Hi All
Just passing and I thought that I'd add my own two cents.
I am currently editing a mission of mine in which you play a small team black ops being inserted onto an enemy controlled island (Desert Everon) in a Cessna 182. You start off in the air, lost (random start pos) and out of fuel so you have to dead stick the plane in.
Once you land the plane starts to smoke and then burn before blowing up (camcreate fire inflamed, camcreate smoke grenade, camcreate shell73 !). While this is happening you have to loot the plane as fast as you can (via an addaction) to try and get your gear out. Each time you execute the action you get another piece of equipment (compass, GPS, weapons, ammo, map etc).
I am still working on the scripts but I discovered that you can actually use the "showMap", "showCompass" etc commands in scripts as well as in the description.ext file. The only difference is that rather than typing "showMap=1" you type "showMap true".
So to create the above effect all I had to do was set all the "shows" to 0 at start (after the briefing of course, but before play begins), then add them back via the addaction scripts. I know that it works, I just it tested it last night no problems.
This raises all sorts of neat possibilities, such as stealing a map from an enemy base (along with all the markers showing wher the enemy units are), losing your compass or watch after beig captured or whatever.
Man I love this game !