Druid_

Yep he used my Lua random number generator which as you so correctly said uses the function os.time to seed. Sorry Badger. Why ED removed all of the OS functions god only knows.

Oo thats screws all my missions up then (haven't tested any of them since I am down to one hand after shoulder surgery). Why, why,why would they remove trigger.setUserFlag() ?!! Feeling just a little frustrated by all of these changes. Maybe ED can tell us in advance of ALL the upcoming changes for patch .1.10 ? and even 1.11 while they're at it. Ok so rant over, but rather than make us wait 10 weeks for the next patch how about a Hotfix to address the issues in this thread? I am sure there would be a lot of community members who would very much appreciate it, me included. The alternative is that I for one will give up on mission building. I enjoy doing it & hopefully doing it well but I don't have the time or the inclination to keep going back & changing missions that are broken due to patch changes. So please ED help us out here.

I usually send my buddy down in the weeds to take a look & spot where the tracer fire or SAM launch appears at. He's good like that.

Are we not grasping at straws until AMD add support for DCS A10c to their list of optimised games? I have seen very little in the way of performance gains over the last 10 months. Having said that I am using a 5970 and not a 6 series card. Maybe when DCS is out on DVD in states they might take a look, who knows.

Hats off to you Speed for persevering with this one. Although it does seem like a lot of work for something that might change with the release of the next patch. If ED want to encourage Mods & a different approach to mission design then I really hope they are considering providing a safe & efficient environment in which it can be done easily. Once it is done then modders will not be put off by continuously having to change their Mods after each patch. For instance a DCS function that allows us to write to a specific DCS folder only would be nice. (My latest mission that allowed Game Loads & Saves is nerfed until something else comes out, maybe your workaround will help or maybe I'll wait a while & see what develops).

It seems to me the boom operator has much more constrained limits to its real life counterpart. (i.e. total movement 15 degrees in pitch with limits of 25-40 degrees from horizontal). Therefore if you approach the boom at the upper level of its limit he won't raise it. When you close in and he initially raises into position, approach slightly low on the boom, don't try and fly the boom into the recipticle. Approach very slowly and you will find he will lower the boom nicely into position for you. I find the ideal approach to be where I can just see the very bottom of the boom wings with the rest hidden by the canopy arch (normal zoom levels) when I am about 10ft from the boom. My observations of others are that most approach too high on the boom rather than too low (that last minute raise of the boom into position doesn't help tbh).

If the steerpoint is set at say 15,000ft in the mission Editor and you CHina Aft long to slave TGP to it then it will 'appear' to be pointing into space. Although on the 2D TAD the steerpoint appears to be on the ground, the only real confirmation is the placement of the steerpoint in your HUD (or by checking the WP info in the EGI, which you could change to ground level btw). It comes down the the mission designers. I set Transit waypoints at the Altitude I want the player to transit at. Approaching target areas I place IP & TGT waypoints at ground level.

IIRC panzertard brought out a mod for the ME which allows you to copy and paste units including all of their waypoints. Sorry I had a quick look in the modders section & couldnt find it. Maybe pm panzertard.

Yes that would be a solution but to be honest it should be more than just a range thing. Elevation data of units(i.e. If you are looking down on plains from a plateau then you are much more likely to spot any enemy units on the low ground) , weather, trees (unlikely to happen, units see through trees remarkabley well) and a random element to the amount of time the units are LOS before the detection occurs. If you were to go a step further then how well camoflaged the units are with regard to their background would add even more realism. Unfortunately, realism comes at a cost. FPS. So until we see more powerful PCs or a mutlicore/thread environment I doubt these kinds of things will be implemented for some time yet. In the meantime Speeds suggestion is the best (i.e. Set a limit to their visibility).

For those of us who don't get the time to commit to large amounts of coding/testing etc this sure would get my vote if its possible to do.

Not at all, & it wasn't a go at you. But lets be honest here, the Devs are really not giving us anything to go on. Something like "we have examined the Print() function and removing it was an oversight, it will be restored in the next patch" however is. I have no time for politician type replies, sorry.

yep AI have bionic vision & sixth sense. Really need dumbing down or better still made more realistic.

After a few days off from PC I open up the forums, see 09s been released & this is the first thread I read. All I can say is ... take out the bold print and you have something Mission Designers can go on and move forward with. Unfortunately you aren't telling us anything constructive I'm afraid. Personally I shall wait until something concrete is said.

Strange, well there's been around 270 downloads of it & it was written some time ago so I am assuming you are the only one. Sorry thats not much help but I can see no reason why it would CTD. I am not running any scripts in this mission & very little happens prior to RV1. There is only 1 moving trigger around Tusk flight in fact iirc. Doesn't crash for me but if enough people are having same problem then I will re-package it for patch 09 (whenever that occurs).

