RELEASE: DaiZy Chernarus 1.7.6.1 FACTIONS 2.1 [07/11 FINAL RELEASE]

[Anubis]

Hi Haleks,

I am now trying the new update. It is perfect, you did a great work! A couple of things I noted:

1. The "recruit unit" option appears always, even if the AI is already recruited. But who cares.

2. Now the AI answers to the squad menu, but there is no green diamond icon showing its position. Which I think it is good, more realistic.

EDIT:
3. Immediately after you "recruit" the unit the game slows down for maybe 10-20 seconds (frame rate drops) and then go normal again. It happens every time I use the "recruit unit" option

4. After a while: the AI stop attacking Zombies. Do not know why. If you want them to attack a Zombie you must target it and use the "attack citizen" command
 
One stupid question: survivors and bandits respawn if killed? Or once killed, they never come back? I think they respawn after a while, but that's only an impression...

The result is very good. I like the fact you have to get closer to figure out whether those are good guys or not and sometimes you understand it when they start firing.

Anubis

[Haleks]

Anubis wrote

[...]

Yeah I know about the recruit option... Will try to figure out a way to remove it while the AI is in the player's group.
About the fps drops, I think I know what's causing it.

Also : bandits spawn every time the player enters a trigger zone, but not the survivors (to prevent the player from finding too much of them). I'll work on a AI respawn script for them ;)

EDIT : The fps drop is actually due to the recruit script calling some functions - basically the same functions called when a new unit spawns. Trouble is - even if it's an already existing unit, we have to call those functions again every time it changes group : otherwise the AI would stop behaving as expected...
Looks like there's nothing I can do... :/ I hope it's not game-breaking.
Do you have a low-end computer though? It's hardly noticeable on mine.

[Nabu]

hello,

about AI i recognized is that the recruted survivors are shooting from the heli-mg also if they are on hold fire. I saw that before to when i was trying around with the editor making a squad. Mounted on light armor or tanks i spawned they dont behave like that. Small issue, as the uh-1h is the onley helicopter/vehicle with weapons mounted. but like this you cant reach any point with team on the uh-1h and full mg-mags to let rain death in a specific area which is a bit sad as this would be a lot of fun.

If i am right and i dont mix mods now, in the Chernaurus 1.7.6.1 is a drop items, vehicles...etc. cheat. that one which drops the stuff from planes who pass by. you open it in the pause menu, i dont knot how it's called. this cheat has a "unstuck" mode. so this one is useful if you enter in the big crashed planes. i got stuck in the red seats inside twice, in this addon and also in the "normal"-map from Above. just wanted to tell you as in your addon this cheat isn't present.

[Ray]

Use AI Enhancement mods. AI + vehicles = shitstorm. The mods mostly fix matters as such (depends which youre getting).

[Anubis]

Hi Haleks,

Don't worry about the "recruit unit" appearing, it is nothing!

About the slow down after recruiting, that's funny because I have an high-end quad core at 4.5 GHz, but also that does not matter.

What worries me is the fact the AI stop fighting Z (hopefully they'll still engage bandits). I will do some tests and play with the squad commands to see whether this is some kind of glitch that can be fixed.

About survivor respawning: maybe you could have them respawing just like bandits (endlessly) but keeping a counter of the living survivors who have joined the squad: every time a survivor joins the squad the counter goes up and every time a squad member is killed the counter goes down.

Then, you can have the 'recruit unit' ootion appears only if that counter is (for example) below 5 to prevent the player from recruiting a whole army.

Anubis

[Ray]

CPU dosent matter that much in ArmA 2, have a i7 4.8Ghz myself and still lag from time to time. ArmA eats RAM and video memory alot.

[Haleks]

Anubis wrote

...

What worries me is the fact the AI stop fighting Z (hopefully they'll still engage bandits). I will do some tests and play with the squad commands to see whether this is some kind of glitch that can be fixed.

About survivor respawning: maybe you could have them respawing just like bandits (endlessly) but keeping a counter of the living survivors who have joined the squad: every time a survivor joins the squad the counter goes up and every time a squad member is killed the counter goes down.

