vicx

Flagrum I assume the values mentioned are in "effect_count" in bombs_table.lua Am I the only one who is going to turn the effect_count to 268 and drop a bomb when I get a chance. Just while people are focused on bombs. Is there a way to make the bomb impact decals permanent in a mission. After bomb runs I want to see some effects recorded even if I landed wide or short. It would be nice to have lingering smoke but that might impact FPS too much. I'd also much rather have the impact decals.

I recall seeing such manuals posted somewhere, maybe even in this forum. But I can't read the Russian.

I was wondering if you could make a mod that executes a quiclk head movement and visually zooms in on the switch that operates the NAV lights even when you are triggering the switch via keyboard or HOTAS. I would like a feature like this in the FC3 planes - not quite animated switches but you still get the sense of operating switches in a cockpit. So the question is which switch actually operates the nav lights in a Su-25T?

Flagram, yes I just ran across some work by mbot. He has made a LOS mod which weights the probability of ground units making visual contact with attacking aircraft based on some nice calculations. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=117424 and http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=116726&highlight=LOS It comes with limitations but I'm going to give it a go. As far as I know that should be possible. If you draw a zone encompassing a town and make a unit in that zone hidden and then do a visual detection check of your own design of that unit vs enemy units within visual range. Once your unit hidden in the town fails the check then it becomes visible to the standard enemy LOS check. I'll test some stuff out and see if it makes sense.

Thanks for reply. Of course I agree AI can always be improved. I have checked out many mission scripts to see what people are doing from that direction and I am impressed. This thread I will try to keep focused on one subject. That subject is of visual contact of ground to ground unit. Can we make trees and smoke provide partial cover with tricks. Even looking to see what can be done with scripts in terms of calculating a "visual cover" value (MIST will help me with many useful functions) in the end is it true that I can only make a unit HIDDEN or NOT HIDDEN. This to me seems not good enough. The fog of war effect on a unit on the command map where it is translucent. Is that a unit property?

I bought CA expecting it to be a more polished experience. Despite that I am falling for it and now I want to see it improved to be closer to what it should be. Like many others I have grand ideas that probably require EDGE 2016 but at the same time I keep wondering about improvements that can be made right now without requiring a brand new engine or stacks of new content and models. The number one most jarring part of CA for me right now is the apparent x-ray vision and 100% situational awareness of AI ground based enemy units. I don't like how they can see me when I can't see them. Note* I am specifically talking about ground to ground visual contact. I think the evidence of this is that so many CA mods use "HIDDEN on map" as a trick just to keep units from being clobbered. :bash: There is no denying that 'hidden' even if it is a hack does work and that is why I wonder if "hidden" was made into a visibility flag with an integer value (visible->some percentage of visual cover->hidden) instead of boolean (visible/hidden) then engine code and mods could use that. Off the top of my head I think mission designers and modders could use the mission editor more or less instantly to create zones on the map offering visual concealment bonuses. Infantry inside an urban/town zone would be in better cover and tree zones wouldn't have to be totally transparent to AI like they are now. Unit to unit visual contact could check which flagged zones (zones are always 2D?) line of sight vectors are traversing and height check for forests or . The pragmatic solution I propose is that visibility checks on units be made into something we can tweak via mods (to improve and modify) ourselves. I am not claiming that the modelling of visual cover for ground vs ground units doesn't take a lot of things into account,; what I am saying is that mission scripters and modders would be able to improve the realism of visual contact checks if they had better tools to override or augment the engine. Of course the EDGE engine and/or a new map format might be introducing new techniques for modelling this stuff with greater fidelity but even then I'd like to see scripts be able to manipulate and peek at the calculations the engine is doing. Your thoughts?

Thanks for sharing this great script (thanks also for documentation). I got my Scout Manpad guy to peek around a building at the enemies with his binoculars and the tactical nuke blew them up just as it should. Now that is some Combined Arms. I did get some error messages pop up though. When the enemy tanks took pot shots at me and hit the building I was hiding behind in first person view. Because the building didn't have a coalition value the event.target code caused an error.

I was going to wait and see what the Arma3 Heli DLC delivers but then I started watching some Youtube clips of some Arma guys scratching an itch in DCS doing F15 afterburner gun runs on lines of AA units and I thought that looks unreal. So I ended buying DCS FC3, DCS CA and DCS KA-50 for $45. Now for some strange reason instead of launching straight into funtimes in the sky I have been spending most of my time fiddling with the DCS module that I find the most disappointing and reading forums. CA is a very weird DLC. It doesn't really do anything particularly well yet. I have been in the mission editor trying to make Combined Arms do something cool. It's the mission editor and the F10 map that are bringing me down. The gui is old. Yknow what game has mission editor that looks like it was made this century ... Arma3. The Arma3 real-time mission editor looks amazing. Maybe the new weapons suck but when modders port all the Arma2 stuff across it's going to be a very fun air, sea, land combat sandbox. One year from now you can thank all the DayZ players for funding the engine refresh and for keeping all new maps. The Dayz effect makes me think that maybe the best thing that could happen to DCS World right now would be for someone to make an Independence Day Mod where all the flight guys can scramble jets to fight an alien invasion. Think about it. All the damage models will get shown off and all the missile modelling pays off, and there are a fifty planes engaging the boss ships and fifty planes going down in flames and the SAM sites are shooting up into the fight and there are flight controllers directing the battle and nobody really cares what the ground looks like because all the action is coming down from space and the ground is just full of smoking wrecks. Even I want to play that game. ED sell a million copies of FC3 and thousands of copies of the harder DCS modules and then they start using that money to make a better air, sea, land simulator ... but then all the flight guys tell them that they just want to fight aliens again but this time in 1942. So ED spend all the money they made by updating the DCS engine so that alien lasers scorch the lead based paint on a WW2 warbird in a physically accurate way. The end.

I'm hoping CA will one day allow a game master to add real time smarts to ground units and ships. If you could do all the stuff in the mission builder during a live game then you would be almost there.