DragonShadow

A short film of a dogfight between a MiG-21bis and a F4 Phantom, and the consequences. Full screen viewing suggested. Labels on given they were the default in the mission and I've been practising up some gun fighting. Still familiarizing with the MiG-21 all in all. However I found when trying a recording without labels that the film probably works better this way for people not yet familiar with DCS. Better visibility makes for a better understanding on what's going on. Who know's, perhaps it might inspire someone.

Merry Christmas to you as well Jamison, and all others too. Seeing things like this is a good reminder of what a great community we have here :). I'd be interested in the L-39, especially given it's multi-seating features. Looks like a lot of fun,

I've uninstalled the MiG-21 Bis from my beta installation for the moment while this is being looked into. I'll just fly some other aircraft in the meanwhile, it is beta after all.. While an inconvenience, it should hopefully at least mean no wasted activation and no need to add to the workload by requesting a new set once the bug is fixed?

Sounds good! Curious to see it in action. Though what do you mean about them informing how far they are? What kind of a system did you device for the radio frequency allocation?

You could have either mission triggers or a small secondary script that would monitor the health status of the groups in question. Then once they fell below a certain percentage, have the trigger/script call the medevac inject function on that group. This is definitely the kind of a thing I had intended it for :) If these are randomly generated groups, a small secondary script iterating the groups world probably work better. Not sure if there is an event handler for this directly to be able to do it without polling. Maybe something like checking the status of a group when the handler for something having been destroyed is called.

I don't mind if someone else implements radio beacons for the rescuees, if you feel like coding. Right now it may be a bit until I will be getting around to them with my current workload. Basically there would be an option where each group would put up a radio location beacon the Huey at least can home in on, when the group is spawned. It could even be randomized wether the groups would report coordinates, put up a beacon, do both or something else.

That's exactly what I'm talking about, thanks. Exploding units unfortunately doesn't cut it when you've got anything less than 100% chance for a medevac event to be spawned. I can't test it yet but I'll be seeing later on if I can incorporate the new version to an existing mission and give that a run through. Excellent, that used to be an annoying issue :)

My original idea with the changes to the bleed timer was to build a system that would always give you a fair chance to make it to the MASH - while also giving you a fun challenge for it. There could be more variance built in for it though certainly. It could sometimes give you a more leisurely flight and a chance to pick up multiple groups - while other times it should really make you kick it in the gear to make it on time for a critical case.

Great to see some refactoring done on the script towards added stability, the effort is appreciated. I haven't had the chance to test the new version yet, but on a look through the code it seems you kept the functionality for injecting existing groups as well? My mission Two-Pin Hedgehog is one to make use of this, and being able to add in groups to medevaced at will opens up all kinds of SAR mission building possibilities. My time for such has been rather tight lately, but there's a few features I'd rather like to add in sooner or later. One of them is an option to have the crews set up radio beacons for locating. This would go very neatly with the Huey capability to home in. Also do medevac units that were not active at the time of a distress call get the SAR events added for them as well already? That's another thing that I've had in mind to fix. This has been an issue during multiplayer.

Hey xxJohnxx, thanks for the rather informative reply. Orbx looks interesting, they appear to have a few time unlimited demos even which would be perfect for checking what I can put together with FSX without investing into it yet. I'll be sure to grab those and give them a try. I'll probably be most interested in the FTX terrain regions, since for now I'd be doing more localized VFR rather than crossing continents or so. Will certainly take a look at the airports as well It's interesting, if a little unfortunate if they are something separate from the terrain packages then. What do you normally get for these packages? The airport structures modeled and a little of the surroundings perhaps? Finding one awesome light aircraft for starters sounds good to me :). Later on I'll probably be expanding out from there, but just having one good one to enjoy learning, flying and the scenery with would be perfect for now. Do you know if these kinds of addons are compatible with the Steam version, or would I need to be using a stand-alone with them in general? It sounds like I'd be going for the A2ASimulations AccuSim module then indeed. I think something low to medium altitude would be the ideal solution. Flying too high up I'd pretty much be missing one of the joys of VFR flight altogether.