They won't if you follow the brief. Corridors in & out of conflict areas are true to life. I went a step further by adding an airfield IFF failure to the SAM interegator. Stay in the corridors & stay below 500ft !

Glad you enjoyed it. There are 2 ground FACs & 1 airborne AFAC. They all worked fine when I tested. What exactly was the problem? If the enemy closes in on their position they might well get destroyed & therefore unable to answer back. I guess its also conceivable that they might get 'hit' midstream through a 9-line.

THE BATTLE FOR BELORECHENSK (Multiplayer co-op mission for up to 8 players.) Last night enemy forces took control of the city of MAYKOP & its Airport. indications are that they intend to advance on the city of BELORECHENSK. 80k South East of our location (Krasnodar Centre URKI). Blue Ground Forces were severely hit in the defence of Maykop and have had to retreat to defend the City of Belorechensk. We are the only airborne assets available to oppose forces attacking from the South & East of Krasnodar. All other Blue forces (BLUFOR) are engaged defending the attack on Novorossiysk to the South. It is imperative we hold Belorechensk for the next 48hrs. This is the ETA for BlueFor Re-inforcements. If we fail the enemies next objective will probably be the city of Krasnodar & our current airfield. (It is possible to play this single player, you won't succeed but you may have fun trying! Note: you will not have any wingmen at your disposal) There are two versions both identical except one is much larger in size due to voice over comms to add to reality/immersion. The Battle for Belorechensk_MP8withComms.miz The Battle for Belorechensk_MP8v4.miz

All sounds good except I'm all for avoiding loitering. Its bad enough IRL without just flying in circles waiting in DCS imho. One way I got round this in a mission is to have radio calls as triggers e.g. Hawg11 awaiting further tasking means that the objective is complete & nothing is happening, so activate next round of action in trigger. For Multiplayer the only way to do this is to use Speeds chatiolib lua script.

That was my experience. Hence my random number generator using tables. With regard to your functions, good effort but is it worth writing lua functions for 1 line triggers in ME. Don't think anyone will use it. e.g. rand_activate(group_name, probability) would be ONCE blah RANDOM(value%) GROUP ACTIVATE(groupname) randvalue = rand_value(min, max) however is a good one not easily done in GUI triggers. I completely agree on the adding of randomness to missions. Its so easy to overdo it and lose touch with the substance of the mission. A bit like watching a movie with great special effects but no storyline. In the time it takes to add so much randomness to a mission you could have written another 3 missions.

IRL you would abandon your jet on the ramp, hand it over to the groundcrew. You would then head to the intelligence officer for a debrief and then either to the crewroom for rations or the Bosses office for a bollocking. You might then replan for another flight. Having said that I have returned a U/S jet and signed out another, legged it over to the aircraft and strapped in. Prob took me about ... 3 mins . whoa ...spooky.

I can confirm that priority tasking from any JTAC is broken in patch 08.

Interesting. Maybe there is something else in there causing problems. At one point during one task there is a single 3-5 sec freeze & I am almost at a loss as to what is causing it since it doesn't coincide with any triggers or anything else I can think of. It only happens during this one task. I will have to test further.

I believe that it is all possible but you will have to utilize lua scripting to be able to do it. I already have a long CAS mission (waiting on patch .09 to release) that has a LOAD & SAVE option. However the kind of mission I have lends itself to this as after each CAS task is complete its state is saved to a lua table. It is possible to do likewise with a larger mission as the position of each unit is known and accessible through scripting. Each units state can be saved via scripting again whenever it is damaged or destroyed. Buildings are a little more complicated to do but not impossible. When you LOAD a mission you will have to wait whilst all the buildings & units etc are destroyed and again the fires allowed to still burn or put out depending on the timeline (again not easy). Then you have to log the weapons count and .... etc etc. Lots to think about here & no small task & not one I have the time to dig deeper into let alone the scripting expertise to enable me to do so. However, I believe there are a bunch of clever chaps over at ED who are able to. Probably a few on the forums too but its a large task for 1 person alone.

I have a CAS mission which will take you over 4 hours to complete if everything goes well. I must admit with 180 triggers its starting to cause a few FPS problems so I might have to hack it into pieces. I have however through scripting managed to add a LOAD & SAVE option so you dont have to restart the whole mission from the begining each time. Now it not Dynamic as previously destroyed units won't appear again in their destroyed position smoking away but its not really required for this type of CAS mission as I have you moving around the map supporting ground units. I understand Wildfires passion for creating a large scale battlefield environment but to be honest when tasked you would only be dealing with a small part of it IRL. Having multiple units fight it out even 80nm away from your local battle is only going to use up unecessary CPU utilisation. DCS just isn't designed to handle large scale battles so for now as MizBuilders we're better off coming up with 90 min battles which when complete LOAD another 90 min battle mission and so on. Its still possible to create immersion & reality on smaller scales its just how you go about it.

Nope, or DCS. 6 weeks off so will miz build & drive the wife mad instead.