Frontlines Georgia bug reports

Hi NineLine, reporting a few issues I encountered playing the campaign and offering some solutions.

General issues:

May be worth having an editor go over the text. There are some spelling and grammar issues in the campaign description and briefings.

It is not immediately clear what role players are taking. While it may be a bit immersion breaking, a designer's note in the initial situation text might help to help players understand why they are unable to directly control vehicles in some missions. I.E. "In this mission you will act as a tactical commander for multiple groups of units. Units will not be directly controllable, but must be commanded through the Combined Arms interface in the F10 map" I've seen several instances of players believing this to be a bug or a problem with the campaign rather than intended design.

When not using supplemental documentation and viewing briefings directly through the ME, it is not clear you need to arm your air support through the mission planner until after you are no longer able to access the mission planner. Consider adding a note to the situation field, viewable before launching the mission, that will let players know to arm their support A/C.

Mission 1:

a) VOs overlapped on several occasions.

Possible solution: increase a flag with every VO, with approximate values of the length of VOs; i.e. flag 5, 5 seconds, flag 10, 10 seconds, flag 15, 15 seconds etc. Include in each dialogue trigger TIME SINCE FLAG (5, 5) TIME SINCE FLAG (10, 10) TIME SINCE FLAG (15, 15) etc.

b) After failing the mission due to losing control of Alpha, I was able to succeed upon retaking it. Received both "MISSION FAILED" and "MISSION SUCCESS" messages and campaign progressed.

Possible solution: Set a flag on mission failure. Include a FLAG IS FALSE condition in the mission success trigger.

c) Some units did not play VOs on movement, only displayed text messages

Possible solution: Not sure if not all units are voice acted or if DCS dropped your .ogg files. I have experienced the latter on occasion. If all lines should be voice acted, open the .miz and double check that your files play when you hit the play button. If they do not, rename the VO file and re-add it to the mission, or manually drag the file into the l10n directory.

d) All enemy units visible in mission planner. Not sure if this is by design or not.

e) Player is able to click and drag FARP location in mission planner.

f) Wind direction causes A/C at Senaki to take off from RWY 27 despite being parked at the threshold of 09.

Possible solution: relocate a/c parking

Mission 2: I experienced a number of gameplay and comms issues with this one.

a) RADAR screen not visible on Shilka. Not sure if this is a deliberate change or a bug in a recent patch. I see the icon indicating the RADAR is emitting but no display. I run a 2x1080P monitor setup with the main game on the "left" and MFD exports on the "right" as far as Windows and DCS are concerned.

b) Helicopter group tasked to Spitter 3 was reported to be coming from heading 141 instead of heading 321

Possible solution: re-record VO :music_whistling:

c) Similarly, the helicopter group tasked to Spitter 2 reported coming from 082 instead of 262

d) Same issue with the group of 4 helos tasked to Spitter 2; headings are inverted

e) Next helicopter group is tasked to Spitter 1 in the VO, but is actually approaching Spitter 3 from the West

f) Helicopters that were damaged and forced into a survivable emergency landing were not reported as dead, blocking mission progress until totally destroyed.

Possible solution: include either a UNIT'S LIFE LESS THAN check that explodes the helos, or a UNIT'S ALTITUDE and UNIT'S SPEED LOWER THAN check to determine if helos are stationary and count them as destroyed.

g) Helicopter groups that were damaged and bugged out were not reported as dead, blocking mission progress. A damaged Mi-24 made it all the way across the Inguri before I stopped watching him. I was unable to progress beyond this point in the mission as one helo auto'd in an unreachable location and this guy bugged out. In spite of sustaining no casualties and forcing all enemy helos to retreat, the mission was reported as a failure to hold off the enemy air assault.

Possible solution:

In addition to damage/altitude checks proposed above, consider adding a UNIT OUTSIDE ZONE trigger to detect if hostile helos bug out or, alternately, adding a red FARP somewhere in the city so they divert and land if damaged, triggering the altitude/speed check in a timely fashion.

Will continue to post as I play more missions.

Adding to feefifofum's report

Mission 2

-Spitter 1-1 is not controllable.