Then, you can have the 'recruit unit' option appears only if that counter is (for example) below 5 to prevent the player from recruiting a whole army.

Anubis

I can't see why survivors would stop engaging Zeds - except for not having ammo anymore or being set to "hold fire". I've played something like 3 hours last night and found 3 survivors, plus one AI I spawned at the beginning via Loki's. All the four of them reacted as wanted - including the one spawned with Loki's. I'll keep an eye on it though.

And about the AI respawn : what you're suggesting would be a possible solution; but I've used the addAction script from the game to create the Recruit option, and it's quite limited in Arma - I'm not sure I can define such specific conditions. Besides, I don't want to decide for the player how big his group should be.

The cool thing with the respawn script (if I can get it to work), is that we could have the killed survivors respawning at the shore - just like any player in MP - and then making his way to one random city. :D

EDIT : Just noticed a small glitch : it looks like the food & drink icons won't deplete while you're in a vehicle; I think the MP mod had the same bug at one point. I'll look at it and see what can be done.

[Nabu]

hello again,

->
i was testing around with the re-recruting after changing uniform-skin:

Before changing skin you should make sure that nobody of the squad is mounted on a vehicle, as it seems that re-recruting gets imposible at the moment if the squadmember is inside a vehicle and drops out of your squad.
edit: I wanted to recomend get all out and do the skin-change but i tested it at the moment with strange result. i went some 100m away form my cars and the uh-1h i found. The first try the survivor i kicked out of my squad seemed to not move and was easily to recrute, but the second try he run away from me and i chased him to re-recrute him, and he walked straight back to the heli where we came from to mount it before i could re-recrute him. kind of funny but -.- and i dont want to imagen this with a 5 man squad or more^^

->
-until now the survivor i found fires at zeds and bandits and all works fine. ofcourse he is  out of amo fast and needs another weapon or more mun. And after reloading ammo he goes on fighting nicely. so for me that seems to work fine until now.

->
do you have plans how to heal the squad?

may its one posibility if it's not possible to heal them with bloodpacks yourself or things like that: if you add to your survivor-skript a (low/verylow) chance to spawn a "medic-survivor" then he could help out the squadmembers if they strongly wounded. but i made just a fast testing.

greetings!

[Haleks]

Nabu wrote

hello again,

->
i was testing around with the re-recruting after changing uniform-skin:

Before changing skin you should make sure that nobody of the squad is mounted on a vehicle, as it seems that re-recruting gets imposible at the moment if the squadmember is inside a vehicle and drops out of your squad.
edit: I wanted to recomend get all out and do the skin-change but i tested it at the moment with strange result. i went some 100m away form my cars and the uh-1h i found. The first try the survivor i kicked out of my squad seemed to not move and was easily to recrute, but the second try he run away from me and i chased him to re-recrute him, and he walked straight back to the heli where we came from to mount it before i could re-recrute him. kind of funny but -.- and i dont want to imagen this with a 5 man squad or more^^
[...]
do you have plans how to heal the squad?

Thanks for the feedback mate!
I didn't know about the AI in vehicles being impossible to interact with - thanks for letting me know ;)
I've also noticed some strange reactions happening when the survivors are dismissed; I suggest ordering them to hold their position before changing skin (didn't tried yet). I'll try to improve the recruit script.

Regarding the AI healing matter, I don't really have an exact idea atm; I might add some medic - trouble is they can't heal the player (they might be able to heal a broken leg, but that would make the morphine useless).
Meanwhile I found out that you can order them to heal themselves on certain occasions : when around a medical tent/some military camp (like the ones in Elektro & Cherno), a "heal" order will be available in the squad action menu. Select your unit with F2, F3, etc and hit "6" to check if the "heal" order is there.

