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Module Intelligence
MCF_Intelligence. Requires Core. Nothing to place to switch it on — it attaches itself to whatever game mode the mission uses, the same way Core does.
Two things that turn out to be the same thing: intel as objects players carry around, and an operations board where a commander turns what they brought back into orders.
The centre of the module. Place one where players will walk past it — a command tent, a room in a building. Everything below reaches the board eventually.
It is two screens in one object. Walk up and use it to open the full board; the sheet hanging on it is readable from a few metres away without touching anything.
Letters, notepads, phones, laptops and maps. Any prefab carrying an
MCF_Intel_CarrierComponent is an intel object: players can pick it up, read
it, and carry it.
The component's view decides how it draws:
| View | How it reads |
|---|---|
| DOCUMENT | One body of text, full width. A letter, an order, a page from a logbook. |
| DEVICE | A list of entries with the selected one beside it. A radio log. |
| PAPER | A single sheet held in the hands, one entry per page, turned rather than listed. |
| NOTEPAD | A bound pad, leafed through the same way. |
| PHONE | A home screen of apps, a list inside each, one message at a time. |
| LAPTOP | The same, framed as a laptop. The lid opens. |
MAP is in the list and does nothing yet. It cannot be removed without corrupting saved documents, so it stays as a reserved slot.
You can write the text in the prefab, but you almost never want to — see Edit intel below, which does it live.
A live map on a table or a wall, using the game's own map rendering. Markers, a grid, and freehand drawing on top of it.
Everyone sees the same map, one person moves it. Walk up and take Control map: the map opens full screen with the game's own panning, zooming, markers and right-click menu, and the board in the room follows you while you work. Close it with CLOSE BOARD on the paper, or with Escape where your bindings reach it. There is a grid readout under the cross so you can call a square out loud while you move.
Detail follows the zoom the way it does on your own map: zoomed out you get the island and the coastline, zoomed in you get roads, buildings and place names.
What travels between machines is the centre and how much world to show, in metres — never a zoom in pixels. Two people looking at one board from windows of different sizes therefore see the same ground, not the same number of pixels.
Freehand drawing belongs to the mission rather than to the board: it shows on every board in every room, on the commander's own map, and on the map of somebody who joins an hour later. The server holds it.
A logic node with no mesh. It listens for an event and produces intel.
Needs the Objectives module, which has not shipped yet. Intel Source is driven by an event, and nothing in this release publishes one. It is documented here because it is part of Intelligence and will start working the day Objectives is released.
Needs the Objectives module, which has not shipped yet. Intel Source is driven by an event, and nothing in this release publishes one. It is documented here because it is part of Intelligence and will start working the day Objectives is released.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Triggered Event | The event name that sets it off |
| Mode | DROP or SIGNAL |
| Spawn offset | Where the dropped object lands relative to the node |
| Fire once | Whether it can produce intel more than once |
DROP spawns a physical object somebody has to find, pick up and carry back. Nothing reaches the force until they do. Use the spawn offset to put the drop on a table rather than inside it.
SIGNAL files the report on a faction's board directly. It needs a faction key — intel with no side goes to everyone, which is almost never what somebody configuring a radio intercept meant.
DROP is the default and it is the one that keeps the design honest. The carrying is the interesting part.
An intel object can also carry a lock component, so it has to be broken into before it can be read. Two settings: whether it starts secured, and how hard it is.
The lock lives in its own component beside the carrier rather than inside it. If you do not want any of it, leave the component off and the object reads normally.
Right-click any intel object, choose Edit intel.
This is where the words are written. The vanilla attribute panel cannot carry text — every attribute value is packed into a single vector and replicated as twelve bytes — so MCF carries text over its own RPC instead, where that limit does not exist. Numbers and toggles still go through the normal panel and should.
The screen is one page at a time. A letter has one page; a notebook has several. The list on the left is the pages, the fields on the right are the page you picked. Typing is held locally until you press APPLY, so you can rewrite three pages and commit them as one change, and backing out costs nothing.
The button at the bottom flips the object between document and device shape, and takes the interaction verb with it — a device is searched, a page is read.
The same idea for phone and laptop profiles: the apps, the messages inside each, and which are marked new.
A profile is per object. Editing one phone does not change another phone with the same prefab.
