Confused about DSMS on a test flight

[-Ice]

I'm trying out some concepts and whipped up a mission starting in the air pointing towards where I want to go. The funny thing is when I have weapons loaded, my DSMS looks funny --- all the boxes are red if the pylon is loaded, green if not loaded, but the boxes are empty.

 

Switching Master Arm to SAFE shows me my munitions but Training and Armed just goes back to the emply colored boxes.

 

Attached are some screenshots to show what I mean. Any help appreciated. Have tried an air start and a runway start, still no joy.

[SmokeyTheLung]

Reload DSMS via the load page, see if that works.

 

It is weird that you would see this without rearming, did you use the prepare mission function?

[-Ice]

Reload DSMS doesn't work, rearming doesnt work, and reloading DSMS after rearming does not do anything either.

 

Weirdly, if I load up one of my older training missions, everything works fine.

 

I will attach the mission in question if anyone wants to take a look and try.

DSMS Trouble.miz

[-Ice]

I believe so. Did the usual steps when I made it...

[-Ice]

Sorry, what is "prepare mission" again?

[nomdeplume]

Prepare Mission lets you make adjustments to the various systems (including DSMS, waypoint database, and many other things) and then when you quit, the settings you configured are saved in the mission file. When the mission is run after that, those saved settings are automatically applied to all the systems. So, if you want to set up extra waypoints which aren't part of the flight plan, you can do that using Prepare Mission.

 

Unfortunately, when it re-loads the weapons profiles for the DSMS, if they don't match your actual loadout, weird things happen. So what's happened is that at some point you used Prepare Mission which saved your DSMS profiles (even if you didn't manually modify them). Later, you decided to change the loadout for the mission, and now when you run the mission the DSMS profiles are incompatible with your actual loadout and the game gets horribly confused.

 

The only way I know of to fix this is to manually delete the DSMS configuration information from the mission file.

 

The .miz file is actually a normal ZIP compressed file which contains some specific files, which the game loads in order to run the mission. You can therefore open it up with any ZIP-aware archiver like 7-zip, WinZip, WinRAR, etc. You can also use Windows' built-in ZIP capabilities, if you rename the mission from .miz to .zip.

 

If you look in the archive you'll see a bunch of directories with names corresponding to systems the aircraft has. The easiest option is probably just to delete everything that isn't specifically required for your mission. The only two files actually needed are the ones called 'mission' and 'options' - all the folders can be removed.

 

If you've added triggered sounds to the mission you'll want to leave them as well. If you do want to pre-configure some of the aircraft systems you can just delete the DSMS directory from the archive.

 

And obviously - make a backup copy before you start deleting stuff from the .miz file, so if you make a mistake you can try again.

 

Edit: you might want to read through this thread about the same issue. I recommend avoiding 'Prepare Mission' and just using 'Fly Mission' instead.

Edited June 26, 2011 by nomdeplume

[-Ice]

Brilliant post there nom! Thanks! I think I've flow Prepare Mission a couple of times so that might be it. I'll be sure to Fly Mission from now on.