Spawn question

[mongoose]

In ship spawns, anyone know what these refer to?

<Unit Type="lst"/>
<Unit Type="lct" Repeat="2"/>

[33lima]

I suppose LST could spawn a single Landing Ship, Tank while the other one could spawn a pair of the much smaller Landing Craft, Tank.

[Daiwilletti]

They are USA ships, given the type auxiliary which makes for some ridiculous ship formations sometimes. By the way has anybody spotted the duplication of USA landing craft, a typical CFS3 snafu where two models are identical, but the xdps differ?

Hint: one is called a_lci

[mongoose]

So, given this is 1940, why would a BoB spawn have them??

[Daiwilletti]

Emtered service date for the US ships is too early. Also why is the country.xml allowing USA spawns as the default? Unless the ships are attached to a facility, in which case random allied nations spawn.

[Led Zeppelin]

Also why is the country.xml allowing USA spawns as the default?

This is one of the many annoying things in CFS3 and this why trying to make a dynamic campaign as immersive as possible is so difficult. I tried to do some campaigns as part of the ETO project but it has been so time consuming to build specific spawn packages for a result that is far from being perfect.

As the entry/leave service dates for vehicles, ships and aircraft are not accurate, the best thing to do is to build spawns calling for specific aircrafts. As a spawn file can can randomly several different XML files, it is possible to bring diversity anyway.
But this can only work for a campaign that is limited in time (Campaign in the West May-June 1940, Battle of Britain July-October 1940, End of WWII January-May 1945...).

[Daiwilletti]

Hi Led Zeppelin,
those are the exactly the issues I am encountering.

One thing I was thinking of doing was creating a different country.xml for each era in ETO, to control default aircraft spawns. But for spawned ground object in facilities, they are still getting randomised per the NEK_ETO.xml which is the single mission file in the game.xml file.

In the D-Day addon, they provide a few different country.xml files but seem to prefer the "sequential missions as a campaign" approach to using the campaign engine in CFS3 for the D-Day period.

[Led Zeppelin]

If I recall correctly the Type in an XML script refers to the Category in the xdp file. It should be possible to add several references separated by a comma in Category and I wonder if it's possible to setup whatever you want.

Let's say you have a vehicle setup as Category="tracked". If you change it to Category="tracked,SOH_CFS3" and you create a spawn script that will call for Type="SOH_CFS3" maybe it will work. I remembered having tried a few things like this, I don' remember if it was working as expected but I stopped because it's such a huge task to setup all this.

[Daiwilletti]

Yes there's no getting away from it - a lot of spawn files need to be written to get interesting results. Fouteman used to put a lot of picktype entries into his aircraft xdps, and said that, despite the limited list of picktypes in the SDK, his unique picktypes worked on testing. It allows for better differentiated spawning.

I have a much better handle on attaching spawn table files to facilities these days, and so can use facilities geographically located in the global_layer, to trigger air spawns belonging to specific fighter Groups, for example.

[mongoose]

Tell us more!