How To: Drop a Bomb in Falcon 4.0 BMS on your Friend in Arma 3
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Ok I back away from the comms issue. Im sure there are people smarter than me who can handle that.
For the visualisation part:
You may be able to make some sort of prediction using the set velocity and commands to set pitch/bankvangles.Nevertheless, the view distance issue kill the nesecity of a visualisation of the aircraft. It would just mean we are limited to type 2 and type 3 control in CAS situation. Which is fine! It will be damn cool anyway.
Using MFDE as a ROVER system would kinda make it even better.If you can pull a velocity vector, and up vector, and a ASL positional value from Falcon during live play that is all you need. You’d need something to translate that to Arma (which is why HLA/DIS implementations exist).
Arma can do interpolation of those values and replicate a model in flight, so even if the model is at 25,000 AGL we could have it in game, which would be nice for in the future if we ever figure out a way to send events back into Falcon, such as SAM, AAA, and misc ground fire.
The only thing I’d worry about is the fidelity of units on the ground… This might be sacrilege, but I’ve always seen this implementation being more full blown in a game like DCS (as much as I prefer BMS to that series).
Anyway, I am a big proponent of better fixed wing flight in Arma, whatever the source. I have kicked around the idea of integrating JSBSim as a FDM into Arma for a while, which is totally plausible, but sadly way out of my time constraints. If BIS added render to texture canvases in Arma you could honestly create a very high fidelity flight simulator using an external FDM. There really is no limit to what Arma can do if you really put your mind to it, it is a wonderful platform.
Also I don’t know if anyone has seen this here, but they just started a competition yesterday for addons/mods with up to 500,000 Euros in prizes… Maybe some talented people from this community will enter it and make something insanely awesome: http://makearmanotwar.com/
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I read that aswell…
Lets make money. -
Hmmm, you both have me wondering now if I can somehow get the drone footage I am broadcasting out to the Arma 3 Tablet application onto the MFD’s in BMS….
I wish I knew how to get in touch with the BMS folks to talk to them about an API, even after another year of updates it would be nice to have and fun to play with.
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I was just thinking…
What if the webserver, handling the location data, runs on the same server as the falcon server?
That potentially lowers the delay by a hundred of times…I was also thinking…since F4AWACS has ground unit positions, you can use Falcon as the platform for all the ground vehicles (Or atleast the ones relevant for that mission). That will instantly synchronise locations of these vehicles with the ARMA world!
The most ideal would be to have a Theater 100% optimised to match the ArmA stock theater. This is just an 11x11nm area so should be piece 'a cake for a experienced Theater builder.
Can’t ASharpe and Noubernou and me not get together on TS some day soon to share some ideas and knowledge?
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I was just thinking…
What if the webserver, handling the location data, runs on the same server as the falcon server?
That potentially lowers the delay by a hundred of times…Ideally, you could get a gaming server and do this with Falcon and ARMA 3 and the MySQL database running on the same server. This would be the best way to handle it, but dedicated gaming servers are expensive. Doing it this way, you could drop INIDB and re-write it to allow ARMA 3 and Falcon to read/write directly to and from the MySQL database, which would eliminate about 66% of the delay.
I was also thinking…since F4AWACS has ground unit positions, you can use Falcon as the platform for all the ground vehicles (Or atleast the ones relevant for that mission). That will instantly synchronise locations of these vehicles with the ARMA world!
I have not seen ground positions in F4AWACS. In fact, my talks with Sarkis (SP?) he said this wasn’t possible because of how he was reading the Falcon Data out of memory.
The most ideal would be to have a Theater 100% optimised to match the ArmA stock theater. This is just an 11x11nm area so should be piece 'a cake for a experienced Theater builder.
This is not actually ideal. There are a couple of problems with this, first the naval units from Falcon would be to crammed together on an 11x11 mile map. The A3 map, for future reference, is 30 KM x 30 KM, just so you know. But also if you put in a SA-7 it would be engaging you as soon as you took off from the airfield. The extra space for padding lets you add in extra airfields, additional ranges for air to air contacts, refueling tracks and also AWACs tracks, and put some of those things out of range of the AA threats. There’s a certain amount of tension that gets build up flying from Turkey to Lemnos that makes this kinda fun.
