Brain

I'm getting old and my mind seems already limping. Good thing I'm not a horse, wouldn't like a headshot!
Checked my local save and apparently I forgot to disable HQ fragging on the 910th. The 908th on the other hand looks fine. I even did a test flight so .... *picard facepalm*
HQ disabled was intended for both of them, so would be great if you can set that for the next restart. For now we should be good since Minrah already fixed my little brain fart.

Now please excuse me, have to bash my head against a wall for a few minutes

Just when it's getting busy with 7 clients the server crashes. I rarely see that many pilots online at the same time.

Ladies and Gentleman, please welcome the 910th with their KC-10s.

Since they only come in bunches of 4 planes, I actually added 2 new tanker squadrons:

KC-10   -  910th  -   Choongwon Airbase
KC-135 -  908th  -   Choongwon Airbase

If you ever need a tanker, frag them there. The save file can be acquired here

Further I took the liberty of disabling HQ fragging for some of the reinforcing Hornets and biased the AI ones towards air-to-air, to mostly conduct CAP in the area. They have proven to be a pest on arrival when DPRK is already in pretty bad shape. It actually reminds me of the four horseman, the fourth one being described as the pest in this pretty sweet song It just can't get any worse when these guys arrive
 

I think it was Toby but I haven't seen him in months. I added the tanker, had trouble with my ISP again, totally forgot to upload it afterwards and now I can't find the save game anymore. Might have been on my laptop but deleted BMS as it didn't run very well. ... getting old and might need a new callsign soon
If you can pass me the save I can add a tanker in minutes easily...and I'll not wait with uploading this time. My saves are all heavily modified and given the current state of BMS I expect them to make the server less stable; main problem being the insane unit count.

Failure description is at the very beginning:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Default value cannot be lower than minimum value!

Been browsing for a few minutes and it seems to be an issue with a value in one of the entities listed after "Forced entities". Every mob has a max and min value for damage, speed etc. as well as a default value for each. If the internet is to be trusted, one of the mods added a mob and for some reason it's attributes are incorrect, resulting in the error above.

removing EnderZoo has solved it for one person, if trying that is an option.

Other than that:
If you installed the modpack before switching to 64bit or increasing Java memory allocation, you may have had an issue while unpacking and installing (which happens on the first MC launch IIRC). Uninstall, delete the folder manually (if necessary) and reinstall from scratch. Painful, but let's you rule out a corrupt installation.
Just be patient on the first launch and don't exit even if it says "minecraft stopped responding". Of course it's not responding, it's busy unpacking / installing! I see 2.5 of 4GB being allocated in the log so Java should be set up properly by now.

If you want to dig through all the forum posts and maybe find a better solution, just search for the error message at the beginning. Loads of MC players have had the issue.

Right click - add package - lock take off time - set TO time 20 minutes into the future - add flight - 1 ship, KC 135, 909th, Kadena - Task: Refuel - Ok - Done.
We all know that but just saying so we're all on the same page here. I do not understand what's going wrong here ... not at all. Not sure how long I'll be on during the week so we can check that out together.

Added a KC-10 squadron to the day 1 save. Will double check everything is fine and get Semler's approval to use that on the next restart.
Also still got a roughly re-balanced campaign around but the amount of air traffic would probably kill the server in 24 hours. Need to find a way to cut down on that and then fly some 4-ships on 'release' to get ballz deep into the action and deliver a good first strike. More when we'll get there.

Unless included in the crash log some basic info about your PC would be nice. Laptop or not, OS, RAM ...

Ran into a similar problem while on a backup laptop (Win7 64bit, 4GB RAM). It just couldn't handle the size of the mod pack and crashed back to desktop. Make sure you're running MC with 64bit Java (loads of guides how to do it online, easy) and try out single player. If that doesn't do it try reinstalling and test again, maybe lack of memory broke something while unpacking. 
That's all I can think of now. In my experience CTDs like that are out of memory related (unless some files are broken). Report back if something works for you and otherwise include the crash log.

Speaking of tankers:

While it's a pretty sweet shot it's actually insanely annoying. In this particular situation the boom was blocked by the 2 ship on the left. Even if not I'd have had to refuel while flying inside the wake of these two guys, which is not fun at all.
Don't know what causes it, just wanted to mention it. Maybe the KC-10 is somehow less broken.

Only the time you locked in the package window matters. It will either be takeoff time (time steer 1) or time on target (first triangle on flightplan). All other times on steerpoint will be calculated using a default flight profile for each plane. I just set up a tanker east of Seosan 5 hours in the future and it popped up after just a few seconds. It should work with less (5 - 20 minutes) like every other package.
I can only think of picking the wrong plane type by accident or the worst case of server lag in a while.

