Mission editor in arma3 is now called “eden”, it is 3D editor unlike the previous one ever since OFP beginning.

This page explains many mission editor features and how to do something with it, but this is not total beginner tutorial. If you are first time user then go through the eden editor tutorial (top right corner you see red “!” character on the icon) as it explains pretty nicely all the basics of the editor.

Trigger attributes “C” field is the height of the trigger. If you use value -1 it means its endless, goes as high/low as you can see.

Trigger condition you can use TriggerActivated command to check if another trigger has been activated.

TriggerActivated "NameOfAnotherTrigger";

Systems → Combat Patrol → Combat Patrol Init. This is all you need to start combat patrol mission on the current terrain using your squad.

Systems → Strategic → Open Strategic Map → Strategic Map → Mission. Then synchronize open strategic map to your player character.

This is the single selectable mission setup, you can add many more missions.

Play → Play In Multiplayer (MP) allows you to start mission in MP environment with hosted server.

This option works the same for Missions and MPMissions directories, there is no difference between these two directories, use them as you wish to organize your missions.

Importing 2D editor mission.sqm format is easy, just open such mission and eden asks you confirmation to convert the sqm file and to create backup file called mission.sqm.OldBackup in the same directory.

This old 2D editor mission.sqm must be up to date and valid with currently loaded addon classes because if it is not, eden editor just simply deletes the missing classes! Note: you can restore them from the mission.sqm.OldBackup file. Make sure you can load the mission in 2D editor without ANY errors before opening / importing it with eden editor.

How to move a group inside a vehicle, select the group and ALT-LMB drag it over the vehicle, units are put in.

When you move your character into a vehicle and want them to sit on specific seat, RMB click this character and choose change seat, this gives you list of available seats to switch over to.

CTRL-SHIFT-V pastes your copied objects into their original location.

Note that some objects may get funky pitch/bank, for example CUP NAPA weapon box gets placed sideways. You can fix this by selecting the box, ALT-LMB dragging the object up and setting it down again snapping to ground, now its aligned properly.

2019-12-22

Align to ground all “entities”.

Select character, vehicle or object, RMB → transform → snap to surface.

Note that triggers and gamelogics cannot be aligned to ground unfortunately… unless you select character/vehicle/object along with them (yep, makes no sense but that's how it is).

When I want to make sure all my entities are aligned to ground properly I'll make sure the mapview is all the way zoomed out/back then do CTRL-A (select all) and then on the entities tab RMB to character/vehicle/object → transform → snap to surface. Works nicely.

2021-07-29

Creepy moonlight night time special forces sneaking around anyone? :)

Eden editor environment (CTRL-I) shows you in the DATE field a small graphical sun scale, this can be used to pick dawn and dusk times using the slider.

Just click a mouse on the position where black turns to first shade of gray towards the sun in the middle, this is your first dawn at this specific date.

When you change dates this scale changes. Wonderful environments of ArmA 3 take real world sun / star positions into account so if your terrain latitude / longitude is on Antarctica it gets dark very early and if the terrain is on equator then day light starts very early.

When the Sun is directly above the Earth's equator (on the equinoxes of approximately March 20 and September 23), sunlight shines perpendicular to the Earth's axis of rotation, and all latitudes have a 12-hour day and 12-hour night. -equator (wikipedia).

Dawn and dusk times also depend on your monitor brightness settings as well as ArmA 3 video settings for gamma. What someone else sees in their computer might not be exactly identical what you see. One should assume that everyone's monitors are calibrated correctly for colors and brightness, but not everyone has or are playing in completely dark room etc, so it varies just a little bit.