TEMPEST.114

You know there is a SAVE disk icon on the left toolbar you can click? that is if you have already given it a name.

You might want to read this:

Ground AI run into rotor blades, get stuck behind walls, get stuck inside scenery, crash when driving over bridges, drive through walls / gardens and don't follow the waypoint path... you can't even trust that an infantry unit will disembark a helo, run through their waypoints and board the helo again because some will get lost or stuck. How is this 'delightful' It's the same broken AI that handles the wings. Or the broken AI that handles aircraft with 'follow' orders, or naval ships that are supposed to 'follow' a lead but go crazy and run in circles or hit the thing they're following. I don't know what you're trying to do but I can most assuredly guarantee that all the AI is broken and so is it's pathing. Even they know this and have admitted it.

SO MUCH is broken and unusable that it needs to be completely redone. people have said this for a decade. nothing changes. I’ve been brow-beaten into realising I must stop trying to get dcs to do what I want and what’s realistic or normal (like just getting infantry or vehicles to follow a freaking waypoint list and not get lost, stuck in scenery or get killed by walking into tail rotors) and reduce the mission’s interest, immersion and interactivity I make, and to just make the generic dumbed down ones everyone makes, just because of what’s broken. stick around here long enough and you’ll find the same. work within the awful confines of how broken the ai/pathing etc limitations and just make the best missions you can.

Saved games\<dcs>\logs\dcs.log

Flags are just variable names. These variables are either Boolean (true/false or on/off) or an integer (a number value) its much easier if you give then a name I.e. KILL_COUNT or IS_COALTION_FEET_DRY You can use upper or lowercase but it’s helpful to have a style that differentiates them from Trigger Zone names and Group Names - hence I use all caps. Either way, stop using numbers that don’t mean anything. It makes complicated conditions much easier to read and debug.

FYI if you have ANY dialog inspector open on the right side of the Mission Editor the auto save won't save when its countdown completes, the countdown will just restart and wait until the countdown completes AND all those panels are closed. Because the way the ME was written it doesn't understand these 'atomic' changes (another reason it doesn't have undo/redo) and at this point it's impossible to add in without a HUGE amount of refactoring (basically a complete re-write). So yeah, this is known about and mentioned in the bug list, because people have lost hours / a day of work on a mission because they didn't understand or know this.

It's perfectly reliable. But a PITA to do in the M.E. and something you MUST pre-plan as every other unit you add after the fact needs to adopt all those same triggers and properties. Like I said... HUGE PITA, but it works. Of course if you could flip coalitions on the fly (as I requested in the Wish List last year) then all this overly complicated and excruciating time sink shenanigans goes away... but that's probably never going to happen. Especially with how I now know how the ME 'mission' table works. It would be far easier to make units actively target a specific group or unit (or both) REGARDLESS of it's coalition... that WOULD be possible and not too difficult to add...

Yup, it sucks. I reported this about 6 months ago.

If you read the wiki, 'invisible' is to prevent the opposition AI from being able to target it. It does nothing for friendly units.

I've managed to do it. It's a PITA... You have to play around with different coalitions and invisible / visible states on the fly. I got it working in the ME but it took a few days.

Not the point but thanks.

/facepalm... Just like everything else, the AI pathing in DCS strikes again... so many, many things are broken because of that ******* pathing. Grrrrrrr. Thanks for everything you've done. It was an interesting little sojourn, but like everything in DCS it's one step forward and two steps back.

Did you get them to walk? I'm looking at Suntsag's Infantry Unit - Animated Pilot Mod - DCS Modding - ED Forums I can place it on the carrier (it's a pilot not a solider - I can't get any of them to work) but when I set it to walk it just spins like a top in place. I then tried it with another infantry unit mod and that span in place too. Do you think this is related to the 'link unit' thing? That's just for statics though right? I can't find the exact mod you referenced, but those 'people' - could you get them to walk/board?

Because from your privileged position you don't have to. The default in DCS is male. White male to be exact. And when that applies to the players, they don't 'notice' it because it's their default. That the majority of the DCS community don't have the empathy or compassion to see that isn't a surprise, but it's still a sad indictment of the world at large.

Hello... is this mic on?! /s

My hero… This is amazing! Thank you so much! You are an incredible detective!!!

Exactly; which isn’t what I wanted. I want to see the troops board, not add more fakery… hence asking modders for help making it work…

More important is failures in MP and on clients.

