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New "serious" multiplayer mission, "Intervention Prevention"


Speed

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MISSION NOW SHOULD WORK IN RELEASE VERSION

 

This is a one to six player multiplayer mission.

 

I just got done adding all major features to a mission I made. In this mission, you strike a Russian invasion force building up at Beslan airport. Actually, the mission is not serious at all. It's got some jokes mixed in, some music, is not totally realistic (the F-15s should help you more, for example)... but you have to FLY "serious". That is what the folks in my squad were hungering for: an old, Falcon 4 style, low altitude, time sensitive objective, where you only get ONE aircraft and you HAVE to work together with your wingmen. This mission succeeds in delivering that. The features that force you to fly "serious" are:

 

1) Time sensitive objective. Flight lead must follow time on steerpoint (TOS) cues on the HUD in order to not arrive too early or too late. Too early, you get shot down by SAMs. Too late, you get shot down by MiGs. This is because at 06:16:45, a "cruise missile" strike occurs on the target that knocks out the majority of the air defenses, and alerts Russian fighters all over the Caucuses to the imminent attack.

 

ADDITIONALLY, due to what is hopefully a bug in the way TOS is calculated in the CDU, client1 MUST start "on the runway". This gives client1, AND ONLY CLIENT1, the proper TOS. Unforunately, the TOS set by the mission creator in the mission editor is offset by the amount of time that it takes someone to start the CDU. Eagle Dynamics, PLEASE FIX THIS!

 

The reason no one else starts on the runway is that this tends to group people very tightly, where just one slight warp will cause a mission-killing collision and explosion.

 

2) Stay low, in the canyons, undetected. This mission uses a line of sight (LOS) script that determines if you are LOS to the enemy A-50 (an AWACS), an enemy early warning radar (EWR), or an enemy SA-10 search radar. Once inside a certain range of these radars, if you are line of sight for more than 8-12 seconds you will be "detected". This causes MiGs to scramble, and alerts Russian air defenses. You will D-I-E. But, stay low, follow the waypoints, and you should be alright!

 

3) One pilot, one aircraft. You only get one aircraft in this mission! The game host NEEDS TO LEAVE IT PAUSED UNTIL EVERYONE IS IN THE COCKPIT!!!! Due to bugs or undesirable features of this Beta, I had to code up a "Registration" system that gets the .id_ of the multiplayer client aircraft. You cannot use the .lua function Unit.getByName(<name>) on multiplayer clients, ED, PLEASE FIX!

 

4) Stay tight! On ingress, Russian air defenses, unless you are detected, are a little sleepy, and don't "wake up" until after someone flies near them. So STAY TIGHT! If your flight starts stringing it out over several miles, the rear aircraft will probably get fragged. If you're tight, then they don't have time to react before the whole flight is already gone. I never liked how twitching and hair-trigger air defenses are in DCS, so this is a solution, at least for this mission.

 

5) Pay attention to AWACS! They will tell you how far away enemy aircraft are. Just like getting to the target is time critical, how long you stay there is time critical too....

 

6) BRIEF!!! At least skim over the verbal briefing, and carefully examine the briefing images.

 

If you have no sense of humor and hate Top Gun, disable "Top Gun Mode" by making the appropriate trigger evaluate true.

 

This mission requires you to fly serious, but is not serious in itself... there is stupid movie reference joke I mixed in there, as well as "mood music" in the target area. Everyone who flew this with me thought that the music added alot to the mission. However, I believe all the sound files, with a total playtime of 10 minutes at lease, really only add up to like 30% of the megabytage of this mission. Alot is in the six briefing pictures, and the scripts and all that stuff. It takes a while to load, perhaps a minute, but the wait is worth it, IMO :thumbup:

 

This mission started out after I had made the Unit LOS (line of sight) .lua script- I had to decide what to do with it. I decided to do some kind of OCA strike- a strike on an airbase. I decided to make it that if you get detected, then enemy fighters scrambled, but if you weren't detected till right till you popped up on the enemy airbase, you could kill the fighters on the ground. From there it morphed into this.

 

Oh, and the requirements to achieve success scale with the number of people flying. More people, and a higher score you have to achieve. The scoring system I use is actually a combination of .lua scripting and triggers- I do not use the built-in mission scoring system... I didn't like it much in Black Shark and I think lua is better anyway.

