pdmarsh

Operation Erase & Replace Name: Operation Erase & Replace Author: pdmarsh Mission type: SP/MP Controllable: A-10C/Su-25T/UH-1H/Ka-50/Mi-8MTV2 Quick Summary 1 to 6 players. All user roles have AI counterparts if not taken by human pilots. Enemy forces have occupied the town of Verhnebakanskiy and enemy reinforcements are on the way. Your mission is to erase these occupiers from the scene and replace them with your own forces. You must also stop the enemy reinforcements from arriving. This mission has been updated for DCS World 1.5. See discussion thread link below. Link/Download: http://forums.eagle.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=109785&d=1418952161 Full brief/Discussion thread: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=136047

GENERAL COMMENTS All user roles in this mission have AI counterparts. In fact, this mission will play itself out in entirety if a player takes the role of Observer. The tasks and threats will scale to some degree according to the number of players and role(s) selected. This is the first mission I have scripted that I am going public with. I don't presume that it is great, but I hope it will be fun for those who fly it. 3rd PARTY CREDITS This mission makes use of the Complete Troop Transport Script (CTTS.lua) by geloxo, itself built on the HueyDrop2 script by Deck. Note -- Due to an apparent bug in DCSW release 1.2.12, CTTS.lua was modified for this mission--excellent modifications made by Chump. Do not extract and use this version of CTTS.lua for other missions--recommend you download original CTTS.lua and make mods appropriate to your mission. MISSION DESCRIPTION Players: 1-6 Available Player Aircraft & Roles: Su-25T x 2 (SEAD); A-10C x 2 (CAS); UH-1H x 2 (Transport) All player aircraft on hot start. THE SITUATION Enemy forces have occupied the town of Verhnebakanskiy and enemy reinforcements are on the way. Your mission is to erase these occupiers from the scene and replace them with your own forces. You must also stop the enemy reinforcements from arriving. TASKS SEAD -- If possible, all enemy air defenses in and around the town must be eliminated. AI CAS and AI transports will not enter the hot zone until this is accomplished. If all air defenses are not successfully eliminated, you can call in CAS and the transports manually (if you are willing to risk it!). AI SEAD will leave the hot zone if all air threats have been eliminated or if they go winchester. Human SEAD (that's you), can loiter to assist CAS if needed. SAMs can be marked with orange smoke if desired (changed from white as noted below in mission V2)--use the /F10 options menu. CAS -- Close air support will be needed to remove threats to our own forces moving into the hot zone and to stop enemy reinforcements from arriving. Transports -- There are a number of enemy troop concentrations in the town. Erasing these will be the job of the Huey transports and the friendly troops they drop nearby. Upon takeoff from Anapa-Vityazevo, fly ESE on a heading of 120° until you see the blue smoke marking the FARP. Land and pick up your first load of troops. Wait for SEAD flight to let you know the coast is clear, or enter the hot zone at your own risk. Fly 120° to the south side of town, then head northeast. Drop zones near enemy troop concentrations will be marked with smoke (red and green). Get in, drop your troops and get out fast--the enemy infantry is on a hair trigger. Return to the FARP for more troops and re-enter the lion's den until the enemy infantry is vanquished! GOALS FOR MISSION SUCCESS Enemy troop concentrations at 20% or less. Friendly task force(s) reach town. UPDATES DCS World 1.5 version of this mission posted (see new post later in thread). Includes all 1.2 version updates as of 1/12/16. See post below for mission version 2 and update notes. Please see post below by Xeno426. He has made good mods to this mission (V2.5), including the addition of Mi-8MTV2 and Ka-50 aircraft as choices for human pilots. (1/3/15) . Operation Erase & Replace.miz

Thanks again Chump. Your script works perfectly and, if I may say so, better than the original. The dropped troops now move much more reliably toward the enemy troops in the area. Before it seemed as if they were confused as to where to go. Paul

To All -- Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad I went ahead and posted this. Paul

@Chump -- Thank you very much for taking time to dig into this so thoroughly. I am anxious to try and apply your changes. Getting the dropped troops to head towards enemy troops will be a huge fix for my own little mission that I am scripting. I got around this by simply dropping troops smack in front of the enemy and letting them duke it out immediately. I'm not sure yet, but I believe a fire suppression script that's out there is broken as well. When I try to use it (SuppressionFireScript.lua), DCS stops running and an error message comes up relating to a different script that stops working. I need to look into this further, but simply not using the fire suppression script resolves the issue. Thanks again, Paul

