Mission editing tips

[Durham]

I was very impressed by the immersive environment created by the author of A Normal Day, which we played on Friday evening.  His name is R 3 4 P 3 R and he has obviously done this before, as he has a whole directory full of custom scripts.

To get to the files you need pbomanager which works like winzip and compiles and decompiles .pbo files. (http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=16369)

I worked out how he got the radios to play different audio streams, which works as follows:

There is a file called "description.ext" in which you can define custom classes within some of the Bohemia cfg classes.  It needs to be in the mission directory alongside "mission.sqf".  This is initialized at mission start with no calls, and allows you to change stuff which then gets reused throughout the mission.

The class for sounds is CfgSounds.

So description.ext looks like this

class CfgSounds
{
   class ambient_radio  //any name, no spaces and no leading _ which is for local variables, therefore this is public
   {
      name = "ambient_radio";  //repeat of the name
      sound[] = {"music\radio.ogg", 0.8, 1}; //directory location of the sound file, volume, pitch
      titles[] = {0, ""};  //not used
   };
};

You then place down an object (in this case called "radio"), and have the following code in the init.sqf file:

[] spawn {
   while {true} do {
      if(player distance radio < 26) then {
         radio say ["ambient_radio", 26];  //this will play the the sound file defined inside the class when player is < 26 distance from it
         sleep 104;
      };
      sleep 2;
   };
};

To mess with sound you need a program called audacity (http://audacityteam.org/download/) which can produce the required .ogg file type from most standard audio files.

There are tools to get sound files out of youtube videos, but I have yet to find one that works without a load of adware attached.  Nonetheless, audacity allows you to record your own sounds with your microphone, so if you wanted to do custom briefings during insertion, you would record the briefing, place an object in the insertion vehicle and voila.

He did a lot of other cool stuff which I will work at understanding and repeating.

D

[Durham]

As one of our party was so fascinated by the picture shown on the laptop, I thought I would give you the script.

The laptop is Objects (Small) Laptop (Open).

The init for the object is:

this  attachTo [laptoptisch,[0,0,0.55]]; this setObjectTextureGlobal [0, "images\youp.paa"];

where "laptoptisch" is a Objects (Camping) Camping Table on which the laptop is sitting.

images\ is the directory for the picture file in the custom BI format ".paa" where youp.paa is located.

You can convert common image files into .paa using TexView2 (http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=1563) which is a BI developer tool.

Using the tips above you could record your own audio from a porn site and then the laptop would have sound effects also.  In this case the guy is obviously using headphones!

[Asid]

Interesting.

I agree with the immersion provided by R 3 4 P 3 R. He has put in a lot of work.

thanks for providing the info

Regards

[Durham]

The two most important structural things I have learnt are as follows, owing to the lag of a step debugger as in excel, sql or visual studio:

1.  LOG FILES

These are stored in "C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Arma 3" as .rpt files which log all the activities in the meeting and will throw the errors in your code.  Poseidon tools, which I am using as my IDE (http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=22139) will take you straight to the most recent log file.

2.  SANDBOX

Have a debugging mission going using the altis airfield to test new additions and scripts.  Only bring the new stuff into your big mission once the simple mission does what you want and your scripts throw no errors in the .rpt file.  Looking for missing semi colons in a large file is a nightmare, so keep the files small when you are testing so you have as good a chance as any of seeing your syntax errors.  The intellisense is nowhere near as good as a real IDE, so do not think just because it accepts your code it is without basic errors.

[wilso845]

All this information will help others who are making or thinking about making missions, this is how a community should work,

Thanks Durham

[Asid]

All this information will help others who are making or thinking about making missions, this is how a community should work,

Thanks Durham

Well said