Helo Transport Mission: Chickenhawk

[TeTeT]

Hi,

I've recently ported Workhorse by BTK from Takistan to Chernarus. Instead of flying a CH-47 the player controls a Mi-8 MTV there. Today I started to create a random helo transport mission for an unarmed UH-1H for VTE, I hope I'll have an alpha ready by Monday. A question on the helo crew: I ordered my copilot to board the helo, but he takes place in the transport area, not in the copilot seat. Is there a way to move him there? I've picked the Dak Seang map from VTE, particulary as I played Sup3rSam3r's mission there. Are there any prepared populated bases for that map around that I could use?

Cheers,
TeTeT

[Snake Man]

random helo transport mission for an unarmed UH-1H for VTE

Cool, please let us know when you have it available for download.

I ordered my copilot to board the helo, but he takes place in the transport area, not in the copilot seat. Is there a way to move him there?

No, VTE huey has cargo spaces only in the backseats. There is no co-pilot. But this is a good point, I've written it into VTE bugs list and will add that real co-pilot, so when huey is in-game, its manned with pilot and co-pilot.

Thanks for the tip.

Are there any prepared populated bases for that map around that I could use?

Dak Seang has one nice base in the central area, you should be able to find it easily. Or did you mean something else "populated"?

[TeTeT]

Yes, I meant something different. I was thinking of guards, vehicles, patrols, idle people and so forth at the base. Kind of like an AmbientBaseLife script. When I think about, it would be nice to have the same for the villages. When the player comes close to a village, some sort of village life starts and when he 's gone, the villagers disappear again. Wonder if anything like that is possible? Needless to say, I'm pretty new to arma editing ...

[Snake Man]

Ah okay, no we don't have any mission templates for populated bases or villages. I can't remember the status of ALICE module, but it should be quite easy to configure for VTE too, again something for future upgrades

[TeTeT]

I've encountered two problems so far: the rotor blade texture seems to be white unless it's spinning and there is a floating bridge close to the center camp. Here are two images illustrating the problem:

http://tspindler.de/arma/missions/chick ... bridge.png
http://tspindler.de/arma/missions/chick ... exture.png

A very very early version of the mission is up here, I hope it works at all, I only tested it from the editor so far:
http://tspindler.de/arma/missions/chick ... _seang.pbo

Right now there are only three transport missions, nothing exciting or so.

[Snake Man]

Hmm floating bridge, darn I have missed that then. I was pretty careful when going through all the terrains that there is no floating bridges left. I have written that down to bugs list, thanks for the report. I don't know whats up with the rotor blade, looks like simple missing texture, except... we don't get any missing texture errors. I'll have to investigate it, luckily its no critical bug.

[TeTeT]

I've made some progress with the mission, but not as much as I had hoped for ... There's just 7 tasks so far, so I need to add a dozen or so more to make it a bit more random and interesting.

I've started to populate the base a bit and set two squads on patrol via UPSMON. I also wanted to add guards to the watchtowers, but somehow they don't like to get on top of the platform. I tried _guard setPos (_x buildingPos Y) with Y being 0, 1, and 2. All the time the guard stands beside the tower. Any chance to have it look from the platform? Here's the code I use to init the base watchtowers:

Code: Select all

_towerGroup = createGroup west;
_name = "Land_VTE_Watchtower2";

_pos = getPos BaseSpawn;
_dist = 300;

_towers = nearestObjects [_pos, [_name], _dist];
{ 
  _guard = "VTE_Armysoldier" createUnit [getPos _x, _towerGroup, ""];
  // _guard setPos (_x buildingPos 2);
} forEach _towers;

[Snake Man]

Hmm honestly I can't remember the details right now. In mission editor when you carefully place a unit, it will be positioned in the tower at the right spot, but if you just setpos/createUnit the guy to the coordinates... dunno if you need to additionally give it height too, so he is created in the air in the right spot.

[TeTeT]

For the record, I delayed the setPos call with a sleep and now it works just fine. Here's the code, though the guardpost script cal could use some love, so the outside of the camp is watched, not the compound. If you want to recycle it, you need three objects on map named BaseSpawn, FSB18Pos and OutpostPos. Of course they can be changed

Code: Select all

// Towers
_towerGroup = createGroup west;
_name = "Land_VTE_Watchtower2";

_positions = [(getPos BaseSpawn), (getPos FSB18Pos), (getPos OutpostPos)];
_dist = 300;

{
  _pos = _x;
  _towers = nearestObjects [_pos, [_name], _dist];
  { 
    _tower = _x;
    _guard = "VTE_Armysoldier" createUnit [ (getPos _tower), _towerGroup, ""];
    // _guard setPos (_tower buildingPos random(4));
  } forEach _towers;
} forEach _positions;
sleep 1;
{
  _x setPos ((nearestBuilding _x) buildingPos random(3));
  [_x, 360, "SAFE", "Middle", true, 2] execVM "guard_post\GuardPost.sqf";
} forEach (units _towerGroup);
DEBUG_MSG(["BASE INIT COMPLETE"])

When I tried to get a guard on the tower, I tried various approaches and none worked for a long time. So I had around 10 guards spawned around each watchtower. When I found the work around above, suddenly a few guards fell from the tower

[Snake Man]

Code: Select all

_x setPos ((nearestBuilding _x) buildingPos random(3)); 

This is pretty cool. I've always done it the old fashioned way of just setPosing him to the right height

[TeTeT]

The first working alpha is there. Fly four out of ten sorties to complete the mission. There are two extra missions, that can be activated by flying two other missions first. There are still a lot of missions missing, as well as overall polish, but it is basically playable. You can test the latest daily build from here:
http://tspindler.de/arma/missions/chickenhawk/

I tried to use the DAC module for the civilians, as it activates and deactivates units on players presence. Unfortunately it didn't work and so I hardcoded the civ generation. There are some 55 civilians activate, plus 40 US guards and some 10 VC. In the biggest firefight 80 additional soldiers are spawned when closing in on the LZ. There are also any number of random helo and planes in the air. So expect to get low frames on low end systems.

