Hi all, I've had the chance to do a bit more digging. I've got the same issue as @Furia, a mission that worked flawlessly before the switch to the updated CBA and most recent ALiVE version is now no longer reliably loading the player's location. I have just done some testing and recreated the issue with a completely clean copy of Arma installed on a clean Windows 10, with a brand new mission on Altis. This is using TADST. The only real setting that isn't default is -filepatching (I sometimes use bCombat). I'm now pretty satisfied that it's not just something wrong with my setup as I couldn't have really been more clinical about ruling that out.
I've noticed that for me, losing player persistence has a 100% correlation with a particular loading behavior. Loading mission from a dedicated server, the loading screen will appear as normal, then it will flash to the briefing screen / map view, then it will jump back to a loading screen again. If you run the same scenario in single player, the mission will load, jump in-game for a moment, then jump back to the loading screen, during which time you can hear environmental sounds and the sound of any teammates getting in formation.
This second load screen can take a while (several minutes on SSD / Skylake i7). I suspect this loading time depends on the complexity of the mission + some unknown variable (perhaps internet speed - see below). It seems to be in addition to the time the entire mission would take to load in previous versions of ALiVE, so now missions take twice as long to load. Before, the mission would load without any jumping in and out of the load screen, the map briefing screen would appear, I'd click "Continue" and then unleash hell, with my player information saving / loading as it should.
Generally, the map/briefing screen is only skipped when there is pre-existing War Room data on that mission. On a newly renamed mission, the map/briefing screen will usually load up and loading won't take as long. This leads me to believe that perhaps the duration of the secondary loading screen is in some way related to how quickly it takes the Data module to get all the required information, which would explain the variability (sometimes it works, sometimes not - internet speed?).
On dedi, the player's location will always persist if the second loading period completes before the map/briefing screen times out (that is, loading finishes and then the map screen that requires the player to click "Continue" on the bottom right appears, rather than jumping straight into the mission). However, mostly the game will skip the map/briefing screen and jump straight into the mission after an extended second load time. When this happens, I lose all player persistence. All other persistence remains (logistics, vehicles, virtual AI, OPCOM, markers, everything). This now happens almost all of the time on all my ALiVE missions with persistent data since updating.
Interestingly, this load=>mission=>load issue disappears completely if you revert back to CBA 2.2 but obviously that breaks the latest ALiVE in other ways now. I strongly suspect the issue relates to the module load order, and specifically, the way CBA 2.3.1 handles the module load order. The mission starts before loading is complete, and somehow the data module manages to correctly load everything but player information.
I cannot recreate this in all scenarios. The more complex a mission, however, the more likely it seems to appear. Especially if the mission contains Ambient Weather / IED / CQB modules and is on a large map with tons of objectives. In the mission I just made from scratch (attached), there are two OPCOMs with a civilian and military objective between them, two logistics modules for them, Alive (req), Virtual AI, Ambient Weather, IED, data, player options, Civ Pop and Placement, and probably one or two others - all normal ALiVE modules. The mission is on Altis. The only object is a player. There are no scripts or anything else. Data debug is on. There are two examples of this happening in the attached file. The first, Virtual AI didn't even work at all and I ended up with a perpetual loading screen (which now happens quite often). The second was a perfect example of what I have described above, on the new mission with clean War Room data.
Hopefully this helps!
