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Problems in Mission Builder

fani

fani

Charter Member
Could you solve the following problems in Mission Builder ?


1) How to stop Landing Craft Vehicle ( The Higgins Boat ) on
the beach


2) How to make my AI companion land
How to make a shorter [FONT=sans-serif, Arial]landing rollout of my AI companion [/FONT]

Thanks in advance.
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]fani.[/FONT]
 
"Mission Building Handbook"

CFS 2 Utilities Add-Ons Library
Cody Coyote's Mission Building Handbook (Revised 4-2011).zip

page 100 deals with landing craft stopping on beaches.
 
About the second point ,
I'm sure it's possible to avoid that after the landing of the player aircraft his companion continues to turn on the airport without landing but I do not remember how .
 
My wingman is waiting to land ......!!!!!

Any suggestions ??? :dizzy::dizzy::dizzy:

[FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Cheers.

fani[/FONT]
 
Do you have "land anywhere" or "land at specific airfield" chosen in mission builder? Which airfield?

Also which aircraft is it that you are having problems with? Some aircraft behave better than others as AI, for different reasons.
 
The easiest way I know of to loose wingmen is to let them land and crash. :banghead: My I suggest that you land and and end the mission? Otherwise, take RWills advice and check if they are "land at base X" or "land anywhere."
 
Here's my way of ending missions. I prefer this to the standard CFS2 way of warping to six miles final and being offered the choice of landing or pressing X to end the mission. It also avoids the problem of wingmen crashing or landing long.


To do this, I set the last waypoint of the route about six to ten miles from the destination airfield and disable warp when reaching this waypoint. The next waypoint is a very short distance abeam the approach end of the runway, and the very last one set to Land At Base.


This way, after the last warp you have waypoint guidance towards the airfield. When you get near you have to set up your approach yourself and land. The wingmen just keep flying around in the vicinity of the airfield. The point is not to overfly the next to last waypoint (the one adjacent to the runway), so the wingmen don't go into "landing mode".


However, you must create an event to end the mission. This can be selected from the Miscellaneous menu in the Events window. I use three triggers, Airspeed 0, Engine Off and Brakes 60%.
This way you have to land, stop the plane, shut down the engine and then hold the brakes for a few seconds, and the mission will end.
 
Some aircraft do seem to land ok, so it's worth using one that does, to check you have the mission set up to allow them a reasonable chance to do so. Aircraft will often crash if you set waypoints/headings/speed/climb rates/deceleration that the aircraft cannot achieve. A waypoint with low enough altitude and speed, sufficiently far from the runway helps ensure that AI aircraft have a chance of approaching and landing successfully. Similarly, if you want AI aircraft to bomb, drop torpedoes, dive bomb, attack surface targets you often need to help them by setting up the mission/waypoints to suit. It's worth creating missions where you just sit back and watch the AI aircraft perform and learn what affects their behaviour, and what they can cope with/how much space they need to perform various tasks.
 
RWILLS said:
Some aircraft do seem to land ok, so it's worth using one that does, to check you have the mission set up to allow them a reasonable chance to do so. Aircraft will often crash if you set waypoints/headings/speed/climb rates/deceleration that the aircraft cannot achieve. A waypoint with low enough altitude and speed, sufficiently far from the runway helps ensure that AI aircraft have a chance of approaching and landing successfully. Similarly, if you want AI aircraft to bomb, drop torpedoes, dive bomb, attack surface targets you often need to help them by setting up the mission/waypoints to suit. It's worth creating missions where you just sit back and watch the AI aircraft perform and learn what affects their behaviour, and what they can cope with/how much space they need to perform various tasks.
Click to expand...

CFS2 is kinda funny. Instead of planes landing in the same direction as take off, as if they were flying "into the wind," I find that they always land on a 180 degree reverse heading and from about 6 miles form the touchdown point, regardless of where you set the last waypoint. For example: when you take off at 270 degrees from a land base, CFS2 seems to be programed to land you and all others at 090 degrees.

