Dispatch, timers, and responding units
The Setup tab holds everything about the response: which modules are on, what the dispatcher says, how often the drill prompts command, and which units are coming.
Time of day#
Every scenario runs in daylight unless you set it to night. At night the exterior scene photos darken: exposure drops, contrast rises, and the edges fall off into darkness. Fire, smoke, and markers stay at full brightness on top, so flames read against the dark the way they do on a real 0200 call. Interior views are not darkened: inside, the light comes from the fire and the crew's own lights, so interiors render as you authored them. The tactical map stays in daylight so it remains readable.
Night changes nothing about how the drill runs; it changes what crews can see. The same scenario makes a good pair drilled both ways.
On exterior views, a night scenario also offers Generate night photo in the view editor: the photo is relit as a true night scene, sun shadows removed and replaced with streetlights and porch light, and you approve the result before it is kept. Views without a generated photo use the live darkening instead. Each generation is an AI image call and takes ten seconds or so.
Category#
Every structure scenario has a building category: 1-story residential, 2-story residential, apartment, duplex, big box, strip mall, or commercial. You pick it when you create the scenario and can change it here. The category groups the scenario list on the home screen and the pick-a-scenario list when starting a drill, and it is the building type in the training-hours coverage grid. Scenarios built before categories existed are filed as 1-story residential until someone re-files them.
The category also presets the interior layout when you turn on interior simulation (a 2-story, apartment, or duplex gets the multi-story layout; big box and commercial get the big-box layout). Wildland scenarios have no category; they list in their own group.
Modules#
Two checkboxes:
- Apparatus placement turns on plan-versus-actual apparatus positioning on the aerial. Requires an aerial view with an image. See Module: apparatus placement.
- Interior simulation lets companies with an interior assignment travel inside the structure. Ticking it reveals the Interior layout dropdown, preset from the category. See Module: interior simulation.
They need an active department subscription; without one the server refuses to save a scenario with either enabled.
Dispatch#
Incident address is read aloud by the dispatcher when the drill starts, it appears in the dispatch line in the feed, and it stays pinned at the top center of the drill screen and the after-action review so nobody has to remember it from the dispatch. Write it the way you want it spoken. Street types are expanded when spoken, and three-digit numbers are read radio-style, so 675 is read as "six seventy-five."
This address is independent of the addresses you used to fetch imagery. You can build from one building's photos and dispatch to any address you like.
Timers#
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Elapsed-time notification every (min) | How often the dispatcher announces elapsed time to command. |
| PAR every (min) | How often an elapsed-time notification also prompts a personnel accountability report. 0 turns PAR prompts off. |
Both are measured from the start of the exercise. Ten and twenty minutes are typical. These fire automatically; the instructor can also prompt a PAR at any time during the drill with the PAR button.
Responding units#
Each unit has three fields:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Callsign | What dispatch says and what appears on the command board, for example Engine 52. |
| Type | engine, truck, rescue, medic, police, command, boat, or utv. |
| Arrives | A window in minutes after dispatch, entered as a range. |
Add as many units as your drill needs. The trash button removes one.
Departments with a defined fleet can skip the typing: Load configuration at the top of the panel replaces the scenario's units with one of the department's response configurations (first alarm, second alarm, MVA, and so on), defaults windows included, and Save as configuration turns the units you have into a new one. See Apparatus inventory and configurations.
How arrival works#
When the clock starts, each unit's arrival time is rolled once at random inside its own window, and that roll is fixed for the rest of the drill. Two runs of the same scenario produce different arrival orders, which keeps a scenario useful more than once.
Members assigned to a unit see a responding screen until their unit arrives. They can hear and use the radio while responding, but they do not see the scene until they are on scene. Observers, meaning members with no unit assigned, see the scene from the start.
Arrivals are not announced by the dispatcher. Noticing that a unit is on scene is the IC's job. The unit shows as arrived on the command board and in the feed, and the instructor can always call it over the radio.
The IC's unit arrives first#
If an instructor designates an incident commander before the clock starts, that officer's unit is moved into the earliest arrival slot, and the unit that would have been first takes the IC's original time. The overall spread is preserved. This follows the convention that the first-arriving officer establishes command.
If nobody has command when the clock starts, arrival order is purely the roll.
Choosing windows#
- Tight windows (
1to2) make arrival predictable, which is useful when you want to drill a specific sequence. - Wide windows (
2to8) make the IC work with whatever shows up, which is closer to reality. - Give later-alarm units genuinely later windows. A second engine arriving 30 seconds behind the first does not exercise much.
You do not have to get this exactly right. During a drill the instructor can click any unit's countdown chip to bring it on scene immediately, so a window that turns out too long is a click to fix rather than a scenario edit. See Instructor guide.