@Antonio -- Your fix worked better than mine. Thanks. Paul

Antonio -- I was able to make a very simple modification to CTTS.lua that resolved the problem for my mission, but it will undoubtedly break something else. In the first line below, I changed the coalition number from 1 to 2. This has the effect of stopping the script from looking for red coalition emplacements, and therefore it will not see dead ones either. I suspect that if there were a blue emplacement that was killed, the script would fail again. After testing, I believe these numbers must remain either 1 or 2 or the script fails completely. Hope this helps until a better fix arrives. Paul local RedList = coalition.getGroups(2, nil) -- gets most recent grouplist local BlueList = coalition.getGroups(2, nil)

I really did, thanks. In fact, I thought I wanted to make a career out of it in the sense that I started my college years majoring in marine biology. In reality, I guess I thought I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau, but I never really thought about what kind of job I could get in the real world. Ended up switching to Business Admin, but still went SCUBA diving occasionally. Enjoy your SCUBA diving experiences! Paul

Hi Antonio -- Modifying CTTS.lua as I suggested did not work, I'm afraid. I'm going to try to apply other helicopter scripting tools that are available and see if I can get troop drop to work that way. Paul

I was certified about 40 years ago--YMCA. Diving experience: Quarries (one or two, don't recall) John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, Florida Keys Off the coast of Florida in general Off the coast of New England Virgin Islands (dove on the Rhone shipwreck which was used in filming of the movie The Deep (really dating myself here!) Crystal River, Florida (swam with a manatee) Night diving River diving Haven't done any SCUBA diving in quite some time now. Thanks for the memories! Paul

While reading the latest issue of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, something in the photo below caught my eye: For anyone interested in some of the history behind The Fighter Collection logo we see posted on the DCS site, here is a link to the article: http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/americas-first-combat-pilots-180953371/ Thanks, Paul

@Grimes -- Thank you very much for taking time to find the source of this issue. After looking at some of the resources in you signature line, it appears there are other tools out there that do infantry pick-up and drop-off. They might be beyond my ability to implement right now, but I'll try to learn how. For now, I think I can simply delete the "Find nearest enemy..." section of CTTS.lua. I'm dropping infantry right in a hot zone, so as long as they react to incoming fire, they'll have no trouble knowing where the enemy is. We'll see how this works. Thanks again. Your time is very much appreciated. Paul

Hi Gecko6, You do not need to run multiple instances of the script. The script already has quite a few group names set up as you noted above, e.g. transport1, transport2, etc. All you have to do is use those names for your unit pilots' names. It's all in the notes with the script. Paul

Hi geloxo, I just want to point out that CTTS.lua is misbehaving in DCSW release 1.2.12. Given that the script was working fine before and now does not indicates that the problem is with DCSW. I posted a bug report here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=135312 The behavior is easily reproduced in the mission file I posted. It is odd behavior indeed! I only just started using your script and I love it. I hope DCS can sort this out, but I doubt it will be given any priority unless lots of other missions have been broken as well. Thanks for the script in any case. I'll look forward to using again if this gets fixed, or in other scenarios where this particular fault is not an issue. Take care, Paul

To Moderators -- I'm not sure this really is a Mission Editor issue. If it needs to be elsewhere, please move to appropriate forum. Thanks, Paul

How to Reproduce the Issue Steps to reproduce/demonstrate issue: 1. Open attached mission. 2. Enter mission as "Observer." 3. Allow UH-1H transports to land at pickzone. 4. Use options menu to release transports from pickzone (\F10\F2). 5. Track transports to first dropzone. 6. Observe that troops spawn as soon as transports land. 7. Exit and restart mission, entering as "Observer." 8. Allow CAS flight to enter orbit. 9. Use options menu to release CAS flight (\F10\F1). 10. Allow CAS flight to destroy SAM. 11. Release transports as noted above. 12. Observe that troops do not spawn after transports land in dropzone. FailureToSpawn.miz

After a great deal of experimenting with different scenarios, what I discovered is that the simple act of destroying an enemy emplacement, e.g. SAM or AAA, precludes the spawning of friendly troops. If no emplacements have been destroyed, the troops will spawn. If only one emplacement gets destroyed, the troops will not spawn. I realize this sounds odd, but I tried quite a few different scenarios and it always boils down to whether or not an enemy emplacement has been destroyed. I'll try to create a simple mission that displays this behavior and post it. Paul

