Priest

30+ minutes to load??? There has got to be something else going on with your system that is crazy. Even 5 minutes is a long time. I'm not saying it's instantaneous on my system, but it's never occurred to me to measure it either.

I didn't think to test that! I had the target vehicle set to drive around in a loop and ROE weapons hold.

Yes!!!

Check out the DCS user manual pages 225-226 offer a pretty good explanation of how DCS handles multiple tasks. The example given should be helpful.

Could lay down some static objects to give the tank a little boost. "M92 Pile of Woods" under structures works ok-ish it gets the M-60 just high enough to fire over the lower points of the berm.

Perfection! Now we can even put our source zones for the clone zones in or near the randomized clone zone. That was actually the first "issue" I ran into but saw it as an acceptable inconvenience since obviously the source zones could be placed anywhere on the map and out of the way. It was the actual clone zones in or near the randomized area that seemed to create an unintended functional conflict. This is perfect now.

Alright been playing with this for a week may I suggest a (hopefully) small tweak! When searching for the nearest clone zone to attach a noSpawn zone to, ignore clone zones that don't have the rndLoc attribute active. This way you can still have smaller, more traditional clone zones inside a large area clone zone without the risk of noSpawns attaching to an unintended zone or failing to attach due to being outside of the nearest zone found. Here's a screenshot of what I was trying to do. In this example noSpawn zones 5, 6, 13, 34, 37 (in purple) on the left side of the green spawn area try to attach to the cloner HIND-1 (blue) and noSpawn-3 buried at the six o'clock position tries to attach to cloner HIND-3. Since the noSpawn zones are completely outside the nearest zones found they are ignored/rejected. The AAA SPAWN AREA cloner uses rndLoc, the cloners HIND-1 through HIND-6 on the pads do not use rndLoc. An unintended side-effect of being able to create a huge spawn area for sure! My thinking was if noSpawns only work if rndLoc is active, no reason to attach to zones where rndLoc is not active. Maybe more complicated, but another way to do it would be to (optionally) allow the positive linking of noSpawns to a specific cloner by direct reference to a specific zone name in the noSpawn attribute field. Then could still use rndLoc in other zones as needed. ps..If you can't tell I hate trees, but not so much that I want to cut them all down this works perfectly even with all those zones and tons of units! null null

I've always started with step 6 that still works fine. Drop down from the 'edit' menu isn't working it seems.

It would be nice if these were on their own layer rather than the "buildings" layer so they could be toggled on/off independently.

Previously I'd have done something like that with multiple clone zones combined with rnd flags to select individual zones but when playing my own missions I'd still always have a pretty good idea where the threats are since no matter what I know where the zones are! So I'd add more and more clone zones to expand the number of potential spawn points and that quickly becomes it's own pandoras box. Now it's super easy to really open things up with just a handful of nospawn zones. It's awesome!

YES!!! I threw 3x the units at it and added some additional nospawn zones this is awesome! What are the "rules" so to speak?

Hey cfrag I had an idea for an enhancement to good old clone zones I wanted to run by you. With the newer maps having so much detail what we really be awesome is the ability to create super detailed multipoint zones we can use to define clone/spawn areas, but ED hasn't given us that feature yet. So how about something else that still fits within the DML-style of things and accomplishes almost the same thing. Enter: mask zones and unmask zones. The basic idea is create a clone zone, then create zones within the clone zone that define where units shouldn't spawn. In a sense this would function a lot like the inBuiltup option for rndLoc, except instead of looking for map objects to determine where not to spawn, DML looks for user defined mask zones to determine where not to spawn. Example! Basic quad-point clone zone, we want to clone a multi-unit SAM site from a source template (not illustrated) to a random point into this zone. So we set up a clone zone with rndLoc set to true, link it to a source zone, assume we are using the wholeGroups option. null But we don't want that SAM site to spawn in the wooded areas within our clone zone, so here's where we add the new feature mask zones! These magical quad-point zones tagged with the mask zone attribute define where we don't want the units to spawn. Now in DML terms (and with a lot of cfrag wizardry) we have a clone zone that effectively looks like this! DML picks a random spot within our clone zone, and if that spot happens to fall within one of our mask zones, try again. And here it is again with all the quad-point zones hidden for illustrative purposes. That's one fancy looking clone zone! But wait a sec what was that about unmask zones? These would give us an extra little trick up our sleeves to make some really detailed stuff. Another Example!! Basic quad-point clone zone at Fulda. We want to spawn an air defense unit at a randomly selected point in this zone. But we don't want it to spawn in the parking area, on taxiways, or in the little patch of trees so we add mask zones to define those areas. But wait a sec those mask zones block off a little too much spawn area so we add unmask zones to define areas within the mask zones we added earlier that we will still allow units to spawn! And once again in DML-terms (and a bunch more of cfrag's wizardry) we have a clone zone that looks like this! DML picks a random spot within our original clone zone, and if that spot falls within one of our mask zones, try again, unless that spot also falls within one of our unmask zones. And here it is once again with the all the zones hidden for illustrative purposes. That's ONE fancy looking clone zone! Just some ideas. Love everything you do and thank you for DML!

Nice!

Nice list! If we're adding a locking function let's just go ahead and make that a thing for everything units, zones, drawings, yes please.

That A-10 Pilot's Coloring Book needs to be included in the kneeboard and perma bookmarked