Many Questions

[3./JG51_Stecher]

Hi, I am part of the Ghost Skies team that is looking to put together a campaign for CLOD.  We have been very impressed with your campaign system, and have been learning and testing things with it for a little while now.  We're coming from a dynamic campaign for the old IL-2 that allowed the use of moving columns during the mission.  From what we can see so far, HRCodWar supports only static tanks, trucks, etc, not moving ones.  They can be repositioned between missions, but nothing is actually driving around during gameplay.  I just want to confirm that this is correct.  And if so, would you guys consider adding support for live moving units during a mission?  In our old campaign we found that this feature greatly added to the dynamic aspect of each mission and made the interaction between air and ground forces a lot more fun, seeing the world alive.  Do you think it would be worth doing?

[Grainovich]

Hi Stecher , welcome to our forum and thanks for your words

Yes, you are right, we would like movable units too, moving units will make the campaign more immersive and realistic, but we have a main problem, a problem in the CLOD artificial intelligence units. I don´t know If you used the CLOD full editor and observed the units behavior across the field... and the problem of the bridges and rivers mainly.

CLOD, in some features, it is an unfinished simulator, and the IA units it's one. You can see a unit blocked on a telephone post or hitting a house corner without forward, and arriving to a river and crossing it above water like a messias or falling down deeper... and the bridges!! the nemesis of the units, when a unit try to cross a bridge only 10% of the times will be success, usually is blocked on the beginning of the bridge and goodbye, it's a nightmare!!

For all these strange behaviour, we were obliged to take the decision of use only statics units, because the units will never follow the waypoints marked.

Sorry for my awful english, do you understand me? 

[3./JG51_Stecher]

Thanks.  I hadn't tried with the bridges before, only on roads.  I see what you mean now.  They get stuck, and even kill themselves in the river sometimes.  That's too bad, but I understand the need to only use static tanks, trucks, etc.  What do you think about ships though?  Since they don't have to deal with those problems, maybe they would work better, just going directly between 2 waypoints in the open water.

Also, I was hoping you could clarify what counts towards a team unit when calculating the captures of assets.  Does everything a team can have count equally toward the 2:1 ratio?  Tanks, cars, AA guns, AT guns, artillery, etc.  How about supply columns, do they count the same when figuring the capturing/defending groups?

[Grainovich]

Yes!, you are right again! , ships can sail free from point A to point B, theoretically this feature can be implemented, but it's logic?? if all units can't move? do the ships should do it?

When we planned the campaign system, we thought If all units can´t move .. the ships too, not exists units in movement in the campaign, and thankful to this static feature, the implementation (internal programming side) is more standard and easy and we needed less time to get this feature ready

Conquer resources... ok, the resources can be conquering are: Factories, refineries, power plants and bases.
All resource have a coordinates ok?, so, If at the end (this is important... the calculate is made at the end of the mission) of the mission a side have 2:1 (at least) of units (each unit count like one unit) around (2000 meters) their coordinate, the resource has been conquered.

The proportion and distance are:

conf.ini

metros_conquista = 2000  -> Distance
proporcion_conquista = 2  -> Porpotion (ratio)

I explain myself?

[3./JG51_Stecher]

I guess my thinking is if you can't have them all moving, it may be worth doing the ones you can, rather than none.  But I understand being consistent streamlines the code.

Thanks for the capture confirmation.  I just wanted to make sure that a tank wasn't worth 2X a gun or something like that.

We ran our first full length mission test last night, and I'm still learning plenty from the manual, which is a huge help by the way.  Thank you for including it.   We were trying to do open field rescues of ditched pilots.  Can you confirm, is it correct that you can only rescue a player that is from the same type of aircraft?  Stuka to Stuka worked, 110 to 110 worked, 111 to 111 worked, even if it was a different variant of the same type.  But if a 109 pilot tries to be rescued by a Stuka, it's telling us that there aren't any open seats, even though it does have 2 seats of course.  I don't suppose there is a way of making that situation work.  Are single seater pilots just not able to be rescued?

