I think the civilians spawn fine, just that I had issues finding them. when debugging the civ-modules the entire city gets covered by green dots so that should not be an issue.

what I was trying to get at is that they don't seem to despawn if I move away from them, which I thought would happen if I hit the "active limiter" number and move out of the spawn radius. but maybe I missed the purpose of that function competely.

Also, another question. would the cqb module work with civilians. as in can players interact with them and do they count towards "insurgency-shenannigans"? I'm guessing not, but thought I'd ask.

I'm trying to make a asymetric mission in a large city (fallujah map) and i'd like to have a lot of civilians walking around the streets.

I set the placement level to extreme and lower the spawn radius to 600 (I guess this will keep the actually spawned population denser around the players.)

Changed the active limiter to 200 (A tad much) for testing purposes.

I drive into the city and check "civilian countSide allUnits;" in the debug menu to make sure there is 200 civilians spawned, which there is. However I can't really see more than a few, I guess (again) that they are mostly hiding in buildings, is there any way to get them moving more often? or maybe I just need to wait i bit?

Anyway, so far everything seems to be working fine. But if I speed up and drive through the city the fps starts dropping to unplayable levels. and when i check how many civs are spawned using the above command it is closer to 300.

have I misunderstood the purpose of the "active limiter" option? or do I need to do something else as well?

Sounds awesome, Hope you have a good time! Can barely wait for the upcoming releases :)

@HeroesandvillainsOS  Do you let friendlies spawn around the map too? Or are you restricting them to your bases areas only, and syncing your OPCOM to the enemy objectives so they eventually leave and begin attacking enemy objectives around the map?

I usually only let them spawn in the "safe zone", this however is larger than a single base and covers a few objectives so more groups spawn. you can always partially cover this spawn area with a objectives-only module as well and sync it to the enemy commander so they have the possibility to push if you like, or just manually place groups so you get a few extra.

as a example I might have one milobjective module spawn opfor on the entire map (except the safe-zone and around the edges), and another one that spawn blufor in the safe-zone. the opfor commander is only synced to the one spawning opfor and the blufor commander is synced to both.

@HeroesandvillainsOS  1. They don't seem to leave the base areas and go out on objectives with any real urgency. They just like to stick around the TAOR. Though this could be mitigated a bit by changing their strategy to "invasion." I guess I'd have to see to what extent.

Invasion strategy will definitely take care of this, as long as the commander have a few groups to work with.

@HeroesandvillainsOS  2. Since the number of profiles that spawn are directly tied to the number of available objectives, limiting the initial spawns to my 3 FOB's, or even a general area around them, would mean the enemy would vastly outnumber me in initial profiles. Are you using Dynamic reinforcements for this then so you get a bump in friendlies as you take new objectives?

I usually have a quite large initial safe-zone and tweak the strength of spawned units. If you don't want a large zone manually place a few extra squads, the "override" option might work as well? I have not experimented with dynamic reinforcements yet.

Lastly I have also had a few accidents where players have been run over by vehicles at the mission start, i "fixed" it by either moving them to a safer spot (they usually spend some time fixing gear at the start) or have them get inserted by a chopper and time it so by the time they land everything should be safe. You could also place the vehicles manually instead and choose not to spawn any by modules.

Did you have a look under Mod Compatability here?: http://alivemod.com/wiki/index.php/Logistics_Support

I dont use persistance myself but it might be what you need.

Ambient war with C2ISTAR missions is pretty much the only style of missions I have done. One thing you could try is to add a quite large safezone around a base (or more) where you let the blufor and players spawn and equip, and the rest of the map could start as already occupied by the enemy commander. Make sure the player side's commander is set to invade and sit back and watch the action :) quite basic but it works fine for full map missions, one of my favorite is Gunkizli.

The trick is to balance it so that blufor can push back by themselves for a bit but eventually reach a stalemate (objectives might change owner but no one will be able to win), for which the players can work as the tipping point.

I usually give both sides unlimited respawns as well.

If you let both blufor and opfor spawn at will in the same area i imagine that you would loose quite a few profiles early on as they could spawn on top of eachother.

If this is a conventional army vs army battle I imagine there would be a rough frontline established, maybe try and set it up so that each area only have one faction that spawns there and instead create some empty "objective only" module for where you want them to attack. If this is how you do it already just ignore me :P

no problem, hope you manage to sort it out! =)

@BvB Lastly, is there any not too resource pricey way to track casualties? I remember this from one of Benny's CTI missions, seeing the count when the mission ended, gave an interesting spin to the usual "Mission failed/completed" ending.

I dont know the answer to your other questions unfortunately but for a civ killed tracker you can find some info here: http://alivemod.com/wiki/index.php/Script_Snippets#Adding_Custom_Inits_to_Spawned_Units

Basically modify one of the examples on the wiki and add this to you description.ext

class Extended_Init_EventHandlers {
 class Man {
  init = "_this call (compile preprocessFileLineNumbers 'my_script.sqf')";
 };
};

where my_script.sqf could look like this

private "_this";
_this = _this select 0;
 
if ((side _this == civ) and (!isPlayer _this)) then {
 //Add your custom code here!
//I recommend adding a onKilledEventHandler that would increase a counter or such that you can use to modify score and / or the end screen.
 };

hope it helps getting you started, tell me if you run into issues.

As someone who used to write "helpcenter" articles for a customer support I really like the example you posted, I like when you get as much (relevant) info as possible. And listing the parameters with a detailed explanation of what the different options do is great!

A minor aesthetic change however would be to change sub-lists to bullet points instead if having them numbered as well. But yea, as I said minor =)