A spawn question

[mongoose]

I think I have asked about this before but let's see if anyone has any ideas. I want to have airfield lights only to work when a friendly aircraft is approaching an airfield. My idea was to have a facility file with the lights separate from the airfield, but I think it's not that simple and a spawn file will require other or different files. So far I can do aircraft spawns and one or 2 other types but this seems a whole new ball game.

 

[MajorMagee]

Could they be done as flak guns that trigger turning on a light when an aircraft approaches?

 

[mongoose]

Would they do that as a friend? I suppose one could have respectively labeled 'enemy' guns?

 

[mongoose]

Actually, since lights are vehicles, maybe they could be part of a spawn. I am trying to imagine how difficult to make a spawn with 50+ lights at very specific locations would be.

 

[gecko]

I'm pretty sure you could make your facility as normal, and add all the lights to it placed on the facility exactly where you want them. Then cut out all the light entries from the facility xml and put them in their own facility made up only of the lights. Name it YourAirbaseName_Lights.xml or something to keep track of it. Set up your spawn so that it spawns the light facility at the exact coordinates and heading as the airfield's entry in the gsl and everything should line up.

 

[mongoose]

Thanks Dan. I'll give it a try with one of Ted's airbases as Ted is helping me redo all my TOW_Deelen lights which didn't seem to work with Sahers30. I had already extracted the lights there to a different facility.

EDIT: I am wondering though how this would work with an aircraft staring an mission (or QC) from the airport?

 

[mongoose]

So the first task of building a facility spawn using airfield lights with Germany as the country and a friendly aircraft, seems to work well.
I have yet to try it in a mission with the aircraft actually ON the spawn runway.
However when I use the same spawn with a British aircraft, I still see the runway while the object is not to. How to do that?

 

[mongoose]

So the above post is not the full story.

1. I made the spawn with an absolute position; namely that of the Kiel airbase, and the same orientation; namely '0'. I should note the main runway angle in the facility is also '0'.

2. The lights facility which I cut and pasted from the airbase_dual_1 facility has the same ground plane as the airbase_dual_1 facility.

3. However, while the lights spawn central to the airfield AFAIK, the orientation is off.