ALiVE : Uprising — Familiarization and Resources

ALiVE is an incredible and sophisticated mod for ARMA 3 that provides mission makers with the power to build highly dynamic, immersive combat scenarios. Naturally, there are quite a significant number of inter-related tools you will need to master in order to unleash the potential of ARMA 3 and ALiVE; to that end, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with the documentation and resources provided before trying to dive in and build your amazing scenario. There is a lot of information to read and understand, but it will pay off in the long run; don’t get impatient.

Tutorial Series

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

The ALiVE Team has done a phenomenal job of providing plenty of documentation for the aspiring mission maker. Their wiki lays out a solid path to getting started and building a quick, functioning test mission. This will get you into some of the basic modules and up and running quickly, but this alone will most likely not help you fully grasp each module or how best to leverage them; that’s where this page comes in. I recommend reading and comprehending the following pages in this order:

1. ALiVE Fundamentals — Read this to get a brief introduction to the basics of ALiVE’s core mechanics.
2. Core Modules — Read the individual pages of each Core Module for a detailed understanding of ALiVE’s required configuration modules. These are really basic but important.
3. Quickstart — This will have you building your own very quick Invasion scenario with one attacking force and one occupying force.
4. Module Overview — This page has good, short descriptions of each of ALiVE’s modules just to give you an introduction to the tools you have available. It also contains many great video tutorials when you’ve got time to explore them.
5. Tactical Areas of Responsibility — This explains how you can use ALiVE’s TAOR markers alongside the Military Placement Modules to spawn units and identify objectives for both players and AI. TAOR markers and Military Placement Modules are the most crucial elements to understand fully.
6. ALiVE Schematic — This diagram is a concise but holistic picture of ALiVE’s many modules and how they relate to each other. This is a great reference image to keep handy.
7. ALiVE FAQ — This will give you a few pointers about what you are looking at in ALiVE’s debug mode. Pay particular attention to the “What do the numbers mean…” question as it will help you comprehend the debug markers that ALiVE draws on the map.
8. Troubleshooting — Here are the causes of some common errors you may run in to while building.

Keep these pages open while you’re building for easy reference. These are the articles I found most useful while just getting started. There is plenty more documentation provided, but try to start experimenting with the basics before moving in to the advanced topics.

Before you get started building, make sure you understand which Factions and Maps are supported by ALiVE:

• Supported Maps
• Supported Factions

Don’t find out the hard way (like I did initially) that your carefully crafted scenario was broken from the beginning because you chose an unsupported map.

Understanding these pieces gives you a solid foundation for building your scenario. Happy building!

The first step I took when building Uprising was to set up a common base mission.

Tutorial Series

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