Sorry about that, this mission is quite old by now and stuff is bound to break with mod updates. Are you getting a specific error message?

Dont work for me :(

@RedRock911 Yes, basic loot is quite plentyful though, no worries.

Am I supposed to start with nothing?

bug fix update. Kudos to @11th Epoch et al. for the report.

For the enemy gear: I understand the direction you are taking. However, I don't think this is the right approach. It is really easy to get military gear in this map. You can cycle mil buildings e.g. near berezino and have 10+ mags and full NATO gear etc in under an hour. Engaging soldiers was very risky by comparison. It was more an issue with the extreme break in verisimilitude. Until I code dived it seemed like a frustrating bug, not a deliberate feature. My players outright threatened to quit when it happened after an otherwise very memorable fight with a loner patrol (that didn't have better gear than them anyway!).

This is probably my biggest criticism so we'll have to disagree on this point. It was very easy to change with some scripting knowledge, at least. Perhaps it was just us, I guess you'll see from other feedback.

Thanks again for the long response. Hopefully my comments help you figure out some of the bugs. Liked and favourited so that you get some more exposure :-)

Thanks for your in-depth reply! To respond to major points/answer your questions:

There were random Loner/Renegade spawns in the Airfield, but no army spawns whatsover, no.

Animal groups have desync issues - they were normally invisible (I can see their markers on Zeus but not at all in-game). So, we mostly had to look for canned beans etc in houses. It was pretty grindy in the tedious, rather than atmospheric, way. But, YMMV.

Lack of victory screen probably needs more explanation in-game. It seemed very much like a bug (especially as you fly off the map to finish it).

Arsenals don't have weapons IN the arsenal, but if you press the inventory key instead you'll see they are chock full of 2035 weapons in the inventory area.

4)leaving enemy gear: hard "no" from me here, sorry ;) Similar to how in Call of Chernobyl and Dead Air weapons found on enemies are literally useless because they jam every second shot, in this mission I want to force players to use whatever shotguns and bolt action rifles they can find on the ground for the first half. touting AK101 after the first contact with soldiers makes the early game PVE trivial in my opinion. As before though, please change it to your tastes.
5)zombie spawns: i haven't encountered that actually. zombies spawn by the ravage mod, similar to ALiVE units. They spawn within 600 meters of players, but not closer than 150 meters. If they do for you, then it may be an issue with server desync.

Again, thanks for playing. I am happy you enjoyed it despite the bugs!

gameplay:
1)too many guns: thats fair enough, i strongly encourage to change things up, especially since arma randomization appears to be kind of insane.
2)food: that is definitely true, but i thought about it, too. I would (if performance allows) encourage to split into two groups when its suitable, to scavenge two nearby towns simultaniously. also: hunt! finding a animal group gives you 10 steaks, easily. water should be no problem when finding purification tablets (use the pumps).
3) spawn together: i'll leave this to the zeus. i think its super nice to find each other by using found radios (just agree on a channel beforehand). i'll leave it in as an option, zeus can always teleport people in the beginning.

Bugs first though:
1) Victory screen: Correct, there is none :D the idea was that you guys can decide if you want to end the game, or go on without an objective.
2)Arsenals: strange! Should not have that, I only allowed Dying Breath weapons.
3)NorthWest Airfield. The army units are located at the hangars and barracks. Are you saying they were not there at all? Other hostiles?
4)Anomaly detector works on dedicated in my tests.
5)Respawn, not much I can do about it, I am guessing this mission is bending arma almost to the breaking point. just quickly about the mechanics: you will always spawn at the respawn camp. you need to go through the antenna (action: "teleport to platoon rally point"). will add a sign or somthing for this.
6)thats unfortunate, its so scenic! :D I will move it. you seem to be better drivers than me though, I always lose my tires to an anomaly after 5 minutes, so I dont bother much with cars. good you got them to work for you though.

Okay, so that was a relatively recent version, which is concerning for me, but well, thats arma ;)
First, thanks for playing! I tried to build a mission that contains the aspects I enjoyed most in the original stakler games with Dying Breath. many of the decisions may be quite peculiar for other players, while they make total sense for me. You had exactly the right idea going into the pbo and changing things. Thats what mods are about. Nonetheless, I am going to try to explain my reasoning for some of the points.