 

Finally, if you want to try this out in "Single Player", make a multiplayer server, and password it so no one comes in.

 

Things still to do:

 

 

-Randomize threats on ingress/egress

 

-Improve the registration system to make it fool-proof

 

-Add another Top Gun reference or two just for sillyness and entertainment sake. As MadTommy points out, we fly these missions to have fun :)

 

-Re-write the briefing to make it more concise, and perhaps, give less hints on the appropriate actions to do. Also, fix the mission puncuation that disappeared when I copied and pasted from MS Word. (WTF?) Currently, the briefing is like an 1800 word monstrosity. You need to at least remember the basics of the briefing in order to succeed.

 

EDIT:

Edited to work in release version. AGM-86 ALCMs are back! They appear to work, but please report any CTDs that might occur to me.


Edited by Speed
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Sounds fun. Thanks for sharing.

 

Look forward to trying it, (and most likely failing :joystick:)

 

EDIT: I have a question; i often do some of my mission making in a text editor to the mission file, so wanted to have a quick look at you mission and was interested in your use of scripts. Something i don't understand yet. But i notice you have 4 folders; track_data, track, Scripts & Config that contain numerous files, however all these files are empty.

 

What is going on with these? Is there are issue or are they left over from some process?

 

I'm simply interested as I'm wanting to learn other mission makers techniques to help me develop my missions further. If you don't care to share, i understand. Thanks.

 

And one last thing.. bit of feedback.. using png format for your briefing images is making the mission a lot larger than it needs to be, png is a very bulky image format. You could likely save 2 MB off the mission size by converting these. A 490KB png could easily be made to be a 50KB jpeg. (considering the briefing image size is 512x512 px)


Edited by MadTommy

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This is a one to six player multiplayer mission.

 

 

3) One pilot, one aircraft. You only get one aircraft in this mission!

 

 

 

 

How i can make that ? i like to limit player's aircraft too in my multiplayer missions:helpsmilie:

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Sounds fun. Thanks for sharing.

 

Look forward to trying it, (and most likely failing :joystick:)

 

EDIT: I have a question; i often do some of my mission making in a text editor to the mission file, so wanted to have a quick look at you mission and was interested in your use of scripts. Something i don't understand yet. But i notice you have 4 folders; track_data, track, Scripts & Config that contain numerous files, however all these files are empty.

 

What is going on with these? Is there are issue or are they left over from some process?

 

I'm simply interested as I'm wanting to learn other mission makers techniques to help me develop my missions further. If you don't care to share, i understand. Thanks.

 

And one last thing.. bit of feedback.. using png format for your briefing images is making the mission a lot larger than it needs to be, png is a very bulky image format. You could likely save 2 MB off the mission size by converting these. A 490KB png could easily be made to be a 50KB jpeg. (considering the briefing image size is 512x512 px)

 

At one point during the creation process, the mission editor CTD while saving: I had the previous version, but the new version I had been working on for 45 minutes was corrupted. So to recover the new version, and not lose 45 minutes of work, I just recovered the new version from a recent testing track. Looks like I just need to go in and delete those empty track folders.

 

.png seems to have alot higher resolution than .jpg though. I think if I save the briefing images of .jpg, they may become impossible to read. That was my past experience, at least, I could try again.

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How i can make that ? i like to limit player's aircraft too in my multiplayer missions:helpsmilie:

 

During registration process, a flag is set (601 through 606) for each pilot that is flying. If, after I go through the registration process, I detect that one of the registered pilots is dead, then another flag is set (801 thorugh 806 IIRC). Later, if they are detected to be alive and outside the zone of "homeplate", their aircraft explodes.

 

If someone tries to join after mission start, missing the registration process, and they are detected outside of homeplate, then their aircraft explodes too.

 

You wouldn't want to join more than like 20 minutes after mission start anyway, you'd get annihilated by the "woken up" SAMs.


Edited by Speed

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At one point during the creation process, the mission editor CTD while saving: I had the previous version, but the new version I had been working on for 45 minutes was corrupted. So to recover the new version, and not lose 45 minutes of work, I just recovered the new version from a recent testing track. Looks like I just need to go in and delete those empty track folders.

 

And the scripts & config folders also have various empty files too, seemed odd, that's all. Thanks for the explanation.

