OK, this is premature because I have not really experimented with campaign layout in BEDitor, but here goes...

Can new units be added via some data file editing or is this purely a coded thing?

I'd like to try adding:
1. Civilians: at least clustered within town objects, at best as unarmed "military" units wandering around the map to make IFF (much) more interesting (since I think only military units actually move in the game, and everything else is just planted in the ground).
2. Radar dummies: add a few nonrendering radar contacts to each military formation to give false positives for the helo radars (yeah, you could do something fancier in code, but I'm not really a coder).

If anyone has some experience in this arena, let me know.

Thanks,
Olds

dfang and I added a new player-controllable helicopter. The great help was that we just modified a copy of the existing.

Addition of non-player controllable unit is both an addition of a new unit of existing type (and it's solvable, a little of 3d modeling, a little of copy-paste in the code) and an addition AI code to make it to operate (if it differs from the existing unit behavior).
The second part can be hard. But I don't know.

It's an interesting topic, but I'll be unavailable for a couple of weeks.
After that I'll look at this topic and see the discussion.

Will you do 3d modeling part of modification?

Sure, 3D modeling, texturing, animating, no problem. Lightwave is not my app of choice, but I'll use it if I have to darnit! Just tell me what you need.

I haven't paid enough attention to the existing (ground unit) AI to notice how it behaves. But I'll take a look at it while you're away and would be happy to put together a crude spec of desired civilian behavior if useful.

A first approximation might involve milling around civilian keysites (automobiles, foot) and occasionally randomly transiting from one keysite to another one (automobiles). It might not take much to add a whole lot of interest and flavor.

-Olds

Olds-Can you add a circular light source to the burning wreckage?something like the picture, I think that for professional graphic is a very simple matter,game would look a lot better with this.

Looks easy. I haven't played with textures at all yet, so I need to familiarize myself with how they work. Only obvious limitation might be that it will only look good on flat surfaces (if it's not a truly projected texture, but simply a (flat) sprite. If you already know what to do and you just need a small texture file, that's quickly done.

-Olds

It is used in all new simulators, black shark, and the like, but in DX7 is also to obtain.
Unfortunately I am not a specialist in this area
maybe Dfang somehow you will lead.

So a quick observation of a campaign and I see the following (correct me if you've seen otherwise), Ground Units are:
1. Mobile--in which case they are restricted to placement and movement on roads.
or
2. Stationary--in which case you find them on keysites, FARPs, etc.
3. Armor, artillery, and transports can be either Mobile or Stationary.
4. Infantry, AA-only units, MANPADS are Stationary only.
4b. The "exception" to this is that Infantry units occasionally send 1 member off on a little circular recon-walk.

So without creating new AI you could presumably have the following Civilians added:
A. Stationary pedestrians peppered around cities and towns (with one member who wanders off on the occasional smoke-break).
B. Civilian car groups who travel from node to node on the road network.

I think that'd be a neat start. It would add some life and occasionally interfere with your targeting. There's no real fog-of-war in EECH mission planning(?), so the odds are probably slim you'll find yourself accidentally shooting near civilians, but who knows?

Any thoughts?

That's a lightmap, Banita? Not a texture but applying colored lighting to the surrounding area from a lightsource (i.e. explosion point)

No, it's just an illuminated texture on a poly. I'm looking into all this in more depth in the this thread. I'd like to make the fx more realistic, but I can only work with what's allowed currently in the game (and I doubt anything more than vertex lighting is in there). Even basic improvements will take help from coders. If someone wants to get more ambitious then let us know and I'll help with the art!

Let's keep this thread on the subject of civilians in combat sims. For example, does anyone even know of a sim that simulates civilian clutter (decently or otherwise)?

Thx
Olds

As far as I know, smoke effects support billboards only.
But explosions support objects, and it is possible to place a horizontal square at the place of explosion with a lightmap texture.
Maybe it's a good start for this effect to be implemented.