An ARMA 3 mission inspired by a very similar sounding game.
Liberate cities, villages and other locations on the islands of Tanoa. Player starting inventory, loot inventory and enemy inventory is random and improves with game progress. At the start, you'll be facing looters with no body armor armed with pistols, SMGs and shotguns, until you encounter the Tanoan National Army, who'll come equipped with assault rifles and machine guns.
- Developer-written code to quantify a weapon's "value" on the battlefield, that is generic, meaning it could in theory be applicable to any mod OOTB
- This quantification of a weapon's quality is thus used to randomize every unit's inventory and loadout, granting the end-user a complete loot-based environment with regards to weapons the missions offers to the users
- This random genericness is further used on locations themselves; enemy bases and roadblocks are created in editor; a script is used to extract the relative positions of every item and create a
#define BUILDING_HQ_TYPEblueprint; during mission start, the map is scanned for buildings with known "base-configurations" and a random one is chosen - All of the above ensures tons of randomness and thereby a same, but unique experience everytime it's played
- Presently, it is only written for and usable on Tanoa (the building configs above require it; there are generics, but also only for Tanoa (tropical flavor; generifying this is also possible, in theory, or maybe just LUT translation))
- It requires all official DLCs (e.g. Marksmen DLC, etc.), including Contact and no mods to have the same experience as the developer and clients that have so far tested it
- You can replace the place-holding sound files with the real deal for the more authentic experience; only intro (Menu music), win (sector won), lose (sector lost) are implemented; they add a lot of atmosphere, but I don't want to tread licensing issues by including them here, so this is on you
- For the actual current source code, please refer to the attachments of the releases
- There is no saving, so your progress is lost; the current workaround is a dedicated server with persistency; if you hack around and enable saving and it happens to work, tell me!
Download the latest release here.
If you want to play it single-player, place the PBO file in your MPMissions folder in your Arma directory and host a local LAN multiplayer game; this is effectively de facto single-player ("lone multiplayer").
You parajump in; left-click the location, right-click and hold to drag the map around AND set the direction you want to be faced inserting, mouse-wheel to zoom, and then click OK to spawn in. Liberated locations in your control will show up on the left side of the map as an alternative spawn location, without parajumping.
The default intention is Imuri Island -> Koumac -> Bala Airport, much like Omerta -> Drassen, but the parajump allows you to pick any location you'd want, since it's all code designed to run as generic as possible.
As of v220402, it seems the user experience is the same on dedicated/locally hosted
This is the command I use to spawn a dedicated server on a Linux shell I've SSH'ed into with the Arma 3 directory as the working directory
nohup ./RA2_Tanoa.sh >stdout.log 2>stderr.log &
These are the contents of RA2_Tanoa.sh
#!/bin/sh
./arma3server_x64 -cfg="./serverconfig/basic.cfg" -config="./serverconfig/CONFIG_RA2_Tanoa.cfg" -world=empty -port=2902 -noSound -hugePages -loadMissionToMemory -autoInit
These are the (brevity- and privacy-redacted) contents of CONFIG_RA2_Tanoa.cfg
hostname = "[DE] cr4qsh0t's dedicated | Ragged Alliance 2 | PUBLIC TESTING"; // *if* my dedicated public server is running, you can find my dedicated server on port 2902 on morgen.ist or zaidatek.net
//password = "YOUR_SERVER_PASSWORD";
passwordAdmin = "YOUR_ADMIN_PASSWORD";
maxPlayers = 8;
persistent = 1;
disableVoN = 0; // If set to 1, voice chat will be disabled
vonCodecQuality = 10; // Supports range 1-30
voteMissionPlayers = 1;
voteThreshold = 9999;
allowedVoteCmds[] = // Voting commands allowed to players
{
{"admin", false, false}, // vote admin
{"kick", false, true, 0.51}, // vote kick
{"missions", false, false}, // mission change
{"mission", false, false}, // mission selection
{"restart", false, false}, // mission restart
{"reassign", false, false} // mission restart with roles unassigned
};
motd[] = {""};
motdInterval = 0;
autoSelectMission = true; // fix for battleyequerytimeout // idk if still required; used to be an issue around 2021/2022
class Missions
{
class Mission1
{
template = "cr4qsh0t_RA2.Tanoa"; // Filename of pbo in MPMissions folder
difficulty = "Regular"; // "Recruit", "Regular", "Veteran", "Custom"
class Params { // find the names of variables and their default/possible values in CRQ__Param.hpp and CQM__Param.hpp files inside the PBO file
CRA_SystemClutterDetect = 1;
CRA_ProgressFactor = 4000;
CRA_ProgressInit = 0;
};
};
};
timeStampFormat = "short";
logFile = "server_console.log";
BattlEye = 0;
verifySignatures = 2;
kickDuplicate = 1;
allowedFilePatching = 1;
allowedLoadFileExtensions[] = {"hpp","sqs","sqf","fsm","cpp","paa","txt","xml","inc","ext","sqm","ods","fxy","lip","csv","kb","bik","bikb","html","htm","biedi"}; // only allow files with those extensions to be loaded via loadFile command (since Arma 3 v1.19.124216)