Yeah, I don't use 3rd party scripts and there's nothing there that shows infantry ON a carrier boarding a helo. Because you can't PLACE infantry on a carrier because the stupid ME says it's water.

If you log out the table of the 'Airbase' object from DCS API scripting engine for the TAWARA, then you get this: { ['massEmpty'] = 38900000, ['RCS'] = 11065.158203125, ['box'] = { ['min'] = { ['y'] = -7.8527727127075, ['x'] = -131.38269042969, ['z'] = -29.710758209229 }, ['max'] = { ['y'] = 59.248474121094, ['x'] = 120.88059234619, ['z'] = 30.254930496216 } }, ['speedMax'] = 15.433300018311, ['life'] = 0, ['attributes'] = { ['ski_jump'] = true, ['Aircraft Carriers'] = true, ['AircraftCarrier With Tramplin'] = true, ['AircraftCarrier'] = true, ['Ships'] = true, ['Heavy armed ships'] = true, ['HeavyArmoredUnits'] = true, ['Armed Air Defence'] = true, ['RADAR_BAND1_FOR_ARM'] = true, ['Armed ships'] = true, ['Armed Ship'] = true, ['RADAR_BAND2_FOR_ARM'] = true, ['All'] = true, ['DetectionByAWACS'] = true, ['Naval'] = true }, ['category'] = 2, ['Kmax'] = 0.050000000745058, ['_origin'] = 'AV-8B N/A AI by RAZBAM Sims', ['typeName'] = 'LHA_Tarawa', ['displayName'] = 'LHA-1 Tarawa' } Surely this is a bug? The TARAWA doesn't have either a ski-jump, or a 'Tramplin' Also, when I get the 'ID' of the TAWARA on the Persian Gulf map, what returns is Kasab, but that might be another bug...

there are a few posts on here, but to a large extent it's a continuous grind that everyone is seemingly made to go through for themselves just because those who came before were made to. ED have zero interest in a proper, fully functional and documented API / Scripting engine. i.e. when you want to know how to spawn a particular unit with a particular livery and loadout, you make a mission with nothing else but that unit configured how you want it in the ME. Then save the miz, extract the mission table and grab the group table and trim out the bits you don't need / mustn't use (again trial and error and a few hard to find helpful posts) and hours/days/weeks later you are able to spawn that unit. When you've learnt how to do that to enough distinct units, you can refactor your code to do 'most' of it as a generic spawn method, but you will still have large branching if statements to cover all the corner cases. ED haven't really bothered with a proper API, most of this is 'untested' or 'as is' and they don't seem to care about it one bit - going by the eons old wish lists that never gets done - let alone replied to - and the fact that they never seem to mention the ME or the API in any of their 'updates' or 'year ahead' stuff... There is no 'official' documentation - only what Grimes has done off his own back on the HOGGIT site of all places, but that's out of date a bit, misleading, missing stuff and sometimes very opaque. This is what it is. It seems no amount of asking, begging, pleading or bargaining can get the devs or managers at ED to make it more usable or stable or fill in the many, many, MANY flaw/gaps/bugs/missing features that have been outstanding for 10 years or so. You're going to have to treat this like a reverse engineering problem and with the help of kind people on the forums and searching for old posts, try and slowly piece it together. I say this as someone who started in ME mission design and lua scripting just about 6 months ago with no experience of lua or scripting and no understanding of the (awful) mission editor. It's been a very steep curve but there are some amazing and kind people on this forum (and a few that really, really aren't) and finally last month I was able to spawn the units I wanted at an airfield of my choosing at run time, and have full control of tankers and awacs and make them come to my players upon request and change their tanking alt and speed and even lead them to their chosen homebase whilst tanking. It is possible, but it's a long, long climb. And then be prepared for players to not give a crap about all your hard work.

THANK YOU...

so there is this on a page on the wiki Thing is I can't any of those Western Units listed in the Category/Type in the ME. I'm guessing this is yet another labelling thing, but can anyone help translate this into something that non-military hardware nerds can understand please? I know aircraft, but expecting to know all the trucks and stuff's alternate names and codes is a bit much...

Is there some way to mod the lua for the units to make it so I can load troops from the carrier onto say a Huey and then drop them off again at the end of the mission? I find it incredible this is prohibited by default...