ATG Preferences

What the mod does

ATG Preferences is a bundle of house rules for a server: changes to how the base game behaves that some servers want and many will not. Nothing in it is tied to a map, a faction or a scenario. It is published unlisted, and no system, faction or framework mod needs it, so the only reason to load it is that you want these rules or a scenario you run is built around them, as ATG Everon PMC is.

It has no settings. Every rule below is on as soon as the mod is loaded, and none of them can be switched off on its own. If you want some of them and not others, this is not the mod for you.

It requires nothing beyond the base game.

What it changes

Voting

Every vote is refused: a player cannot start one, cast one or take one back, and the voting menu offers nothing. That includes voting a player in as Game Master, so on this mod Game Master is granted only by the server’s own admin and role setup.

The “no active Game Master” message

The base game puts a standing notice on every player’s screen while no Game Master is logged in, inviting them to vote one in. Since nobody can vote, the notice is hidden.

Power lines

Power line cables in Arma Reforger have no collision, so a helicopter can fly straight through a line of pylons without a scratch. With this mod the server tracks the cables near each low-flying helicopter and treats contact as a strike:

• A cable through a turning rotor damages that rotor in proportion to speed. At about 45 m/s a strike takes the rotor off completely; slower, it costs the rotor some of its efficiency, so the aircraft loses lift and power rather than control.
• A cable across the airframe that misses the rotors damages the hull in proportion to speed, and shakes every rotor hard, but never finishes a rotor off. The aircraft is brought down, not deleted out of the air.
• The cable comes down. The whole span the aircraft hit is destroyed, the same as if it had been shot through.

A parked aircraft’s blades are not turning, so a cable resting on them does nothing. The check runs only below 50 m above the ground and only while the aircraft is moving, so cruising traffic costs the server nothing.

The cables’ droop is worked out from the poles they hang between rather than read off the cable, so where a map’s power lines hang unusually high or low the strike can land a little early or late. The powerlines command below measures that for your map.

Game Master only arsenal actions

The mod ships four interaction actions for a mission maker to fit onto an arsenal (or any prop) in the World Editor or a prefab of their own. Each behaves exactly like the base game action it is built on, except that it is shown to, and can be used by, a player holding Game Master powers only. Everyone else does not see it.

“Game Master powers” means the player has an unrestricted Game Master editor, whether or not it is open at that moment.

It also ships an arsenal component, ATG_ArsenalComponent, which stocks an arsenal from a catalogue config you name in its Custom Catalog Path field rather than from the faction’s own catalogue. Leave the field empty and it behaves like the base game’s arsenal component. Together these make a “back room” arsenal that holds whatever kit you choose and only a Game Master can open.

The mod places none of these anywhere itself. On a server with nobody fitting them, they do nothing.

Wrecks and bodies

The mod overrides two of the base game’s garbage collection rules:

• Dead characters stay for 20 minutes, and are only removed once no player is within 500 m, so a firefight’s aftermath is still there when somebody comes back to look.
• Vehicles are only collected once destroyed, an hour after that, and only with no player within 1000 m. A vehicle left intact is never removed, however long it sits.

The base game’s other rules, such as dropped items, are left alone. A mod of your own loaded after this one that overrides Configs/Systems/GarbageSystem/Default.conf wins over these values.

Two small fixes

• ACE Compass. When ACE Compass is loaded, a compass whose on-screen display was never created no longer throws a script error every frame. Without ACE Compass this does nothing.
• Game Master content browser. A prefab in the content browser that cannot be loaded, usually because a mod it came from is missing, is skipped quietly instead of filling the log with errors as the browser opens.

Commands

With ATG Commands loaded, a Game Master gets one extra command:

It reports how far the cables hang below their poles, grouped by span length, and a separate line for spans whose two poles stand at the same height. That level-span line is the one to read: on a slope, the other lines include the height difference between the poles and read much larger. A large radius walks a lot of the world in one go, so keep it modest on a busy server.

Without ATG Commands the command does not exist and the rest of the mod works the same.

Load order

Two of the mod’s parts look for another mod while it is being compiled, so they only appear when that mod is loaded before ATG Preferences:

Ordered the other way round, there is no error: the part simply is not there. The server log says once per world whether the load-loadout action was compiled in.

-addons ATG-Core,ATG-Commands,ATG-Preferences

Settings

None of its own. The amount it writes to the server log follows ATG Core’s log verbosity when ATG Core is loaded first; see ATG Core.