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MP Mission: Taking Krymsk Coop8 (Ka-50 + A-10C)


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Mission: TAKING KRYMSK COOP8 v1.1

Aircraft: 4 slots A-10C, 4 slots Ka-50

Approx. length: 2-3 hours

 

Me and masterk have been working on this mission for almost a month now with the ultimate goal of making a large scale airfield assault type of mission that involves both the Ka-50 and the A-10C in an operation that requires close cooperation between both types of aircraft.

 

The mission features voiceovers done by masterk (Hammer 1) and myself (Command One) as well as thoughrough pre-flight briefing imagery in an attempt to add to player immersion. Although some aspects of this mission are unrealistic (e.g. the lack of SEAD), they were so chosen in favour of fun and diverse gameplay rather than 100 % authenticity. These features may be changed in future versions if the requests are many. :)

 

The mission has multiplayer slots for 4 A-10C "Warthog" as well as 4 Ka-50 "Black Shark", although it may be completed with as little as two or three good pilots.

 

General mission design, image work, and trigger logic done by LostOblivion, with a huge contribution from masterk on voiceovers, thoughrough testing, and as the Ka-50 player experience quality supervisor.

 

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Scenario Description:

 

This is a joint operation between US NATO forces and the sovereign state of Georgia against Russian forces stationed at KRYMSK. The US 74th F.S. "Flying Tigers" is currently stationed at GELENDZHIK with 7 currently operational A-10s, the only combat ready A-10 squadron in the northern Kaukasus.

 

The OP is spearheaded by a flight of A-10s from the 74th, callsign Hawg 1, as well as a flight of Ka-50 from the Georgian Army, callsign Dodge 1.

 

GELENDZHIK houses the CAOC for this mission, Command One, with NOVOROSSIYSK currently supporting continuing insertion of NATO forces into northern Kaukasus. NOVOROSSIYSK may be used by Hawg flight to re-arm and re-fuel if needed during this mission.

 

For the past week, allied forces have seized control of the suburbs south-west of KRYMSK and have established a forward operating base serving as a middle-station between the coast and KRYMSK. Housing a FARP, FOB MADRID may be used by Dodge flight to re-arm and re-fuel during the operation.

 

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Hawg & Dodge Tasking:

 

You will be part of one of two flights for this mission, a 4-ship section of A-10s, callsign Hawg 1, or a 4-ship section of Ka-50s, callsign Dodge 1.

 

This operation consists of three phases:

1. SEAD in the vicinity of KRYMSK.

2. Attrition of SOUTH SCREEN, two lines of defense screening the entrance to the airfield: point IMPACT, a hostile FARP compound south-west of the airfield consisting of mainly MBTs and light armor, and point COVER, an artillery bty. directly south of the airfield supported by AAA and light armor. (See photos.)

3. Covering the advance of Hammer 1 cav. assaulting KRYMSK airfield from FOB MADRID.

 

HAWG FLIGHT will take off at 0710 and proceed to WP1 where they will anchor and assess the situation at and around KRYMSK, with the initial task of suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) near the city.

 

Hostile SA-3 MERAD has been reported in the area defending KRYMSK, as well as SHORAD threats in close vicinity of the airfield. The favourable position of the mountains between WP1 and KRYMSK will allow Hawg flight to determine the position of any SA-3 sites from a safe distance at WP1 before ingressing the AO and engaging them from IP BANKS near FOB MADRID. Stay below SAM detection altitudes and use the ridges near the IP to mask yourself from fire until all SA-3 sites have been destroyed.

 

Hint: When engaging SA-3 sites, destroying their tracking radar (see photos) will render the site effectively useless.

 

Once all MERAD threats have been destroyed, continue with the suppression of any SHORAD threats, if present, such as Tor or Tunguska SAM, around the airfield.

 

DODGE FLIGHT will take off at 0710 and proceed to and hold at point BANKS, near FOB MADRID, using the ridges to mask themselves from potential SAM engagement. Once Hawg flight has confirmed the destruction of all SAM threats near KRYMSK, Dodge flight will fly east to IP EDSEL and ingress the target area using the city as cover, assisting Hawg flight with the thinning of SOUTH SCREEN (point IMPACT and point COVER) as well as remaining force reserves stationed at the airfield, including grounded air assets. The compound north of the airfield contains most of the enemy reserves. (See photo.)

 

This will enable our assaulting armor groups, callsign Hammer 1, to advance on KRYMSK with minimal losses. Hammer 1 cav. will follow the A-146 highway into KRYMSK and assault and secure the airfield, paving the way for Pontiac, two flights of chinooks bringing troops and equipment to build up defenses once KRYMSK has been taken. Hammer 1 is currently stationed at FOB MADRID, close to point BANKS and will begin their assault once SOUTH SCREEN has been sufficiently thinned for them to advance.

