GNV Civilians (ACCEPTED)

[Gone Native]

Commando84:
Any1 know how would i add this piece o script to this great populate island script?

In the GNV_ scripts all by the script created civilian vehicles get a 'setFuel 1.0' and 'setDamage 0.0' at each waypoint that they reach.
This means that small damage is not an issue and the vehicles will never run out of fuel 

The advantage is that serious damage in between waypoints, mostly because of combat or an accident, is not affected by this waypoint statement.
If the car is disabled, it is not 'suddenly' magically repaired. But small damage during gameplay, like hitting roadsigns and barriers or hitting other vehicles, is not rendering the civilian vehicle after a while out of service.

[Commando84]

sweet thx dude! 

[Gone Native]

GNV Civilians went from beta to version 1.0

You can read the change log and find the fresh download in the first post of this thread.

[Mandoble]

Nice work Gone Native, might be you want to adjust the civilian population to not be quite close to the bus lanes. I know pretty well it is not your fault, but you know that ArmA driving is plain terrible and the buses keep killing civilians crossing the roads, and then stopping and not being able the maneouver in the street, that if not just crashing against other cars. My suggestion would be to have the bus lanes as clean as possible mainly for player usage when necesary.

[Mr.Peanut]

A certain amount of roadkill is realistic, don't you think?

[Gone Native]

@Mandoble:
What you suggest is a lot of work.

Example: Mercalillo has the main roads going in a T-junction through the hamlet.
Now it is filled with civilians with just one statement.
If one likes to keep the main roads clear you need three statements:
one above the T; one left of the T; one right of the T.

Something for version 1.1 

It is also a pity that in ArmA the civilian AI prefers to walk the exact middle of the road. 
More natural behaviour would be to walk on the side of a road. Even when one walks on a vehicle dirt track you don't walk exactly in the middle.


Another interesting issue is better multiplayer behaviour:
Now each human player has it's own "bubble" of civilians around him.
Works to some extend well with only a few human players, but doesn't work nicely with a lot of human players.

A solution might be to give each location where one creates civilians also a unique boolean variable (true/false) which is global to all human players.
If the creation of civilians in location X is already triggered by human player A the boolean for that location is put on 'true'.
If another player, let's say player B get nears location X, the creation of civilians is not triggered, because the location boolean, is on 'true', meaning: another human player has already triggered the creation of civilians for that location.

[desrat]

Any luck on full MP compatability as yet?  Would love to make use of this in somthing..

[Gone Native]

I will work on a version 1.1 in which I will implement the comments of Mandoble (i.e. try to keep road the bus travels free from civilians) and and I will think about trying to solve the -more than a few players- multiplayer issue.

Solving both issues will make the population part of the script suite more complicated, so might affect performance. (The vehicle part of the script suite, like the buslines and cars, are uneffected by this and can at present without any problems be used in multiplayer).

Anyway: it might take some time before there will be a version 1.1

In the present situation each human player has it's own "bubble" with civilians, so if you keep the civilian _fillfactor low, that might work for your mission. It depends on how many human players you expect to gather within a civilian area like a town or a hamlet.

[desrat]

Well I'm talking 30 player co-op for my missions, and want civilians to help increase the realism factor, I could place them manually of course but I'm lazy and any option to automate anything apeals to me

Thats why I like Mykes ArmA Co-Op Essential pack where you place an editor item (I believe he uses a road cone as an example) as the centre of a spawn radius that tells the server to spawn enemies/civilians when your within a certain distance of that area, maybe this is something you could look at fiddling with to use and just enable the transport links.

That way the misson planners have the power to place civs just where they're needed and not have to populate the whole north/south, again hopefully improving system resource useage.

Maybe I'm totally off here but that would work for me..

[Gone Native]

What might work better for you (because of performance and you don't need half an island with civilians) and is quite easy to do:

In the mission editor, choose "groups F2"; "Civilians"; "Type: Infantry Squad"; "Name: Crowd"

This will place a group of nine random civilians.
Than give them just one waypoint of the type "Dismissed".
Make their behaviour etc.. to your own taste, but I usually choose "careless", "full speed", if these civilians are in a combat zone.
"Dismissed" means that they will walk around like dismissed soldiers, even sitting if they are relaxed.

Two of these groups in a hamlet or a few in a small town and you have your civilians in a warzone.

[desrat]

Yes that would do the trick but what I really need is those units held in cache untill needed and then spawned rather than having these civs all over, my mission is a dynamic campaign with multiple targets and populating areas dynamically is really a better all round soloution to me..

I wish I had the know how to do this myself, I really do but I'm still doing baby steps when it comes to scripting and need to draw heavily on other people's great work..


#EDIT - Removed unnecessary quote      h-

[Kremator]

Can't DAC2 do that for you?  That would make it a dynamic spawn.

[TAO] Kremator

[desrat]

Can't DAC2 do that for you?

Interesting scripts, haven't come across these before although we (my team) do use some mapfact addons already, so thanks for pointing them out..

EDIT: This is a little overly complicated to implement and I have to admit is taking some effort getting my head around, but I'll get there so thx again for the re-direct..

[laggy]

Hi Gone Native and thanks for a great script.

This will definitely make your missions more "alive" without too much effort. Good Job!

One question though:

How are the civilians deleted when the players are out of range to see them?
In a mission I would like the players to be able to make a civilian take them somewhere.
That civilian would be "picked" from your generated createUnit'd units.
How can I bypass the deleting function for that or those picked units?

Is the deleting based on "present in area" or group or name or what?

Thanks again,

Laggy

[Gone Native]

Sorry for reacting after a week, but I rarely visit this forum now-a-days.

If a player gets within 550 "ArmA" meters of a defined civilian spawn area, a group of civilians will spawn in a  rectangle, which size is defined in GNV_x_Populate.sqf.
After the player leaves that 550 "ArmA" meters radius, they will be removed with a deleteGroup statement.
You can look for that in the CSL_ part of the script suite.

I advise against using one of these spawned civilians for some special purspose within a mission.
Because:
First: they don't have an individual (vehicle or object) name. Makes it difficult to single them out and address them.
Secondly: they have orders to walk around within the defined rectangle, and their objective will shift at a random time for a random amount of "ArmA" meters.

So you have to identify your nearest civilian within the group -note that the 'civilians' contain 20 different type of civilians-, remove him from the group (because the group gets different orders).
I think that it can be done, but won't be easy. I would simply spawn a few civilians that at least have a individual (vehicle) name, so can be controlled by the mission maker.