Multiplayer team

We're glad we're seing many of you try our new feature! One thing we noticed is that many pilots struggle to find the best strategy to keep the fire contained resulting in the fire growing extremely large in size Like in real life if you drop a lot of water into the center of the fire it will not keep the fire from growing at all. However, if you drop the water in front of the fire as seen in the graphic below, the fire will not be able to grow past the blue lines. If you work your way from the outside to the inside, you will be able to thin the fire out. After you close the water line in the center the fire will be unable to grow. this is the point were it makes sense to actually pour water into the fire to make it go out quicker. In the meanwhile we are investigating possible solutions on keeping the fire from growing too fast, especially when there is nobody around fighting it. We really look forward to your feedback!

We are proud to introduce a new feature to our civilian ops server: Fire Fighting! First things first, like our Search and Rescue feature this is of course an approximation based on what DCS currently allows us to do, which is pop smoke and adjust aircraft weight. Nevertheless we did our best to immerse you into an intense fight against time. The longer it takes the bigger the fire will get. It starts with just one small fire but it will grow fast. To fight fires all you need to do is pick up water with your Helicopter. Since we cannot change the weight of sling-loads we opted for belly-mounted tanks for now, similar to those used for instance by Cal Fire (http://www.rvcfire.org/stationsAndFunctions/OpsSppt/HRAAB/PublishingImages/H301%20water%20drop.jpg). The tank is filled by dipping the hose of to the tank into water (you really just need to hover above water!) and wait until a pump has filled the tank. You can use either the sea, a lake or just a small river. Sounds simple right? Just keep in mind your helicopter will gradually become heavier, you'll have to keep pulling collective to keep your helicopter out of the water! To drop water you use the F10 menu, F1 will release your load until it's empty. We would have loved to give you the option to bind it to a joystick button or similar, but there is no such API currently in DCS that also works in multiplayer. Bummer, we know. To extinguish fire there's obviously multiple ways. The simplest way is to drop water directly over fire to extinguish it. If you dropped enough water the fire will go out. If it wont go out it will at least burn for a shorter time than before the water drop. But keep in mind the fire will spread! A more effective way to fight the fire from spreading is to drop water in front of the fire to prevent it from spreading. The most effective way to extinguish a fire is as follows: Drop one load from the outer left side of the fire for as far towards the center as you can. This will prevent a small strip of fire from spreading further. Now return to your next water source and refill your tank, this time you start from the right side of the fire and also cut a strip of growth off from the side. By the time you refill and reach the left side again, you should already see in the smoke that the fire has spread more towards the center. What you want to do is narrow the path of the fire with every pass you make. Ultimately the fire will stop spreading, and you can focus on dropping water directly onto the fire to extinguish it completely. But don't worry, once the fire has stopped we will immediately spark a new one for your pyromaniac pleasure. Frequently asked Questions: I've dropped water directly on the fire but it's still smoking: unfortunately we are bound to the limitations of DCS. While we can pop smoke easily, we cannot remove it. Fortunately smoke in DCS only lasts for 5 minutes, so after that period we check if the fire is still burning and pop another smoke or not. Why are you not using the big black smoke effect? While the big black smoke would for sure be way more visually pleasing, this smoke will for one never disappear and even worse, if you join the server after this smoke was created you would not see it at all. We'd love to use the bigger smoke though! Why no bambi bucket? We've spent a lot of time researching, writing and testing code snippets. While we could get it to work somehow it would be quite a hack, so we decided the way we implemented it now is the easiest, most believable and most reliable way to do it at this moment of time. We'd love to hear your ideas on how bambi buckets could work and would still like to add it in the future. How exactly does the fire system work? It's of course a very simplified system. The fire is spread on a rough grid of 50x50 meters. When you drop water the position is approximated to this grid. This way we could have a few thousand fire cells without complex math and tons of computation power required. To hide the visual grid effect the smoke positions are randomized on that grid to avoid patternization. The fire growth is also very simple: when a new fire sparks it will also create two seedlings that travel along the wind-axis in a 6 degree cone. If a fire-seedling reaches a fresh grid it sparks a new fire. If there's already water this grid it wont spark. For the time being it does not matter how much water there is on the grid. PS We've seen some people struggle to deliver medical supplies to Mestia clinic... PRO tip: You can actually land supplies crate anywhere on the map and just remember the place. Crate should stay there even after restart, and you can just continue later. Please check it. PPS We've changed frequency of clinic messages pop ups to be slower.

We will think about it. Currently we are working on fire fighting concept, taking some time already..

We had to change and update some things on machine that is running server. Now its up.