Hello to any general aviation enthusiasts out there. I've ended up bringing some people to DCS before by just being interested in it myself, and I thought there must be such people here in terms of X-Plane and XFS as well if I just ask. I'm rather interested in giving either one of the simulations a more proper whirl. I actually have both X-Plane 10 (stand-alone) and XFS Steam Edition already, but it feels to me that the out of the box experience with either one is somewhat lackluster. While in most cases graphics are relatively unimportant to me, when it comes to general aviation I feel it's quite important to the experience of 'being there'. That and realistic systems and flight modeling of course. I've seen some videos that look nothing like the base sims, and to my understanding this is generally remedied with a generous amount of addons? At this point I have no idea where to start though, and what would really be worth getting. My primary interest right now would be truly bringing a simulator to life and making it look as real as possible, with a well modeled single prop light aviation aircraft and some scenery and a few airfields to fly from. Perhaps something alike the Ikarus C42, basically something that is feasible to fly VFR in reality. I'm willing to spend a reasonable amount on this, something that would get me started and be possible to build upon later rather than necessarily having to get everything at once. I'm perhaps leaning a bit more towards X-Plane on personal feeling.. But whichever can be built out to such ends would do. I'm not overly enthusiastic about the thought of having to do a lot of manual work on getting things working (editing files, etc) while that's something I can certainly do too if it's worth it, but more polished installation would be nice. So what do you think? Can we get me off the ground, and where should I go from there? DCS always has missions for something to do, what about these sims after you've got the plane down? Multiplayer would be high on my interest list too. Suggestions appreciated :)

Glad to see this has been confirmed as a bug. The engine on the P-51D seemed to need a lot more effort in spinning up, and for the first half of my practice flight I was fully expecting it to give out at any time. Meter was consistently showing 150-200 oil pressure on DCS 1.2.14 on the Aerobatics server today, but otherwise performed OK.

I want a Hawk, to give to a dear one for the holidays. Since I already bought one for myself :).

I'd like to nominate Hagios, who has been quite helpful in mission testing, etc.

Hi RagnarDa. Thanks for the suggestions, this is not a linebreak character issue though. This is DCS mission editor failing to display long scripts, and apparently briefings if they are entered in the usual text fields in the mission editor. It just cuts out in the middle of a line once it reaches a certain amount of characters. As to including scripts from external files with 'Script File', this has had an issue in the past where the script would not always be included in the mission every time it was saved. I'm not sure if this has been fixed yet or not.

Thanks Sabre, glad to hear it's getting some attention.

I started 1.2.10 and opened an earlier mission project of mine which makes extensive use of lua scripting. In this case the scripting is stored as a 'Do script' actions since there had been issues with loading external scripts earlier. I was attempting to copy & paste the script out of the mission editor into a text editor when I noted I had only gotten a partial copy of the script. Looking back into the mission editor it appears that it is unable to display a script longer than ~4180-4200 something characters. The script does still exist inside the mission file if I unzip it, but it's not in directly usable form (Primarily it has a bunch of \\\ at the end of each line, easy enough to filter but..). The same happens if I create a completely new mission, add a "Do script" action to it, paste in a long script, save and load the mission. A few examples of the cut off lines in my scripts: a) -- Flag??_ b) trigger.action.outTextForCoalition(coalition.side.BLUE, "Current " .. str??_ The lines seem to always be cut off with three special characters which appear as [][][] type blocks (single characters). Is this a commonly noted problem and is there a quick conversion fix? Or would I really need to dig out all my scripting from my missions, filter and save them into external files? I was hoping I'd get a little work done now that I had a moment to look into mission scripting again.

