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No.401_Wolverine
Dec-23-2015, 09:55
Working in the FMB last night I came across something that might affect mission building in general but may be just my imagination. Looking to get some confirmation on this theory from other builders.

I believe I discovered that if I put a static object on the map as army 'none' that it did not produce the distance dot that many objects show (thus giving away the target area if you're using them for targets). I noticed this as I was looking at fuel barrel objects. I'd placed a TON of these on the map in various places, but on approaching the target to test an attack, I realized that I couldn't see any dots. Also, bomb craters produced no dots. But then I noticed that there were still objects on my map producing dots. When I went back into the FMB I saw that the things I was observing on the map were the objects with an 'army' assigned.

So I changed the army of objects that I knew I could see as dots to none and reloaded the map. No dots.

I'll be testing this more extensively, but this might be useful information to mission builders new and old.

Question for all those Mission Builders out there is have you notice this same behavior? Can you replicate it and confirm it?

ATAG_Bliss
Dec-23-2015, 10:11
Hmm - That's a very interesting find. I haven't dabbled in the FMB in quite a long time, but it would be good to know if that's the case. Can you still set triggers and the like to objects that have no army attached to them?

ATAG_Freya
Dec-23-2015, 10:14
I recently placed a bunch of vehicles in tents (all army none) and now that you mention it, I don't think the dots were visable.. I'll check it again soon though, to be sure. This could be a great finding!

:thumbsup:

No.401_Wolverine
Dec-23-2015, 10:20
Hmm - That's a very interesting find. I haven't dabbled in the FMB in quite a long time, but it would be good to know if that's the case. Can you still set triggers and the like to objects that have no army attached to them?

Yes, this shouldn't really affect triggers. Again, some testing would be good to confirm. As it stands, I'm using the code that fires when any static object is destroyed and then reading what type it is to determine mission results instead of a traditional 'trigger', so I can confirm that that works correctly. As the ground destroyed % trigger doesn't require any army type to determine its result, I imagine that the trigger just works out the number of objects contained in its area without regard to army type and counts them up as the static object destroyed code fires until it reaches the required value. This means it should work just fine.

♣_Spiritus_♣
Dec-23-2015, 13:42
Great find Wolverine, if I can get CloD running again I'll check it out. Recently upgraded to Windows 10 and still working on trying to get CloD to start.

Maybe this may shed some light on where to look in the code on why the dots appear when an army is assigned to the object?

No.401_Wolverine
Dec-23-2015, 14:43
Great find Wolverine, if I can get CloD running again I'll check it out. Recently upgraded to Windows 10 and still working on trying to get CloD to start.

Maybe this may shed some light on where to look in the code on why the dots appear when an army is assigned to the object?

Perhaps. It would be good to leave the function as is, if it truly is the case. That way a mission designer can decide whether or not to have their targets visible via dots or not. Choice is good.

Cassius
Dec-26-2015, 12:52
Very interesting! I'll check it tomorrow too.

No.401_Wolverine
Dec-26-2015, 13:30
Did a big test today and results confirmed. When I shifted all the objects to army = none, the dots disappeared. This was tested hosting locally as a server. Not sure if dedicated server hosting will change anything, but it shouldn't (but it's CloD so you never know).

One problem is that the things like artillery and raid sirens require the army to be set in order to function properly, so these will continue to produce dots unless you add them as non-functioning visual elements only. Also, if you have static aircraft, setting them to army none removes the markings. Not a huge deal, but important to some people I suppose.