Hi Stu, no problem. Don't feel like you have to address everything. I know it's a lot of feedback at once. Please don't see it as an attack on you your mission, we really liked it!

We played the version that was last updated on Apr 21 @ 11:47pm. I did modify your PBOs to tweak scripts as mentioned in my comments, but I don't believe any of the bugs here are related to that.

4) Deleting all npc equipment on kill is REALLY heavy handed and unsatisfying. My group complained constantly about it to the point of not wanting to continue unless I changed it. I modified the script so that the gun and vest inventory remains while everything else (e.g. overstocked backpacks) disappeared. This worked a lot better and didn't feel OP at all.

5) Zombies spawn so quickly and at such short range on player shots fired (but not NPC shots, grrr!). 20+ popping in around you instantly in an open field is just weird.. like, were they hiding underground or something? The script needed tweaking either so that there is a greater delay until zombie spawn and/or greater distance.

This is a big list because we played for a long time so thought we'd give a lot of feedback. Overall we really enjoyed it, especially after the script tweaks we made mentioned above. Again thanks so much for putting the mission together!

Hi Epoch, thanks so much for your detailled comments. I will try to address your points a bit later, but first, would you mind sharing which version you played (i.e. when you copied the mission to your server)? Some of the things you raised should be fixed already.

Gameplay comments:

1) After playing through, gun spawn rate in houses is definitely too high. We dropped it to "1" rather than "3" in the standard loot table and this seemed a lot better.

2) Related to this, food spawn rate is too low. I doubled it for standard and grocery store tables and it was still a challenge to stay well fed/hydrated. My guess would be because you play-tested solo while we were in a large group. Larger groups all have their hunger clock ticking simultaneously but the optimal solution (spread out as individuals and search different towns) is not intuitive or fun (may as well just play solo).

3) Players should probably start at the STALKER camp. On first death they'll teleport there anyway so it saves some wasted time. Otherwise it seems too much like a bug and there's no context about why you spawn there or who they are or anything. Worth noting that enemies will still happily path through the 'safe' area and cause various glitches.

5) ALiVE saving continued to be very buggy throughout. Often our equipment wouldn't save. Mission objectives never saved. Cars would get moved around and respawn in buildings and explode. We never got it to work on a dedicated server. I constantly had to fix things with zeus.

6) Respawn was buggy. Sometimes we would get stuck in instant death loops. Rad damage effects persisted after respawn. We could move our stash but the respawn wouldn't follow. Player bodies and equipment disappeared seemingly at random - sometimes with players guarding them after 30 seconds, sometimes still persistent after hours.

7) The teleporter in the castle is a good idea but it's way too buggy. Half of us died on entry as we clipped either through the floor or off the side of the castle. Also, by the time you get access to teleporters you have vehicles, so teleport locations that don't fit vehicles don't end up getting used, which is a shame. It's always faster to drive.

Hi Stu,

Thanks again for making the mission. Overall it was good fun and very atmospheric. My group managed to finish it after about 15 or so hours on-and-off. We saved up a lot of bug reports and also some general gameplay comments for you. I'll start with the bugs:

1) Probably the biggest bug was that the victory screen didn't work correctly. I had to manually end the scenario with Zeus once the last objective was completed. If this is intentional, it needs to be much more clearly signposted.

2) The RHS arsenals that can be found are a great addition. However, they spawn with 2035-era guns inside (MX6.5, LLR etc). My players had a fit when I suggested they return these, but they made the endgame trivial.

3) The army base mission to get the lab location was completely undefended. The officer was alone. This was very anticlimactic and easy.

4) The anomaly detector only works on the host. There's no option to activate it on clients in the ACE menu.

туз отстой

The mission itself is awesome, but my friend and I were having issues with ALIVE saving:

We were playing it Locally off his PC. Whenever we stopped playing, it would not save MY gear/location when I did Player Exit; but it DID save HIS gear/location (him being the server host) when he did Save and Exit.

Our solution turned out to be letting him load completely into the mission first, before I tried to join. Both of us attempting to load in at the same time from the lobby at the start caused it to not load my saved progress.

