I have been away from Arma 3 for a while and when I came back, Steam had updated some of my mods. When I go to play an Alive mission I made about six months ago, I notice some of the units spawn and despawn at certain points in an odd way, generally as a group of soldiers. You can't really shoot at this group and kill them as they disappear relatively fast, but it seems sometimes they can shoot back at you.

Are there any clues what is going on here? Has anybody else noticed some missions being broken by updates?

This may also be related to another question I have... how does ACE's Cookoff option interact with ALiVE? Cookoff is something I use, and it prevents vehicles from just blowing up like they are mare out of explodium (which looks terribly cheesy, even Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising got that right), but it also can leave alot of incapacitated vehicles lying around that the regular garbage collectors will not touch.

The AI in Arma 3, with or without VCom, just isn't very good for vehicles and I suspect that may be part of the issue.

VCom randomly gets into vehicles, it's just what it does. Disabling entering vehicles might be an option, particularly if they are not an insurgency, I doubt you will miss it.

I'm noticing in my insurgency scenario its too easy to ambush patrolling AAF vehicles (armed only with an MK20 and low power optic). To correct that I had to change the scenario design to have more foot patrols, but it's not an ideal solution. The AI doesn't understand how to drive fast and keep moving. I think the AI situation in Arma does better with "static" insurgencies, and not with occupation forces.

Low intensity warfare between two asymetric factions. Because... guerilla warfare is underrated.

I'm not seeing CUP or Alive compositions in the editor despite the PBO's being present. Is this a broken feature?

I actually think missing targets is fairly realistic. If it's conventional munitions like bombs or rockets, about half he time they should be off target by a wide margin. Most military stuff I have read has said that helicopter doctrine has changed alot in the past decades and in a conventional war, helicopter assaults could expect heavy losses. The modern battlefield is dangerous for helicopters fighting conventional armies. Helicopters are slow SAM magnets.

I've had mixed success with fixed-wing CAS. In my Vietnam ALiVE mission the Skyraider's fly OK from a distant base but you get close enough to them and they can get stuck on objects taxing around (are they being virtualized at a distance? I don't know).

Mostly I think infantry is still queen of the battlefield and this is something Arma gets right. A few guys with good AT and AA weapons should be able to take on support.

Laser guided ordinance is definitely the way to go if you want precision. It does involve spotting from a distance, though.

Are you using VCom?

Unless the rounds are guided, artillery is "inaccurate" in real life. Its meant to be used against relatively static enemies occupying a large area.

Are they despawning and being deleted or despawning and returning to being enemies?

I've got a similar type of question so I'd be curious to know. BCombat allows enemies to surrender and I've had similar questions about using it in Alive.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1393321421&searchtext=kavala

I didn't binarize the mission file.

The only issue I had was when I playtested it, when I killed the last insurgent, the game did not end. I used a trigger for the ending:

((count ([getposATL thisTrigger, 2000, ["EAST","entity"]] call ALIVE_fnc_getNearProfiles)) < 1);

CSTAR kept showing the profile.

I got bored after that (maybe the patrolling is a little too realistic), so I am not sure what would happen, if the garbage collector would wipe out the profile or not.

I'd appreciate some folks looking into it and giving some feedback. This is the first time in ages I've uploaded anything to the internet, much less anything that involved any kind of scripting (I think my last formal lesson in programming was in middle school with Pilot decades ago).

I seem to get multiple reports on objectives in the same log file, like it's running the same process over and over.