MOG…it took me hours of searching and reading through old lua code…plus watching many, many boring tutorial videos to find something (in MOOSE) to do something, tat from what I found in this link, I don’t even need MIST for…
[curled into the fetal position and quietly sobbing]
Seriously, as I looked through the MIST functions/libraries I saw the “bits and pieces” of whatI was trying to do (GCI radar, strip alert fighters, terrain masking…player pulls up to high after coming off target…) but couldn’t figure out how to make it come together.
I did learn some useful things like using a late activation helicopter to outline borders and such, but just the concept, not the “nuts and bolts”.
I guess that is the secret. I tried editing some of the big script files I had found (that worked with MIST) to “fit” them into what I trying to accomplish…came to dead ends. What I need to do is take take/study the example lua scripts and see how they work/interface with MIST and/or SSE.
I understand MIST is older however, I have gotten some inkling of way it is doing things. I understand the concept of Object Oriented Programming , however with MOOSE a lot is happening “under the hood”. …crawl, walk, run… I think I’ll still crawl a bit longer to wrap my brain around MIST
In the Anti Ship thread we have been discussing placing simulated, simulated fast attack submarine, an SSN…so this would be a S4N I guess…anyway…I came up with an idea as I was trying to learn how SSE works.
The general idea is “What would a submerged submarine look like in DCS? It would look like the surface of the water.” So come up with a ship “Unit” with no model, length, width, height, collision box, set at driving around at sea level…essentially it is a sub under water.
For torpedos, set a missile with the same the of parameters (no model, etc.but some type of proximity distance for detonation) . Give it a self homing radar (faking a self homing sonar). Also have the “sub” be capable of firing missiles (SS-N-19 for a Russian OSCAR II SSGN; Harpoon for US SSNs).
You cannot add new weapons or units on a per mission basis. This would have to be defined as a new unit or weapon, and loaded into the game at start up. What I’m saying here is this is outside the purview of a mission script, and into the domain of a mod. Outside of that, dunno.
So since this is the “domain of a mod”…is it something an individual could have run at DCS World start up? Or is this something ED would need to add?
The SSE is locked down so you can only use certain commands. I am certain if you defined a new class of missile via mission script and passed it to the engine, the scripting engine wouldn’t know what to do with it.
You would need to define your “missile” either in the scripts/database/missile.lua (probably), or via a mod in the mods/tech (probably). I think @SkateZilla knows more about this stuff.
So it can be done but as part of the lua code DCS uses during start up…which means make a baseline copy and hope I don’t drop a coma somewhere. Thanks!
Being retired Navy guy, I like to plan ship missions. One major drawback is the number of countries that only have “armed speedboat”…last time I looked the UK had this thing called the Royal Navy…but I’ve seen retired for a while now so…budget cuts? Regardless, the UK and other nations have robust merchant fleets.
My question. Looking at the above and with a rudimentary understanding regarding a Entry.LUA mod got me to thinking that perhaps I could add a current merchant ship to other countries…or is there a scripting way to change a nationality?
Thinking along the lines of the tanker war in the early 1980s, I think there could be some good mission ideas with the PG map. I would need to find a way to work ROE (?) or scripts and triggers to keep certain ships (based on nationality) as “neutral” but potentially targets depending on what happens in the mission.
Well good news! You’re getting a Royal Navy soon (probably). Trade off is you’re no longer getting Soviet/Russian surface combatants or US amphibious ships with any sort of promptness.
All AI merchie ships are hold overs from Flanker 2.5. There is hope that with the new tanker civilian auto-gen traffic, ED will take some of those and transform them into actual AI units, but other than acknowledgement a request has been made, there’s been no real update on this front in a while.
Three options
Extreme use of the USAF Aggressors faction and or Georgia. Georgia, Iran, Ukraine and Russia all have merchant ship. USAFA has all units in the game.
Editing the mission an manually changing a previously placed unit from one country to another
Editing the countries.lua (it’s one of those), and adding merchant ships to all and sundry.
Options one and two will not break integrity check, option three absolutely will.
I’ve got several hundred lines of code trying to do this. It’s a pain in the dick. You can do a very rough facsimile by playing with the ROE and Invisible settings, but it’s very painful, and very fragile. There is also the problem that there is no room for ambiguity with the AI. It seems to either not know about a unit, or it knows everything about a unit. Any sort of VID situation would have to be heavily simulated, or for the benefit of the player alone. CMANO this ain’t.