As long as a tanker is patrolling along the track you should be able to refuel with it at about 6 miles. You may have to frag it before your own flight though.
AWACS can point you to the closest tanker which might not be on station yet or RTB. Then you'll get 'negative' when requesting fuel. In this case switch the TCN one channel up or down (should be 59Y - 63Y) to see if there is another tanker. If it's reasonably close you want to find this guy instead.

According to some PDF I found "Bad timing" pops up if you create a flight in the past.

Only thing that comes to mind is you set the take off time but forgot to hit the little lock symbol. Then HQ will try to create a flight with the time on target (default) which will put the TO in the past thanks to the long travel time. Everything else should give you "no AC available" but (say it with me): "BMS can act in strange ways"
The server is sitting in 2D now in case you missed it (got rid of most AI warping issues etc.). Once a flight is considered completed it will be deleted automatically and the server should just jump to the next plane in the ATO. You still can't delete the occupied flight manually ("human player detected") but other than that it shouldn't influence creating/editing/deleting flights.

I still got the VG D1 save at hand and I'll add a squadron of KC-10s available for human tasking. Think they look way sexier than the KC-135 and it will make finding the squadron easy. You'll have to get used to a different contact position but I think you'll appreciate a little diversity ... and actually having tankers available in a less remote location

What happens is that BMS eventually hits a so called memory leak. In it's final hours the server will behave strangely (eg. paused message) and then give you some kind of connection error. Also your BMS client should be restarted after each flight when flying on the server. If not you are likely to get the blue "time compression" message, indicating a bad connection.
There also seems to be a greater influx of brand new players. Everybody is doing a good job at passing information but not all know about the quirks in BMS yet.

The server isn't exactly a Ferrari so that's sadly to be expected. Some opportunistic restarts and player reports usually ensure a mostly constant up time.
We might bring in some traffic today or check out the Israel theater  

After acting odd yesterday (units disappearing) the server crashed today. Thanks for looking into it

It's timing out again after I took a break. A few pilots on but nothing out of the ordinary.

Giving me a "server reply time out" (formerly "Kevin pending message") indicating a hang.

While you're at it, could you check IVC as well? Noticed my?IVC client growing from 6mb to 150mb RAM and beyond when running over extended periods. Don't know about others or the IVC server.
Since it isn't needed, I'd suggest shutting down the IVC client on the VG server to avoid that possible memory leak.

Quote

Seal clubbing
When an individual who is highly skilled at a task, competes with other people who are relatively new/unskilled at said task. Often used in multiplayer video games.

"Man, John went seal clubbing in?TF2?the other day. The other team didn't even know what hit them."
- Urban Dictionary

...having a ship made out of guns helps

Only seal clubbing in St. Louis or Bogatyr as stress relieve. Sometimes IJN DDs for those oblivious BB drivers.?

I just checked. Server is up and campaign is running.

Try going to campaign immediately, click online and connect from there. The session should become visible in a matter of seconds. If you're outside the US and/or have a limited internet connection maybe give it a minute.

If that's not helping check the port forwarding again and firewall (if any)

Only issue I'm able to spot from running x64 time acceleration is the huge amount of planes active. I think it will be more than just challenging for our current player base and not good for server stability either.

I'd have to clear the ATO on both sides first. Then set squadrons to being inactive/reinforcements, stare at the map for a while and repeat until I hit something reasonable. I can imagine this won't work as I expect so it's possible I have to start from scratch.
Overall pretty straight forward but not the most exciting thing in the world and the current trouble with my ISP ($$$, right before my planned airshow vacation) isn't exactly motivating. Feel the need to get my mind off all that PC/Internet related crap...one downside of being a "digital native" I suppose :D
The saves are there for everybody to pick up and some documented experiments would help the effort. I might be limited to 100kbit for the moment but it's just enough for some small files like that.