[Naglfar]

We ran our first full length mission test last night, and I'm still learning plenty from the manual, which is a huge help by the way.  Thank you for including it.   We were trying to do open field rescues of ditched pilots.  Can you confirm, is it correct that you can only rescue a player that is from the same type of aircraft?  Stuka to Stuka worked, 110 to 110 worked, 111 to 111 worked, even if it was a different variant of the same type.  But if a 109 pilot tries to be rescued by a Stuka, it's telling us that there aren't any open seats, even though it does have 2 seats of course.  I don't suppose there is a way of making that situation work.  Are single seater pilots just not able to be rescued?

Are you sure you are not trying to rescue the Stuka pilot by the 109?

From the manual:

>RESCUE PILOT_NICKNAME. Tries to get you into the airplane manned by PILOTNICKNAME. Used to rescue downed pilots behind the enemy lines. Ex: >rescue hr_colibri

In your case, the 109 pilot should use ">rescue stuka_nickname".

Despite the command name you're not trying to rescue that pilot, you're asking that pilot to rescue you.

[Grainovich]

Naglfar's explanation is right!

A tip: You can try this in the own base, you and your comrade can create a 109 and stuka in the same base and go closer to each other, not need takeoff and ditch in the middle of the fields, technically, the player is moved from one airplane to another, doesnt matter "where", you know?

And remember to make the rescue more easy: http://www.halconesrojos.com/hrcodwar/en/conf-ini-reference

metros_rango_rescate: Minimum distance in meters at which both crafts must be located in order a rescue to happen.

You can increase this value.

[3./JG51_Stecher]

Yeah, we actually did that a few times at first, with the rescuer typing in the message.  But after it responded with "no empty seat" on the 109, we figured out we were backwards.  So we had the 109 do the message with the Stuka pilot name.  It also returned the "no empty seat" denial.  We were confused and were actually doing something else while both on the airfield and I accidentally recalled that message in my chat and I wound up in the other guy's plane.  We were both Stukas.  We tried 110/110, 111/111, and they worked, so we figured it was a plane type match requirement.  But last night I tried again as a 109 with a Stuka rescuer.  And I swear we did the exact same thing as before, but this time it worked.  In both instances, we were about 10-15m apart.  Nowhere close to the 100m limit.  I asked the Stuka pilot if he had chocks set, and he said yes.  I am trying to find out if the guy from the first Stuka attempt (different person) had chocks in or not.  I know there is a speed required to be recognized as stopped. I believe it's at 1.  He was, at the very least, stopped with brakes, but not sure about chocks.  Is there an actual chocks requirement, or maybe he was just getting pushed the slightest bit by the wind while on brakes.  I don't know, from my 109 viewpoint, the situations looked identical.  The first one didn't work, the second one did.  We'll do more testing to see if we get it every time.  It's a great feature, and I'm glad to see it working for single seaters in trouble.

[Grainovich]

No, no chocks is needed... only the aircraft stop (speed <=1 like you said) and you can stay with engines on... mmm.. it's weird.

We programed this feature thinking about rescue of fight pilots, mainly have to work with singles seaters

About how the system calculate an aircraft is stopped, it's about his low speed, like you said:

http://www.halconesrojos.com/hrcodwar/en/conf-ini-reference

velocidad_maxima_aparato_parado: Maximum velocity at which a craft will be considered as "stopped", and consequently allowed to perform certain tasks, as load and unload.

Often, an aircraft is stopped on hill with slope falling down and you have the engine stop but the aircraft is moving ... for this reason we "played" with a low velocity to consider stopped

Please, if you find out a potential bug, we are glad to hear you, tell us

[3./JG51_Stecher]

I'll be trying many more rescues in our next test session and will let you know if any of them don't work as expected.

