Its Ready - Syrian Campaign...

[BluBear]

My opinion:

1. Whether we witness them taking off or not is unimportant I reckon, it's not like the days of vulching in IL2.

2. That's a little more difficult because the A2A capabilities vary week on week. If it's Fen's week on, we'd need double the air threat to account for his impact!

[Friar]

Ok chaps, I am hoping I have resolved the AI spawn, so,.......

I am going to have one last go tomorrow (Thursday) with the mission. (starting from fresh). The score module has been updated so I am afraid you will loose any score that is not banked if you are killed.

I will save at the end of the night and then re-load it before the next session to see if it works, rather than save during the first session and then perhaps waster your time if it does not load.

Fingers crossed.

Hope to see you all in the next session.

Friar

 

[BluBear]

Thanks Col. I'll be there!

[Friar]

Hey chaps,

I have just loaded up the mission as if we were going to run week 2.

I am pleased to report that the mission loaded, took a while but it loaded all ok.

Alpha FOB is still showing blue as it Abu Talhur, the JTAC is showing as being located there as well (I moved him to the FOB right at the end of the mission).

and...

The planes that were ferried from Incirlik to Hatay are showing as in stock.

I also kicked off the enemy AI and planes started spawning in

So...

Based on this quick test, I am prepared to say that I think we are now in business to run the Campaign as I had hoped, at last!

Many thanks once again for all your trust and patience to get this working.

[Friar]

Erm, bit embarrassing chaps, we are not quite out of the woods after all.

When I did my test I did not make much of the convoy that attacks Alpha FOB (the one with helicopter escort) starting up, but thinking about it, this is another problem. It means the mechanic I have used (a module called "convoy") which I have discovered is not compliant with Persistence, so they are started fresh each mission, units killed in one session will re-start in the next session.

This is obviously a problem.

I will now go through the mission and remove the convoy module and use a different method to trigger convoys.

What this does mean, unfortunately, that we will need another re-start. I propose to do this Monday evening. 

 

[Friar]

Following some more testing (thanks to @fruitbat for the assistance) we encountered a performance issue after saving the mission a couple of times. I reported this to cfrag (creator of DML) and he kindly investigated.

He unearthed a contributing issue from ED in the way the server performs when loading the mission and has made changes to one of his key scripts to accommodate this. He also commented on the fact that I may have been too keen with the number of units I had in the map. Turns out I had made arrangements for just over 1200! Not all were on the map at the start but they were in the "library" so to speak ready to be used.

To correct this I have decided (and perhaps a decision I should have made at the start) to break the campaign map into phases. Probably 3, may be 2. I will delete all the units that will be required in phase 2 from the phase 1 section, in Phase 2 all the units in Phase 1 will be removed etc.

This should help considerably with our performance, together with the changes to the scripts.

When we move from phase 1 to phase 2, I will test copying the score files over so I am hoping you will be able to keep a running total for the whole campaign. 

I am hoping to have Phase 1 ready for Monday so we can make a start in doing some of the ground work ready for Thursday.

Apologies for yet another fresh start but I am sure you all appreciate the learning curve this has been but I hope (again) we are there this time (yes, I know I have said this before  )

Hopefully Real Life V1.0 will be treating you all a bit better this week, only myself and Fruitbat on Monday and Thursday last week (turns out this was a good thing!)

Cheers

Friar

[Friar]

Below is the area I propose for "Phase 1" of the Campaign