fargo007

It's already in our campaign! I broke it out into its own mission to get feedback and ideas on how to improve it and I haven't been disappointed here. You could put them anywhere since they are late activated. It's just handy to keep them all in one place. One of your groups is chosen at random for each category, each time. @Wood Way to go!

We've been invited in the past to a version of this on PG with Ka-50's, and it felt like an awesome responsibility to knock these sights down hard. They were a bit better defended than IRL, but we got it done, and it was a lot of fun. A great joint RW/FW mission for sure.

Planned for version 4: Switch to a CAS 5-Line format for voice and messages. I worked with a professional who both does and teaches this to get it right. Easier group management. Instead of a fixed number of rigidly named groups in each category, you control them by simply naming them by a convention. e.g. "HEAVY-" Groups with names beginning with this string spawn when heavy TIC is called for. "LIGHT-" Same concept. "SUPPORT-" Same concept for support elements to heavy units. Think trucks/troops that support a tank platoon, or provide recon/anti-air. Your choice. "FRIENDLIES-" These no longer need to be immortal or hold fire (now handled in code). "FRIENDLYSTATIC-" These must be blue coalition statics. There is no maximum, but you must have a minimum of 1 correctly named objects in each category or you will break it. Default coalitions will be Combined Joint Task Force blue or red (e.g. country.id.CJTF_BLUE) Thank you for all the feedback, this should be a big improvement.

Thanks, You can't change the coalitions (color: blue/red/neutral) but you can change the COUNTRIES that make up the coalitions. You are blue, bad guys are red. Whatever you decide that means country by country. Number of units can be whatever you want. The heavy setting spawns a "heavy" group, and also a supporting element, of the type in the "support" zone. It's more targets, and harder opponents. The distance is random, but within a radius (inner/outer). Basically enough distance that you can safely engage on the inside without hurting friendlies, but on the outside, still shooting distance of each other (by a DCS average).

You can kind of do this as-is by just manipulating the contents of the enemy groups. I wanted a light and a heavy deliberately because sometimes you want to roll with just rockets and guns, and I didn't want such a shooter to encounter hard armor that would prove impossible. Or when I go out in the 24, I go heavy until I'm out of ATGMs, then I choose a couple lights before I RTB to spend out the rest of the payload. Wouldn't be hard to do a "random" where it chooses for you. Just got done taking counsel on 5-line stuff with someone whose job that literally is. I'm moving the comm structure over to the 5 line format to see how that goes.

I'm in an all RW squadron so yes, this was built with helos in mind for sure. Under the hood.... the friendlies are immortal, and don't shoot back. This is by design, because most of the time one side will wipe the other out way before you get there. There are some statics used to create the appearance of damage and casualties. Those do get shot at, and they explode and burn. Yes, absolutely - if you are carrying CTLD or similar troops and insert them (e.g. and use CA to vector them accordingly), they will definitely either help, or wind up getting themselves hopelessly slaughtered thanks to the shitty infantry AI right now. Adding a CASEVAC based on a weighted randomness would be a neat feature. I could let a trigger control that via a flag, so you could adjust the percentage from 0% (never happens) to 100% (every time), so the script never needs touching. Come back once you've tried it out!

Thanks for letting me know that the integration went well. I really wanted to hear about a successful example of that. Looking forward and planning version 4, I'm considering changing to a five line format for the transmissions. Minor, but it's a small step toward realism so why not.

In the instructions it describes how you can change the enemies to suit your needs. You can't delete any groups, and you can't rename any groups or statics. Add any aircraft you want, set up how you like them. But you can absolutely change what they are. Anything except deleting or renaming is fine. There are lots of presentations with big groups of infantry involved. The only thing that's mandatory is you fly blue coalition and the enemy is red. You can put whatever countries in whichever coalitions you like though. Leave some feedback once you give it a shot.