 

Expect medium air defenses around the airfield area, including MANPADS.

 

Note: Hammer 1 must survive and at least one chinook must land for this mission to be deemed successful.

 

(Playable) Hawg 1-1, CAS, 4xA-10C "Warthog", UHF 251

(Playable) Dodge 1-1, CAS, 4xKa-50 "Black Shark", VHF AM 127.5

Dodge 2-1, standby CAS, AH-64D "Apache Longbow", VHF AM 124

Pontiac 1-1, Transport, 2xCH-47C "Chinook", VHF AM 124

Pontiac 2-1, Transport, 2xCH-47C "Chinook", VHF AM 124

Colt 1-1, CAP, 2xF-15C "Eagle", VHF AM 124

Overlord 1-1, AWACS, E-3A, VHF AM 124

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Taking Krymsk Coop8 v1.1.miz


Edited by LostOblivion

Nice plane on that gun...

OS764 P930@4 MBUD3R M6GB G5870 SSDX25 CAntec1200 HTMHW

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.

"coming soon" to a theatre near you...

Ok..

Was this a jab at this fact:

After spending 15 minutes "downloading" the mission, and during that time, opening the .miz file that I downloaded manually..

 

Please, convert the voice acting/files whatever, to OGG format.

 

Wav is just *HUGE*, uncompressed audio.

 

80s tech or something.

 

 

The mission file is 30 Megabytes.

 

Kinda SLOOOOOW to download it during connect.

Sometimes I Amaze even Myself!
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Will do. Had some trouble having Audacity output .ogg files correctly (it always cut the last 0.5 seconds off the tracks), but I will defenately give it a go if the DCS user downloads website has a slow download service for some of you.


Edited by LostOblivion

Nice plane on that gun...

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Ah, yes, I put up the post as I was waiting for the ED website admins to accept the new download on the DCS website. It is now available by following the link on the mission name in the beginning of the first post.

Nice plane on that gun...

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LostOblivion -

 

You might need to convert from stereo to mono first if having trouble exporting to ogg, but it should work fine. HUGE difference over wav. file size.

 

Another tip, in Audacity, go to "Tracks" menu, then "Reample". Convert from the default 44100hz to lowest 8,000hz. That will cut the ogg file in almost half right there, and I believe it also degrades the quality slighly to where it sounds more like an actual radio call. My .ogg files are now usually between 30 KB to 100 KB each. I've got missions with 40 voice overs and the miz file is down to 4 MB, big, but manageable.

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Yeah, no offense :)

 

When we finally got it to fly, the mission was nice.

The SA-3 is ... Challenging :)

 

But once we figured it out, it was a doody to take out.

The Tunguska on the other hand was hard to detect and take care of..

 

My game crashed in the middle, when the blue forces commenced their assault, another "Effects.dll" crash.. not related to the mission it self, I get it elsewhere as well.

 

----------

About the download, it was no problem to download from the DCS site for ourselves. But it didn't matter...

When connecting to the server, the game said: "Loading mission" ... for 5-10 minutes..

Where are we supposed to copy the downloaded mission files?

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Sometimes I Amaze even Myself!
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LostOblivion -

 

You might need to convert from stereo to mono first if having trouble exporting to ogg, but it should work fine. HUGE difference over wav. file size.

 

Another tip, in Audacity, go to "Tracks" menu, then "Reample". Convert from the default 44100hz to lowest 8,000hz. That will cut the ogg file in almost half right there, and I believe it also degrades the quality slighly to where it sounds more like an actual radio call. My .ogg files are now usually between 30 KB to 100 KB each. I've got missions with 40 voice overs and the miz file is down to 4 MB, big, but manageable.

 

If you want to make your sound files even smaller, forget .ogg and use and the GSM 6.10 codec for .wav files- at a similar sample rate, it's roughly half the size of .ogg (and that's mono .ogg, not stereo) :thumbup: I can fit 20 minutes of high quality sound into 4 MB, or if I want to go low quality, I can get over an hour of sound into 4 MB. If you don't believe me, direct me to one of your missions you want me to downsize, and I'll work my magic on it if you want, just as an example :)

 

The only downside of .wav files in the GSM 6.10 codec is that the mission editor "play" feature will not work on them.

 

I recently converted every single AI radio call from Longbow 2- literally several thousand sound files (I think... it's rather had to count)- into a total aggregate size of 7MB. A five second radio call is like 6 kB.