[Nabu]

hey,

nice you can use my feedback somehow, as i said i am strongly interested to get AI working in this mod... i dont now about modding and just a bit about arma2 but i can test a bit and give some feedback.

i'll tried before also about giving "stop" and other orders like "go to" before skin change, sadly that's not helping... At the moment when the AI takes over control they do what AI orders. They love bord helis and fire their weapons without order it seems^^

about healing... after reading your reply i got an idea. may there is a way to somehow change the playerskins theirself to be "medic-able". i tried out the medic uniform and i can heal my own squad but not myself as it seems. Onley thing that happens, if i give myself a medic uniform and spawn another soldier as first squadmember is, that i get moved from the first position to the f2 also in the screen in the small icons, cant explain that at the moment and dont know if this would happen later with the survivors.

And one more thing about ai. if there is activated the game-difficulty enhanced hud and i think also the waypointinfo in the hud, then the ai seems to act so bad that it's nearly impossible to enter a town. Just to know that it should be strongly recomended to swich of this two things and at least play at veteran-lvl. I think they "see" more enimys threw walls and opren fire until dont have ammo if this is active. may i'm wrong but i have this feeling.

At the moment for some reason my squadmember is not picking up ammo and weapons on his own if he runs out of ammo anymore. and i have to give him the equipment manualy. At one side this is good as he wont change the equipment, on the other side that produces a lot of "micro management". Did this work before? I think yes...i'm not sure if i'm confused with cowarmod.

greetings!

[Ray]

Nabu wrote

hey,

nice you can use my feedback somehow, as i said i am strongly interested to get AI working in this mod... i dont now about modding and just a bit about arma2 but i can test a bit and give some feedback.

i'll tried before also about giving "stop" and other orders like "go to" before skin change, sadly that's not helping... At the moment when the AI takes over control they do what AI orders. They love bord helis and fire their weapons without order it seems^^

about healing... after reading your reply i got an idea. may there is a way to somehow change the playerskins theirself to be "medic-able". i tried out the medic uniform and i can heal my own squad but not myself as it seems. Onley thing that happens, if i give myself a medic uniform and spawn another soldier as first squadmember is, that i get moved from the first position to the f2 also in the screen in the small icons, cant explain that at the moment and dont know if this would happen later with the survivors.

And one more thing about ai. if there is activated the game-difficulty enhanced hud and i think also the waypointinfo in the hud, then the ai seems to act so bad that it's nearly impossible to enter a town. Just to know that it should be strongly recomended to swich of this two things and at least play at veteran-lvl. I think they "see" more enimys threw walls and opren fire until dont have ammo if this is active. may i'm wrong but i have this feeling.

At the moment for some reason my squadmember is not picking up ammo and weapons on his own if he runs out of ammo anymore. and i have to give him the equipment manualy. At one side this is good as he wont change the equipment, on the other side that produces a lot of "micro management". Did this work before? I think yes...i'm not sure if i'm confused with cowarmod.

greetings!

Get some AI re-arming scripts. To resolve the AI running out of ammo issues. And if you recruit someone, then you become a "team leader" if you change skin or such then an AI will get the leader position as soon as you change the skin, that's to prevent AI not getting orders from anyone. There should be a function in the action menu that you could re-ask leadership from the AI that managed to snatch the position.

[Haleks]

The re-arm thing is a CoWarMod feature, it was never part of the mission itself.
I'm guessing you're playing without it atm? It really enhances the AI effectiveness.

Ray wrote

an AI will get the leader position as soon as you change the skin, that's to prevent AI not getting orders from anyone. There should be a function in the action menu that you could re-ask leadership from the AI that managed to snatch the position.

No need, the player becomes the team leader when AI's join his group. Arma 2 code is set so that the AI joins its own group when dismissed from the player's squad. One AI can be leader of its own group, but it'll always loose its leader position when joining an already existing group (for instance the player's).

[Ray]

No need, the player becomes the team leader when AI's join his group. Arma 2 code is set so that the AI joins its own group when dismissed from the player squad. One AI can be leader of its own group, but it'll always loose its leader position when joining an already existing group (for instance the player's).

Interesting, but if you 'leave group' (change skin etc.) then the AI you were teamed up with should still be in one group that managed to create, just one of the AI with higher rank will lead the squad (AFAIK).

[Nabu]

Thank you guys for clearing that up!

yes, i switched of the cowar-mod while playing around with the re-recruting.

