Creating dummy aircraft

G

grover1

Charter Member
Hi all,

Does anyone know if it's at all possible to create a dummy aircraft that can be used for effects such as "radar reports bandits in your sector" or any other sort of airborne chatter effects?

I also thought about linking radar chatter effects to a facility similar to an anti-aircraft gun?

If so, could someone give me an idea of how to do it, that'd be great.

I know it's possible to create dummy facilities, but is it at all possible to create dummy aircraft?

Thanks,

Chris
 
Dummy aircraft

Several years ago there was a chaff airplane created that would light up the radar screen. It floated down and stopped creating signals. So if you want dummy aircraft. Make a box export it create an airplane etc.... Not sure why the big deal. Now of course the type of dummy will vary according to what you are modeling. To me it is just like an ai but all you need is the game to sense an airplane to trip the effects you want.
 
Pat Pattle said:
Hi Chris,

I've been thinking along similar lines for a while now. I think what's needed are a number of dummy vehicles with the 'gun' emitters set at different heights. Daniel (Gecko) and I did a similar thing to make a towering smoke column.

I'll dig out the old files and see what can be done. There was some discussion on the subject here:

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?92831-GVP-files&highlight=radio
Click to expand...

Hi Clive and to all who posted here,

That's actually what I'm thinking is making dummy vehicles with gun emitters at different heights.

I was considering making a dummy aircraft, but it's too much of a commitment and I'm so pressed for time right now.

The dummy vehicles with 'gun' emitters set at different heights works best. I tried it earlier and it did what I needed to do.

Just need to find a way to make it fire only once, than I should be able to work with it.

James, do you still have those "invisible aircraft" around? Those could also work for having radio chatter

Thanks,

Chris
 
Can't find my invisible ac but I imagine I did something with the texture files. Do have the "windows" chaff ac and spawns if you still have same old email. If new PM me.
 
So, first off, a dummy aircraft is nothing more than a regular aircraft with an invisible model, so it would be pretty easy to do. That said, I don't think it would serve your purposes well, even for extra radio chatter. The main issue I see is that visible AI aircraft and anti-aircraft fire will try to attack it, which wouldn't look right. (This approach works for "window" as the whole purpose was to confuse AA and night fighters as to where the real targets were).

It sounds like you have something working, so great.:applause: Another idea would be to create an a flak gun that shoots an invisible shell at the target which uses the radio message as its sound effect.

For either use, the gun needs to fire only once as you said. You can try giving the vehicle an ammo count of 1, but I'm not sure if ground units can run out of ammo; I think they can, but I'm not certain of it. The other thing you can do is give the gun an incredibly low rate of fire, like 0.0000001 or something which will ensure the gun takes so long to reload that the mission will end before another round can be fired.
 
Daniel, I think you're right. I'll have to create a "flak" type facility that has a stupidly low rate of fire.

I'll do it by creating a dummy vehicle similar to the b_takeoff, but the biggest problem I've got is I don't know which flak gun facility to use?

I'm tied up this week with final exams and switching my program from geology to engineering, so I won't have much time to play around with this until Thursday.

But, I will start looking at more options for radio chatter improvement here in the very near future.

The second thing is I have a friend who's a computer programmer and I'm going to talk him into going into the game engine and possibly rewrite the AI or add in some features that were partly completed.
 
Facility? Just copy any facility .xml, delete all but one entry and have it call for your radar flak gun, and set its position to 0 0.

Interested to see if your friend is able to dig into it. If he's successful, I've got a lot of ideas...
 
What do you have in mind, Daniel?

Run your ideas by me and I'll talk to Dave tomorrow about it.

The other thing is how do I control the burst altitude of a flak shell?

I managed to get one to work, but the biggest thing is I won't get the effect above 5000 feet AGL or so.

That's the biggest hurdle I have right now.

But, other than that, it's totally feasible. Same with other effects such as "Ground Targets Spotted"
 
Glad you're making progress, good work. To get them working at higher altitude increase the range and time alive values in the flak gun xdp.

IDEAS...

For starters:

Tweaks to the AI that cause them to:
-disengage from a fight if they are damaged or odds are against them.
-fly under bomber targets to attack if equipped with upward firing guns.
-wait to fire until closer to targets, say 500 yards during the day and under 100 yards at night
Cloud rendering distance increased
Bullets show impact effects for every round (right impact effects for bullets only show for a small percentage, while 100% of cannon shells show an effect)
Effects triggered based on use of aircraft controls, for such as displaying an effect based on throttle, prop, or mixture setting, or pretty much any other aircraft system or switch.
RADAR and NAV aid simulation.
REAL, WORKING AIRCRAFT CARRIERS!!!!!!!!
Speed of falling bombs configurable so that parachute bombs are possible.

I could go on for quite some time, but those are some of the big ones.
 
A couple more

Ability for damage effects to be placed using XYZ and rotation coordinates instead of just emitters.
Improved radio chatter and increased control over AI aircraft
New aircraft formations (and it would be great if these could be configured in an xml file so that new custom formations could be created)
 
I think the carrier and ai behaviour is easily doable. It seems to me that WOFF programmed their ai similarly to what we've got in mind.

The other thing is I've been looking at the dll files in the main game folder and I think getting into those will get us into the game engine. Its a matter of figuring out which DLL does what.
 
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