Edited by Speed

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

Member of the Virtual Tactical Air Group: http://vtacticalairgroup.com/

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V1.1 RELEASED!

The .miz mission file is now available straight from the forums by following the link in the first post! :)

 

Changelog:

 

- Converted all sound files to .ogg for an overall smaller file size.

- Added more randomness to SHORAD threats. Now, each of the Tor or Tunguska SHORAD will sometimes not spawn at all.

 


Edited by LostOblivion

Nice plane on that gun...

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My game crashed in the middle, when the blue forces commenced their assault, another "Effects.dll" crash.. not related to the mission it self, I get it elsewhere as well.

 

Aha, so that's what that is. It crashed for us during testing too, several times. It only seems to affect DCS Warthog, not Black shark for some reason... Hope ED brings a hotfix soon.

 

Anyways, happy to see people are enjoying the mission :)

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The host crashed twice last night during the stage of the mission where we support the friendly advance on Krymsk.

 

However, overall, the mission is very fun to play. I expect we will be replaying it several times. I am disconcerted to see the level of crashing going on... doesn't seem as bad as 1.1.0.6, but then again, 1.1.0.6 didn't seem so bad at first. Obviously ED has some bugs to fix somewhere with weapons and effects.

 

And masterk, you're unfortunately wrong about it not affecting Black Shark. Our host who crashed twice was hosting with BS2 :(

 

I'd say the biggest problem for me is my low frame rate- this is a very busy mission with a lot of stuff going on. I'm going to have to finally cave and buy that new computer I have been talking about.

 

Anyway, good mission!


Edited by Speed

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

Member of the Virtual Tactical Air Group: http://vtacticalairgroup.com/

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MIssion Scripting Tools (Mist): http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=98616

Slmod version 7.0 for DCS: World: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=80979

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

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Wow, Speed, thank you for the kind words! It is always difficult to tell if a mission is ultimately any fun to play when we have tested it for so long and changed things along the way, but it is good to hear that you enjoyed it. :)

 

Your thoughts on it being a busy mission with a lot of units has also come to our mind when making it, and we have several times wondered if we should attempt to reduce the number of units in it. Unfortunately it is much harder to remove units than to add them, and we decided not to seeing as how masterk's relatively old computer (GeForce 8 Series) ran it fine once he lowered his graphics settings a bit (especially turning down visibility range). Having said that, I tried cutting the overhead as much as possible by doing things like avoiding demaning trigger logic and increasing group size while reducing the number of groups (which is Dragon's tip IIRC?). In addition, the fact that this mission is close to Krymsk and Novorossiysk cities probably adds a lot of overhead for many as well seeing as how these are relatively big cities with a lot of complexity.


Edited by LostOblivion

Nice plane on that gun...

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i played this today on the firehouse server and thoroughly enjoyed it... the preamble is great and the layout of the units is fantastic.

 

the symetry and neat lines of your target areas adds a deep dimension of immersion... things have always looked so ragtag to me with regards to target sites. How did you achieve this? Patience and very frequent F7 views with the game launched? I'd love to know.

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i played this today on the firehouse server and thoroughly enjoyed it... the preamble is great and the layout of the units is fantastic.

 

the symetry and neat lines of your target areas adds a deep dimension of immersion... things have always looked so ragtag to me with regards to target sites. How did you achieve this? Patience and very frequent F7 views with the game launched? I'd love to know.

 

Thank you so much!! It is good to know the hours of work are appreciated, and I am happy that you had fun playing it! :)

 

On the topic of alignment, etc., I tend to use the ruler in the editor to align units, and then check the units in the game with F7, yes. It would be very helpful if they added the ability to have the ruler sticky, i.e., not disappear when you want to move units and align them according to the ruler.

Nice plane on that gun...

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interesting - i never thought to use the ruler for that purpose - i generally use it to estimate flight times etc.

 

can you offer more detail as to how you use it to line vehicles up so well?

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"This was not in the Manual I did not read", cried the Noob" - BMBM, WWIIOL

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interesting - i never thought to use the ruler for that purpose - i tend to use it for estimating flight times etc...

 

can you offer more detail as to how you use it to align units?

ASUS Tuf Gaming Pro x570 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X @ 3.8 / XFX Radeon 6900 XT / 64 GB DDR4 3200 

"This was not in the Manual I did not read", cried the Noob" - BMBM, WWIIOL

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It is just very basic. :) No fancy stuff going on there. All I do is let the edge of the unit symbol align on the ruler, or on a road, or similar. Another good way of aligning units quickly is putting them on a road with a "onroad" WP and then make it "offroad" and then make them face the right direction...voila, perfect alignment for a roadside parking column. ;)


Edited by LostOblivion

Nice plane on that gun...

