I upgraded the interpreter system. It took me a while to work it out but now you can go to a place where you should get constant traffic, switch around the channels a bit, and if you’re still in the area where you should get traffic then you’ll get it. For example, if you go into an enemy occupied town with the wrong channel, you’ll get the message notifying you of the enemy presence when you switch to the correct channel. There’s a slight delay in this (about 15 seconds as a guess) otherwise it would cause performance issues for interpreters, but it means the interpreter can spend time finding the channel while the infantry are in combat instead of having to wait until they go to the next town, and also makes the process more intuitive.

Interpreters now get updates regarding IED and stronghold strengths. These are vague and not very accurate, but it helps get the general idea of what’s up. They also get info for HVT’s and hostages as well, so if you roll past a town and there’s a hostage inside for example then you’ll hear about it.

The rolesheets have had a polish pass using new knowledge from Rik. Arma is fickle when it comes to things like this so let me know if anything breaks, particularly regular sections being flagged as attachments.

Other than that I’ve been doing a little work on the vehicle spawn system at patrol bases, it’s smarter now. The vehicles you get now depend on who’s doing the spawning, whether desert or woodland vehicles are required and what era the mission is, and I put a little script together to make an ANA pickup with armed and unarmed variants that look passable and don’t have the gunner’s legs clipping through the car. This can also be spawned at base by ANA commanders and subcommanders from the spawner.

A new trial has gone in for armour crew. All 3 members of the crew need to be online to proceed, and once everyone is online the commander can spawn vehicles from the spawner. There’s a lot to choose from, but bear in mind that the vehicles that require 3 people actually have an active restriction system on them, so if you don’t man them with 3 people then you’ll be blind. You can spawn a max of 2 vehicles, if both of those get destroyed it lets you have  1 more. The restriction system is fully turned on unlike with earlier tests, I’m reasonably confident in the systems involved and don’t want to compromise general gameplay too much. The system for full crew vehicles has also gone onto the apache and cobra attack helicopters.

The base firing restriction is now automatic and turns itself on when enemies are nearby then turns it off when they’re gone. It also plays the correct sounds from the tannoys so you know when it's switching.

I’m testing a new method of spawning specialised vehicles for regular infantry. If the players have more than X people in their section then they can spawn specialist vehicles. In this first iteration, the commander/sucommander of the ANA section can spawn a special Humvee with a ZSU on it if there are 6 or more people in that section.



 If this works out it will migrate to other sections as an incentive to fill them. The test vehicle worked great in our first session last night, it’s actually really well balanced.
The current idea is to allow access to a CROWS M2 Humvee if the USMC section is populated and an ambulance if the british section is populated, but this will require testing of the system itself and whether ACE’s code for making medical vehicles even works dynamically. The current iteration is there to 1) test the effectiveness of the ZSU HMMWV and 2) see how much of an incentive the system is toward filling a section. If the ANA suddenly becomes super popular then we’ll know it’s effective.

Pro tip: the gun can be destroyed without the car being destroyed. In this case, the repair vehicle functions will not work because the gun is technically completely destroyed. You can get a functional vehicle by taking it back to base, having the person that spawned it select the return vehicle option, and then spawn a new one. If the vehicle is destroyed then you can tow the carcass back to base, return it, and it will let you get a new one.