[Wishlist] A10C Radio presets on ME

Could we have mission editor radio presets for the A10C as we have now with most of the modules?

You know, it would be nice to set all the 3 radio channels so people won't have to change all of them everytime they join a mission or server.

Thanks!

You already can by adding a custom radio setting file to the mission, or by doing a mission prepare (which amounts to the same thing, just more interactively).

But yes, that's an artieact of a much older design that the current version of the ME has made completely obsolete and which really should be rolled into how it works for all other aircraft.

@Tippis, can you elaborate a bit on "adding a custom radio setting file to the mission"?

I'm not sure how to do that.

Our squadron _really_ needs a common set of presets for our hawgs...

On 10/4/2019 at 5:08 PM, Tippis said:

You already can by adding a custom radio setting file to the mission, or by doing a mission prepare (which amounts to the same thing, just more interactively).

 

 

But yes, that's an artieact of a much older design that the current version of the ME has made completely obsolete and which really should be rolled into how it works for all other aircraft.

4 minutes ago, sinistar said:

@Tippis, can you elaborate a bit on "adding a custom radio setting file to the mission"?

I'm not sure how to do that.

Our squadron _really_ needs a common set of presets for our hawgs...

The most immediate way of doing it is to use the thoroughly antiquated “prepare mission” function in the mission editor. It only really works with the A-10 and the Ka-50 — all modules after that put those kinds of settings in the mission editor like the OP is suggesting for the A-10. This puts you in the mission, lets you set up your aircraft, and then you can quit out and have those settings saved.

What this does is that it creates a set of “device files” for the systems you set up during the prep, and those files are then included in the mission file. This only works for SP but the files that are created are things you can then use in an MP mission. I don't fully remember their names and format off the top of my head, so you'll have to experiment a bit with it — they're fairly obvious and self-explanatory though. You can extract them by opening up the .miz file using any old zip manipulation tool and dig around — they'll be in their own subdirectory in the mission file, and it's best to just extract that full directory. You can then insert them in any new mission you create by using the same zip manipulation and just put that directory back in there. They'll be named after the system, so you'll have an ARC-whatever file for each radio for instance, and in those, the presets will be a numbered (Lua) list with the frequencies exposed as simple Hz numbers. It's very easy to manually edit and get what you want.

The limitations to this is that, 1) this is a pretty elaborate process as you may have noticed: create a dummy SP mission, use “prep mission” to create the necessary files, extract them, create the MP mission, re-insert the files. Once you have them extracted once, you can just edit them using any old text editor — no need to keep using the prep mission thing. 2) as mentioned, the method was originally intended for SP and it shows: the files you extract will apply to all A-10s in any mission you import them into, as opposed to the later way of doing things directly in the ME for other aircraft, and have different groups use different settings. Everyone gets the same thing with this method.

This is why it has been (often) proposed to just do a revamp of the whole thing and make the A-10s work like any modern module, with all those “prep mission” settings being exposed, on a per-group basis, directly in the editor.