My ISP went full retard, so instead of wasting my time on the net I spent some of it on this save. It's nothing special, just some proof of concept crap I've thrown together. Included 2 additional saves to spare you waiting for things to happen at 64x. Main focus in this 1st iteration was seeing how things influence the ATO, so I didn't advance too far yet. It's based on the day1 save VG is currently using.https://www.dropbox.com/s/y20ndwyld84cdhq/VG%20prio%20POC.7z?dl=0


For the most part I adjusted BLUFOR prios willy-nilly in mission commander just to see how things turn out. Here a quick summary of changes:
reduced MISSION prio for Strike, SEAD, OCA, Sweep to make BLUFOR less aggressive against high value targets. UNIT and OBJECTIVE prio had to be adjusted accordingly or the AI would still focus on these (Setting UNIT prio for aircraft was done in game, since MC doesn't appear to have an option for that, which seems odd). Maxed out MISSION prio for Escort & all kinds of CAP to defend friendly air assets and airspace.
All Vipers had their speciality set to A2A, Strike Eagles set to General. Reactivated Hogs to help dealing with DPRK ground forces.
All already scheduled SEAD/DEAD/OCA packages have been cancelled.

OPFOR has been adjusted in a similar manner but are slightly more aggressive to make human DCA viable.

I'll just let the save speak for itself for those interested (pay attention to the kinds of mission in the ATO!!!). It's very flawed but the whole point is showing how the fragging AI can be influenced to make players have more of an impact. Again: I think that's what it should be about, not cleaning up behind the AI.


Another thing:
"IF_BORDOM_HOURS" in the campaign's .tri file will end the campaign early based on a timer. Basically if no other event happens (mostly capturing objectives from what I understand) in the given time frame the campaign just ends.

I second that.
Disappearing ground units on TGP is a rare case when switching a2g weapons. If you take your time when doing attack runs it shouldn't be a big deal.

BLUFOR is probably stuck behind all those destroyed bridges. It is a low priority target for AI but since they took care of everything else it's what gets fragged.
Clearing the area of OPFOR troops might allow capturing and repairing certain bridges. Question is if AI commander will give the order to an engineer or if they are all busy elsewhere.

Found the campaign events, they are stored in the saveX.tri files. Have to dig further as this doesn't appear to be the place handling reinforcements. How did you spawn the Vinson on day 1 again? Now, back to my shovel, lol

Has been a reoccurring problem for months. A GBU-12 directly hitting a soft target MIGHT result in 1 kill but everything hit by the splash radius will show up as "damaged" in the debriefing. Doesn't seem to happen in offline flights.

If the server has a 12mbit connection, shouldn't the BW be more around 11000 (1024 per player + 10% overhead)? I know it's just a maximum cap and not necessarily used fully, but if the server tries to send 25mbit worth of data and only 12mbit make it through ... you get the idea.

Have noted popping in ground units again. When switching A2G weapons, looking at the TGP all targets vanish and reappear a few seconds later. Seems to be worse with multiple battalions in line of sight.
Is BMS resetting the bubble in this event, as stupid as it might seem? Is the delayed popup a sign of network data not making it through when refreshing the bubble?

Don't think we've made it past 8 players at once so we could give lowering the host BW a shot. Since the server is physical unable to go beyond 12mbit it shouln't hurt. If it does ... BMS is strange.


Campaign is going well ... for BLUFOR. The ground war was pretty good, took several days to push DPRK back over the DMZ. That's what I expected from removing the Osan Hogs.
Air war is a game of chance. There are some OPFOR flights going on each day but according to the force levels there aren't that many planes left. It's certainly not enough to fly CAP over the FLOT, allowing BLUFOR to conduct missions unopposed.

Another mission done:
Gave some support to a human 2-ship out of Kunsan. They were engaging some MiG-17s which behaved perfectly fine. When both left (after 1 got shot down) I could see the MiGs jumping once, then everything went back to normal. That's the typical host handoff you'd also see from tankers. In case of a smoking MiG-17 it looks just like the "lag" we usually see from AI.

On my way RTB I picked up the remaining plane from the other package, now AI controlled. Flying close formation was no problem at all, formation landing possible (which I screwed up), perfect taxi back to parking position.

I'd say now client's properly "host AI in their bubble". Whatever interfered with it seems to be gone since the server is not in 3D anymore. Average server population seems to be increasing, so there should be some people able to comment on that.

Well, we won't run out of playable F-16s anytime soon :D

After constructing some kind of "CPU Cooler of Dr. Franken" my (formerly) passive cooler now seems to do the job. LOL

Encountered a pack of MiG-23s followed by Frogfoots. TGP showed no signs of the MiGs spinning. Frogfoots held formation nicely, popping flares, going evasive.
...there's more but you get the idea. It ran perfectly.

The catch is I saw VG was looking at the map again ;) Semler, did you adjust the "player bump time"? We found this thing waaaay back and it fixed the server getting kicked periodically. Hidden in some obscure config file.