When you lock a target in the Shilka you get a computed lead pipper like an MBT.

c) I ran out of volunteers for VOs, I am still occasionally adding them but the most important ones are done, and the ear candy is missing a few here and there.

Give me a holler. I've done some VOs, I know radio-speak and I've been told I have a voice for radio. Or maybe it was a face for radio...:D

Mission 5

This has the ditched target aircraft trigger blocking.

Mission 4: The late activation units do not appear, therefore no win conditions are met....

Am I missing something?

My guess is there are units hiding inside a zone you need to keep clear. I was able to get through the mission.

OK, thank you Paganus for the hint. will try to check. Tacview might help.

EDIT: Confirm it works: I had indeed a last infantry unit hiding in buildings...

Currently on Stable, and I'm getting zero voice-overs. Is there a setting that might be suppressing them? They are in the .miz files and do play in Windows.

And these less-than-dead helos are still hanging things up badly. Has the fix been pushed out?

Yes indeed, that was it! Thanks, NL.

I've been playing this campaign and I'm enjoying it, but I've found the next bugs, the second one particularly annoying:

Mission 1: One of my T-72 got stuck BELOW a bridge. Not a big deal but ugly effect (like if it has magnetic tracks).

Mission 2: Air Defense: I've got attacked many positions and defended them all. I've had a problem on the first attack on position A, I shoot down a Hind but didn't explode. I've had to move my Shilka to a position where I could see the Hind, shoot and explode it in the ground.I spent some time until I've realized this.

Then I've refused like 3 or 4 attacks more, shooting down all the hinds (and I believe exploding them). But nothing else happens, I'm sure something has to trigger but it just don't do. I've searched for unexploded Hinds but I didn't found any.

So I had to quit the mission and it gives me a Failes Mission and steps to the next one, which I don't agree.

How can I step back to the second mission of the campaing, maybe editing a .lua file?

And how can I prevent these triggering problems?

Damaged hinds landing safely will not trigger the mission step, you have to kill them for the trigger to work

Thanks for the reports, will start working on those!

 

 

 

I noticed that when I was building it, but I thought I had added those to the units already, but I had some other issues with Mission 2 so maybe I missed an edit somewhere. Will check it out for sure.

hello nineline

consider adding those triggers please. ive seen it happen twice yesterday. helis emergency land and it doesnt count as destroyed - what more, emergency landed helis are invincible and cannot be destroyed (another bug in dcs now). which makes this mission impossible to finish if just one heli lands.

i have also had a heli leave the battlefield and go home, which also makes the mission impossible to finish. not sure why (rtb from low fuel after fuel loss? rtb because no weapons? mission abort due to threats?). perhaps add a trigger that handles leaving heli as if destroyed.

oh and one more thing

in that one mission (dont remember number), where enemy su-27s arrive and fight friendly f-15s, consider disabling weapon jettisoning for player's su-25s. they just drop their stuff as soon as su-27s arrive making them useless for the rest of mission. shouldnt take more than 3 minutes to fix.

hello nineline

consider adding those triggers please. ive seen it happen twice yesterday. helis emergency land and it doesnt count as destroyed - what more, emergency landed helis are invincible and cannot be destroyed (another bug in dcs now). which makes this mission impossible to finish if just one heli lands.

 

i have also had a heli leave the battlefield and go home, which also makes the mission impossible to finish. not sure why (rtb from low fuel after fuel loss? rtb because no weapons? mission abort due to threats?). perhaps add a trigger that handles leaving heli as if destroyed.

Please ED/NineLine could you fix these???

It's almost IMPOSSIBLE to finish this mission.

Seriously, I've tried like 10 or more times and it's impossible to trigger the right conditions to get success in the mission. Most of times helis doesn't count as dead (they land in bad conditions, they become immortal in the ground and doesn't count as destroyed and after a certain amount of time without anything happen, it fails the mission.

Thanks, I will take a look.

Any progress? It's really frustrating and annoying that I can't make advance on this campaign.

If anyone is interested, in the end I've found that the only way to advance/get success in Hinds mission is to manually edit the files and selecting the next scenario.