[Haleks]

Ray wrote

No need, the player becomes the team leader when AI's join his group. Arma 2 code is set so that the AI joins its own group when dismissed from the player squad. One AI can be leader of its own group, but it'll always loose its leader position when joining an already existing group (for instance the player's).

Interesting, but if you 'leave group' (change skin etc.) then the AI you were teamed up with should still be in one group that managed to create, just one of the AI with higher rank will lead the squad (AFAIK).

Yup, the AI does join a new group (sometimes splitted in several teams), but the trouble is : they're assigned a special waypoint when dismissed (well ...I think), that's why they behave randomly. Not sure I can deactivate this feature; but I should be able to find a work-around...

@Nabu : you should defo re-activate, at least, the AI improvements files of CoWarmod; it'll make your life a lot easier ;)

[Haleks]

By the way, I forgot to add it to the changelog, but I added a few bandits in the wilds...
I just encountered some while roaming up north and, damn! forests can prove to be quite dangerous now...

I was on dirt roads driving an old Lada, and 2 survivors with me, when I noticed some smoke coming out of some trees in the middle of nowhere. 5 minutes later, I was on the crash site, found nothing but a M4CCO... Plus a dead bandit woman on my way back to the car (btw : I might add the death flies back for bandits); no sign of the bandit (or survivor) who killed her. She had a nice DMR on her, took my time to loot, equip my mates etc... Well, within 10 minutes, we were nearly overrunned : Zeds coming from the heli crash, others from deeper in the forest and a couple of bandits who began shooting at us from I-dunno-where!

I lost one of my men, but saved the DMR...

[Nabu]

sounds like really good action to me! the forests were to boring. and now with some bandits and zeds much better i think. One has to go on careful now - everywhere. i have mapsymbols active, so i see the enimy early enough on the map if i check her, but still. But i'm thinking about switching that of soon to have to orientate with compass, the names on the town/village entrance in combination with the map, or at the beginning just the sun and the knowledge i gained of the areas...

p.s. cowarmod is ofcourse active again :)

[Haleks]

Nabu wrote

i have mapsymbols active, so i see the enimy early enough on the map if i check her, but still. But i'm thinking about switching that of soon to have to orientate with compass, the names on the town/village entrance in combination with the map, or at the beginning just the sun and the knowledge i gained of the areas...

It'll be a bit harder, but soooo much more immersive. I, personnaly, sometimes play with mercenary settings (no Hud infos, no 3rd person view); I must say I jumped off my chair a couple of times ^^
Such hardcore settings can be stressfull in MP, but it does enhance the SP feeling.

[Anubis]

Haleks,

Recently I have been on a dayZ MP server that has "groups" (3-5) of AI NPC, either survivors or bandits. To meet a group of bandits is a real challenge, because they try to flank you and at least one of those bastards has a sniper rifle.

I was thinking the following: if you change the bandits behavior (a bandit does not attack other bandits) and have them spawning not alone, but in groups of 2-3 wouldn't that be more challenging?

Maybe we could have single bandits spawning on the coast and groups spawning far north, especially around hot places like NWAF, Stary and NEAF.

What do you think?

Anubis
 

[Haleks]

Damn guys... Stop reading my miiind!

More seriously, I've been thinking a long time about that. I'm playing with several ideas regarding the bandits and will try a few things once I've finished with the survivors : adding them a respawn script; create a "ignore/fire at Zeds" order (had an idea while playing last night, should be doable!) and somehow improve the recruit feature.

Once it's done, I'll defo do something about the bandits : I'll probably have some of them moving in squads (maybe 3 people groups) and add some convoys. I've also tried Clayman's Zero mission (wich is already the best user-made mission I've played so far), and I've to say I was overwhelmed by the quality of his work : excellent usage of multiple and complex scripts, very nice background & ideas... While playing it, I was thinking about creating some kinda small bandit army set all the way up North, where from they would send some convoys and squads. (I'll most likely edit the dayz code to remove the wrecks from some of the roads.)
But all of this is "in project", and it'll take some time.