Highest ranking unit?

[Clue]

 I've looked all over the forums, and through the FAQs, but I can't seem to find a way to detect the highest ranking unit on a certain side. I have a surrender cutscene that I would like to begin with the camera targetting the most senior eastern unit that is surrendering. I have no way of knowing beforehand which enemy troops will survive the fight, so I'm trying to find another way of targetting a survivor.

 I'm assuming my cutscene will begin with:

 _man = highest ranking enemy soldier
_camera settarget _man
etc...

 but how do I define which soldier?

I've tried 'leader east_units' but that does nothing (not even an error message)

Any ideas?

[h-]

Yes, unfortunately BIS has left out a somewhat useful 'rank' function...  

Maybe you just need to use a dummy officer which you setPos to where you need him once the cutsecene begins...

[Clue]

Thanks HateR,

 Will have to cheat a little and create a target then.   Cheers for the quick reply.

[Clue]

One slight problem...

 Because I have no idea which enemy units will survive... how do I know which group to put the new createunit in? The command reference says you must specify a group.

[Jezuro]

Wait a second, guys. I think there's a command that you can use to get unit's rank.
I'm talking about the rating command. If used on an AI controlled unit, it returns a number from 0 to 7500 (I think, I'm not at all sure ) depending on the unit's rank.
Need to try it, I've tested it maybe 2 years ago - but I think it's gonna work  

[Clue]

But what command would I use to determine the unit with the highest rating?

 I think I'll keep working with the creatunit command... I can get my head round that one. Thanks for the help... I'll investigate the rating command at a later date...

[Dubieman]

Wasn't it 10,000 cause I remeber when I was an avid multi player and tryed making my own maps.

To make all west soldiers do a deathmatch you put something like addrating (10000) and a lot of other syntax stuff. Maybe the higher the rating the more cause the allies have to pop you one.... Not sure..... :-\

Or maybe that rating thing was for kills and objs..... :-\

[macguba]

Rating has nothing to do with rank.    It is mostly to do with how many bad/good guys the unit has shot.  

The only effect rank has is on on the fleeing of units:  don't get bogged down with RL rank structures, they are not really relevant in the game.

By far your best bet is a minor rethink on how the cutscene starts:  if necessary just fake it, the player doesn't know who the highest ranking enemy left alive is anyway.

[h-]

It's been a good while since I last played about with ratings, but macguba is right...

I think there are functions relating to rank and courage in the game engine but they still have that "advanced designer" switch on...

At least in the config.cpp you can see that the rank Colonel has a numeric value of 7500 and colonels courage is 0.90...

It also seems that the basic ratings of all units are hardcoded as I can't find any mention of 'rating' in the config...

By far your best bet is a minor rethink on how the cutscene starts:  if necessary just fake it, the player doesn't know who the highest ranking enemy left alive is anyway.

Quite.
If I remember correctly, CWC campaign is full of this...  

[Dubieman]

I wouldn't think that they put colonels in the line of fire....

[dmakatra]

The colonels rating vaule in the config.cpp file (7500) is how many points you get/draw away for killing him. If you kill a private I think it's like 200 points or something like that, a colonel and you got 7500 points.

:beat: *Gets Shot* :beat:

[h-]

Oh, ok... That means then that the ranks array in config contain the rating for the different ranks, not some other as I thought they would...

But still, you can't get the highest ranking unit with rating because the AI also gets rating from shooting nmes...
Of course, you could make an assumption that who has the highest rating is the highest in rank...

[dmakatra]

M8, I don't think you understand what I meant. Everyone starts at 0 rating, when you shoot a colonel on the enemy side you get 7500 rating points. And so on. If you are a colonel you start on 0 as any other guy.

:beat: *Gets Shot* :beat:

[h-]

If you are a colonel you start on 0 as any other guy.

Not quite so...

If you go to the editor and test this by adding the line hint format ["%1",rating this] in the players init field and preview with different ranks, you will see that the rating IS dependant of your rank...

Same goes for the AI...

[dmakatra]

Hmmm... Do it like this then. Put out a private on desert island, nothing else. Preview, use endmission cheat, 0 points. Now do the same thing but change the rank to colonel, 0 points...

You can also check the Online ComRef: http://www.ofpec.com/editors/comref.php?letter=R#rating

Hmmm...

:beat: *Gets Shot* :beat: