I Have A Couple of Questions...(again)...

[Beebop]

 

First, I am making a wild fun dogfight mission where I want wave upon wave of 'Zombie Bombers' to attack the airfield  when the planes takeoff.  (Castle Wolfenstein Air Combat LOL)
What I want is to spawn duplicate flights every time the specified plane flies through the trigger.  So far only one set of flights spawn even when I 'Finish mission' and respawn in a new plane.  Passing through the Complex Triggers does not spawn a new set ot planes.  Complex Triggers send Event messages to activate planes and their first waypoints.  See attached screenshot.

 

In a previous post about Complex Triggers JimTM stated "...The complex trigger fires for every instance of a specified object entering the area..."
Mine does not, nor has that ever happened in any other previous mission I have made.  This is the first time I have wanted such a feature.

I have looked through the manuals and cannot find any way to have the trigger only fire once or fire repeatedly.
Is there a way or do I need additional logic?  

I have attached the mission if anyone wants to check it and see what I need to do, or undo.

 

Secondly, is there a way to make the font larger in the mission brief?  I can make it bold, underlined and/or italic but can it be made BIGGER?

 

TIA.

 

The Last Solution.zip

Edited December 23, 2020 by Beebop

[Jaegermeister]

This will work only once

 

 

This will continue to fire every time it is triggered

 

 

 

So I looked at your mission. It appears that any British airplane has to fly through the 250 meter detection zone at 200 meters altitude or below to trigger a flight of bombers. Is this what you were going for?

 

 

I think something like this might work for you. You need to deactivate the bomber flight after it is killed, and then activate it again right after.

 

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by Jaegermeister

[Beebop]

First Jaegerrmeister, let me thank you for taking the time to look at my mission and offer some suggestions.  I appreciate it very much.

 

10 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

It appears that any British airplane has to fly through the 250 meter detection zone at 200 meters altitude or below to trigger a flight of bombers. Is this what you were going for?

Yes.  The idea is every time someone takes off they will spawn another set of flights so that the enemy comes in almost endless waves.

I do notice though that I have 'cylinder' activated instead of 'sphere' so a plane at any altitude should (and in other missions does) activate the trigger.  Thank you for bringing that to my attention.  If I get this trigger to work as I would like, making it a 'sphere'' will prevent any returning planes from activating it until they take off.

 

So looking at your first two diagrams, why are you using a Mission Begin, Timer and Trigger Activate MCU?  I just enable the Complex Trigger as shown in my post.  I assume that using this logic means at the enabled' box is not ticked?  Is there an advantage to this method?

I do not have any deactivation logic tied to those Complex Triggers so they should fire every time a plane passes through them but they don't.  I still don't understand that.

[Jaegermeister]

Your welcome, I may just succeed in confusing us both more though...?

 

Yeah, you don’t need the separate activation sequence unless you want to wait until later in the mission to activate it.

 

After thinking about it a little bit, I realized that the activation logic I posted above is not going to give you what you want.It is just going to reactivate the same flight of planes.

 

What you need is to place duplicate flights in the same place and activate that. Then you would get a new flight starting out every time someone takes off through the activation zone.

 

You could use a Check Zone to detect friendly aircraft just as easily, but it seems like returning flights will activate a new flight when they fly through the zone with either of those options. 

 

What about using “on took off” linked from each player aircraft to an activate command? Then you avoid all those problems.

 

Am I missing something though? I didn’t see any player aircraft in the mission. Just vehicles at the Home airfield.

 

Also I don’t think you can change the font size in the mission briefing. All those formats are hard coded. Just HTML code for text formatting is available.

 

 

Edited December 25, 2020 by Jaegermeister

[Beebop]

2 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

What you need is to place duplicate flights in the same place and activate that. Then you would get a new flight starting out every time someone takes off through the activation zone

Yes but that would make the map quite messy unless I grouped each set of flights.

 

2 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

You could use a Check Zone to detect friendly aircraft just as easily, but it seems like returning flights will activate a new flight when they fly through the zone with either of those options.

Not if I made it a Sphere and kept the radius small like the Complex Trigger I'm using.  At 250meters it would be unlikely that a returning plane would activate it as the idea would be to land in the same direction as you took off from.

 

2 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

What about using “on took off” linked from each player aircraft to an activate command? Then you avoid all those problems.

Am I missing something though? I didn’t see any player aircraft in the mission. Just vehicles at the Home airfield.

Well it's designed to be a Dogfight mission so there is no 'Player' plane and AFAIK you can't send an event message from a Fakefield.

 

Thanks for the input though.  I might solve this problem using a Group made by a squadmate where a U-2 (nice and slow) passes through a series of Complext Triggers each sending Event messages to the flights start Timers.  Speed of the U2 and MCU placement can determine the frequency of enemy planes spawning.