 

.png seems to have alot higher resolution than .jpg though. I think if I save the briefing images of .jpg, they may become impossible to read. That was my past experience, at least, I could try again.

 

You can achieve the same resolution with jpeg, but yes you are correct that you need to be careful to maintain enough quality with jpegs that they are still clear.

 

page18cb552d0dd0e409d95.jpg - page18cb552d0dd0e409d95.png

 

One of these is 489KB png the other is 84.7KB jpg. Considering you can't zoom in on the briefing pages, there is very little difference in their legibility. (at least to my eyes) :smilewink:

  • Like 1

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And the scripts & config folders also have various empty files too, seemed odd, that's all. Thanks for the explanation.

 

 

 

You can achieve the same resolution with jpeg, but yes you are correct that you need to be careful to maintain enough quality with jpegs that they are still clear.

 

page18cb552d0dd0e409d95.jpg - page18cb552d0dd0e409d95.png

 

One of these is 489KB png the other is 84.7KB jpg. Considering you can't zoom in on the briefing pages, there is very little difference in their legibility. (at least to my eyes) :smilewink:

 

Whoa! I'll have to try that again when I get home. As I said, I tried making jpg images look nice back in Black Shark, and gave up- looks like I may need to try again. What program did you make that .jpg with? Does it matter? I do believe I remember a program I had at one time that I could select how much compression I wanted in my .jpg image, but I no longer have that program. Without those .png briefing images, the file size drops from 6.4MB to 4MB, btw... about 500kB per image, as you point out. Looks like I could drop the mission size by a whole two megabytes IF I can make all the other briefing images look as nice in jpg form as that one you just posted.


Edited by Speed

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I use a Windows Explorer replacement program call Directory Opus, that has a built in image converting function, i simply right click on an image to convert it. I don't suggest you use it, its just the simplest way for me. (But Opus is an amazing program.. couldn't live without it!)

 

But any half decent image manipulation application should do it, there are plenty of free ones about. I converted your png to jpeg and set it to 90% image quality to get the above results.

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I use a Windows Explorer replacement program call Directory Opus, that has a built in image converting function, i simply right click on an image to convert it. I don't suggest you use it, its just the simplest way for me. (But Opus is an amazing program.. couldn't live without it!)

 

But any half decent image manipulation application should do it, there are plenty of free ones about. I converted your png to jpeg and set it to 90% image quality to get the above results.

 

I'll have to download something then. My options, as it stands right now are readable png or super shitty jpg.

 

Ah yes, I remember what is was. Windows XP MS picture editor. In the neverending spirit of progress, microsoft removed the ability to save as a different file type from picture editor, and removed the ability to select jpg compression. Just as the new sound recorder, without even the ability to reject a recording let alone add effects as with the old sound recorder, and requiring a command line entry just to record in a .wav format instead of the vastly superior .wma, is a immeaurable improvement.

 

WTG microsoft! Yea! Wouldn't want to make any programs too complex for Granny to understand, or require too much programming for that $200 you make us shelve out for your latest crash prone operating system every 3 years.

 

EDIT: I was able to convert the briefing files to jpgs and make them still readable... mission is now attached in first post.


Edited by Speed

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  • 4 weeks later...

Put off flying this mission until now as MP wasn't particularly stable in beta6 for me. We had 3 flying this one.

 

Enjoyed this one Speed, great mission, only a few problems.

1) What freq is the AWACS on? (couldn't find it in briefing) never heard him.

2) Had to orbit a few times on way to tgt, flying in the mountains at 240kts is a bit slow to be honest.

3) Stayed on target for for an extra 3 mins and never got picked up by the migs

4) The mig's on the ground taxy to the runway intersection and then stop and never move onto the runway (This I am pretty sure is a bug in the release version).

 

Came of target with all kills and no damage until half way home when I got hit by a Manpad. Saw it too late and limped back on 1 eng. For some reason the MIssile Warning system and auto flare system didn't activate (must test this one further). Great MP mission will play this one again.

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Put off flying this mission until now as MP wasn't particularly stable in beta6 for me. We had 3 flying this one.

 

Enjoyed this one Speed, great mission, only a few problems.

1) What freq is the AWACS on? (couldn't find it in briefing) never heard him.

2) Had to orbit a few times on way to tgt, flying in the mountains at 240kts is a bit slow to be honest.

