Mission Making - Script Commands

[Oddball-47]

Hi everyone,

 I was reading a thread in the forums today with regards to AI plans for use in CM missions.
That got me to thinking about the literally endless possibilities the Arma3 mission makers
can utilize through the use of script commands. List of commands here: https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Category:Scripting_Commands_Arma_3

  I'm guessing the current engine precludes the introduction of such a system, but perhaps if/when Battlefront begins work on "Engine 4", a
similar system might be looked upon as perhaps having some merit.

   Perhaps someone in the forums familiar with both working up AI plans in the CM editors as well as Arma3 might have some thoughts on this.
 

Best regards, Odd

[RockinHarry]

did just a little bit of that myself in ARMA2/Iron Front and followed all the various developers projects with great interest. Probably unlikely we´ll see some opening up of the CM game series much in the future, but I would already be somewhat satisfied if just certain parts of the game could be accessed by some externalized text files and may it be just to help mission designers get things done in better ways. I.e customize OOB´s and weapon/ammo loadouts in more specific and detailed ways. Surely more that stuff to be imagined, without BFC required to reveal any the game engines secrets. I could imagine quite a lot more mission makers could be pulled to the game this way.

[Oddball-47]

 I burned myself out on the A3 editor, but it was a fun ride while it lasted. My only experience with Battlefront's
editor resulted in my making a mission that had no AI plan(s) at all and was so huge and had so many units
that it took three minutes just to load. My buddy "Grunt" and I playtested it when it was finished, but we were
both fried after about 45 minutes into the battle and called it a day.
  That was probably two years ago. I fired it up about three months ago and found myself wondering just
what the hell I was thinking when I cobbled it together. Pink Floyd's album, "A Momentary Lapse Of Reason"
comes to mind. 

Best, Odd
  

[BornGinger]

On 3/2/2019 at 7:54 PM, RockinHarry said:

I would already be somewhat satisfied if just certain parts of the game could be accessed by some externalized text files and may it be just to help mission designers get things done in better ways.

Like in the Paradox games where you can use their special scripting code (based on Lua, I think) to make changes to the games. However it could be done it would be great to have the ability to use the "when", "if" and other scripting tags in making AI plans.

[RockinHarry]

15 minutes ago, BornGinger said:

Like in the Paradox games where you can use their special scripting code (based on Lua, I think) to make changes to the games. However it could be done it would be great to have the ability to use the "when", "if" and other scripting tags in making AI plans.

would be a serious mission makers dream for sure. Maybe not so for starters, but who knows. 

[nik mond]

Scripting syntax is pretty much the same for all high level languages , and many people would be able to jump right in. But for people who have no experience it is not really a problem either. Just having a couple pages of example scripts to use, or paste can get you started. Community feed back to help with the debug issues would bring people up to speed to tackle a scenario.

A hybrid system would be awesome too. The  Precanned scripts in CM2 work fairly well, the immediate shortcoming being the commands are linear, and lack branching (OR) conditional statements, looping etc. Having larger selections of AI commands, perhaps layered would be a good alternative for the next gen