Base of Fire

[Monkey6014]

This probably isnt a new topic, but I was just curious. For realism purposes, is there anyway to use a machine gunner to establish a base of fire.
He would fire in suspected enemy areas and keep there heads down and send them running for cover. This way your squad can move under this base of fire into a position.

I wouldnt need the gunner to be part of the squad. Just have one or two AI machine gunners covering my squad.

Any ideas?

[Anci]

 ::)Suppressive fire would be nice, I agree, but I think it's not possible in OFP. Maybe OFP 2...

[Arrouan]

I have made a firingbase script once -as a part of an easy company thing- I'll put it on the net when everything is ready.

There are several problems:

1. getting the firing team at one easy-to-direct location
(I used the user defined marker)
2. only having the firing team holding fire (if not there position is immediately given away to the enemy) apparently if you give the command setCombatMode {BLUE} to more than one soldier, all are holding fire
3. in order to have only machine gunners in your firing time you could check it with hasWeapon {M60}
4. in order to make the firing base work you could add an action to the player that puts combatMode in {YELLOW} or something else, the problem here is that you first have to assign targets as a commander, if you want to keep things realistic
5. I was thinking of making a dummy target for the firing base, as to make the base fire automatically, but I thought of it as too much a hack ... there must be a more structural way to have it done

[Monkey6014]

Well I'm not sure exactly what the editor is capable of and all that.

This is what I would want to happen though:
You have squad A and Squad B. A is your squad and you have to go in and take the town or something like that. Squad B consists of like 2 or 3 machine gunners. I want them to sweep the bushes and other areas that I could decide for them. I also want this fire to make the enemy take cover or flee the areas under fire.

[johnnylump]

AEF Campaign mod has some invisible targets you could put where you wanted the guns to fire

http://www.aef-kampagne.de/german/Addons/InvTargets/InvTargetsAddon.zip

[Unnamed]

Hi,

DoWatch will also make the unit target an object or an [X,Y,Z] position, then just force it to fire using the Fire command?

[shinraiden]

The doWatch and doTarget and doFire or commandFire functions targeted at a game logic would work.

I did a sample once (wanted to test audio of bizon at range) where a spetznaz fired at a fueltruck. Problem was the spetznaz switched to fullauto and drained his loadout in short order. I had made a trigger that ran like this:

cond    fuelTruck getDamage > .05
activ    fuelTruck setDammage 0

to make the truck (NOT THE DRIVER - WASTED) semi-invincible.

What you would need to do is put a named gamelogic in, then write a timed script to blast at the target. Look up the randomize functions in the comref and here at OFPEC Editors Depot.

#here
;randomize _var1, I forget at the moment how to code it.
;This will be seconds to fire.
;---------------------
;randomize _var2
;This is seconds between fire.
;----------------------
gunner doFire logic1
~_var1
;gunner stopfire. Look up in the comref. I'm sorry, but it's on another
;computer for me.
~_var2
goto here

You can expand that simple structure. NOTE! that is not functioning code. You'll need to check the comref and verify and clean it up. Sorry.

Hope this helps.

[General Barron]

Dowatch, dofire, etc are all nice and good, and with them you could get some grunts to shoot rounds into some bushes or whatnot, but there are still big problems with OFP itself that would be very difficult to get around.

Basically, the point of covering fire/base of fire is to get the enemy to keep his head down, while the rest of the squad flanks him, and then assaults through his position (with bayonets/grenades and some war cries). Now, in OFP, the enemy doesn't stop shooting at you just because you are shooting at him. Nor would he stop if you were shooting at some game logic near him. The only way to do this would be via scripting the enemy to stop shooting.

But now we come to the other problem. The only reason the enemy would stop firing is if he was ducking into his fighting position. Unfortunately there is very little hard cover in the OFP landscape, and the AI doesn't know how to use the little that is there. A bush is NOT a fighting position. I dont' know about you, but if someone was firing at me, and there was nothing I could get behind that would stop those bullets, I would put as much lead in the direction of the bad guys as I could. I would NOT simply stop firing and wait to get killed.

So basically, if you wanted to do this, you could, but it would require a lot of scripting (such as having the enemy lay down behind his sandbag walls when getting shot at), and thus it would be hard to make this into a universally useful script. It would only be useable in a carefully constructed situation.