Therefore, I always set my last waypoints for all flights, 7 miles out, at 180 knots and between 7,000 and 3,500 ft AGL and on a 180 degree reverse heading from my take off. Try that approach, when Mission Building. I rarely wait around for AI to land., but when I do, I let my wingmen land first, then follow.

Cheers:

Shadow
 
The landing start/touchdown/stop positions and direction are in the airbases file;

landing_start_pos=5000,350
landing_touchdown_pos=600,0
landing_stop_pos=-250,0


landing_start_pos=-5000,350
landing_touchdown_pos=-600,0
landing_stop_pos=250,0
 
CFS2 is goofy in that you take off and land in opposite directions. This is an easy fix. From my Handbook:

Taking Off and Landing in the Same Direction

I'm sure you've noticed that in CFS2 you take off in one direction and land in the opposite direction. So if you leave to the north, you land to the south. In the real world, we always try to take off and land into the wind, which means that most of the time we are taking off and landing in the same direction. This isn't an issue in CFS2 since it doesn't include wind in the missions. But, if you've added custom wind such as described above, and you want to be more realistic in your flying, here's an easy hand edit to fix this.

Open your mission file and scroll down to the runway for your flight. Look near the bottom for the line:
landing_start_pos=5000,350

Change the 5000 to -10000 so it reads: landing_start_pos=-10000,350. Save your mission and you're done. By changing the landing start position from plus 5,000 to minus 10,000 you have reversed the direction you'll be facing when you warp back to your base. You'll be lined up on approach a couple of miles from the runway facing the same direction as when you took off.

This edit will effect only this one mission. If you want to make a permanent change for this airbase, open the airbases.dat file in the INFO folder. Find the entry for the base and make the change there. Now you will always take off and land in the same direction from that base (unless you edit the mission again as we just described).

Be sure to enter -10000. If you simply enter a minus sign in front of the 5000 you will end up facing the right direction, but you'll be directly over the runway and unable to land without turning around and making another approach. J


I gave up on trying to figure out the AI landing issue, too many variables among the hundreds of planes out there. Instead I use landing the players plane as the way to end the mission when I think that's an important element. You can easily set that up through a variety of Trigger/Event combinations. Just use a combo that works for you.
 
Whether the AI planes land or not is not the Mission Builder fault. It is controlled in the AI aircraft air files, which in themselves are a complex set of interacting instructions. Generally speaking though, a way to fix it is to decrease the MOI (moment of inertia) values in the air file. This is the same fix used to get reluctant AI to drop bombs during ground attacks. There was some debate in the past about whether the IA flew by trim control inputs or by aileron, elevator and rudder. IF the former, the MOI has a direct effect in how fast a plane can pull out of a dive. (Similarly that would appear to affect how a plane can approach and flare for a landing). Reducing the MOI seems to allow the AI to have faster and more positive control responses and when enough control is available for the the AI "brain", the AI plane will then glide bomb and it seems, also land.

Why sometimes the AI aircraft wil land is because their air file instruction is already sufficient for them to do so.

Note: Do not to try the same MOI trick with the player aircraft. Lowereing the MOI enough for the AI can also make the player aircraft wonky, sometimes uncontrollable. Using this MOI reduction method, the AI and the player aircraft must each have their own value. The AI use the MOI value in the air file and the player aircraft uses an MOI value in the .cfg file. If the cfg file doesn't already have that value in it, Use AirEd to open and copy the original MOI in the air file - before messing with it - and copy it into the .cfg file with Notepad or other text editor.

The MOI values for the .cfg file should use this exact format;

;Moments of Inertia
empy_weight_pitch_MOI = the copied value
empy_weight_roll_MOI = the copied value
empty_weight_yaw_MOI = the copied value

Hope this helps for future mission building.
 
What units of measurement are the landing start/touchdown/stop positions? In the following case I realise making the first number negative puts you on the takeoff heading but I don't understand the distance logic.

Landing_start_pos=5000,350 puts you 6 miles out yet landing_start_pos=-8000,350 puts you only about a mile from the runway.

What does the 350 represent?

I've found the positions in the airbases.dat entries to be unrealistic for slow WW1 aircraft landing on small airfields of that era.

