Civilians occupy their homes at night in the village of Girna

ALiVE : Uprising — Creating Civilian Population

After extending the concepts of our Occupational force to extend over the rest of the map, I’ve now got something that looks like this in the editor:

Occupational force covering all of Stratis

I’ve added two new markers as well — one over the city of Agia Marina, and one over the village of Girna; these will become my civilian population centers. The rest of the map will be populated with civilians as well, but it will be sparse.

Setting up civilian population is much simpler than a military force. There are two modules of interest when setting up civilians.

Tutorial Series

1. The Uprising Backstory
2. Familiarization and Resources for building with ALiVE
3. The Base ALiVE Mission
4. Creating the Occupying Force
5. Creating Civilian Population (You are here)
6. Creating the Asymmetrical Force
7. Creating the Attacking Force
8. Creating Playable Forces
9. Troubleshooting Information

The Civilian Population Module

The primary module for working with Civilians is the Civilian Population module. This module is responsible for the configuration of your civilians. It determines their spawn distance from players, how many active civilians there can be at one time, and the hostility levels towards each military side. The configuration settings of this module for Uprising look like this:

The Civilian Roles setting is also very interesting. With an Asymmetric force (as we will build shortly), the Civilians will appoint certain specialist roles to special civilians. Players can identify and then interact with these specialists differently to help in reducing hostility levels in the area. Depending on the selection in Civilian Roles, those specialists will be:

• Western — Priests and Politicians
• Eastern — Muezzins and Town Elders
• None — No civilian specialist roles will be created

Now that we’ve configured the settings for our civilians, it’s time to actually spawn them.

The Civilian Placement Module

The Civilian Placement module controls the spawning of civilian units. It determines which faction of units to spawn, where to spawn them, and how many of them to spawn. It is also used to spawn ambient civilian vehicles.

As I showed earlier, I want two highly populated areas in both Agia Marina and Girna, so I will be using two different Civilian Placement modules. The two markers over the cities are named TAOR_CIV_AGIA and TAOR_BLU_GIRNA, respectively.

For Girna, I want a significant population density with a reasonable amount of vehicles in the area, so the configuration is set up like this:

Civilian Placement configuration for Girna

I’m using the default ARMA civilians for my population. I’ve restricted the spawning to just the TAOR_BLU_GIRNA marker area; I don’t want the entire map to be densely populated.

The settings for Agia Marina are pretty much identical, except I change the name of the TAOR marker appropriately, and I want the most dense population I can get there, so I chose Extreme.

So, I have my two highly populated cities, but now I want to populate the rest of the map with a sort of default, low population setting. To do that, I simply place a third Civilian Placement module, and instead of specifying a TAOR that covers the whole map, I just Blacklist the two zones I’ve already populated. It looks like this:

The “default” Civilian Placement settings

And that’s it! ALiVE will scan all of these zones and pick up civilian housing. It will then spawn civilians in the appropriate densities, and those civilians will act out a normal day in the life. They’ll have a home, some will have a car. They’ll be walking and driving about during the day, then they’ll return home at night, turn the lights on, and have a smoke before bed. Hell, it’s fun just to sit and watch them sometimes (this was like v0.5 footage a year ago, but still cool).

After placing all of our modules, by leaving Debug on, you can see all of the civilian areas identified by ALiVE marked in green on the map when you preview:

Civilian areas identified by ALiVE marked in green

Now we’ve got a fully populated island being strangled by the occupying OPFOR forces; it’s about time we start a little uprising…

Tutorial Series

1. The Uprising Backstory
2. Familiarization and Resources for building with ALiVE
3. The Base ALiVE Mission
4. Creating the Occupying Force
5. Creating Civilian Population (You are here)
6. Creating the Asymmetrical Force
7. Creating the Attacking Force
8. Creating Playable Forces
9. Troubleshooting Information