pakfront

also worth mentioning that the .miz files are actually .zip files. If you open it up with 7-Zip or a similar program you will see a file called 'mission' which is essentially a lua file defining the mission. You may be able to extract what you need from there.

Been playing this SP, as it's great landing/takeoff practice. I*'m a little out-gunned in SP since door gunners don't fire yet. So, a nice addition would be arty or gunship prep of an LZ. Either the player could use radio F10 to designate an LZ to prep, or the Mission could select one, give a time-to-target. The last option sounds fun as it would give a time element to the player as well - you want to land as soon as possible after the arty stopped... but not too soon! It's just an example lua script. You don't need it to play the mission.

This sounds like a bug in DCS itself - it appears that groups created with addGroup are not added to whatever internal list DCS checks when testing zones. Hope they can fix this, as it would be quite a PITA if we had to treat spawned and non-spawned units so differently. If anyone has time, I'm sure ED would appreciate a simple test case. Not sure if this is a bug or just an unfortunate side-effect. Re-spawned/teleported groups aren't really the same group that they replace, they just use the same name, so it makes sense that moving zones would lose their association with the new group.

Good point - anything that creates a new group should return the group it creates.

looks good, hope to get a chance to work with it in the next few days

Robert, if you want to drop the troops anywhere on the map, you will need to do it via scripting with the Group.addGroup() method. At the moment this can be a bit complex to use, but Grimes seems to be working on some nice additions to the Mist scripting library to make it easier.

Ah, thanks. I'll try to write a function that can map the Group object into the table that addGroup wants, along with a translation Vec2 to allow repositioning of the group. If I can get it working, would you considering adding it to MIst?

I'm not that familiar with lua, so I may be making a rookie mistake, but it seems but it seems that simply doing a Group.getByName(), trying to alter the result, then passing it to addGroup does not work. thre result of getByName is immutable or protected somehow, probably to prevent modification at runtime. I tried using a simple deepcopy function to recreate the object as a table, but my limited knowledge of lua made that a waste of time. I think what has to happen is something like: newdata = deepcopy(Group.getByName('ToSpawn01')) as an aside, is this the 'lua'way to adjust the positions of the units in the new data or should I be using some other type of iterator?

In the past, I've gotten some convincing ship motion using a basic buoyancy model - altering the local height of the water over time with a tile-able tessendorf ocean surface and then calculating submerged volumes as portions of cubes or tets. Not quite DCS fidelity, but surprisingly effective.

I have attempted to reupdate and have gotten the same error (folder 5a). I have tried as-is and after deleting the Temp/DCS folder to force a redownload of the files. AV is off. Please let me know if there is any more information I can provide.

Ah, looking through the contents of the mission .miz file, it appears that the 'data' field is actually just a group object, which is great. Am I correct? Then the only outstanding issue is how to assign unique IDs?

The addGroup function takes an argument 'data' that is quite cumbersome to define. http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1738368&postcount=2 Is it possible to get this table from an existing group via scripting? How would you increment the unique ids to prevent id collisions, assuming this is needed? Am asking because I imagine it would be much easier to define the group in 'data' in the ME as deactivated group, sort of like a template, then use addGroup to spawn a copy of it at one or more various locations. If so, it seems that a wrapper function could be written that would make spawning groups much easier. Or is this already possible by serializing a group as in the 'data' table format from the ME in some way? Thanks.

I am getting a similar error, repeatedly. I also have my AV turned off when I start the download: It is always missing 5a. There are other directories in the Temp dir. This also happened on the update from 1.2.3 to 1.2.4. In that case I uninstalled, then reinstalled. 00000.000 INFO : === MiniLog opened UTC 2013-05-07 05:17:34 00000.020 INFO : Current version: 1.2.4.11652.147 00000.020 INFO : Checking for updates... 00000.175 INFO : Repair is available. 00000.175 INFO : Update is available. Latest version is 1.2.4.11855.154 00001.765 INFO : Actualizing local cache... 00011.007 INFO : Downloading update: version=1.2.4.11855.154, timestamp=20130505-163114, database_id=81c33f4f35d2222217222c2ebe3d881f345108febe3fba4107a55f5b6593833a, database_size=1584461 00015.177 INFO : Updating the updater... 00015.178 INFO : Downloading 1101616 bytes in 2 objects 00015.178 INFO : Cached 0 bytes in 0 objects 00019.242 INFO : Applying updates... 00019.303 INFO : === MiniLog closed. 00000.000 INFO : === MiniLog opened UTC 2013-05-07 05:17:54 00000.031 INFO : Current version: 1.2.4.11652.147 00000.206 INFO : Actualizing local cache... 00009.431 INFO : Downloading update: version=1.2.4.11855.154, timestamp=20130505-163114, database_id=81c33f4f35d2222217222c2ebe3d881f345108febe3fba4107a55f5b6593833a, database_size=1584461 00009.631 INFO : Downloading 168078248 bytes in 121 objects 00009.631 INFO : Cached 2686077 bytes in 3 objects 00374.196 INFO : Starting new updater... 00374.273 INFO : === MiniLog closed. 00000.000 INFO : === MiniLog opened UTC 2013-05-07 05:24:20 00000.001 INFO : LOAD_NEW_DB_CORE "d:\Users\Tim\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\update\81\81c33f4f35d2222217222c2ebe3d881f345108febe3fba4107a55f5b6593833a" 00000.018 INFO : LOAD_OLD_DB_CORE "C:\Games\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\autoupdate.db" 00000.036 INFO : LOAD_CONFIG "C:\Games\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\autoupdate.cfg" 00000.037 INFO : LOAD_OLD_DB_FILES "C:\Games\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\autoupdate.db" 00000.159 INFO : LOAD_CACHE "d:\Users\Tim\Saved Games\DCS\autoupdate.cache" 00000.200 INFO : LOAD_NEW_DB_FILES "d:\Users\Tim\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\update\81\81c33f4f35d2222217222c2ebe3d881f345108febe3fba4107a55f5b6593833a" 00000.390 ERROR : check("d:\Users\Tim\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\update\5a\5ab6237f5171ffe7b8702dd3437aec3e09728f4cd4ae7f8aa7f634783ce9b64f"): (3) The system cannot find the path specified. 00000.438 ERROR : Caught an exception: check("d:\Users\Tim\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\update\5a\5ab6237f5171ffe7b8702dd3437aec3e09728f4cd4ae7f8aa7f634783ce9b64f"): (3) The system cannot find the path specified. 00003.978 INFO : === MiniLog closed.

