Serious thanks for all the hard work on tracking this down, @Tupolov and the rest of the Alive team!

@Tupolov This was somewhat easier than i first thought! Will ship in next release.

:D

Thanks!

Well that's more than fair a response, Friznit and Tupolov!

I've no doubt there are concerns about letting people write - or attempt to write - whatever they like into the database. I'm delighted that you'll think it over and look into it, that's all I can ask. I do appreciate it. :)

(And Dixon, thanks for adding it so I can continue to be lazy and not do so, heh.)

Apologies if this is more appropriate for the Mission Makers tag, but as this is pretty niche and very much about persistence, this seemed the one to use.

Does the persistent database provide me with any variable or function through which I can write my own data to be stored across sessions? I don't even have specifics at the moment of why I might use it, this is more of a "well, I know I'm going to want this sooner or later for something..."

As an example off the top of my head, suppose I have some sort of vehicle requisition system. Think Bon's Infantry spawner but for vehicles, and I want to let players replace their (empty, not AI-crewed) vehicle losses over time. I would probably want to store some overall force pool value and modify that based on their time/frequency/type of vehicles requisitioned (spawned) that I would track. (I'm not actually proposing this, ALiVE logistics lets me do this already. It is merely a convenient and easy example.)

Is there some particular variable or function into which I can dump this arbitrary array of whatever I might want to save, and on reloading a session with persistence enabled, ALiVE will spit that back into Arma that I might access and sort it out again for my various purposes?

I know the Combat Support module does have the "CS_code" setvariable. I'm not sure if that gets saved and carried over across sessions or if it is just used when respawning a Combat Support asset but is set afresh from the module each time a mission is loaded on the server. (And would need to be reset each time a new Combat Support asset is manually registered by some other script.) It would be a hell of a hackjob, but if that does get updated and persists across sessions, I imagine I could try to inject my overfilled-array-of-whatever in there.

If this isn't something I can do, does anyone know if there are any other options available to me? I know I could run iniDB on my server, but that seems like such a waste when ALiVE is already doing so much fantastic storage for me.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "gamey" at the moment. In my experience, generally desiring as realistic a game as I can get, I have been routinely frustrated by how ALiVE tags buildings themselves as objectives without giving me any indication whatsoever that that building is the objective.

The most recent and facepalming example was a Chernarus factory chimney tagged as a weapons factory. Not the factory building, the chimney next to it. Oh sure the little village had defenders in it, so certainly we were clued in that there was something there. But it wasn't until a dozen players made multiple full circuits that we finally gave up and toggled on the momentary objective markers to find out what we'd missed. Sure enough, a chimney was the factory building. And here we are trying to win over the populace against an Asymmetric OPCOM and our only method of success is to level their infrastructure.

There was absolutely no way we could have ever determined that chimney was the key building, and had we not toggled on the momentary intel overlay we'd have been facing endless reinforcements despite our having done everything within our power without resorting to "gamey".

Until ALiVE can more reliably select filter to only reasonable buildings as objectives, or better still not make it buildings but merely objects thereby separating destroying objectives from destroying map objects - which isn't likely soon I imagine - I don't think it is particularly "gamey" to have a workaround for ALiVE's own shortcomings.

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Please don't misunderstand, ALiVE has provided me with some fantastic Arma sessions. I criticize because I enjoy it and want to see it better, that is all.