Ok so I know there's a lot of locality differences but one thing I've noticed lately is that I can start my mission up in the editor, fly around in Zeus and see a ton of civilians (I have them set to extreme and a limit of 40, I want busy villages)

But then I upload the mission to the server, start it up and it's like a ghost town. During testing the first town outside our base on Takistan has between 6 and 10 civilians every time. But once that same mission with the same exact setting is on the server, I see no one.

Is it just a case of units taking longer to spawn in once it's on the server or something?
Or is there something restricting them somehow?

Could be because zeus itself is spawning civilians so you hit the limit much earlier. Try removing zeus and see if it's still a ghost town.

@incontinenetia Could be because zeus itself is spawning civilians so you hit the limit much earlier. Try removing zeus and see if it's still a ghost town.

I don't think so, even without using Zeus I can drive up to the nearest town in the editor and it's well populated, but once it's on the server and we drive up there, ghosted.

@marceldev89 Sounds like a locality issue somewhere. Don't think ALiVE differentiates between editor/sp and dedicated server.

If you can provide a repro mission with minimal dependencies (i.e. CBA and ALiVE) then we can check what's going on. :)

Thanks marceldev, I understand why I need to test it vanilla, but I'm not sure how much help it will be, there's not a single vanilla unit or vehicle on the (also not vanilla) map, and knowing ARMA/ALiVE like I do it's always proven hard to recreate an exact situation from one to the other. But I will give it a shot.

To be honest I was hoping someone would just say "Oh have you done x yet" and that I'd feel like an idiot and things would work again :P

Haha yeah it does, I'll do some more testing tonight and see what I can deduce.

Oh one thing I have worked out for sure is that ALiVE roadblocks don't seem to like Takistan very much. At least half of the ones I've seen have been at 90º to the roads, but I'll put some pictures together and raise a ticket once I sign up a github account

Flying around in Zeus you see big ol' purple icons for each civilian so they're impossible to miss. They're just literally not there.

I know starting the mission on a server takes substantially longer than it does testing in the editor, so maybe I'll let things run for 30 mins and then see how things look, maybe things take a little longer to spawn in.

I hope it's not the faction (although I'm not sure why it would work fine in the editor) but I'm using a faction I created with the ORBATARANG which is just simply CUP units. Everything else seems to work fine (apart from Spyders Addons but that seems to be an issue with a lot of custom civilians)

Yeah I've driven around and it's been much much quieter than when it's in the editor.

I've got a ton of work to do on it tonight so I'll do some more testing and see if I can't narrow things down.

Got it sorted!

Completely MY fault, I had manually placed civilians at certain points around the map not realising they counted towards the limit. Basically meaning the civ module only had 5 or 6 units to spawn for itself.