Player can drive... aw crap!

[ENO]

Eh guys...

 

I'm working on a mission that involves an AI defending force and a player driven attacking force. The concept is that the A-10s / KA-50s can go in and whittle down the defenders as much as possible, and then follow up with a ground assault. Not a coincidence that I just finished reading "Warthog" by William Smallwood and got a major hotel oscar for the Gulf War concept. Success will largely depend on how many forces are successfully routed by the aircraft... but victory will need to be achieved on the ground.

 

Anyway, I've just finished placing my defensive force and realized I forgot to take off "player can drive" on the red side.

 

Do I now have to go back and click off "player can drive" on every single vehicle or is there a way around it? Also, every vehicle is pointing north (though I did catch this one and orientate the original group I copied)... Is there anything you can do to get "all" in a group selected and orientated instead of having to do everything individually?

 

It's not the end of the world- if red wants to roll with some vehicles it just adds to the whole thing- but I still need to turn off SO many fricken vehicles a shortcut would be nice.

[Grimes]

Do you have CA roles on Red? If you don't it simply doesn't matter if "player can drive" is ticked because absolutely nothing can control them.

 

However modifying the mission file directly with something like notepad++ is an easy way to modify something in bulk.

Open up the mission fire in a rar program then open up the mission file in a text editor. If you are using notepad++ set the language to "LUA" as that makes it much easier to read and follow what is going on. You can then find one of the offending groups, not what the proper entry should be. Highlight the entire red team entry and do a "find and replace" in the selection.

[B25Mitch]

If this is one of those missions where Red team is meant to lose, be warned - I obtain great pleasure from joining the Red team and completely turning the battle around, until the Blue airbase is overrun.

 

If you intend Blue to win, you'd better make sure there are no Battlefield Commander slots for Red.

[ENO]

Grimes- thanks a lot. If I leave everything off (no ground commanders or jtac etc) of red I guess it should be okay then. I'm interested in this scripting method as well though I'm afraid a lot of that language is waaaaaaay beyond me.

 

Mitch- it actually isn't at all a "blue is going to win" mission- if the guys in the attacking force don't coordinate and deplete the defending force before the offensive begins- they'll be slaughtered.

[Habu_69]

Reread Grime's post. I don't know Lua either, but all you are doing is opening the "mission" file code in a text editor where you can find things using search/replace function. I discovered, among other things, this is a great way to print out the mission Blue or Red task descriptions. Just search for "descriptionblue", copy the text at that section of code, paste it to a new file and print it out.

 

I have also used Notepad ++ to debug/fix some older A-10 missions. For example, apparently many missions were broken when the scripting code syntax changed from trigger.setuserflag to trigger.action.setuserflag. I have fixed many missions simply by a search and replace for these terms.

 

Try it. It is quite easy and useful. Of course, when attempting anything new and unfamiliar, make a backup copy of the mission first.

[Grimes]

Unless it was used in a custom lua script, I'm pretty sure when you save the file it re-writes the mission file... triggers should have been automatically adjusted once it saves.

[Habu_69]

Yes, these were missions with custom scripts in Steerpoint trigger actions.