Supposedly ED will be adding a neutral coalition sometime soon (probably), perhaps that will help.
Thanks for the (as always) valuable insights. I think I’ll try Option 2. From your description of the difficulties I will rethink my Tanker War scenario so be less sophisticated than my first ideas. Maybe just some potentially hit in the cross fire stuff that deducts points (actually automatically deducted ifs side)
This would be so much better with CDCM! To paraphrase the Bard, “My Kingdom for a C802!”
Well I think I may have answered my own question. But I was thinking for the mission I’m working on could a number my human flags 100, 101, 102 ect. and have my AI action Flags be 200, 201, 202 ect. That way I can keep track of whats what… after about 15 flags I’m lost in my actions…
Perhaps “I am surrendering to fun!” should be the motto for all DCS-themed forums.
…and “I am surrendering to a 32-bit application, a hopelessly outdated graphics engine that still won’t give full performance with today’s CPUs and a navigation aid database that is litterly from the the last century!” should be my FSX-themed forum motto…oops, was that my out loud voice?
So, I was trying a little bit of a “realistic” scenario design per our hijack of the RAZBAM F-15E thread (shoutout to @Hangar200) and I was using ye olde Flanker 2.0 F-14As to run a CAP when I came across a rather nagging problem: the F-14 is apparently configured with short legs. So they get out to the area to perform CAP and maaayyybeeee shoot down one MiG, but then turn tail and glue themselves to the S-3B, which apparently doesn’t have enough gas for a single F-14, let alone two, resulting in one F-14 crew ejecting 'cause no gas (not enough beans). I could have sworn there was a way to add fuel via trigger or set infinite fuel for a particular aircraft, so is that right or am I completely wrong?
If I can’t make the F-14s work I’ll have to replace them with bugs, which I kinda don’t want to do unless I have to.
Tonight I landed my Mig-21 a bit hard and blew all three tires…which, as it turned out happened to be a good thing, seeing as how I had forgotten to put the gear handle in the neutral position, which used up all the pressure air…so no drag chute and no wheel brakes…it took most of the runway, but riding on the rims stopped me…but I digress.
I called the ground crew for repair and wouldn’t you know it, they had Mig-21tires! At a base with no Mig-21s stationed there! What are the odds?
Right now there is a pretty cool supply system at airfields, airplanes, ammo, fuel and misc stuff like pods and fuel tanks.
But what about parts? Your plane comes back damaged but not a total loss…a few systems shot up, maybe a new elevator or gear strut, possinly an engine change out…and of course new tires.
So what if each base had some quantity of spares for aircraft that are stationed at a base with links to warehouses or other bases for aircraft that make an emergency landing there…so they have to wait a bit to get repaired.
The list of things that show up as broken in the debrief when you crash and explode might be a place to start…not the whole list, just the stuff you could swap out.
OK, probably not until DCS 3.0…I can’t think of anyway to script it.
Yeah…I did think of that. If single player campaign mission, I’m pretty sure there is a way to immediately start a new mission with a “48 hours later” message to kick things off.
If in something like Blue Flag, the idea would be to add a couple of minutes…so instead of the normal 170 seconds you might have 240 seconds…enough to “get the feel” of waiting on parts without a really lengthy delay…a couple minutes to listen to how the battle is going and plan your next move…maybe get a cup of coffee and…er…“see a man about a horse” as it were.
For a Blue Flag I think the idea would be to do this for any airbase that was originally the other side’s, but was captured by your side…they’d have to keep track of that some how.
What would really be cool is doing something with carriers. So I land in my shot up Su-33 on USS Carrier. Obviously they don’t have the correct widgets to repair me. About a minute later, as I sit on the flight deck, I see a C-2 COD trap, taxi and park. My parts have arrived! The Russians don’t have a COD so maybe one of their big helos…in DHL colors!
BTW, in the real world, F-4 wheels/tires fit Mig-23s…the Soviet idea was as they overran western airbases, they would capture ready made spare parts to fix their aircraft. They never got to put it to the test, but the USN did. Way back, a Cuban Flogger pilot defected by flying to NAS Guantanamo Bay. The Mig-23’s tires were pretty thread bare. Not wanting an accident on the runway when the Cubans came to get their plane back, we replaced the tires with F-4 tires. A perfect fit.