There was some downtime, but its running now

New changes are online: - added bearing to mission and base-directions - improved overal message display - switched back to infantry units instead of carrier personel - fixed a few bugs in the system that could potentially break functionality

Just checked, it seems to be working. Did you try to change player slots?

1.9.0.1

Did you try DCS repair?

Currently it is 12 hours for patient to heal 100 of health. Thing is patients you save in field have random health which drops until they are saved. So if you bring patient in with 60% of health it should take less than 6 hours for them to heal. All patients data is saved on server hard drive and mission independent. (edit: sorry being sophisticated here. Yes they are saved between restarts!)

Didn't catch it in time to check exact mission. But currently there are only two with rain and this season: rainy one: And thunderstorm:

Current issue with full hospitals is fixed. We need to experiment with patients heal rate. So ethic decision was made to not erase currently registered patients in hospitals :D but double hospitals capacity. Also heal rate for patients is now double faster, please warn us if patients will still be healing slow while inside medical facilities and if they will be filling up again.

You guys not missing anything, it is bug we are trying to resolve currently. Will update when squash it.

We take it, not sure how previous post was thought as offensive, just describing next steps to explain where we will be able to use suggestions. thank you.

Server was restarted recently. Need to check that Hospitals have supplies, or they won't be able to treat patients, therefore maybe that is why they are full, because people are not bringing supplies in :) We are checking Overall, current server state is kind of test of features. We want to implement each feature we have in mind and test it first, then when all features are ready we would need to work on how map should look like to accommodate all features in one environment. So we expect some sloppy placement and briefing vagueness now :( SAR missions directions and how they are displayed were reported by a lot of guys here, this is what we would need to rework. Thanks! Pickup time 30 to 45 sec. could be made as part of SAR mission difficulty. Later we would need to make different types of SAR missions, some of them will be a lot easier than others and most likely they will appear on user demand and would be tied to specific pilot. Currently we are trying to make proof of concept for fire fighting missions, which is not easy. As said before we tried to not disclose all plans, partially because not sure everything can be implemented, partially because we have seen that our ideas taken and implemented on other servers :) not sure how to feel about that :) Even here in this thread one of the ideas spoken here before, appeared in a certain server after 2 months. We would like to increase our pace, but not sure if its possible yet.

hospitals receive supplies flow?

Server up now

Was explained couple posts ago. In briefing pictures you can see zone of each medical facility. Cargo can be placed anywhere in that zone. Of course need to use a bit logic and creativity to not place it on landing zone :D

So far you can figure out exact heading by checking F10 map and using ruller tool on it. Until we can provide other options.

Server up, had some DCS crash..

SO far you can find screenshots in briefing for each medical facility. You can see zone there. Place cargo anywhere in that zone.

A little insight on how the sling loading works: the cargo load is just a regular static cargo object. The script checks the position of the cargo object every 5 seconds. If it has moved it assumes the cargo is on the hook, because that's really the only way to move them. It then checks if there's a heli above it within a ropes length and thus knows who is transporting the crate (there is no specific api for that in dcs). If the crate has stopped moving (no position change since the last check 5 seconds ago) the script checks if the crate is inside a zone, if it's inside a hospitals zone the hospital is supplied and the crate is destroyed (if nothign is supplied the crate is not destroyed). Unfortunately the crates destroy function is still a bit bugged, it will not disappear for the client, but you also wont be able to pick it up again. If you reconnect to the server the crate should be gone. If the crate has not been detected to be inside a hospital zone it wont be destroyed and you will be able to pick it up a gain. So when you pick up the crate, maximum 5 seconds later you should receive a message that you have picked up a slingload crate. The crate remembers who you are. Once you have put the crate down again it can take up to 10 seconds until the crate detects it's on the ground (If you touch it down 0.01 seconds after the loop ran the last time the position after 5 seconds will detect movement so it takes another 5 seconds to make sure the crate does not move resulting in ~10 seconds total). I know this is plenty of time for you to check if a supply has happened thus i thought it's best to explain how it works under the hood. There is no black magic, just a bit of working around a missing programming interface :smilewink:

It was internal cargo, not sling load? What was the weight? It happened only once or reproduceable?

Hey Beagle! Did you select internal cargo or sling load? I assume internal cargo, since the sling load does not show up in the status (maybe it should?). If you pick internal cargo and it shows 0 kg please try picking it again, sometimes the F10 menus are a bit glitchy and need a second try. If it is still not working please post here along with at which time it happened. This way we can check the serverlogs and pin down the chain of events that led to the malfunction, so we can fix it.

We fly hardcore stuff ourselves , so I've put some missions on timer and last hour in mission usually in sunset. But this is sophisticated task to tackle, I guess only vote would decide at later time.