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We played it again last night, host was using BS2 (host was me) and we (I) CTDed, again on the same part (friendly assault on Krymsk airfield). My frame rates were awful though- 8 frames per second! I have reduced my graphics settings a bit to try to deal with it. It's a problem with my computer and the game, not the mission- even in the Kyrmsk area with nothing going on, I get like 15 or 16 frames a second (sometimes less, sometimes more)! Sheesh!!! So not a problem per say with the mission, what we're looking at is a problem with DCS and my computer.

 

I also got a consistent problem with my Shkval too- the second I would launch a Vikhr, my Skhval range would jump from the correct range to a range value that was like 2-3km short of the correct range. It would happen consistently, on every target on every Vikhr launch, regardless of launch location and having a very clear, unobstructed LOS. It would also happen while firing guns, meaning I would have to lase about once every two gun bursts. Needless to say, my laser range finder was only good for about a single load of weapons, then I would have to deliberately wreck my landing gear and get a new chopper.

 

I also had my Shkval take off a time or two on the "crazy Shkval" problem, but it wasn't too bad.

 

Unfortunately, because of the CTD, no track exists.

 

I have been unable to reproduce the problem in test missions. Anyway, I'll probably modify this mission slightly to try to replicate this bug.

 

All three of the times we've hosted this and it has crashed, it has been with a host who has Black Shark, a good internet connection, but not so good a computer. I wonder if it will crash if we use a host who has an excellent computer instead?

 

Also, could you give us any idea as to what kind of host you used when the mission did not crash during the friendly assault on the airbase stage of the mission? How was the host's internet connection speed, computer specs, hosting platform (BS2/A-10C), etc? Dedicated server perhaps?

 

For whatever reason, this mission is proving to be a good one for discovering bugs in DCS :)

 

Anyway, if I were you, I wouldn't try to change anything to accommodate these bugs unless they can be isolated fixed without impacting the mission's game play much. Even though we've been CTDing, you should hear the "AWWWWW"s on teamspeak each time it has happened. People were really enjoying the mission. Probably, the next attempt to fly this mission will be with a faster computer as host.


Edited by Speed

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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Hi, Speed, thanks for looking into this for us. It is appreciated. Although you could always blame the DCS engine for crashing, etc., you could also say that there is simpy too much to do for the poor sim in this mission, and that it makes it crash. However, I agree that this should not be a problem. It can run slow, but not crash.

 

We know there is a pretty big lag spike for about 5 seconds at each of the ambushes when everyone fires all at once--lotsa ballistics calculations, but only for about 5 secs. This only happens for the host though, parhaps for clients seeing all the tracers. Does it crash at the same time always? Which part exactly? Which voiceover message? :)

 

It is strange you mention the shkval problem where it hops off target and will not lase properly, we also had this problem, both of us. Though none of us have played enough BS2 yet to know whether there is something bugged with the mission, or in general.

 

When we tested the mission, I hosted it every time using the DCSW MP executable while playing myself--no dedicated. I have a fairly sturdy computer. i7 overclocked to 4 GHz (it is stable), 6 GB DDR3, HD 5870, Intel X25 SSD. We connected using VPN LAN. Although it does crash a lot for us as well, we have been able to finish both ambushes without any, and we did not have any crashes at all when we tested it in DCSW .9. We figured it was a bug with the latest patch since there have been other people with the same problems, according to masterk (he stalks the forums quietly :P). I noticed that DCS ran faster with a lot of units than what it used to before the latest patch, maybe there is some heuristic that went too wrong and makes the game crash or something, I dunno.

 

Btw, if you are going to test it, I suggest...

setting the "TEST Set Test Flag" trigger "SetFlag" action from 98 to 99. It will turn on some practical radio cheats to speed things up in the mission timeline. ;)

 

 

Another thing: this mission was originally created using DCSW 1.1.0.9, and I had some trouble making it work properly when moving to the BS2 editor. When I tried running it in BS2 for the first time since DCSW .9, all the GroupDead triggers would always be true, even though the group was alive. I found out that there is a bug in BS2 where if you put periods in a group's name (e.g. Hammer 1.1), some (all?) of the triggers that work on groups will not work. You can try this yourself creating a fresh BS2 mission, Nate has looked into it. So a quick fix for me was to just change to Hammer 1-1. Anyway, might be related, might not.

 

Thanks again.

 

Lost.


Edited by LostOblivion
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Nice plane on that gun...

OS764 P930@4 MBUD3R M6GB G5870 SSDX25 CAntec1200 HTMHW

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