Bahger

The tracks are not big files because they are not replays that record missions, they are merely collections of mission input data that, when re-inputted during the playing of a track, rarely produce the same results. It's been like this since LOMAC, despite all efforts by the devs to fix the system, or improve it. What concerns me more is the other examples of iffy data reporting that I have cited. It's one thing for the tracks to be inaccurate, quite another for the debriefs to be as eccentric and unreliable as the tracks. Shot-down aircraft should be accurately reported as losses.

Thanks, WC. Simplest thing would be for me just to alter the timings a little. I might split the difference, putting the player(s) a little "behind the curve" so that the mission is slightly more difficult in MP. I remember from the Beta days how dismissive the purists were of non cold-start missions. I wonder if that has eased up a little.

Got it. Makes sense now you mention it.

I've made a mission for SP in which both client and AI aircraft set to "Take off From Runway" are indeed placed in takeoff position on the runway. However, the same placement when running the MP version of the mission puts the client aircraft on the ramp. It's a relatively short taxi but it affects the mission timings compared to the SP mission. Is it possible to script all aircraft to be holding position on the runway in MP or do I need to adjust all other affected mission timings to reflect an unanticipated, approximately 120-second delay in getting Blue aircraft into the air?

Posting this just in case it's something the devs wish to acknowledge and/or fix. I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground with it. In repeatedly testing a .miz I made in the ME, the following always ocurred: - "My Victories" in the debrief screen no longer appears to work. - The mission track system has never, not once, reproduced a mission accurately (thank goodness for Tacview.) I know this is an old issue but it's so egregious that I'm not at all sure what, if anything, the tracks are good for. - Aircraft losses are not reported accurately when pilots eject. In a recent play-through, Blue losses were recorded in the debrief as 0/18, yet an F-15C was shot down by a MiG-23 MLD and, interestingly, an A-10 that strayed into this dogfight was hit by a stray AIM-120. I'm not sure about the two Red a/c that were destroyed (pilots ejected), but Blue lost 2 a/c, neither of which were tagged as "Dead" or as any sort of loss in the debrief.

Thanks, Habu. I'm very flattered to hear this from you, as I spent ten minutes this morning admiring your work with Operation Bactria. This is exactly the kind of tactically realistic, large-scale MP mission I'd like to make and/or fly. However, I'm not doing any squadron-based MP at the moment so I'd be more interested in SP, and I notice that it's not yet optimsed for SP in DCSW. When it is, I'm there. I'm fairly proud of my own, smaller-scale .miz and will be publishing it, both in MP and SP within 48 hours. It does not provide a persistent world, like your mission, because I do not have the scripting skills necessary to set up that very extensive, intricate latticework of triggers and scripts. However, as a single-objective mission it offers a realistically-scaled battlefield, a decent but not preposterous level of threat and, I believe, a genuinely tactical challenge, which is, for me, the Holy Grail of mission making in any realistic combat sim.

What I did was: FLAG ON 70 FLAG 70 INCREASE 69 I guess I don't need the FLAG ON 70, huh? Thanks for all your help, grimes, as ever. I think this is a good .miz, all the better for having layered victory conditions.

I tip my hat to guys like you who can wrap their brains around this kind of thing. I have an MA in Eng. Lit. from Cambridge but my ability to comprehend mathematical abstraction is inferior to that of my 9th-grade son (and he's no math whiz either). I think the mission works now but the Flag value counter overwrote the message that would have confirmed it, so I'm going to run it again without the counter. Aside from my own obstuseness, I think that some of these problems are caused by linguistic ambiguity in the descriptions of conditions; for example, who would ever assume that "Increase Flag 70 to 70" really means "Give Flag 70 a value of 71"?? Now I understand why you ME ninjas prefer to use lua; pure mathematical language eliminates all ambiguity.

