Best Method For Checking Multiple Human Player Advancement Along A Front Line? One Big Zone or Multiple Smaller Ones?

[DD_Friar]

Salute

 

I am currently working on a tank mission where I want to check for my squad mates advancing on a position. They could be spread out in a long line. 

 

Is it better (game mechanics wise / mission design) to have a single big check zone where the arc of the zone covers the line where I want the trigger to take place...

 

Or

 

Should I place lots of smaller zones side by side along the line that I want to detect?

 

I am finding more and more that it would be AMAZING to have a rectangular zone for checking such a scenario (closes eyes, crosses fingers and clicks ruby sparkly shoes together twice)

 

Does anyone have any idea on which is a better method?

 

I get with multiple zones I will need lots of deactivates once the first zone is triggered to stop multiple references.

 

As always your ideas and guidance is much appreciated.

 

Cheers

 

DD_Friar

[Jaegermeister]

Well fortunately it's tanks, so you aren't talking about a huge area. Either one will work, to me it just depends on which will fit the shape of your front line better. Considering deactivating the other CheckZones when 1 is fired, I would say the less there are, the better. 

[Sketch]

You would have to do this with multiple checkzones, or with a large complex trigger. 

 

Checkzones (in "Closer" configuration) – The trigger fires when the first of the specified objects enters the zone or if any of the objects are already inside of the zone. All of the specified objects must leave the zone before the trigger can once again detect a specified object entering the zone.

 

Complex Trigger - The complex trigger translator detects when the following events occur:

• Specified planes or vehicles either enter or leave a defined zone.
• Specified planes or vehicles that are within a defined zone cause a specified event to occur

Note: Detection occurs for each of the specified planes or vehicles. 

 

 

-------------------------

 

Personally, I would do it with multiple checkzones. Each area would have two checkzones, one to detect if the player is in position, and another to check if the player left the position. If the player is in the right location, then I add 1 to the counter, and if the player leaves the position, then I take 1 away from the counter. Once the counter is filled, then I can set off an event. 

 

If two players enter the same checkzone, the second player would not add +1 to the counter for that checkzone because the checkzone would not fire again since there's already a player in that particular checkzone. Also, my checkzone activation logic would not activate the outside checkzone until the player leaves the inside checkzone. (That's why there's a buffer of about 150m between the inside checkzone and outside checkzone. This buffer can be reduced to about 25m for tanks.)

 

Here's an image of how I would check for multiple player driven tanks are in position.

 

 

A video explaining how this logic works.

 

 

Group to dissect, reverse engineer, and use:

MultipleTanksInPositionCheck.zip

Edited July 27, 2021 by Sketch

[Gambit21]

Friar, like Jaeger said, whatever is best in your situation.  Consider a few large, overlapping zones either with a switchboard (each zone turning the others off) as mentioned.

 

Or as Sketch has done in his example.

 

Oh, and yes rectangular zones are nice to have - I placed one in my current mission build...you know where.

 

[DD_Friar]

Many thanks guys for the replies.