TEMPEST.114

Okay, thank you for letting us know. I'll continue with my own solution then.

I ask because whilst I'm building my own zone manager, I'd like to be able to send to the Mission Editor the same events - i.e. moving in zone or group in zone etc, so that mission designers can use my zone manager but not have to use any lua, and access it from the ME trigger conditions.

@Flappie As title says... are they coming and if so, when? If not, is it possible to request the ability to turn a drawing polygon into a trigger zone?

<crickets>

IF they are then it would break IC as they wouldn't be in SAVED GAMES but in the CORE DCS folders. However I'd imagine that they are more hard coded than that.

As a rough guide, you'd probably need to write a script that: continuously polls the net.get_player_list() to see who's connected. Cross check those players with net.get_player_info() and net.get_player_slot() to find the player in the games master slot. Then you can stop the polling. Then when you have that playerID of the GamesMaster/GCI player. ETA: These 'controller' roles do not interact with the DCS Scripting Engine at all. So they have no unit, no group and do not trigger a BIRTH or ENTER / LEAVE events. This means, unfortunately, all communication with them will have to be done through the net singleton and as such you will need a lua script with a public API you can access from the mission editor so you can send messages to any of these roles. END EDIT Then you'll need a public API function that you can call from within the DO SCRIPT action on a trigger in the ME that you can send your message string to for it to show to the unit(or group) with trigger.action.outTextForUnit(). Without actually coding it that's the best overview I can give you. You *might* want to think about solving your problem another way? ETA: E.g. Play a sound file that has a human voice saying a 'code' and give the Game Master a cypher so that they can hear the code and read what it means - other players won't have any idea.

I do. And in my missions, the map is just a map - nothing on it at all. That has NOTHING to do with the OP's request to dumb the game down.

You can *probably* do it with scripting; how are you at that? You'll need to have it at the server level and then have a script that you can talk to from the Mission Editor and send a command to, so then show it to the Games Master / GCI etc. Look at this: https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_server_gameGUI

In an ideal world, the 'F10 Map' would be on your kneeboard. Like it would be in a real aircraft. Having a live map with units showing and moving around as you fly is like Ace Combat compared to Real Life or DCS. So, I stand by my point. A top down view of everything you'd see, live, on the F10 taking up a quadrant of the screen is too OP. Negates SA and pilotage.

Impossible to tell what you're doing without seeing the mission file or what you're doing. Everything else is just a guess. Has the unit/group names changed? Have you deleted and re-added the advanced trigger? Does that fix it?

Do you have any 'bad' characters in your mission file name? I'd suggest saving to a different drive with a basic name and see if that works first.

Close DCS. Download either Notepad++ or MS Visual Studio Code. Go to your SAVED GAMES/DCS/MissionEditor/logbook.lua Make changes in there to correct the mistake. Save Reopen DCS to confirm changes. You may want to make a backup of logbook.lua before you hack it about just to be safe. ETA: The times in the logbook are in decimal seconds.

Yes, and my wish is no to this. It’s not an arcade game.

No.

Thank you both.

They are annoying and don't match the movements of the helo, so getting the extra frame or two back from this unnecessary animation would be great. Thanks.

This might interest you:

So I was noodling around trying to find out why the gates aren't able to be turned off and I found the bug after 5 mins. The command in the mission editor to show them to a unit includes a field called 'FLAG' with a value of 1. I guessed this was the ON flag. Setting it to 0, five seconds after it had been turn on, via another trigger in the ME, indeed turned it off - but for a millisecond. They visually flash but reappear. So I made a little test mission and script that after 10 seconds in mission, it sets the flag to 0 and loops every thousandths of a second and does it again And guess what, they vanish. Then, another trigger at 20 seconds turns off the loop and the gates return; oddly the gates for previous but now deceased waypoints return - another bug? Attached is the mission file. What we can conclude here is that the FLAG field on SHOW HELPER GATES FOR UNIT, is indeed the ON/OFF switch, but there is a bug in the game code that turns it right back on again. Obviously this doesn't permit granular turning off of individual gates at each way point, but it does permit them to be removed completely. helper_gates_bug_demo_TF-51.miz

The whole ME locks up and goes modal once the 'Group ID and makeup, renaming' is visible. Clicking anywhere off it, on the side inspector panel should hide it, and whilst it is open clicking any unit / group on the map (and scrolling/zooming the map) should be possible. As it is, if you have two units in two groups flying formation and you want to view this info, you have to click the first group, click the ? next to 'GROUP NAME' on the right inspector panel, then view it, then click the 'x' on the new dialog, then click the next group, then click the '?' again and then you can see it. It's a UX pain. Should be a quick fix please.