Protip gratefully received and implemented. Using Grimes' script I ran the mission again. FYI, setting "FLAG 70 INCREASE 70" gives me a starting value for Flag 70 of 71. I just had to laugh. Trying again now with "FLAG 70 INCREASE 69"

Thanks so much, guys. Grimes, I'm sure you are right -- as usual -- but before I test it, may I just run this by you: I'm going to address your point by making the first trigger as follows: ONCE>ALL OF GROUP IN ZONE> FLAG ON 70, FLAG 70 INCREASE 70 (Where "Group" is my "CE" group and the zone is a huge one called Spawn that cover the whole beattlefield so Wrecking Crew's concerns about a unit not being seen as in-zone will not apply). If I do the above< I assume I will not need another trigger, FLAG 70 = 70 because (i) it's covered in the previous trigger above and (ii) as you point out, this does not actually set a value for a flag, it merely switches it on, if my understanding is correct. Finally, would I be correct in assuming that once I fix this, the logic in the remainder of my triggers is sound and that the victory conditions they cover will pan out as intended? Wrecking Crew, thank you for your response. The interesting thing about your point re. using "Group alive less than" is that with "Group alive more than" no longer available in the ME, I cannot use a combination of those two conditions to set a range of numbers with a high and low limit. See, As long as I have a condition that sets "Group alive less than 100%", then any other condition referencing any number under 100% will register as True because I won't be able to set another high ceiling below 100% For that I'd need "Group alive more than 50% =FALSE" so that I can set a victory condition whereby the player won't fail for finishing with < 100% of the ground group ("CE") but >50%. Why they disposed of that condition I cannot fathom.

OK, here is what I have done. I'd be very grateful if someone could confirm that it will work, or if not, why not. I created a flag, FLAG 70, generated by a trigger: ONCE>ALL OF GROUP IN ZONE>FLAG 70 The zone being a large area covering the battlefield and the group being my Combat Engineer group (CE) that spawns when the mission starts. I gave names by the first eight letters of the alphabet to each unit within the CE group. I then created the following trigger for each member of this group: ONCE> UNIT DEAD>FLAG IS LESS, 70 -1 (i.e. minus one) Here is the .miz in case someone would like to look at the triggers/conditions. I'm stumped. I then organised my victory conditions as follows: TOTAL VICTORY: Group CE is 100% alive when it accomplishes its objective (Flag 11) FLAG 11 ON FLAG 70 = 70 VICTORY: Group CE has lost no more than 2 units when it accomplishes its objective (Flag 11) FLAG 11 ON FLAG 70 is less than 70 FLAG 70 is more than 67 DEFEAT: Group CE has lost more than 4 units (i.e. 50% of total strength) when it accomplishes its objective (Flag 11) FLAG 11 ON FLAG 70 is less than 67 There is also an additional defeat condition that will tell the player he has lost the mission before or after CE's accomplishment of its objective: GROUP DEAD I tried slightly different versions of this last night but it didn't work as planned, in most cases because I had made stupid mistakes that I think are corrected in the programming described above. However, I am capable of making large conceptual errors and would be very grateful if one of you could confirm that the conditions/triggers set out here are likely to produce the victory condition structure that I want. Thanks, as ever. Gah, I just tested it twice, and both times I got a "Defeat" message when none of the CE units had been killed! What can I be doing wrong?? What is it that's triggering the "Defeat" condition when it's FLAG (70) IS LESS (67) and no unit has been killed, let alone three units that would then subtract 3 from Flag 70's value (70)? Here is the .miz file in case someone would like to look at the trigger list. It's a large file because there are a few custom sounds. I'm stumped. Broken Wing 06.miz

Very interesting non-lua solutions. By assigning flags to individual unit deaths, I think -- I'll have to check -- that I'd be able to make a condition for a mutually exclusive range of values i.e. with a minimum and maximum number, so: Total Victory: Flag X = 8 Victory: Flag X is less than 8, Flag X is more than 4 Loss: Flag X is less than 4 Does that make sense?

Thanks very much Sobek, Speed. The above code makes some sense to me. Now I must either (i) study up on Mist/Lua so that I'm not bugging you guys with every elementary question I might have or (ii) make do with a more binary mission victory condition structure built entirely in the ME, which would be: Major Victory: Ground group acheives its objective with zero casualties Victory: Ground group acheives its objective with casualties Defeat: Ground group is destroyed at any point in the mission I'm sure you can see how my original plan was better. 50% losses in the course of achieving an objective is a failure by modern standards of warfare, as planned and waged by NATO. OK, sorry but I'm going to ask one dumbass question: In which ME field is the above code pasted?

Thank you, Speed. I promise I will read up on Mist. meanwhile, do I need to install anything to make this script work, where do I paste it to and what exactly does it do? I have re-edited the mission with less ambitious, more binary victory conditions but will incorporate this code as soon as I know exactly what it does. Sorry, I do not mean to sound either lazy or ignorant but I do not have a programmer's brain.

