It's easy enough to designate, but need to know if it's destroyed (in real time) for in-game triggers like comms or such coming up.

What about putting another object right on top of the reactor building in such a way so that it will be destroyed when the reactor building is destroyed, and use that as a trigger? The players don't have to know they're getting points for killing a surrogate.

That is what I am doing. And I basically want the pilots to level the whole area around the cooling tower. I can put a static object 'WC' on top of the cooling tower and that will disappear when the tower is hit, a Pump Station on top of another building will blow and continue to spit out fireballs for quite some time, but many of the other static objects don't go away when the building they are on top of get destroyed. I wonder if the static objects are under the rubble and protected in some way - I've tried multiple hits... ?

I figure that this weekend I will lay out all the static objects on top of buildings and put waypoints on each with appropriate labels of the static objects. Then I can use JDAMs and drop drop drop and assess pretty quickly which ones are doing what.

I have not started using triggers yet, but do have the GUI manual open and am reading through it.

Look for my mission in mp - at server WCrew's Nest.

Thanks for all the responses folks, -Ice.

WC

That is the problem. How to put buildings ON TOP of other buildings. From what I remember, units (tanks, infantry) can be placed ON TOP of buildings, but static objects merge/clip the map buildings and unless the static object is physically bigger, it will be "hidden" on the map building. Drop a bomb and that map building will desintegrate, but will leave the "hidden" static object intact, even though everything around the static object is burning.

The reason I don't want to put units on top of or around buildings is I do not want any indicator for the pilot to see that it is the target building... I want the pilot to find the target building either by JTAC lasing or marking with WP, not by scanning with the TGP and finding a tank/soldier on the building.

I got sidetracked. Put together a different mission with ships in it and had "Windows stopped working" issues when certain ships were hit or destroyed. Remembered that this came up right before the November Fly In, when Moa had to take out the Molniyas from Rampant Bear.

Here is the list of ships that cause a crash -

Here are the Russian (red) ships that cause DCS A-10C to stop working in Win 7 64 bit -
v1.1.1.1
Zvezdny
Molniya
Kilo SSK887
Rezky
Som SSK641B
Grisha
Armed Speedboat
Elna
Ivanov
YakuShev

These ships are OK -
Neustrashimy
Pyotr (awesome ship)
Moskva
The Admiral

DCS Forum Link

Wrecking Crew

More sidetracking - now I'm working with triggers.

Adding triggers to recognize when a red air base is cleared, when reinforcements should start travelling, to make F/A-18s disappear after a carrier landing... and when the blue side takes over an air base to "win" the mission.

What I don't get yet is this, Start Conditions panel -

And the one for Stop Conditions. Page 124 in the GUI Manual...




WC

First off what you're looking at isn't a trigger, it's a waypoint action. If no conditions are specified, tasks will start as soon as they are able to be executed (per the waypoint action timeline (GUI Manual page 121) and will continue to be executed per the same timeline. Crafty mission editors can specify additional start and stop criteria, per the window above.

For example, you can set a unit to have a 50% probability of starting the Task of Attack Unit. These draws are made once per action call so, in this example, there's a 50% chance per mission that the unit will execute this task (when it pops up in the timeline). You could also add a stop condition to a task to have a unit stop executing the CAS Enroute Task at a certain time.

Hmm, OK. I am setting flags in the Set Trigger events, such as when a trigger zone is clear of red units. And I do delay some units in the mission by setting their start time to after the mission start.

The Probability line is the least confusing of the other sections of the waypoint action box above. The Is User Flag I don't get at all, and I can't find any guide on what is legitimate in the Conditions box. Why is there a Time line in this box when the Group Waypoint has a Time associated with it?

Thanks, Einstein.

WC

With this Is User Flag, what I think it does is to turn on a selected flag, 0 - 9, to True. Hmm, maybe it is a flag particular to a user and it can have values 0 - 9?

Is this flag particular to that user? Let's say I choose Is User Flag = 1. Is Flag 1 universal or are there many Flag 1's - one for every user that sets a Is User Flag = 1?


The reason that I connected this Conditions panel to Triggers is because of the ability for the Conditions to set a flag, and then have a Trigger act on the flag's state.


How many flags can be used? I am reading through the DCS A-10C Mission Builders forum, but want to open up a conversation here for the advantage of us SimHQ folk.

WC

OK, after a lot of reading on the DCS A-10C Mission Builders forum, the functionality of Flags is starting to gel.

There can be many flags. In one post a Flag 999 was mentioned; in another post it was implied that a Flag can have a number using 5 digits. It is up to the mission designer as to how many flags are needed and how they are assigned.

All Flags start in the mission as False.

Flags are not binary 0 & 1. A Flag's value can be incremented and decremented. *I think* that any value, including zero, will result in the Flag's Boolean state as True, while a Flag Clear (n) will reset the Flag (n) to False.

It is prolly a very good idea to develop a group/unit naming scheme and define how numbered flags are associated with these groups/units. This is where the number of digits in the Flag number can indicate some hierarchy of relationship. For instance, Blue forces could begin with 1, Reds with 2. So a Blue air group could be named 'B AirGrp 105', and a unit in that group would be 'B AirUnit 10501'; 'B ShipGrp 106' and 'B ShipUnit 10612. Then a Flag with the same number could be dedicated to the group/unit. I don't know how all this will work out yet, I need to get back to my sim puter and start defining the possibilities (in Excel, with charts :-)

I need to check that the Is Unit Flag value can be set to large integer numbers like these. There may be a hard limit to the max value, too, like ~65,000.


It looks like tons of things can be accomplished with the flags and triggers, and using the Conditional Start and Stop waypoint actions.


WC