Thanks,
Kevin
 
kdriver said:
What units of measurement are the landing start/touchdown/stop positions? In the following case I realise making the first number negative puts you on the takeoff heading but I don't understand the distance logic.

Landing_start_pos=5000,350 puts you 6 miles out yet landing_start_pos=-8000,350 puts you only about a mile from the runway.

What does the 350 represent?

I've found the positions in the airbases.dat entries to be unrealistic for slow WW1 aircraft landing on small airfields of that era.

Thanks,
Kevin
Click to expand...

Hi Kevin,

350 is the altitude in meters when you warp to approach at 6 miles out. 350 will put you around 1150ft and 550 around 1800ft

Cheers
aussie
 
Gotta love MS - mixing up imperial & metric units for fun - I guess it keeps us on our toes :biggrin-new:

Kevin,

After lots of false starts & mistakes over the years I've found the best method is to put an object in the centre of the runway, & save it as a layout. That runway centre becomes the runway coordinates for the airbases.dat entry. Don't rely on the FSSC info, or even the scasm file runway coordinates, load it in Mission Builder & find the runway centre by eye & place an object. The difference can seem to be small, but they do make a difference.

Now the fun starts:-

You'll need the runway heeding (true) & length (in mtrs)

takeoff_start_pos= take half the runway length & reduce by another 50 mtrs. Make sure it's a negative value.
takeoff_stop_pos= seems to be 1600mtrs past runway ctr, at an altitude of 200mtrs
landing_start_pos= as explained above by Aussie, seems to be 5000mtrs out from the runway coords, & 350mtrs alt (but see that jewel of a piece of info by Cody above for swapping the landing approach direction!!!)
landing_touchdown_pos= take half the runway length & reduce it by another 50mtrs. Make sure it's a +ive value (but see Cody's note about reversing direction)
landing_stop_pos= seems to always be 250mtrs short of runway ctr - not sure why you wouldn't use the entire runway lgth, maybe it's CFS2's crappy AI braking logic :devilish:

Because the WW1 aircraft are so slow & manouevrable compared to WW2, you might get some improvements just by reducing the warp to positions by a factor of 2 perhaps? (so landing_start_pos= becomes 2500,175, & takeoff_stop_pos= becomes 800,100 ?)
 
Hi aussie and John,

Thanks for your explanations. The different units of measurement certainly can be confusing at times.

John, in my AFD file building I've always used takeoff_start_pos=0,0 for the runway threshold. I can see this will affect things to some degree.

I've been experimenting with the Landing_start_pos distances for WW1 aircraft without much success. I only reduced the distance and not the altitude. Consequently the final approach was shortened but the aircraft overflew the airfield. I'll try your numbers.

The thing I could not understand was how Gary Aumaugher reduced the final approach distance to about a mile with the figures -8000,350 in his WW1 Cambrai missions.

This all started in relation to Fani's second question - trying to get WW1 AI aircraft to land and stop on the airfield. Our Westfront gurus appear to have had a major breakthrough with this in the last couple of weeks. It's in the PID section of the air file, but I'll have to leave it to them to explain.

Cheers,
Kevin
 
Hi Kevin & John,

It appears that warping to the last waypoint sets the AI up to land properly. I tried flying it and only 1 landed, 2 overshot the runway, and 1 just kept circling above. In testing when I warp I get 100% success of all AI landing.

With regards to the MOI that Captain Kurt mentions. This only seems a factor if the air file is wrong to begin with. I wrote a quick excel spreadsheet that calculates the correct MOI values based on the SDK. The spreadsheet will give the same MOI values as Airwrench so if the plane has issues using these values it something else not the MOI. Both AI and player aircraft can use the same values as long as the air file is correct.

Here's the link
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Autj7kVRO6yUqHqIooaFwUs-0_TJ?e=Y2Z4Au

Cheers
Aussie
 
Yes Aussie, I've been doing some more testing and have come to the same conclusion. It all depends on whether you are flying in real time or warping. With warping you end up on short final and the AI land.

Cheers,
Kevin
 
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