3) Stayed on target for for an extra 3 mins and never got picked up by the migs

4) The mig's on the ground taxy to the runway intersection and then stop and never move onto the runway (This I am pretty sure is a bug in the release version).

 

Came of target with all kills and no damage until half way home when I got hit by a Manpad. Saw it too late and limped back on 1 eng. For some reason the MIssile Warning system and auto flare system didn't activate (must test this one further). Great MP mission will play this one again.

 

 

It must be the Final Release, I have flown this mission a few times and it worked fine, but that was in beta 4. I almost died from a mig chasing me but i think i made him crash into a mountain while chasing me.

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Yea, this mission is not yet compatable with final release, sorry. AWACs were implemented with triggers, not in actuality. That way, in beta 4, they would actually talk to you. So yea, this is a beta 4 mission, not a release mission. I modified the original post to make it clear.


Edited by Speed

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Sure, I knew you wrote it for beta4 but thought I would try it out on release versionings and posted in case you had any plans to modify?

 

Are triggers broken in the release version or are there other issues?

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Sure, I knew you wrote it for beta4 but thought I would try it out on release versionings and posted in case you had any plans to modify?

 

Are triggers broken in the release version or are there other issues?

 

Well, the Weapon.getPosition function is now Object.getPosition. When I wrote those scripts, I didn't realize I could just make it <unit>:getPostion... whatever... anyway, the scripting is busted till I make those changes.

 

As far as the MiGs not taking off or showing up, I thought I had them on a unit inside zone or a line of sight, but I don't know for sure.

 

I also will have auto-registration with next version I think.

 

Just wait, I should get around to it eventually, but not being able to debug lua anymore due to changes in the release version (boo!) is going to be a MAJOR hurdle.


Edited by Speed

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Okay, look forward to a Release version at some point.

 

I had to go in to my last mission and pull out a bunch of Lua as it broke from beta4 to release somehow and debugging is a pain as you say.

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Okay, look forward to a Release version at some point.

 

I had to go in to my last mission and pull out a bunch of Lua as it broke from beta4 to release somehow and debugging is a pain as you say.

 

I think that all that needs to happen is to change those functions over from Weapon.getPostion to <unit>:getPosition, and then it would work, but I've also got some changes in mind for the mission as a whole. It will probably be a few weeks.... but the release version should be better than the beta version (with the inclusion of automatic "registration" system, for example).

 

As far as none of the migs coming to get you- it is directly because of the Weapon.getPosition() function not working- you were never detected by the enemy radars because the line of sight script was non-functional. Thus, they never tried to come get you, and you thus never heard anyway AWACs calls.

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I've updated the mission now to work now in the release versions. This is not the new version I intend to work in eventually, this is just a version that should work now with final release. We tested it last night with six pilots.

 

Fixes:

-Line Of Sight scripts now working again. Stay low and undetected!

-MiG-29s will take off again. I had to move some tanks further away from the runway so that incredibly timid taxi AI of the MiG-29s introduced with final release does not trigger them to stop in the middle of the taxiway and never take off.

 

Notes:

The AWACs and ALCMs still only exist through triggers. Also, some briefing images are a little out of date now, but who cares. I think that next version, instead of trying to update and add in EVERYTHING I want to, I'll just update a little. #1 priority is making the briefing more concise, #2 priority is adding the ALCMs back in if testing proves them stable in multiplayer (in Beta 4 they caused a host CTD). Well, actually they are still in there, just disabled by a trigger, that's what the "ALCM launch disabled" message means.

 

To anyone thinking of flying this now that it's fixed, keep in mind this mission is designed to be pretty much impossible if you ignore the briefing and try do to your own thing... but I designed the mission to have a high survivability rate if everyone follows the briefing, and sticks together on ingress.


Edited by Speed

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ED appears to have fixed the bug that was causing ALCMs to crash multiplayer hosts, so I enabled them back into the mission. v1.1 is probably one the last edits I will make to this mission till I get one or two other missions out the door. Anyway, here's some cool screenshots of the ALCMs in action:

attachment.php?attachmentid=48882&stc=1&d=1299957456

 

attachment.php?attachmentid=48883&stc=1&d=1299957456

Intelligent discourse can only begin with the honest admission of your own fallibility.

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Now includes remote server administration tools for kicking, banning, loading missions, etc.

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