Airspace was pretty crowded at the time, DPRK flying sweeps over Osan, multiple escorted Frogfoot packages.
That doesn't sound like particularly low server loads, especially with 3 active pilots at that time. I don't know if anybody waved their magic wand or what.
I remember something along the lines of hosting in 2d is not supported. Can anybody confirm that?
No graphics, flight physics or plane avionics to worry about, no "bubble" around the host's plane...and all "bubbles" are guaranteed hosted on a client PC. Sounds like pretty good hosting conditions if you ask me..?

Going up again in a bit, choosing some crowded airfield (if any). Let's see how AI handles something simple like taxi.

EDIT: Wingmen seem to work. "Duck" took an AI wingman and he seemed to be fine. Previously they would crash on the airfield or just vanish. 6 Players flying at the same time, smooth AI movements, excellent.

Warping happens even with one player on the server, even when the server PC has just been restarted.
We got 18000+ ground units across several hundred battalions and hundreds of planes airborne at the same time. Just because they are not "in a player bubble" doesn't mean they are idle. The war goes on 24/7 and all of the battles still need to be calculated in some way.

Since you had no issues on your testflight I would assume connection/distance is not the issue but processing power. BMS might not be able to fully utilize a quad core CPU but having the operating system in the background on a 2.5 ghz dual core doesn't help. So, yeah, we might be SOL for the moment in that regard.

I downloaded the campaign and let it run for ~48 hours. Spoiler alert! https://www.dropbox.com/s/gmy5q8za4h0po2w/VG-Camp-29-4-48h.cam?dl=0
Well, it's not as bad as previously but DPRK is still being clubbed pretty hard. Most radars you'll see on the map are actually just search radars. It will be well sufficient for the weekend but after that it's going to be pretty uninteresting again (read: little to no opposition). And remember: that's without a single human flight, just me looking at the map (and going to the grocery store).

Looking at the squadrons I noticed all stock Viper squadrons are still set to HQ. For months we had 3 of them disabled (Kunsan, Osan, Seosan) and still the campaign won itself. What exaclty is the thought behind it? How is it supposed to help when BLUFOR is already overpowered?


No, that's wrong!
You can edit the AI priorities so they won't fly that many SEAD missions. I brought that up twice now, even with a guide on where to find these settings in Mission Commander!


And that's what it should be all about: player action and it's influence on the campaign.
Take out airfields for air superiority and limiting DPRK ability to strike back, take out engineer battalions to delay repair of said airfields, fly SEAD to open corridors for follow up missions, destroy war production to limit supplies .... with the default prio settings the AI will do all those things for you and it's just a matter of time until there are no valuable missions left to do. Just changing some planes around only changes how fast this happens. Everybody playing on the server has been able to observe this.

I can't deny that a well executed OCA strike will tip the balance but if it was a hard fight it feels rewarding and it's only a temporary victory. You'd have to destroy the engineers tasked with repairing as well, which is suicidal with all the air defenses in the area. So, a 'permanent victory' would require multiple missions or a larger flight/package (haven't seen many people online, unless that changed during the last week).

If you guys are meeting up in TS these days, drop me a line so we can go over some scenarios. I'm starting to feel like I'm unable to clearly express my concerns and explain my reasoning, so a direct dialogue might help answering all questions.

This was one hell of a post ... literally. So I scrapped most of it. I'll go into MC, export the map and litter it with annotations. It should be easier than explaining everything.

Having trouble with my CPU overheating but was able to look at MC today:

AI fragging priorities can be found under "Teams - Bonus/Priority" (has to be set for US and ROK individually). However, this means you can't exactly tweak individual squadrons as I intended (unless the speciality makes a difference, which can be set in the squadron details window).
This is a mandatory change no matter how tedious or convoluted it seems. If this isn't changed, AI will keep fragging offensive missions and at best we're only delaying the inevitable: DPRK seal clubbing.
Ideally the same should be done for DPRK, but I suggest seeing how well the AI adapts to the situation. It's possible the AI doesn't adjust at all and basically flies suicide missions all day long. If that's the case adjustments need to be made here as well.

It's self explanatory and by default ROK/US is set to be very aggressive. With a ~10% priority for CAP/DCA it's no wonder DPRK has such an easy time making it into South Korea.
Increasing tanker priority slightly seems like a good idea as well. Especially with heavy a2g loads and center line tanks they are really helpful but rarely there is one on station past day 2 or 3

For every human squadron I recommend clearing the schedule. This can be done easily under "Units", double-clicking the squad in question and hitting "Clear" on the far right side.


Feedback on Strong DPRK would be needed rather sooner than later. If it is decided DPRK is a joke no matter how well it is balanced (which is pretty much my point of view) we've to start all over again.