Can you see me?


I made a DCS A-10C MP mission and my Win 7 firewall is checked On for both Home/Work and Public. This mission is broadcasting as Internet with server name 'SimHQ WCrew'. I double-checked the server's IP for Port Forwarding on the modem.

I cannot see this server of mine on the Internet page of the DCS servers window.
But with LAN instead of Internet, I can see this DCS A-10C server and join the mission with my other computer.

My mission was up as 'SimHQ WCrew'. On my other puter I cannot see the 'SimHQ WCrew' server under Internet but I can see it under LAN.

How to fix?

I'm not seeing ya, Wreck. First guess is that you're behind a router and you don't have the ports forwarded correctly.

I'm on TS3 and will chat with ya when you're on.

Got it - had to open the UDP port as well, 10308.

WC

Fun times, Wreck! It was fun flying with PMike and Unpilot as well. Them formations are just getting prettier.

Had a fun time on your server last night, WC. Those nuke plants didn't stand a chance.

Hey BadK,
It was good flying - man there's one target close to Nuke 1 that just keeps blowing up like a volcano. It's a tough mission, "Nuke Plant", with all the air defenses - best to stay upstairs.

I left it running all night but there was not much destruction this morning - it's a four ship - air start because the ingress is a long way... maybe folks don't like that much.

WC

WC, I thought it was just fine. I had nailed the two nuke cooling towers before I left. I try to up that high myself for most missions. Air start was okay with me also. Only thing I would change, is to maybe the loadout, to just two Mav Ds (to eliminate drag that high up) instead of six and add two (GBU-12 or GBU-38) to compliment your GBU-31s.

Hope to see you online again, fun times.

- Ice,
You posted a topic in DCS Forums about designating a building as a target -
- Ice, Bombing Buildings


I'm trying to do the same thing in my new Nuke Plant mission - I have about 10 buildings near a nuke cooling tower that I want to designate as targets. I placed static buildings over those buildings on the map. Seems some of those placed static units will be destroyed when the map building is bombed, like the Pumping Station seems to blow, but lots of the static objects remain after the map building is destroyed.

Did you figure a solution?

Wrecking Crew

Never did, WC, sorry. Unless you put a static building in the vicinity and designate THAT as the target. Unfortunately, we have only a few selection of static objects so you can't put a "fake nuke site" anywhere. Want to blow up some containers though?

Why not just use triggers to designate it with smoke or give the coordinates? Its not like the nuke plant can move locations. As for detecting if an object is destroyed, the latest version of SLMOD can determine if world objects are destroyed. Basically you blow them up in single player, grab the debrief log to get the ID of the building, add the IDs to a SLMOD script.

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