Can’t ASharpe and Noubernou and me not get together on TS some day soon to share some ideas and knowledge?
Yes. When I get home tonight I will PM my private TS details to the relevant members. It’s used by a small amount of gamers for fun stuff, so there may be others floating around on it but I also use it when I am doing group development with members of my team.
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Ok cool waiting for your PM.
With an ArmA compatible theater I was more thinking of a standard Falcon theater size map with all (or some Arma 1 2 and 3) maps. Whichever are used or can be used. Put all the islands some miles away from eachother and sync it generally with true lat/lng’s.
Most islands are infact based on island in the middleterenian and adriatic sea. Everon (from OFP) for example off the coast of croatia.
So you will have a very sea filled falcon theaterOR just have the full Aegean theater with the Arma3 island, as you allready did, but more detail for specifically tgat island. It should be easy enough to only draw the Falcon-side aircraft is it’s location is within certaon parameters.
Ohwww my brain is going wild! Haha
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Ok cool waiting for your PM.
With an ArmA compatible theater I was more thinking of a standard Falcon theater size map with all (or some Arma 1 2 and 3) maps. Whichever are used or can be used. Put all the islands some miles away from eachother and sync it generally with true lat/lng’s.
Most islands are infact based on island in the middleterenian and adriatic sea. Everon (from OFP) for example off the coast of croatia.
So you will have a very sea filled falcon theaterOR just have the full Aegean theater with the Arma3 island, as you allready did, but more detail for specifically tgat island. It should be easy enough to only draw the Falcon-side aircraft is it’s location is within certaon parameters.
Ohwww my brain is going wild! Haha
This is an interesting thought that had not previously occurred to me. It would in fact be possible to spin up, say, a Stratis theater. It would have a different offset to convert to Falcon, but moving the falcon coordinate offset to the Arma 3 side instead of the falcon script would mean that you could just pass it between theaters…So you could have server A running Stratis and Server B running Altis, and then have Falcon interacting with multiple theaters…
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Ok cool waiting for your PM.
With an ArmA compatible theater I was more thinking of a standard Falcon theater size map with all (or some Arma 1 2 and 3) maps. Whichever are used or can be used. Put all the islands some miles away from eachother and sync it generally with true lat/lng’s.
Most islands are infact based on island in the middleterenian and adriatic sea. Everon (from OFP) for example off the coast of croatia.
So you will have a very sea filled falcon theaterOR just have the full Aegean theater with the Arma3 island, as you allready did, but more detail for specifically tgat island. It should be easy enough to only draw the Falcon-side aircraft is it’s location is within certaon parameters.
Ohwww my brain is going wild! Haha
^ This is a great idea.
I have to say, I am consistently amazed at just how smart some of you guys out there are with modding these games. Finding a way to combine ARMA 3 with Falcon, even in a limited way, would be groundbreaking and simply too awesome for words.
I hope you guys can figure this out!
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The Kurile theater would be a good candidate too, if I understand what you guys are trying to do. Of course it needs a lot more work than Korea, so maybe it’s not a good candidate…I guess I’ll leave that to you guys to decide.
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Of course it needs a lot more work than Korea, so maybe it’s not a good candidate…
Imagine fighting the Korean war campaign with live feeds from the ground…… Real 9 Line calls… Simply Awesome thought time will tell.
Tj
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Well you guys have already hit the nail on the head - one of the biggest issues with this system is that the maps do not translate 100% between systems. My dream would be a new Falcon Aegean map, setup just like arma 3, buildings and all, but I am not a map maker.
I have looked at editing Falcon maps, but the editors never seem to do what the tutorials I have been reading about say they should. But I digress.
To setup a MTO (Mutli-Theater Operation) you would have to have two servers hosted, Altis and Stratis, and they would both be writing out to the database, and then the Falcon server which would also be writing to the database. This is certainly doable, I think I will work on this when I get off my current side project and back onto the F4A3 Bridge.
