In the mission editor, attempting to use the 'Placement Radius' field in the unit or waypoint menu does not work properly when the unit/waypoint is near buldings. Often a unit or waypoint with a random placement radius will appear in game exactly where it was placed in the editor. This prevents easy randomization when designing missions.
{F19827}
Load attached repro mission. You have a waypoint about 20m in front of you with a random placement radius of 84m. The player has a random placement radius of 50m. Take note of initial positions of the player and the waypoint. Make sure you have HUD waypoint information enabled and enter the game.
With a radius of 84m, sometimes the waypoint location will be random, sometimes not. 84m seems to be the limit for randomization in that particular area, probably based on how many open areas there are nearby.
Quit the mission and change the WP radius to 50m. Enter the game and restart it several times, and note that the player's initial location never changes, and the waypoint is always 22m in front of you.
Changing the WP radius to 85m will allow randomization, but the WP always seems to be about 85-90m to your left, across the bridge. Sometimes the initial location does not change.
Finally, drag the player and the waypoint to an open area without any buildings, and observe that both the waypoint and player begin in randomized positions.
Still a problem in recent dev build. Weirdly the only building I have found that allows random waypoints near it is the Fuel Station (Shed) object - if you place a random waypoint on that building then the in-game waypoint will always show up somewhere randomly within that object's model area, nowhere outside it.
Still an issue in release version.
Upon further testing, random placement will rarely work in towns if the radius is less than 75m. Even if the waypoint does change from its initial centre location, it seems to favour certain points as if it is selecting from a pool of 'allowed' areas, rather than being truly random.
Same issue when trying to place objects in forests.
A workaround is to create some markers and group them with the unit. The unit will randomly pop over markers.
Yeah I had to write an overly complicated script just to get random patrols in a town. Should have been as easy as putting down a few waypoints with large random radius, which is what BIS likes doing in their own missions.