countdown triggers

[TAPNKEGS]

ok situation is, I have a jeep barrel up to me in town and tell me that a tank column is about 5 miles away ( say around 10 min real time) I've tried different triggers of countdowns and timeouts and nothing seems to work from the trigger point of the guy telling me the column is approaching.

How do I tie in a trigger so that when the man tells me the column is five miles away, that it starts a ten minute timer to when the tanks roll into town.  sorry for such a dumb question...  just seem to be missing steps in crucial places.  thanks for the help.

[Ranger]

You can do this with a trigger.

Here's one possible way, although there are many:

1. When you have the guy in the jeep tell you about the tanks, in the waypoint located next to you, put the following code in the Activation field:

StartTimer = true

2. Create an init.sqs script if you don't already have one, and put in the following code:

StartTimer = false

3. Create a trigger with the low, mid, and high times set to 600 (10 minutes), select the Countdown option, and change the Condition field to the following code:

StartTimer

4. In that trigger's On Activation field, make whatever happen that you want to happen.

So, when the StartTimer global variable is set to true, the 10-minute countdown will begin at that time.

[Kaliyuga]

try synching the jeep's get out waypoint with the second waypoint of your tanks....
 then making the tank's third waypoint have a timeout of 10 minutes, and they should wait at the second waypoint until the jeep hits his waypoint....  then wait ten minutes at the third waypoint . before moving on

just a way to do it all in the editor... keep it nice and simple.... in a way ;D

[TAPNKEGS]

kali that was my intial thinking, but how on earth do i time out a ten minute distance from that waypoint activation.....a bit too tedious I've tried that on other missions before and gave up on em but i thank you for the idea.

Ranger I understood everything you said except the init.sqs part of the settimer stuff, could you elaborate a bit  (btw. i do not know how to make a script)  i am just a newb that uses triggers and waypoints   ;D

[macguba]

Ranger is offline so I'll answer the question .... hope you don't mind mate  

init.sqs is a special script file which executes right at the start of a mission.     you can make a simple mission without it, but for any kind of excitement at all - like this -  its essential.    It is very easy to use and there is an excellent tutorial (How to use Objectives and init.sqs by snYpir) in the Ed Depot - Tutorials - Getting Started.     In that section there is also a Tutorial Mission which has an init.sqs for you to copy.  

Here's the summary:

Open a  text editor like Notepad
Create a new file
Call it init.sqs and save it to the mission directory so it is next to mission.sqm
Write the following text in the file

StartTimer=false
exit

Save it and that's it.

[TAPNKEGS]

  very well. Very easy. thanks very much Mac, you should be a professional tutorial meister. the rest of this forum could learn much from you and Ranger.. thanks and have a great day ;D