** Swoop **
Lmao...
Sorry J, been out of the office for the last coupla days on very important high-powered executive business trips. Or something like that. But now I'm back with a vengeance, and I find that no-one posts in this forum when I'm here, only behind my back when I go away! Conspiracy??
Anyway, in keeping with your earlier rebuke, that's the joke, now for the answer to your question...
Okay. First thing's first. Hostages are a pain in the *EDIT*. A hostage should always be in the Allied company, not the enemy company. Set the hostage to Captive Behaviour (note that I've added the U in "behaviour" deliberately to correct Ubi/Red Storm's spelling! Lol) in the startup script block. While an allied actor is in "hostage mode" the enemy won't kill him - you don't need to make him invisible or anything like that. Once an allied is no longer in "hostage mode", the enemy will shoot him on sight, like they would any other allied actor. There are three ways in which a hostage stops being in "hostage mode":
1) You rescue him (bump him so that he follows you)
2) You switch off the Hostage Behaviour in the mission scripting
3) The problem one. A hostage will attempt to make a break for freedom if you start throwing bullets around at his captors. This switches off his hostage behaviour, and there's nothing you can do about it - I think it's in the game engine. It's a problem for two reasons: (a) it means that any enemies you haven't yet killed will shoot him if they see him (so you have to drop them all very, very fast (without catching your hostage with a stray round!), and (b) if he's not in hostage behaviour, you can't bump him - so he won't follow you.
This is what makes them a pain to use. One way to get round it is to either have them away from the enemy - eg held in a room in a house, but with no guards in that room. This means that you won't be shooting his captors all around him, so he stays in hostage behaviour. This is like what was done with the flight crew in GR mission 2.
Another way I do it, if you want lots of guards around your hostage, is to do something cunning with the scripting. Set all the guards around your hostage to be a distinct platoon. Then, use a DeathPlatoonMember trigger, along with BlockPreserve to reset hostage behaviour every time one of the guards around him is killed. This has the effect of blocking his attempt to make a run for it every time he might be tempted to try.
Doing either of the above suggestions allows you to rescue your hostage safely, and then he should be vulnerable to attack once you've bumped him. Since you said you were having trouble there, try checking that he really is in the allied company - it can be very easy to confuse hostages and captives!
A hostage is a friendly being held by the enemy, awaiting rescue. A captive is an enemy, initially "free", that you have captured (like Ordonez in the IT mission mentioned - mission... 5 is it?) or Papashvilli in the caves in GR mission 1. Or, come to think of it, the officer in the swamp mission.
Anyway, do the above, and you should get it working...
