New to DCS and mission building

[Dante Chance]

Greetings all,

 

I recently picked up a copy of DCS: FC3 and as a result have purchased nearly all mods available in a fortnight. What a fantastic simulation experience.

 

I have been creating missions over the past week and have spent many late nights working out how to make triggers work and so far I have managed to do simple things like randomise what ThreatFor I face and create triggers with the use of the radio items to get air support airborn and make them land when not required.

 

What I am chasing now is some information on Air insertion. I have made missions whereby a certain condition is met prior to the Helo's inserting troops to capture an INS Comd in a nearby town. The way I do this currently is by making a squad spawn with late activation, and linking their activation with the establishment of a cordon which puts the Hueys on a landing near the objective. I have the Infantry spawn 300 seconds after the cordon is established which at times can be messy due to the random landing pattern and different times of the helicopters. At times it looks near perfect whereas others they actually spawn a minute prior to the landing or a good two minutes after landing and a good couple of hundred meters from the Hueys.

 

My question is that I read about LUA scripts that spawn troops made by a member named GEL, is this currently working with the latest patch as his tutorial mission did not seem to work.

 

Secondly, I understand nothing about scripting but am trying to learn rapidly. Do I need to use scripts or do the flags and triggers in game work fine for accomplishing something like this.

 

Thirdly If scripting is a required knowledge for mission building, could someone put me in the right path for the beginners guide to DCS scripts.

 

Kind regards

[Wrecking Crew]

Here is a link to my flags scheme. This approach can be used with events or scripts.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=114492

 

A few posts in this forum will help you understand scripts.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=114676

 

WC

[Grimes]

Some basic guides and documentation is available here: http://wiki.hoggit.us/view/Simulator_Scripting_Engine_Documentation

 

Scripting isn't required, but it does open up the possibilities of what you can do with a mission. The mission editor is incredibly powerful by itself, but there are limitations, and scripting generally picks up where the editor leaves off. For instance while you can spawn in groups via triggers, the group has to be placed in the mission editor beforehand and it will only spawn in that one location. With the scripting engine you can dynamically spawn groups whenever and where-ever you want.