Agreed. Even the intro mission is confusing - it's not clear whether you will be landing on the airstrip or at the helipads, and if so, which pad is yours. If you have icons ON, or really good eyes, you can follow the Hinds in, but otherwise it's quite easy to get lost. This could easily be avoided with a few short lines in the 'Objective' entry

Also a fan of the SAR series. Some SAR and CSAR missions would be fantastic. At the moment, without slings, swimmers and collidable trees it will have to be done with triggers but even so it gives me a real motivation to try harder at mission editing.

Possible to install BS2 Upgrade to DCS World w/o BS1 on disk? Is it possible to install BS2 Upgrade to DCS World without BS1 being installed first? Just did a fresh install of Windows and would rather not have unused software cluttering up the dirve/registry etc.

It may be - it is playable at lower settings for me and I have a comparable system: . Windows XP Pro 32bit, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3ghz, 2GB RAM . GeForce 8800GTS 640mb @ 1920x1200

Speed, I'm really curious, how are you calculating LOS? Are you doing your own calculations against a heightfield you extracted from the game? Or is an in game calculation possible?

fantastic work, really impressive and obviously time consuming (chromium, if you can convert comma separated lists (.csv) to excel, I can convert the .lua in the .miz to csv pretty easily. Do you just need a name per entry?) templates.csv.zip templates2.csv.zip

Good luck! I have messed around with Inputs on windows years ago. I hope it has gotten better, but it used to be very easy to get 90% working and very hard to get 100% working. In the end I just used GlovePIE and PPJoy, though I understand that PPJoy will not work on the newer Windows. However, GlovePIE does a lot of what you are trying to do already (reampping inputs as other inputs) and allows use of some pretty unique input devices - TrackIR, VR Gloves, Wiimotes. http://glovepie.org/glovepie.php ...

I don't see realistic levels of Poison Oak! Just kiddin'; looks good!

Essentially, yes. The IR Tracker (basically a webcam) has to be able to see the reflectors mounted on your hat/headphones. Most people mount the camera on top of their monitors and if they turn their heads too far to the side, or lean out of the camera's view, tracking stops. So, no, you don't get full spherical tracking. It's more like a half-hemisphere of tracking. That said, getting used to the 'exaggerated movement' only takes 20minutes or so and feels quite natural after that. I think using TrackIR with your glasses would work quite well.

Tez, thanks for answering. However these are tracks of missions I just flew, moments before watching. FYI running the latest patch. No mods installed except for the audio 'Make my game speak English' mod.

When I playback a track of a successful mission it seems that my Ka-50 often crashes into the ground and explodes at the points in the original game-play where I was hovering very close to the ground. Is this a known bug? Is it possible to prevent this from happening? I was jumping the camera around to various units and playing back at various speeds; perhaps this is the cause of the problem?

I wish for better LOS determination from ground vehicles and troops to/from aircraft. Also, better use by ground troops and vehicles of concealment, meaning the AI needs to know what parts of the terrain offer concealment. I have been using Spherical Harmonics for fast approximation of soft shadows and ambient occlusion in image renders. It struck me that this same technique could be used to determine LOS from a point on terrain to an arbitrary point in the sky, like a helicopter. This data could be baked into a texture on the terrain and would make fast calculation of a vehicle percentage of visibility to/from a flying object fairly fast. Fast enough? I don't know. As a side effect it can also produces nice shadowing and ambient lighting effects. A paper on the subject: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cs4162/slides/spherical-harmonic-lighting.pdf