I haven't had a chance to test compatibility. Any experiences out there? I'm pretty sure I've seen the occasional 1.2.10 servers running the mission. Usually if you open the mission in the editor and re-save it, it tends to clear up most cross-version issues. I think some of the earlier issues like dynamically relocated units getting listed as buildings when destroyed had also been fixed on the DCS end. Any confirmations on this?

Nvidia GeForce GTX 670, 2GB video RAM.

Yes, seems like we have something in the spirit of an open source project :) I spent an evening working on it and was able to integrate the modifications into the newest script. I also wrote up a function to get the distance to the closest MASH, which was required for calculating the fair bleed time. I've not had the time to test it properly, but it runs and I was able to complete a CSAR flight too. Consider it beta until better tested, but want to give this one a try Shagrat? I made a few small suggestions to the messages that tell you how critical the patient is, too. I think at the point we have to re-animate a patient it might be a tiny bit too late :) Medevac_SAR v5-beta.lua

Sure, it's fine on my behalf. Thanks for adding me to the credits. My modifications won't work directly with the latest version of the script though since it's not set up yet to handle multiple MASH units. I'm working on solving this by calculating the distance to the closest MASH. Right now though I'm running into weird issues like variables I'm passing to functions suddenly turning into 'nil'. It's pretty tiresome debugging with DCS, but at least my Huey landings are improving alongside each attempt. I've also unified my coding style a bit more with yours and cleaned up some of the indenting, etc in the merge.

Version 1.1.1 released. Somehow I keep feeling I should implement something fancy and new. But in the meanwhile the bugfix and other smaller changes were being delayed.. and I don't want anyone to run into a script crash. So perhaps it's better release what's done now? Changelog: 1.1.1 - Fixed potential script crash during Zhelez operation. - Improved efficiency of countGroupUnitsAlive function, now leveraging inbuilt getSize(). - Added reminder of useful commands in Radio F10 menu to mission briefing. - Changed SU-25T loadout to include MPS-410 ECM pods.

Glad to hear you like the ideas :) Not at all, here's the modified script. The community is free to use it in the spirit of the original script. I've functionalized most of the new code, but there are of course places where I've needed to modify existing functions as well. I've marked the places with comments beginning with '-- DS:'. Feel free to integrate them into the main script too. Do let me know how you liked the mission itself :) Always curious to get feedback on my work. Medevac_SAR v3-DSMod.lua

Hey RagnarDa. Just wanted to say thanks for your efforts on creating this script. I thought you might like to know that I used it (v3) on my latest mission Two-Pin Hedgehog. The scripts used for the general dynamic CSAR, but also is a specific part of a fully featured CSAR side objective in the mission. I made a few modifications you might find interesting, like basing the bleedout timer on an average speed and the distance the CSAR flight has to travel to the MASH. I think it should provide a relatively fair and fun challenge set up that way. I also added a function to inject CSAR tasks for existing units, and a little something for calculating a true direct distance between two points. A few things that would be quite nice to have is tasks being added also for people who were not in a CSAR unit at the time the tasking was initially created, but being able to jump into a helo afterwards as well and having the task available. The second feature being radio beacons, which would help with and add a bunch to the homing in.

Hey Fishbreath. Great to see you guys had fun! Interesting flight with 4x SU-25t too. It's quite useful to get back some footage on how people take the mission on, appreciate it. Shame about the recording and ACMI, but the stream did work and being able to listen in on the comms was both informative and fun for me as well :) For the next version I've already added the SU-25T ECM pods in the default loadout for one thing. I also noted you disabled the fighters on the red side, though for this I'd like to point out that there definitely is an alternative way to deal with them as well. Nevertheless mods are always an interesting to see, if I do prefer to keep publishing control over my missions. Didn't expect to see a portuguese version of Blindsided earlier either for example :) Certainly curious what all is out there. Think some of my favorite reactions were the ones to there actually being a useful briefing, the lack of ELINT pods was it?, and to the aftermath of the battle of Podkumok. Always good to see new pilots to these skies, too. Hopefully DCS 1.2.7 will be more stable for us.