[Snake Man]

Hmm that pbo is 37.9mb in size, that is questionable for single player and totally unacceptable for multiplayer. You had the images dir with two huge duplicate images and I bet the sounds dir ogg files can be compressed to a smaller size. Also once you get the scripts working, you should delete all readme's and any other unused files except the scripts themselves from the dirs.

You didn't say if this was pure SP mission or can be played in MP too?

[TeTeT]

Thanks for the advice! I didn't really pay any attention to the size. The Sound folder was 30+ MB, as I used full quality conversion from the base mp3 I used. It's down to 14 MB now, and I guess the 44100 Hz sampling rate is also not needed. I'll have to brush up my ffmpeg skills though to get the reduction done. The two large images were leftovers from the early loading screen and not even in use anymore. Once the mission is ready, I'll follow your advice and get rid of the docs directory. It's just 24k though.

I just uploaded the mission again, it's still 16 MB of which 14 MB are the sounds ... BTW the sounds are old AFVN jingles and the Functions/Music.sqf file has an array with the mods music and the jingles names and length in it, so a hopefully continuous playback can be achieved. Unfortunately saving the game messes up the sleep timing. BTW if you want to add the jingles to the mod, I think that would be awesome Maybe even a function can be added to emulate afvn, as I tried with the Music.sqf script.

For now the mission is single player and I will rename it accordingly soon. I don't think a multiplayer version will be very attractive, as I find that the helo pilots I encounter in multiplayer are already quite busy. There's always something to transport or bomb However, if there's interest in it, I can give it a try.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Snake Man]

My rule of thumb for in-game music is that "if it sounds bad, you have compressed it too much, take one notch back." heh. I believe the VTE music tracks are very very poor quality like 22kbit (or dunno about those values, cant even remember how I did them back then), but as said, if they still sound like "OK" you're good. Having excellent sound quality (technically) there is just waste of space, especially in a mission.

BTW take a quick comparison of the duration and file sizes on your ogg's against VTE's music tracks, that should give you rough outline to follow.

[TeTeT]

I made some progress on the mission over the last days. The pbo size is down to 10 MB, the jingles have been compressed further now. I don't think there's any quality loss. I added a dynamic AI spawn / despawn script for villages and bases. Currently there are 15 tasks available of which 4 will compose the mission. For today's upload I disabled the debug messages, so it should look nicer: http://tspindler.de/arma/missions/chick ... _seang.pbo. There seems to be an issue with restoring a save when the UPSMON scripts are initializing or so, so better don't use the saves

[Snake Man]

Alright size wise it looks much more nicer for single player now, good job

[TeTeT]

Time for a beta release I think. There are 19 base missions, 2 extra missions that will be available when the right base mission is played and 1 RTB mission. There is some traffic in form of helicopters, planes and ships, and the villages are populated by a few civilians. The bases are also populated. Bases and villages will activate and deactivate on player proximity, so the total number of AI people will be below 100 and vehicle below 50.

What I haven't figured out so far, is how to fix the script errors when reloading a saved mission. Somehow the firefight and upsmon scripts break and I don't really understand why.

If you want to take a look:
http://tspindler.de/arma/missions/chickenhawk/
and either use the beta (played at least once) or the latest daily (maybe untested).

[TeTeT]

Bummer, I discovered another problem. The civilian boats that I spawned seem to be all enemy and confuse the attack helo ai when attacking. Any idea what might go wrong here:

Code: Select all

_boatCiv = "VTE_sampan";
_boatUS = "VTE_pbr";
_boatVC = "VTE_sampan";
_boatType = _boatCiv;
_totalBoats = 0;

spawnBoat = {
  _spawn = _riverSpawnPoints call BIS_fnc_selectRandom;
  // removed east from auto spawn, so attack helo does not get distracted
  _side = [west, civilian] call BIS_fnc_selectRandom;
  if (_side == west) then { _boatType = _boatUs; };
  // if (_side == east) then { _boatType = _boatVC; };
  if (_side == civilian) then { _boatType = _boatCiv; };
  _northOrSouth = floor(random(2));
  _dir = 180 * _northOrSouth;
  _dest = [ RiverNorth, RiverSouth ] select _northOrSouth;
  _all = [(getPos _spawn), _dir, _boatType, _side] call BIS_fnc_spawnVehicle;
  _boat = _all select 0;
  _boatGroup = _all select 2;
  _pos = getPos _dest;
  _WP = _boatGroup addWaypoint [_pos, 0];
  WP(_WP, "MOVE");
  _boatGroup setCurrentWaypoint [_boatGroup, 0];
  _boat
};

[Snake Man]

I need to add real civilian side sampan's, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'm not sure if you can fix the AI attacking them as enemy.

[TeTeT]

Another wishlist item would be to change the default faces for the Vietnamese. PMC should have introduced some nice new types. Here's a list of those that I think are suitable for VC:

face57, face58, face108_PMC, face109_PMC, face110_PMC, face111_PMC, face112_PMC, face114_PMC, face115_PMC, face116_PMC, face119_PMC, face120_PMC, face121_PMC, face122_PMC, face123_PMC, face124_PMC