Respawn loadout is fixed now, issue was a clash between vanilla arma mechanics and ACE settings.

Can somebody confirm that ALiVE persistence is still broken on dedicated? I cant test that right now.

Thanks for looking into it! I can confirm that it is now possible to persistent save for a local hosted game, but dedicated server saving is still broken :-(. I will try hosting locally instead - but, this drops my FPS down about 20 frames so it might not be a playable solution for a group.

Also, respawn still appears to be bugged. Upon respawn back at the stalker camp we are given a full set of 2035 NATO gear.

Thanks for the fast fix, can confirm issue is sorted for me :)

ALiVE persistence/saving is now fixed and should work again as intended. I'd advice everyone to delete old saves.

Thanks for the input guys, i'll see if i can find out what is causing this.

I can't say if it worked before today as this is the first time i've tried playing this scenario but the saving doesn't seem to work at all for me either, as reported below the server save and exit button seems to do nothing, scenario is really cool though and i hope to be able to play it with friends soon!

Unfortunately couldn't find the central cause after a few more hours of troubleshooting. The ALiVE save function works perfectly fine in all other missions, even with the same mod set running. Hosting via the game or via a dedicated makes no difference. Reinstalling didn't help. The server log is not revealing. Looks like ARMA has beaten me on this one. Shame, it's a nice mission!

Tried saving the server, 30 mins later still doesn't appear to be saved unfortunately.

Ah, I mean, the player saves work until the server is reset... and then everything is lost, including the player saves :-(.

Tried with a 32-bit server and hosting directly -> both had the same issue. Running out of ideas, but I will keep poking around.

I played on a dedicated once after the old man update, and saving the server took a long time, but it worked. I am currently working on increasing performance, and hopefully this will affect saving as well. Keep an eye on future updates.
In any case, it is encouraging that at least player saves work, individual progress is usually the most frustrating to lose.

Also had a dig through the server logs, and found only this:

ALiVE Exit - Saving Server
ADMIN UID: 76561197994506121
ADMIN: B Alpha 1-1:1 (Blakmane) REMOTE
ALiVE Pausing state of ALiVE_ALiVE_sys_profile instance set to true!

There's no noticeable effect. The button just... does nothing. I wish I could be more helpful. Is it working fine for you?

I was logged in as admin, yeah. We did wait but nothing happened. Maybe it's taking a very long time to save? I can try leaving it for 10 minutes or so to see if that makes a difference.

If I close or reset the server, nothing is retained. If I leave the server running then the player save/exit works fine (they can come back in where they were with all equipment etc). It seems to be specifically the server save that's not working.

There was a big arma update for old man recently, and this is the first time we've played since then. Makes me wonder if that's involved.

The button is not working? Were you Server admin? Did you wait a while (2-3 minutes) after clicking the button, to see what happens? I have had problems with it before, but never a "button just doesnt work"...
When you loaded up the mission again, did players retain their equipment? I didnt change anything about the save system since I uploaded the mission for the first time, so this is strange.

@stu no problem. Thanks for looking into it for me!

Yes, the players are exiting the server via ALiVE. I cannot use the server exit as that is what is broken - the button does not do anything (doesn't exit the server or save). In the previous version we had no problems and it was working fine.

We are copying the .pbo to run as a dedicated server. From my understanding, ALiVE will happily persist even through map updates as long as the .pbo is named identically --- but regardless, in this case that isn't the issue we were encountering. It's not that the save is missing or deleted, it's that we cannot save at all.

@Epoch: I'm sorry to hear that. I will look into it in detail, but first some questions for you.
Did the players exit the server with the ALiVE player exit, and the server admin with the Server Exit? This is the necessary procedure as I understand.
Also, did you copy the mission file to your server, or did you play on the workshop subscription copy? If I update the mission on the workshop, and you dont play on your own copy, your mission files will be overwritten by my update, deleting the saved state.

Server persistence is currently broken in the current version. The save/exit ALiVE function doesn't seem to work. Unfortunately this is a scenario-ruining bug. Any insights?

FYI there seems to be perhaps an ACE mission setting that is also preventing 3rd person view regardless of the server settings. We aren't using 3rd person but thought I should mention.