I was in the middle of developing a new mission when DCSW 1.2.12 was released. Infantry drops using CTTS.lua worked as expected before the release, but with the new release, successful infantry drops did not work consistently. When attempting to drop troops in the drop zone, I would get a screen message saying troops were dropped, but they would not be drawn by DCSW and would not show up in F10 view. However, I could pick up and drop of troops at or near the FARP where the pick up zone is. My mission file was not edited between the prior build and release 1.2.12, so this behavior, whether a bug or not, was introduced with the new release. I did open and re-save the mission using the new build and still had the problem. I will do more testing and post details and/or files, but I want to get this posted in the event others are seeing something similar and wish to comment. Thanks, Paul

I have been having issues with 1.2.8 as well. On my main flight sim PC, it stopped recording altogether. On my laptop it won't record Ka-50 flights, but it did record AI F-15s in that flight and it recorded an Su-27 flight I did as test. I will try deleting the lua files mentioned above and see what happens. Thanks, Paul Update -- I just tested Tacview on the laptop after deleting the lua files first. In a mulitplayer mission, it recorded the AI F-15s, but not the Ka-50 I was flying. In a single player mission with just me flying a Ka-50, the flight was recorded and showed the Ka-50. Just to clarify, I have read that on-line multiplayer missions cannot be recorded without playing back the mission first. However, I was flying a multiplayer mission offline and Tacview successfully recorded these missions in the past. Update -- OK, I'm learning. I suppose this is documented somewhere, but if I fly a multiplayer mission off-line but as a "Client," Tacview will not record that flight. If I fly the same multiplayer mission off-line, but set my flight to "Player," Tacview will record my flight. So, not I need to see if I can get Tacview to simply create ACMI files on the other PC. Final Update (I think) -- Deleting the lua files noted above resolved the issue on the PC that was not recording and not creating ACMI files. Thanks for that tip. Regarding the other issues, I just had to learn about the multiplayer aspect of all this.

@Sabre-TLA -- Thank you very much! I sure over-complicated things. Your example works perfectly. Thanks again, Paul

I'm trying to develop a mission in which only one of four groups will activate, and that activation will be random. If any one of the four groups activate, that activation will restrict the others from activating. This can be, and perhaps has to be sequential in that group 1 tries first; if group 1 does not activate, group 2 tries. If 1,2, or 3 don't activate, 4 will by default. I have tried doing this with a somewhat complicated application of flags, but my approach is not working. I first set all flags to false as a kind of initialization, and then if any given group appears in its own trigger zone, its flag goes on. This brings up a confusing item within Mission Editor; is "on" equal to "true," and is "off" equal to "false?" I wonder if this is causing some trouble in that my flags being set to "on" seem to be ignored when looking for that flag to be either true or false. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks, Paul

Thank you, Dmitry. I appreciate the clarification. Sincerely, Paul

The pinned and locked post regarding the installation bug is not clear. In the first line it says to hold off on doing the installation. In the second line it says that the udpater is fixed: "If you have SU-25T training installed, please hold off with the update until the hotfix for DCS_updater is pushed to the release. The fix is out in DCS_Updater 2.4.3.62" Has the installation issue been resolved now? Thanks, Paul

I recently discovered a neat trick that can be done with ArturDCS' program. You can gang commands to one switch action as long as they use the same modifiers. A perfect example of this are the commands for the ejection seat arming system in the Ka-50 Black Shark. After flipping up the cover, three switches need to be set. Instead of using three switches for this, you can use one. All you have to do is edit the pup_bindings file manually. Here are the lines: PanelSwitchKey{1SWITCHKEY_LIGHTS_LANDING}\o/OSKeyPress{FiftyMilliSec,RMENU + RSHIFT + VK_E + VK_R + VK_T} PanelSwitchKey{0SWITCHKEY_LIGHTS_LANDING}\o/OSKeyPress{FiftyMilliSec,RMENU + RSHIFT + VK_E + VK_R + VK_T} For some reason this does not work in all cases. In the same aircraft I can use the keyboard to switch the EEG engine control switches on and off simultaneously, but when programmed in this app it won't work well. I can flip the covers up with one switch, but they won't come down, for example. Hope you will find this useful. Paul

Thanks ArturDCS. It will be worth the wait. Paul