

So it seems when aiming in 3rd person the reticule is broken by being zoomed either in or out, in that the point you think you are aiming at is not correct. The further out you are zoomed the more short you will hit when you fire, see images for examples This is the first shot, taken when zoomed in as far as possible And here is the second shot, taken fully zoomed out aiming at the same point: Here are the two impacts: This seems to be consistent behaviour on every vehicle I've tried, and is much much more pronounced at short range (basically the closer you get the harder it is to aim) which is especially frustrating as at short range is when the standard first person sight is the least practical Another way to see this issue Jump in a tank and pick a nearby target (closer is better, to make it super obvious pick something maybe 20-30 feet away), pick a point that is easy to distinguish, go into 3rd person fully zoomed and place your reticule on that point, then zoom out taking care to not actually move your mouse, you will notice that the gun of the tank does not move but the reticule moves to suggest you are aiming elsewhere Here is the track from when i generated these images: CA_AIM.trk