Flashy

Okay, thats a lot more than I had actually thought were possible. I had seen people over on the Il-2 forums saying that more than 30 active at a time was problematic, so 80 is definitely an improvement. Thanks, I'll try find that - would be useful! Yes, well that is the reason I wanted a negative operator on the counter - it would make counting deaths and disconnects possible. I dont think respawns matter as long as you can count the death.. I'm not actually that concerned with counting players (I have basically given up on being able to do that for now - we dont have the tools) but I know that I can count AI to some extent. Thats why I wanted to try and use the negative counter logic to keep the number of active AI at around 40 at all times. That way, it should never reach the point of overloading the server, no matter how many players "trigger" AI spawners.. Thanks, it was very helpful actually! I'm not sure I quite understand this though - how do the timers stagger the events then if they are all set to 1 second? So lets say you have a flight of Spads in close formation entering a zone: the first one enters at 0 seconds, the 2nd enters at 500 milliseconds, the third at 1 second etc. If I then put those events into 1 second timers, I'm still only going to have half a second delay when all those timers go off? How do you "add time" to each of those events so that they can be counted by the counter logic?

Been thinking about this a bit more, and would like to know more about how you "stagger" the events using timers and counters. Do you perhaps have a group I could look at if its not too much trouble? As we know, we all spawn objects using triggers when players enter certain areas to prevent too many objects being active at any one time, but its still possible (although unlikely) that 10 players will simultaneously enter 10 different areas and spawn too many objects. So, I was wondering if it might be possible to create something in the mission that keeps track of how many objects are active (like the counter logic) and only spawns an object if the mission can afford it. Something along the lines of a "can I spawn?" master timer that gets disabled once 40 (for example) objects have been spawned, enabled again once there are less than 40 active, and against which any new object trying to spawn gets checked before spawning. I thought it might be possible to do this by expanding Butzzell's timer to be able to count to 40, and then somehow staggering the spawn and delete events created during the mission to that they can be reliably counted by the counter logic. What do you guys think? Possible?

Thanks Butzzell, seems to be working correctly now!

Thanks, yeah that is a good solution to staggering the events to prevent overwhelming the counter. Will try it! Its funny, I have also read that checkzones dont work for non-dedicated server MP missions, but in the mission I am making now, they are working in non-dedicated. Although they werent intially, so I dont know whats going on! Maybe they work intermittently or something, but I'll test it some more. I copied the artillery battery spawning logic from the SP campaign mission and pretty much pasted it into my mission and changed it to all allied planes and it does spawn the guns when an AI plane enters.. weird.. As far as I can tell, the new MCU's allow for setting the value of a counter to something else, and for adding a fixed value to a counter. Although I cant think of a situation in which that would be useful.. yet..

Just another quick question: I have been playing with this counter a bit and I am noticing some..odd behaviour. I added simple increment and decrement logic to both sides, changed the inputs to timers and it seems to count up perfectly fine, but coming back down it does weird stuff, with a whole bunch of the translators being activated at the same time. It also doesnt go back down past 30, and the 0 and 33 translator is always on. I tried adding a bit of a delay into my count logic, but it didnt fix it. I also changed the number of increments to only 15 in case I was trying to count past what the counter could handle, but it still breaks on the decrement operation. Could you maybe take a look and see what is going on? There are little subtitles in the left and right bottom corner showing when the up and down operation is being triggered.. oh, and I also started adding extra timers to replace the translators, but they arent doing anything at the moment or being triggered, so ignore them Counter Test.zip

oh cool, thanks! That is really awesome - will give it a look. The main reason I have wanted a negative operator on a counter is to keep track of the number of planes in a particular area. If you look at how other missions (including the SP campaign) decide if a ground target should be spawned, it always seems to involve a fairly complex combination of checkzones or complex triggers to detect planes, or just a timer to despawn them after X number of minutes. The SP missions for example use two checkzones called Further and Closer to determine if planes are near enough to spawn the ground units, then despawn them when they are further away than X km. I have always thought it would be much easier to just have one complex trigger and keep track of how many planes have entered, and how many have left/died. So, for each plane that enters, you increment the counter. For each plane that dies/exits/leaves, you decrement the counter. When the counter hits 0 - despawn the units. So if 5 planes flew into the area, and only 3 are left or have died(exited, whatever) then you know to keep the ground units active. As I said earlier, Ankor built a similar mechanism to the counter you attached a while back for RoF, but I think we had issues with the speed at which events could be counted - I found it was quite easy to trigger events too quickly for the counter to count, and then the logic would break. For example, if you had two Spads in a dive flying close together enter the zone, it would only count one. I would imagine that problem would be even worse for WW2 planes that are much faster. Do you perhaps know what the "response time" of your counter is? Have you ever used it for events that occur in quick succession?

Thanks Kliegmann, thats pretty much the solution I went for as well. 3 named recons that each have their own complex trigger, which activates other complex triggers as they are needed when the player takes off, flies over the target etc. It actually is pretty simple this way, and only results in 3-4 complex triggers active at any one time for the recon planes. I didnt need the counters and timers etc because the recon plane is only required to spot a target (in this case a panzer "division"), so there is no need for him to stay in the area or take pictures. Thanks again for all the replies and help!

Thanks guys, have seen Butzzell a PM. I had a question about the recon logic in the FiF missions and how it works. Not sure who is the right person to talk to about that, but lets see what Butzzell says..

Hi everyone, Just a quick question: who is the mission designer/author of the FiF missions? I want to pick their brain about some ME logic.. thanks!

In-Game Name: Flashy Squadron affiliation: none Preferred side: Dont care timezone: GMT +2