Can you turn on truck lights?

[NETSCAPE]

The situation is a night transfer flight. I want to light up the taxi way and runway with some trucks. So the trucks are stationary. 

 

I have force complete set to low priority. The "land lights" turn on fine but the Opel trucks lights don't. I swear I've played an official campaign JU52 mission where some Opel's had their lights on at the unloading zone. Am I imagining things? Because these trucks don't want to turn on their lights! 

 

edit: trying all sorts of work arounds with no success. Slowest you can get it to turn on lights and move seems is too fast unfortunately... 1kph, no fractions.

Edited July 9, 2017 by NETSCAPE

[JimTM]

Just guessing but have you tried the force complete command, as you use for land lights? You could also try the formation command with "Panic Stop" or "Continue Moving" (no waypoints) but, again, just guessing.

Edited July 9, 2017 by JimTM

[NETSCAPE]

Yep as I mentioned.

[JimTM]

Yep as I mentioned.

Doh! Sorry, I didn't read carefully.

[NETSCAPE]

I gave up. Probably spent a couple hours experimenting... I guess I'll settle for more land lights. 

[Gambit21]

Yep -,it's not possible from what I've found.

Figured 'd let you grind at it because who knows - you might discover something.

 

I found in short order building my 3rd Ju-52 mission that vehicle inactive = no motion = no lights.

Edited July 10, 2017 by Gambit21

[NETSCAPE]

If only we could have an Opel drive at 0.0001 speed 

[Hamaha15]

Hi, there's a possibility to make a truck help you find your destination on the ground. It works only with German vehicles because the Russian ones remain blacked out at night. German AI don't seem to fear Soviet air raids.

 

Set a truck and a waypoint pointing into your direction and set the speed to 1 km/h which is the lowest possible value. From the cockpit of a taxiing plane you won't note that the vehicle is actually moving if it doesn't come too close, the angle between your and its direction of movement is about 180° and the displacement of the truck is small enough to avoid an unwanted before-after comparison. As a default setting the headlights remain switched on for a couple of seconds after the vehicle has stopped. This setting can be used to reduce the truck's speed by a sequence of "Stop" and "Continue Moving" commands, a kind of reverse effect sustainer. The timer triggers need to be adjusted to produce continuous light without continuous movement - unfortunately I can't tell you the required duration of the intervals, I didn't take notes.

 

The attached picture shows a variant. The timers are set to produce flashing headlights. However, the result isn't really convincing because the lights-on interval is relatively long, the ratio between on and off intervals isn't well balanced. At least it works - see attached video.

 

Other limitations are that the headlights are not visible from a greater distance and the duration of the effect is limited by the truck's distance from the waypoint and it's speed. I haven't tried but I guess that illuminating a runway isn't an easy task to implement. There may be solutions to extend the illumination time e. g. by deleting and respawning trucks and waypoints sucessively after they have completed their run.

 

Cheers

ju52_mos_2017-08-28.trk.gz

[Hamaha15]

Hello,

 

I refined the functionality described above to extend the duration of the effect. The 'Stop' - 'Resume' commands are linked to each other in an endless loop. One lap lasts 10 seconds. To switch the lights off after a chosen period the loop must be interrupted which is achieved by deactivation of the 'Resume' command which would switch the lights on again. The responsible timer trigger can be set to any delay, however, the set time must be 8 seconds shorter than the desired activation time because the headlights remain on about 8s after switching them off as an AI's default setting which can't be influenced. In the meantime the truck doesn't move at all. Lighting up a runway is possible...

 

In the attached example the headlights are switched on during one minute.

 

Cheers

 

Here I come with the attachements...

 

 

 

 

Edited October 16, 2019 by Hamaha15

[Hamaha15]

...and with a working group.

 

See pictures from my previous post above. Please note that the Stop-Timer needs some individual tweaking for each type of vehicle. 2 seconds work fine with an Opel Blitz, 1.5 seconds with a Willys Jeep and the GMC requires 1.4 seconds. If the Stop delay is too short the lights don't go on, if the delay is too long the truck makes notable movement.

 

I added a Set Value Modifier to reset the counter to zero after each run of the functionality e.g. after the player took off. This way the lights can go on again repeatedly e.g. if the player returns back to the landing strip. In this case the Event-ON trigger needs to be target linked to a checkzone trigger.

 

Enjoy

 

Truck-lights_ON.zip

 

 

 

Edited October 19, 2019 by Hamaha15

[SCG_Neun]

Thanks for sharing