Intel objects pick up these rows in the properties panel:
| Setting | On what |
|---|---|
| Read range, fade, refresh rate, sharpness | Anything with a screen |
| Object size | Anything with a screen |
| Lid open | Laptops |
| Secured, difficulty | Anything with a lock |
| Markers, marker size, grid | The map board |
| Board use range | The operations board |
| Who may write orders | The operations board |
| Open permissions | The operations board |
| Accepted orders in HUD | The operations board |
| Show closed orders | The operations board |
| Source mode, fire once | Intel Source nodes |
A player who found something carries it back and logs it as an INTREP. A record holds a source, a heading, a timestamp, a body, the faction, and the player who filed it.
Records are held by the server and sent to each player individually, filtered by faction. A rifleman does not hold the commander's whole picture. That is wrong in the fiction before it is wasteful on the wire.
Photographs can be attached to a record and opened full screen from the board.
DRAFT FROM INTEL starts an order from the record you are looking at, with the heading carried across.
Orders are written in five-paragraph format: situation, mission, execution, admin and logistics, command and signal. Each one gets a reference — OPORD-001 — and a state:
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| DRAFT | Being written. Visible only to its author. |
| PUBLISHED | On the board for the force. Nobody has taken it. |
| ASSIGNED | Somebody accepted it. |
| ACKNOWLEDGED | They have written a back brief. |
| COMPLETE / CANCELLED / FAILED | Closed. |
SET LOCATION opens the game's own map. The map moves under a fixed cross in the middle of the screen; line the cross up and press FIX HERE. The order picks up a grid reference, shown in its detail panel.
There is no click-a-point-on-the-map callback in the engine, which is why it works this way round.
ACCEPT assigns the order to you. BACK BRIEF is where you write, in your own words, what you intend to do, and it goes back to the commander before you move. AMEND reopens the text. COMPLETE, CANCEL and DELETE do what they say.
If accepted orders in HUD is on, an accepted order also appears in Arma Reforger's own task list, with its marker on the map, and goes green when the commander completes it.
The board is the paperwork — five paragraphs, a state, an author, a back brief, a record that outlives the session. The task system is the HUD entry and the marker. Nothing writes back from the task system into the board; if the two ever disagree the board is right and the mirror gets rebuilt from it.
The sheet hanging on the board object shows references, subjects and states to anyone walking past, without opening anything. It is filtered per reader, so two people standing at the same board see their own taskings.
Closed orders come off it unless you turn that setting on. A board carrying every order a mission ever had stops being a board.
The who may write orders setting is a rank threshold: everyone, squad leader and up, or commander only. Open permissions overrides it and lets everyone do everything.
Open permissions defaults to off, so the rank check is live from the start. That check resolves correctly and has never actually refused anybody, because it was bypassed for most of development. Treat your first session with real ranks as a test of it, and turn open permissions on if it gets in the way.
Right-click the board, choose Mission data.
This is the only screen in MCF that deletes, which shapes it. Nothing is destroyed on one click: the clear button arms first and says what will go, and a second click does it. Every count comes from the server, because a screen that guessed would show you four taskings while deleting seven. And it tells you what a set is before offering to delete it — "Conversations" does not tell a person that a week of authored dialogue is inside.
Three sets are registered:
| Set | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Taskings | Every order on the board, published and draft, and who accepted what. |
| Intel reports | Every INTREP entered on the board, including the photographs filed with them. |
| Device profiles | What Game Masters wrote onto phones and laptops. Prefab contents are untouched. |
Pick a set and the right-hand side lists its entries individually, each with an edit and a remove button.
The same screen manages Arma Reforger's own save games, read from the host rather than from your client:
- List the saves that exist
- Load one
- Delete one
- Take a manual save under a name you choose
If saving reports as disabled, check that your world has a mission header. A
raw .ent world without one has the whole persistence system switched off, and
that is the engine's behaviour rather than a bug in MCF.
Taskings and intel survive a server restart. The store writes to $profile:
through FileIO rather than the engine's world or session saves, so a mod
update cannot wipe a running campaign.
Dropped intel objects do not respawn after a restart. The board record survives; the physical document in the world does not.
- A commander cannot delegate. ACCEPT is the only route from published to assigned. Squad membership, and with it delegation to a group, belongs to the commander module that is coming.
- A GROUP-assigned task is only visible to its author, for the same reason — group membership cannot be resolved yet, and withholding is safer than over-sharing.
- Late join has not been watched.
- Dropped intel does not respawn.
- MAP view is a reserved slot and draws nothing.
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