Because most of what we see are vidyas of Apaches supporting troops on the ground that are in contact, I built a pretty robust "Troops in Contact" mission on 3 maps that I posted in the main Missions & Campaigns section. Just added version 3. I had this in mind for the 64, but it's great fun with the MI-24, Ka-50, 342L, and any fixed wing bomb truck you wanna bring. It is mostly script driven, fully multiplayer capable and includes instructions for consuming it into your own missions. https://forums.eagle.ru/topic/286538-troops-in-contact-v3-released/

Thanks @Stratos For helping to test. V3 released, which contains bugfixes that involved fixed wing. Now released as a zip that contains all three maps: Caucasus, Persian Gulf, Syria.

Thank you guys! For some reason I never considered that the switch worked also for bombs.

When dropping the FAB style bombs from the pilot seat, they drop one at a time. When dropping from the operator seat, they all go off the racks at once. Is this expected behavior, or am I missing something?

Thanks, I am on my way to sorting it out! Now I need to figure out why all the bombs drop when the operator does the bombing, and only one at a time drops when the pilot does it.

Thank you, same. I will check it out soon and see what can be expanded from where we are here. If an indexed, spawned unitname is exposed, I'm pretty sure we can get it and use it, at least with an event handler. It's cool stuff we're doin' bro. We toil for the glory of DCS.

Thank you very much for the reply. This does help a lot actually. I imagine with it I can track events by unit (rail car) as well, and have scenarios where single cars in a large train might be specifically targeted, or when attacked (hit), have enemies spill out from them with SpawnFromUnit() and start fighting back.

I'd just take the drive out of the old one, add it in to the new one and copy the stuff over locally. Then use the old drive as expansion space.

No need, I have those. They still don't make it clear how the equipment is to be used.

They've made the articulating front seat sight usable, and the bomb timer as well. Has anyone dug into how these are to be employed for bomb dropping? I'm staying away from the KMGU/USLP clusterbombs for now since they create a horrible frame rate issue. But we do see examples of dumb bombs being used IRL.

Thanks guys. @Stratos You can add any aircraft you want. Fixed or Rotary wing. @MK84 Hell yes it does! If you have multiple aircraft in one area, the contact will be in that area. If you have aircraft in TWO areas, the contact could appear in either one.

I guess it depends on where you've put things. The far edges of maps aren't really popular places in my missions. I've never had difficulty with this at all. Drag the units to suit and don't cut and paste them. It's still FAR easier than rebuilding the entire thing manually, especially if the time required to rebuild a giant trigger stack far outweighs the burden of moving the objects. If your mission is much more unit-centric or script driven than triggers, there's no benefit here. If it's largely trigger-driven, this is the best choice I've found. The right tool for the right job. Nobody said mission building in DCS would be easy.....

This technique might help in some way perhaps: You can port a mission between maps easily by unpacking, changing the theatre file to suit, and then changing the "[theatre]" tag in the mission file as well. Repack into a zip, rename .miz and then all your stuff will be in the exact same x/y coords as in the previous map. You now have to move all the zones, aircraft, etc. When I have to reproduce triggers, I snap off screenshots of each one in the source mission, and just manually rebuild them in the new one.

I just encountered this an hour ago with the Mi-24 dropping KMGU's.

Been flying with this a while now. I can recommend the alpha-L on the virpil collective without reservation. Really works great. IMHO there are totally enough controls there between that and the cyclic (with at least two easy modifiers) to do everything that needs doing. I may add a modification of a hydraulic buffer on the collective so I can loosen up the friction.

From the RW side, paratroopers would be really cool. An in-box general solution to consume waypoints from the map into each aircraft's systems. A new icon perhaps, that places enumerated waypoint marks on the map, then a button that loads them all in, in the order they were placed. More helicopters of course, especially a medium or heavy transport with some capacity and speed. Top choices would be UH-60, CH-53, CH-47. All would be amazing. Built in functionality equivalent to the CSAR/CTLD scripts to make missions a lot easier for non-yodas to build.