Other priorities:
-ARMA 3 Longitude/Latitude convertor in game
-Long/Lat convertor for the Tactical Operations Terminal
-All Falcon AWACs data printing to the Tactical Operations Terminal
-Munitions dropped from Falcon guiding in ARMA
-CBU Munitions type supported in FalconOnce all of that is in play we’ll work up some sort of communications plan for the IVC/ACRE stuff.
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I’m sure Dave (Demer928 ) or one of the other theater guys could create a theater in which this would work…create an Altis if you will in the Falcon world.
In fact, I’d almost say that’s the easy part. Not for me, but for the guys who know how to do it it’s probably not nearly as hard as you’d think.
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I’m sure Dave (Demer928 ) or one of the other theater guys could create a theater in which this would work…create an Altis if you will in the Falcon world.
In fact, I’d almost say that’s the easy part. Not for me, but for the guys who know how to do it it’s probably not nearly as hard as you’d think.
I will have to reach out to him soon. I will have an announcement here soon about how this can be used for testing, working on setting up a website and a server environment to make it work.
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I’m sure Dave (Demer928 ) or one of the other theater guys could create a theater in which this would work…create an Altis if you will in the Falcon world.
In fact, I’d almost say that’s the easy part. Not for me, but for the guys who know how to do it it’s probably not nearly as hard as you’d think.
I will have to reach out to him soon. I will have an announcement here soon about how this can be used for testing, working on setting up a website and a server environment to make it work.
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Interesting.
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well this will work from falcon to Arma. the other way arround nope… so do only I see a dead horse here?
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well this will work from falcon to Arma. the other way arround nope… so do only I see a dead horse here?
Why would it be a dead horse? There are still AA and Naval Threats you can work into Falcon to build a challenging engagement area, without needing to pull data out of ARMA 3. Sure, the CAS support drops might be a little tricky, you have to set a markpoint and drop on the markpoint, but it’s a helluva lot more fun then try to fly the terrible ARMA 3 planes with no tanker support, no real radar systems worth speaking of, nothing more then jokes to throw at the enemy because the aircraft are all so lightly armed. The list goes on and on and on.
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Not to mention Time sensitive strikes, for SpecOps on the ground some where…
If the Falcon guys are not able to get bombs on target, guys on the ground are in the shit. Not to mention friendly fire if a bomb totally misses …A ship as Naval artillery may harras ground troops…
Not destroying the ship makes the Arma side a whole lot harderStill I do think CAS can still work. As an aircraft you dont need to specifically see what you are bombing. If there is a machinegun nest in a house, just bombing the house is enough. But you still need the CAS-brief to do so.
Lots and lots of potential!
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Not to mention Time sensitive strikes, for SpecOps on the ground some where…
If the Falcon guys are not able to get bombs on target, guys on the ground are in the shit. Not to mention friendly fire if a bomb totally misses …A ship as Naval artillery may harras ground troops…
Not destroying the ship makes the Arma side a whole lot harderStill I do think CAS can still work. As an aircraft you dont need to specifically see what you are bombing. If there is a machinegun nest in a house, just bombing the house is enough. But you still need the CAS-brief to do so.
Lots and lots of potential!
This is a direction I want to take this in, though I will need to start pulling more Falcon data to make it possible: Strategic Bombing to support troops on the ground. For example, blowing a power relay station to shut off all the lights in the city. Even smaller things, like dropping bombs at the airport to prevent helo support for the ground forces. It will require some significant programming on the web side of things, but I think it’s doable.
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Asharpe u said about naval that need to be worked in Falcon…
BMS devs have a long lasting list for BMS it’self to work on. I don’t think they will have time for this as much even if they like this (whatever this is, merging , collaboration), also in Falcon every bits and byte count. I don’t think they will sucrifice resources that easily.
Sure they have a mouth of their own and could answer for them selfs but u talk about a unique theater for this. Building a theater is way hard for Falcon. How big the area should be for this u have in mind?Sorry to let u down. I would also love something like this to happen, and make Falcon Ground war more alive and not AI.