allowedPreprocessFileExtensions[] = {"hpp","sqs","sqf","fsm","cpp","paa","txt","xml","inc","ext","sqm","ods","fxy","lip","csv","kb","bik","bikb","html","htm","biedi"}; // only allow files with those extensions to be loaded via preprocessFile / preprocessFileLineNumbers commands (since Arma 3 v1.19.124323)
allowedHTMLLoadExtensions[] = {"htm","html","php","xml","txt"}; // only allow files and URLs with those extensions to be loaded via htmlLoad command (since Arma 3 v1.27.126715)
onUserConnected = ""; // command to run when a player connects
onUserDisconnected = ""; // command to run when a player disconnects
doubleIdDetected = ""; // command to run if a player has the same ID as another player in the server
onUnsignedData = "kick (_this select 0)"; // command to run if a player has unsigned files
onHackedData = "kick (_this select 0)"; // command to run if a player has tampered files
headlessClients[] = {""};
localClient[] = {"127.0.0.1"};
As you can see from the above, I make the progress 4x faster (apparently I've also set that as the default, just to be safe), meaning you need only acquire 25% of the island's locations for 100% equipment progress, otherwise, the full mission would likely take 240+ hours (no victory condition has been programmed yet; obviously I'm inspired to make it about assasinating a particularly ruthless dictator). System-clutter detect makes the engine run a simulation with known objects to determine their EXACT maximum dimensions via ray-collision, allowing those generic bases to be placed even more immersive into location by having to delete fewer surrounding cluttering objects.
Once it's started, there are two modes it works: One will hot-load locations, the other cold-loads them before the server starts. Faster systems (>= e.g. Ryzen 2700X) should use the latter, slower the former (e.g. <=i5-3470), this is a user-defined setting, the default I think is to hot-load, so you may need to wait five minutes until the server is warm and ready (you can join beforehand, but only a progress indicator will be there, no enemies or anything).
Spawning in the first time is a bit buggy.May have been fixed.Probably has.- A base might not yet be spawned when you teleport in, so watch out when it does (1s resolution), especially if the base is on a slope, because you might get hit by a tumbling 40-foot container...
- Duplicate user-defined actions on inventory/maps at locations are unintentional, but harmless and cosmetic
- Enemy names are not synced if the user is not present when they spawn in, these are harmless as well, and also only cosmetic
- Road-Blocks and Outposts can be cleared without having been discovered; in either case, there is no music to signify an acquisition of the player's party by it (usual victory music too much; silence too litte; but cosmetic)
- and a few more I'm currently likely not thinking about
The map after liberating Imuri Island, Koumac and Bala Airstrip, and using the "Gather Intel" action on Bala Airstrip's map, revealing the surrounding area's locations (in the case of an airport, a lot of intel is secured). Half-transparent markers are inactive locations, for which simulation runs suspended. The distance of this defaults to a flat 700m, but it can be adjusted to a higher/lower value and grow or shrink with progress. Locations are kept in an unknown state to decide at the very last moment (to mirror the current progress as closely as possible) what equipment, units, faction, etc. the location is spawned with/as.
The randomly picked enemy base in Yanukka from the preceding screenshot. As a lone player and with default settings, only one larger guard squad and two smaller patrol squads garrison a base at this stage. In the background, a civilian vehicle is moving away into the distance and was spawned in such a way that its origin and destination are beyond the player's activation range and a central waypoint is a random road segment within a certain radius of the player (a civilian road vehicle becomes spawnable when a valid path fulfilling the above criteria has been found, after which it becomes a probability if it gets spawned at all). Compensations due for moving players are also in effect.
Same as above, a little later, but without HUD.
The inside of that base. The map can be gathered for intel, revealing locations, and used to teleport and parajump (arbitrarily as of current development state). The inventory box also gathers loot from corpses and on the ground, and can unload/repack items/mags. A map is part of every location worth points and one that a player can secure, and intentionally missing from Road Blocks/Outposts (which currently cannot be captured by the player, only neutralized)
The plants are not part of the base configuration are part of the scenery; they did not intersect with the base's blueprint, hence they are not deleted from the global scenery when the base spawns. Every component in a non-player/non-character unit's identity (voice, face, pitch, uniform/clothing) is a randomly picked as well.
Patrol paths and bases (what to delete, what to insert) are all precalculated at the beginning to optimize run-time efficiency. A ground-evenness compensation for base decorations is not being performed, as the tipped over bench demonstrates.