Welp I made good progress tonight with my proof of concept tonight. I have most of the initial function that I wanted done. I’ll have to flesh it out more tomorrow.
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Yeah…now that I read it, that’s not what I meant. I was assuming that ground forces were there ensuring the “All Dead” part…but I wasn’t clear. yes, you are correct.
Which makes the Airborne Assault concept interesting. Essentially you can do the whole thing yourself (a team that is). Both Blue and Red have flyable helos for both the initial aerial strike and follow-up trop deployment.
I worked up a simple single player mission tonight - a proof of concept. Only problem is getting the troops to embark on the helo. They kind of run up to it and then just stand there. Not sure what the issue is…the only YouTube tutorial is with a much earlier version of DCS. You can “fake it” with triggers deactivating a platoon when the helo arrives to embark them and then activate another platoon when you hit the LZ…somebody should grab the code from Operation Flashpoint…they had this fixed in the 1990s!
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Unit spawns, flies to location and executes script as it should.
Next unit spawns and flies to location, executes same script… it doesn’t work.
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I fund some Lua code last night that is supposed to do the embark / disembark…now how to figure out where it goes. Three Choices:
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In Advanced Waypoint menu, Preform Task (or is it Preform Command) has a run Lua code.
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In Triggers for the vehicle/aircraft there is Triggers tab that also has a lua entry.
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Using a Trigger ONE EVENT with the proper condition (probably Unit in Zone) the Action can be a lua command or script.
Last night I got a homing beacon to work for the Hip in two ways.
1 A Russian fortification (Armed Watch Tower) - set frequency and then Transmit Message (you need an .oog or .wav file)
- Using a couple of triggers. Make a trigger zone. First trigger Set a “Beacon Radio” to Flag (1). Second trigger, Make Flag(1) to True and set the action to Transmit message from the trigger zone.
Both work, however, in the Triggers version, I was trying to get the Zone to be a Moving zone attached to an FFG (FFG Zone)- I set the trigger to Continuous and had a KA-27 land on the FFG. The Zone Unit is the FFG, the Zone is FFG Zone, the Unit is the KA-27.
(the Idea is to find the ship in a fog)
It works (i.e. the beacon doesn’t start until the KA-27 lands. However, the Zone seems to “stick” to the spot where it was first activated, not stick to the FFG.
I also tried making the FFG bth the Zone Unit and the activating Unit…that works (negation the Helix requirement)…but the zone still sticks.
Maybe my zone is too big? I don’t think so - 2000 ft.
Also, by setting one of my radio panels to the FFG’s frequency I can get azimuths…and they don’t always match the DF needle in the Hip.
Ideas?
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If you want, feel free to PM me what you’ve got. I can take a look. I’ve got a PhD in smashing my head against various furniture due to Lua.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it, but game engine wise, a capture-able unit (Airfield, Farp), should not be captured until there a unit of the opposing coalition is present while there are no units of the coalition to which the airfield belongs present. I do not specifically remember if it needs to be a ground unit, or if a plane/helicopter counts, but they do need to be touching the ground near the airfield, unopposed.
Paraphrasing a popular cartoon, the golden rule of DCS mission development: Just because it exists doesn’t mean it works, Just because it’s broken doesn’t mean that it’s communicated to you, everything is gonna break eventually. Come fly Hornets. That would appear to be broken. As you found there is a work around.
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Welp after taking some time away from it I decided to go back to basics and lose the CTLD code (though I’d love to learn more about it) So here’s my small proof of concept.
The airfield is Red
Blue air assets clear the airfield of enemy presence.
C-130 deploys to the airfield only after it is clear.
The airfield is currently neutral until the C-130 parks and “deploys”
Deploys only support trucks and a few troops.
The airfield is now blue and open for business. If that is done successfully (the C-130 makes it) Then a C-17 is deployed with a small defensive team to help hold the airfield.
In theory, you would have far more opposition and it would take time to clear ground threats and you would have to watch for air threats too. I have to figure out what would happen if the C-130 didn’t make it.
Edit: in rereading the original post I’m not sure if I accomplished what was asked… Though you would definitely have to escort the aircraft to the new airfield.
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That’s pretty slick. Pretty much what I was asking for.
This way airfield capture is a little more complicated than clear out and drop troops on it. Forces players to remain in the area longer, or risk losing the initiative.
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I’ll keep working on it. Since the airfield goes neutral with out ground units there you could totally lose the field again if you let the enemy slip through your lines. I have an idea for pretty directed responses from the AI I wanna test out tonight.
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Copy all and great mission!
However, I think the point was to get the wrench turners and logisticians to the airfield before it is open for operations.
Which takes us to the support tab…I think…
OK, so I’m Blue and I just captured a Red base per the excellent scenario above.
I’m probably OK with the commie fuel, but what am I going to do with 100 AA-10s and AA-8s when I nead AMRAMs and Sidewinders? Not to mention fuel tanks and other things in the Misc tab (I’m not even going to mention transitioning from 220v/50Hz to 110v/60Hz…go ahead and plug your iPhone into the commie Red outlet and see what happens 
)
I’m thinking what we need is to change the bases logistics / support warehouse or airbase once a second C-17 lands.