It's usually 127.5 but if it's been changed you're going to have to go into the mission and look.

In order to do all that you have to build all of the mission editor controls (all the dialogs, windows, sliders, increments, decrements, text boxes, and EVERYTHING else that can be configured, to handle 'TRANSACTIONS'. Then you have to build a transaction manager to keep a log of past transactions (i.e. changes to a name field or a number value) and be able to send those historical transactions BACK to all of the relevant controls and aircraft, infantry etc etc etc. This is basically a complete REWRITE of the whole mission editor. This can't be shoe-horned in because nothing in the lua code knows anything about 'transactions' and so every control dialog or value that can be changed is atomic. Its the same reason why drag/select/multi-edit can't be done without a rewrite. There is no mechanism is the current mission editor to update the same value (transaction) across multiple units, nor any way to show a subset of common parameters that can be changed when selecting multiple units of different types. This is why every time Nick Gray releases another one of those end of year pats on the back videos that the common folk go mental for, for all the eye candy, I'm standing alone in the comments screaming "MAKE A 21ST CENTURY MISSION EDITOR!!!" because this is over 20 years out of date. And I don't call adding 2d glyphs and drawings a 'huge improvement'. What everyone wants can't be done with it as it is. It needs a complete re-write. In which case they should write it so you can view and edit the world in 3d, and it should be a separate app you can run side-by-side with the game (like modern game engines) and design and edit your mission/campaign on the fly and watch live flags/triggers and tests whilst the mission is running and even inject new triggers/actions/flags at the same time. But how do you think ED can sell that? It's not going to bring in any extra revenue, so whilst a literal handful of people still make campaigns that sell using this 25 year old relic, what's the incentive (other than doing right by the customers) to make it better? When the polls go out, most people are Single Player and happy to go on PVEVP servers or quick action... I guess it's a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche... and therefore they can ignore it.

Wow, so the ME is more restrictive about placement than the sim engine? @BIGNEWY Has this been logged/investigated?

So @Exorcet I know you said you're not big into the scripting engine, but everything you asked (bar faster Time Comp and taking over AI planes) can be done via scripting. I have a logging class that allows me to output to the screen or to the dcs.log virtually all you asked for. If you'd like help making your own, let me know and I'd be happy to help. As regards to immortality mid mission, that was something I asked for about 2 years ago. The concept was dogfighting with an ally mid mission and then getting tasked for real ops. Because there was no way to toggle immortality mid mission and there is not 'dummy ACMI' stuff to use mid mission I scrapped the idea. But it would be great. One line of lua will destroy an object if you wish, inc statics. What would REALLY speed up mission/campaign creation time is if the Mission Editor was it's own app and you could SEE FLAG/TRIGGER STATES live and be writing script code whilst the mission is running and then just Shift+R to restart the mission to apply all the new changes. Again, asked for two years ago and shot down.

Adding meagre drawing tools is not a 'huge improvement' to the mission editor; all the same limitations, bugs, broken UX and lack of features are still there. Just now you can add low res 2d drawings (and those tools have bugs too). I think your ability to be impressed is a little overboard. It's a hardcore military flight sim. Clouds are nice pretty things to look at, but the core sim and it's abilities didn't improve by adding better looking clouds, esp as the enemy AI can STILL see through them - you know, like how tanks and see and shoot you through a dense forest even when flying NOE in an Apache - the sim needs serious work - not just on the pretty stuff. Lipstick on a pig springs to mind sometimes when people go on and on and on about the 'clouds'. This isn't MSFS. We need more than pretty screenshots.