Incremental time vs. Mission Time

[Basher]

I read the wiki several times about incremental time and mission time and I don't see the difference. Is incremental time able to start from a defined event or parameter? If someone has a layman's explanation of this, I would really be interested in hearing it.

[Ssnake]

The incremental time counter is individual for every unit, and it is being reset whenever that unit arrives at a waypoint. IOW, it's ideally suited to measure how long a unit has been hanging around in the same spot.

Mission time is a global variable for all units in a scenario (=time passed since the end of the plannning phase).

[Basher]

So incremental time would be perfect to use for artillery on a unit that lingered at a waypoint over a certain designated time . Now it makes sense to me, thanks for taking the time to explain it. That is one thing I like about this community is that people take that time to pass that knowledge on.

Thanks again Ssnake!

[Ssnake]

I don't think that you can connect an artillery mission to the incremental time. A unit can use the "stopwatch" only on itself, not on other units. The clock starts ticking as soon as the unit arrives on the waypoint. But it's "its own" stopwatch, not some other unit's.

The intended use is to decide when it's time to move on on another route.

[GSprocket]

But you could create a waypoint strike 'event' that links to a unit's incremental time exceeding a threshold, and link the artillery to that event?

[Ssnake]

No. The event cannot be connected to an incremental time argument. If you want to do something like it you can only try one of the two things: Create a condition C that Unit X is at waypoint N, then check if C has been true for more than n minutes. Or create an event E if X has reached N, and then reference E in a new condition and then check if the condition is true for more than n minutes.

I'm mentioning both because I'm not sure if the condition of unit X being at waypoint N would actually be true for more than a millisecond. I think that the waypoint gets effectively deleted (unless other routes are still leading to and away from it), so a condition X is at N might actually never be true. But who knows, maybe it does work after all. I never tried it - but you can, and the Mission Debugger will actually tell you everything directly.