3rd person view is a server setting that you have to enable yourself. It has nothing to do with mission settings.
https://imgur.com/a/IOjiWyA

Hi.how to enable the 3-person view

resolved

@Stu i canot find the mission can you com discord to teach me how to play it

https://discord.gg/mmNh7M

Я умею играть ! Этот мод мне совсем не нравится. Усложняет игру как будто половина клавиатуры не работает или играть одной рукой.

@dwe_x simply host the mission. Go to Multiplayer -> Server Browser -> Host Server

how can i play it with my frindes

@Dator No one is to blame for the fact that you do not know how to play with him and stop shit in the comments that this is a bad mod =)

ACE is evil.

Thanks for pointing me towards the building. Unfortunately, it appears they are just bugged. Even when spawning the loot half a meter in the air, it can not be picked up easily. I did manage to pick it up when very carefully positioning directly above it and then pressing 'G'

For 5), I've identified it as a specific type of building (all buildings with model have the issue). They are two story buildings, for example there are two next to each other at 126095, just south of the lumber camp. No items can be picked up within the building.

Items are also floating rather than being on the ground in all buildings, but I'm guessing that's more engine problems that might be hard for you to address.

As for the guns, Arma random generation is famously problematic, so it's probably just that being weird. Still, 15% is pretty high given there's often 3+ spots per house. Perhaps this is a good thing so that players don't have to be gunless for too long. Once I have a server set up we'll play through the story and I'll get back to you on that.

Thanks for your reply!

For 1) I've hosted directly in-game rather that with a dedicated, so I'm guessing that's the source of the problem. I'll set up a dedicated next time.

For 2) After some bugfixing I think it's a problem on my end, so all good there.

For 3) this is sad but we'll survive. It's a TFAR problem.

*added safe zone around respawn camp, going live with next update

5) The loot positions are set automatically, but I can refine them. If you can provide me with a screenshot or description of what exact building has issues, I can fix that.
The ratio of loot is already very much curated, there is a 15% chance that an occupied loot spot contains a weapon (with a smaller chance of some suitable magazines along). It might be some freak coincidences to find that many guns, or the ArmA randomizing functions being dumb.

Hi Epoch, thanks for your feedback.
1) The respawn bug you reported is strange, I didnt see that on my end. Perhaps it is a server setting? Maybe check on your respawn settings, I will do the same again as well.
2) I cant do much about keybind settings, I personally barely use any ALiVE key binds, so I'd suggest changing that setting instead of the ACE setting.
3) Also not really something I can change, as I dont think most people will play LAN. What you can do is connect to literally any teamspeak, even if you dont use it. It will get rid of the message at least.

2) ACE and ALIVE have conflicting windows key keybinds. I googled this issue and was told to 'rebind use key 20' but this did nothing at all. This is a game-breaking bug, not sure if I'm being dumb about it as I'm assuming you don't encounter it or already solved it?

3) I am currently playing with people in the same room and so aren't using TFAR. As it is an essential mod, we are stuck with the 'not connected to teamspeak' box in the bottom right. This is annoying and immersion breaking.

4) Geiger counter remains on regardless of whether you turn it on/off. Not a big deal.

5) Loot spawning is a little off right now. In some second story areas near the starting spawn, the loot is under the floor and can't be picked up. Also, there are many guns even in the basic houses - I was finding 2-3 guns in a single surburban house at times. Might be better to tone back the gun spawn rate for civilian areas, but co-spawning matching ammo occasionally (not always) to balance this out.

Hey! Cool mod! It has captured that stalker feel well. I tried it out in preparation to play with some of my friends. We love the idea of the open world + story as it gives the game more direction compared to the pure open world mods. At the moment it needs a little more polish. I have some bug reports and suggestions below:

1) Biggest bug, when I died and respawned it brought me back as a NATO soldier (with guns and equipment) in a camp east of Chernarus. The camp itself has some issues too. There is much loot including a huge cache of medical supplies. The stalkers are passive and invulnerable, which I understand if this is some kind of permanent base, but enemies happily spawn in it and then aggro onto them permanently. I completed the cherno mission instantly on spawning there without even being able to see cherno.