Obviously the cheat is to give all bases unlimited everything…but wouldn’t it be more realistic / fun to do it as a graduate build up? Just a thought since I have no idea to code such a thing.
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Good thing DCS Supports editing warehouse contents via script, right guys?
guys?
guys?
(dcs does not support editing warehouse contents via script)
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Can a script manually adjust an aircraft’s armament/loadout/fuel?
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That’s a pretty good idea. DCS doesn’t support it either, though.
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How about interrupting the arming/fueling process? If we can stop that, then potentially we can have our own supply chain, though it’d have to be simplified unless we can get a list of weapons being loaded.
You can detected when a certain weapon is loaded, and take action based off of that. In theory you could detect if someone put an AMRAAM on their jet, and if it’s at a point in the mission where you don’t like that, you could kick them back to spectators for it. You can also block client slots.
But here you get into the reason I’ve only been circling the periphery of this thread instead of diving in. Creating a in-depth theater or AO scenario for a multiplayer environment is a deceptively complex undertaking. There are rather stark areas where DCS is either under or undeveloped when it comes to logistics and what players can or cannot access when it comes to air bases. You can get around this by coding what are essentially home brew logistical systems behind the curtains using Lua and the scripting engine, but these tend to get fairly circuitous the more systems you sidestep or work around. The more complex your code, especially for multiplayer the more difficult and time consuming it is to debug. I’ve tried something on this level twice last year, each time took about a month and averaged around 700 lines of code before I realized the player demand wasn’t there and punted.
I’m not trying to discourage anyone, and I’ll offer help if people want it. That said it might be a more achievable alternative to split this up into a series of more conservative coop single missions as part of a campaign.
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a reading from the Book of Hoggit…
“And lo, the great DCS king said unto his people,
Weapon.flag is an identifier for a bunch of different types of weapons and groupings of weapons. These values are typically used in association with task creation to define “weaponType” entries. Each type of weapon is indexed by the power of 2. Some values are generated by adding enumerators together to create a generalized category. These entries are fixed values.
…and those that heard the proclamation were utterly confused.”
Actually what I think this means is that you can set up a weapons load for a certain task for a certain aircraft (i.e. Antiship missiles on a Viggen for an Anti-ship task) and also set up a different load for a different task (i.e. bombs for a CAS mission).
So when a plane returns from its anti-ship mission you can change its mission to CAS and the load out will change.
Actually that’s a question not a statement. Please add a ?everywhere appropriate…pretty much at the end of every sentence.
It’d take a lot more study on my part, as I’m approaching this from a completely different perspective. I have an extraordinary old dusty system I was making for ArmA3 to track logistics, but it was self contained and for a singleplayer campaign. For DCS, I’m sure there’s a level of compromise required, but it may be more prudent to work a simple system first and get the basics online before tackling more complex problems like logistics.
At one time a year and a half ago I had a node system set up with capture and garrison rules in LUA. If a node was on the front line, spawn and attack the neighbouring enemy. If a node was behind the lines, spawn a convoy to send to the front lines to reinforce/resupply. Attacks would come from that supply at the front line nodes. The problem was making that into good gameplay sucked. If you make it too realistic or too complex, it becomes a maintenance nightmare. Then you have to find a way to get players to the right locations with limited intel and no ability to create good waypoints (I was probably over complicating that).
Sitting back an thinking up ideas is great. I don’t want to discourage that. Implementing those ideas in a dynamic mission is a different problem and maintenance is somewhat difficult - when I want to fly, I don’t want to have to spend hours maintaining a mission as it cuts into the flying time drastically.
That led me down the road to a system to make missions ‘dynamic’ in that you had a mission to accomplish (a target) but the location was variable, the garrisons and counter air were variable giving, what I hope to be the sense of a ‘dynamic’ field without having to deal with all the logistics and tracking. But then the Harrier came out, I got distracted with life issues and then the Hornet came out. Unfortunately neither of those platforms is stable enough to build something around yet. But we are getting there.
Over the past 2-3 years parts of a system of supply have been filtering into DCS - I have the feeling that a developer over there wants to get into it but there were other priorities. Over the last year I seem to remember ED posting a job description for a position that hinted at them focusing on this area of game play. I feel we will see that sometime soon. Not sure it will make it into the LUA sides of things (as in we get to make our own stuff on top of it or if it will be locked in to 3rd Party developers). So, as usual … it’s not available yet.
I think that this can be done for the AI (and you can internally keep track of supply in LUA) but not for players (that I know of).
Try 6-7. I remember when these were introduced in DCS World 1.X
Ok so on the limited supply and build up. You can make a off base warehouse to supply it, and can’t you set the rate of supply?
In theory (I was hoping to test this and haven’t had the time) Couldn’t you have a neutral airbase with a red warehouse and a blue warehouse supplying it? You could even have the warehouses be part of the objectives?