Got to add, this is really quite galling. The lack of a "Group Alive More Than" condition means that there can be no hierarchy of success/failure in a mission, i.e. no way to assign success or failure on a stepped scale. With only "Group Alive Less Than" it's binary. By removing this command, they've taken away a tool which made it possible to add some nuance into mission scoring. It's doctrinally realistic to assign Mission Total Victory to group 100% alive, Mission Victory to group <25% losses and Mission Failure to group >50% losses. Maybe there's a workaround, but I don't see it. Is there a way to do it with .lua (which is essentially beyond me)? Please ED, can we have "Group Alive More Than" back??

Well, I managed to get a "Total Victory" condition to work as follows: I made a trigger zone covering the whole battlefield: Y I made this condition: CONTINUOUS ACTION> All of group in "Y"> FLAG ON:99 Then, with Flag 98 being the one generated when the ground unit completes its mission: ONCE: "Total Victory" FLAG 98 = TRUE FLAG 99 = TRUE It seems to work. I'm hoping there are no contradictions between the above logic for "Total Victory" and using "Group Alive Less Than 100%" for "Victory" (i.e. the ground force has taken casualties.) However, without a "Group Alive More Than" option in the conditions menu, I don't think it's possible to trigger a "Defeat" condition when the ground force is "Group Alive Less Than 50%" because < 50% is also <100%, so I assume that a "Group Alive Less than 40%" trigger alongside the mission completion trigger (Flag 98) will trigger the "Victory" result in the game instead of "Defeat". Or will it? Please advise, I'm not as sharp as most of you with this stuff and my head hurts.

Thanks, Druid. But: "Group Alive More Than" no longer exists in the drop-down conditions menu! What to do? Edit: Would "All of Group in Zone" work because if only one unit is dead, then it won't satisfy that condition? Otherwise, the only alternative appears to be A "Unit Alive" check on every unit in the group, which would be a real kludge. Eliminating "Group Alive More Than" is such an odd, rather limiting decision; does anyone know why it was made? it's definitely not there and there's no reference to it in the latest DCS User Manual.

I am organising victory conditions for my .miz based on the player's CAS performance, as measured by how many units in an armor group survive a battle. Once the group ("Combat Engineers"), or what is left of it, performs a specific action at the objective, a flag ("X") is switched on and victory conditions are assessed as follows: Total Victory: Flag X ON Group COMBAT ENGINEERS is alive Question #1 : Am I correct in assuming that, for the ALIVE condition to be met, 100% of the group must be alive when Flag X is switched on? Victory: Flag X ON Group COMBAT ENGINEERS is alive less than 100% Defeat: Flag X ON Group COMBAT ENGINEERS is alive less than 50% Now, here's where I find a logical ambiguity: Question #2: I want the player to lose the mission if Group X is attrited by more than 50% (depite it having accomplished the objective). However, let's say 3 out of the 8 vehicles survive; that's less than 50% but it is also less than 100%, so how do I know it will not be seen by the game's logic as a Victory instead of a Defeat? Thanks, guys, as ever.

Thanks for responding in such detail, Speed. What you say makes a lot of sense and coincides with my (less high-level) understanding of how the ME works and what logic it uses to get the AI to do what it does.

Thanks Grimes. I'll only be able to jury-rig an approximation of an "under fire from" condition in this .miz but, yes, the idea of implementing "under fire" and, if possible "from [direction]" should really be implemented in a sim with such emphasis on CAS.

I think I already know the answer to this question but just to be sure: there's no way to create a condition for a group that is under fire, is there? I've jury-rigged it by using a "Group Less Alive than 100%" but that logic breaks down because it cannot take into account damage that does not kill and it can't be repeated for when the group moves on and I want to make another such condition (both are to generate SITREPS in the form of sound files ("We have reached X location and are in contact with enemy troops to the north, requesting close air support.") Any suggestions?

Very helpful, MZ, thank you.

Sorry but I'm rusty; could someone please remind me what the optimal image size and resolution is for images that will be outputted in mission briefings? I remember that the images should be square -- as this is the shape of the "window" in which they are formatted in the sim -- but I cannot remember the best size/res. Thanks!

That worked! Thanks very much!

I'm trying again now. I have a good cable connection. The images tries to load then times out, producing a failure message. Does anyone else have a map source for the DCSW battlefield? If not, I'll use screenshots of the sim map.