Question:  Can I have each Complex trigger send event messages to the flights already in the mission and have them spawn with each event message received?  That way I would not have to make duplicate flights.

 

2 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

I don’t think you can change the font size in the mission briefing. All those formats are hard coded. Just HTML code for text formatting is available.

I was afraid of that.  But you never know until you ask.

 

Again thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and lend some suggestions, especially on Christmas.  I will consider them all.

 

I wish you and yours a very MERRY CHRISTMAS.

[JimTM]

1 hour ago, Beebop said:

...

Well it's designed to be a Dogfight mission so there is no 'Player' plane and AFAIK you can't send an event message from a Fakefield.

...

 

There are six event messages available from a fakefield. The only event message I have used so far in OnPlaneSpawned.

[Jaegermeister]

I haven’t done much with Dogfight missions. I see now. 

 

Looks like on plane took off isn’t one of those options.

 

And thanks Merry Christmas to all as well!

[Beebop]

30 minutes ago, JimTM said:

 

There are six event messages available from a fakefield. The only event message I have used so far in OnPlaneSpawned.

??? DOH!  Shoulda checked.  Thanks.

[JimTM]

2 hours ago, Jaegermeister said:

...

And thanks Merry Christmas to all as well!

 

And to you also Jaegermeister.

 

 

2 hours ago, Beebop said:

??? DOH!  Shoulda checked.  Thanks.

You're welcome Beebop. Cheers!

[Sketch]

What you're trying to build is pretty complex in my opinion. I implore you to take a look at our Combat Box Training server's mission design. Each one of the AI planes gets spawned in at random times, locations, and altitudes. You can reverse engineer the logic and make it your own.

 

First, we start with an 'onSpawned' event from the airfield that players spawn at:

 

Then, we spawn in the first plane and disable the 'onSpawned' event. This is because multiple players may spawn in right away... We don't want 15 AI planes spawning too. The server would just bog down. What happens if I have an issue or loaded the wrong guns? Yet another AI plane! Sooo, we stop spawning more planes from 'onSpawned' from the Airfield after the first plane spawns in. Instead, we'll use the AI plane's 'onKilled' event to spawn in the next wave of planes when the first wave is destroyed.

 

I also have a timer, that will remove all planes if no other player spawns in after 20 minutes. This timer gets reset each time a player spawns in. (Timer MCUs are cool like that!) This way, you can keep doing wave after wave of AI planes, but if no one spawns in after 20 minutes the AI planes go away. With this logic, you can have multiple fields of AI planes - like I do in the training server. This helps with performance! Having said that, you may not need this reset/delete all AI planes logic in your mission.

 

Next, I have an target link from my 'onSpawned' logic to all my randomizers for each individual plane:

 

This is randomizes the time the plane spawns in, the location of the plane, the altitude of the plane, the waypoints, and the area the plane will attack. Doing all this will make your waves much more dynamic and ultimately way more fun.

 

When the plane gets killed, I use the 'onKilled' event to go through all the randomizers again and spawn in a new wave of that plane.

 

 

Each plane is tied to this 'onSpawned' event from the player's airfield, and has their own randomizers group from their own 'onKilled' event.

 

 

 

Here's the mission file for you to reverse engineer:

Combat_Box_Training_and_Dogfight.zip

[Beebop]

?  WOW!  Rocket Science!  Presents!  Santa didn't forget me! 

Reverse engineer?  That's how I build things, bass akwards then come here looking for help in getting it the way I should have the first time.  ?

 

It looks really complex but...how else to learn eh?

I'll give this a shot.  It looks like a good basic setup for an interesting dogfight and could open many other doors for me too..

 

So....is there anything you DON'T know?  ?  I mean, if you've got a minute could you PM me some winning Lotto numbers?  ?

Seriously, thanks again.  I can't begin to tell you, and everyone else who responds, how much I appreciate these graduate courses in mission building. 

 

You all have very MERRY CHRISTMAS as well.

[Sketch]

You're welcome, and no I don't have all the answers... I just build missions nearly every week, so I have a lot of practice. ?

[Jaegermeister]

13 hours ago, Beebop said:

It looks really complex but...how else to learn eh?

 

Exactly. Just take it one step at a time and there is always a way to figure it out (almost). That's why everyone calls it "Logic"

 

13 hours ago, Sketch said:

You're welcome, and no I don't have all the answers... I just build missions nearly every week, so I have a lot of practice. ?

 

Excellent explanation as usual Sketch. You may not have all the answers, but when it comes to Multiplayer missions, You da Man!

 

Thanks for getting me off the hook on figuring that one out!