One thing that's been giving us problems is how an abandoned plane is acting.  We saw it when we did the rescue tests on the airfield, and the plane being left was in perfect working condition.  This should normally not come up during a mission.  However, we also see it when someone, who has landed, or not taken off yet, simply hits Esc and then creates a new plane.  I know the appropriate way to get a new plane is to hit Esc, then click on your flag, click OK, and then create a new plane.  And your script handles this very well, getting rid of the old plane in just a few seconds.  But when you don't do the flag/OK step, and just create another plane, an AI pilot takes over the plane, taxis around, takes off, flies circles, and often just crashes the plane.  As much as we will tell people to dispose of their plane properly, we know there will be people that won't get the message, or will forget.  Is there a way of making the other plane simply disappear quickly instead of becoming an AI and flying around, when someone creates two aircraft?

On the ATAG server, they seem to have something that works for this situation, and prevents the plane from being flown by an AI.  But I don't know if it would work with the rest of your script, or if it would need a different code entry.  If it helps at all, here's the console with the debugs enabled for this sequence of events.

[Grainovich]

Thanks for the report Stecher.

As you know, there is only two correct ways to leave your aircraft, like you said.

1 - Press ESC > Hit on flag -> Exit
2 - Write on chat, >exit

This is explained in FAQs and campaign manual (http://www.halconesrojos.com/hrcodwar/en/faqs).

Now, you report to me an error when pilot has forgotten exit the airplane by those two ways and the IA take control of the plane, it's right?

Some pilots have reported the same bug in the last campaign, but not only when the pilot forget exit properly from the aircraft , the bug is aleatory, I don´t know why, we must not forget the cruel reality, it's a unfinished product, you know.

Normally, the aircraft of the bug report was the BF 110.

On the latest stages of the campaign I modified the script with several changes for "destroy an aircraft unused".

1 - If the airplane is flying, the script damages the most important flight systems of the aircraft and after a few seconds, the tank fuel will exploit.
2 - If the airplane is stopped or not made takeoff (the bug case), the script run 2 tasks.
 2.1 - Try to destroy and disappear the aircraft by a call to API CLOD, it's impossible to know if this action will be successfully (the origin of the bug)
 2.2 - The script damages the most important flight systems, so the aircraft is innoperative.

So, when the IA takes the control of the aircraft and the API CLOD fails, the IA takes the control of the an inoperative aircraft and can not do anything, in this scenario, the own system of the game (not HRCODWAR... the game itself) remove the aircraft after a few seconds, but don´t worry, the system (HRCODWAR) counts the aircraft like return and safe in base with no extra damage.

So, the point is?, Why the bug is happening to you?

I think you have an old version of the script, please download it again: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1DB9LptvEJ-cUd6bXh2WTE3N2M/edit?pli=1

Don´t worry about the number version, 3.41 , I do not increase the version number  , I'm sorry,

Replace and overwrite in your HRCODWAR machine server this files.

hrcodwar.cs
lang/es.json
lang/en.json

And in your HRCODWAR website replace the translate files es.json and en.json with the new files (must be the same)

lang_mis/es.json
lang_mis/en.json

Try again and tell us

[3./JG51_Stecher]

Just tried it with the new files.  Unfortunately the same problem.  The AI takes over, taxis, takes off, flies around, etc.

[Grainovich]

Really??  ... this is so weird.. ok ok, I will try myself.

Please Stecher, say me, the bug run with any aircraft?, or only with 110? 109?? ... this is important, thanks

[Grainovich]

dammit!!! you are right!! how is possible!!?? 

[Grainovich]

Ok Stecher, it's fixed ... I believe

Download again please, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1DB9LptvEJ-UXNIZ3dyR2laV28/edit

In your case, replace only hrcodwar.cs file.

This is very strange, we believed tested all combinations but it's obviously we didn't.

Thanks for your testing and help, please let us to know if is all ok