Airfield landing Pattern/circuit

[IckyATLAS]

Once you have triggered the Command Land the rest is handled by AI.

If you have an airfield the landing circuit can be left or right. If you are in a completely flat land it does not make much of a difference, but if you have flat on one side and hills on the other and the plane does the circuit on the hilly mountain side it can screw itself and sometimes it does even not land and loops around.

 

So my question was how to force the plane to go left or right. I looked in the forum in Jim's manual but did not find a clue. But maybe I missed it and somebody commented on this before. In that case it will be a refresher ? 

 

On the other hand on my various airfield sometimes planes did a left circuit sometimes a right one, and depending on your arrival direction to the airfield the circuit could be anything.

I have designed a mission were I need to control exactely the plane and the landing circuit only because I have planes landing and taking off at the same time. So I need to have the flight time around the circuit to be more or less repeatable and known.

When your plane arrives on the airfield and you trigger the Land Command say form the last waypoint you cannot guarantee what the circuit will be before the plane is properly aligned and set for landing. It depends on the position of this last waypoint, the altitude etc.

 

The only reliable way I found to have a perfectly repeatable and defined landing circuit is as follows.

 

Bring your plane flying straight along the axis of the runway in the landing direction at say 300mt ground altitude, and trigger the Land Command something around 2-3 km before the runway start. The plane will continue flying straight overhead the runway until the end of the runway and a few hundred meters after the end of the runway it will intercept the landing circuit and turn either left or right. 

 

You know that it has intercepted the landing circuit because it will switch on the navigation lights.

The AI will use the wind direction to decide how to turn. It will turn in the wind, which by the way is logical. First the wind helps you slow down, second if you drift say because the wind is strong you will drift towards the airfield and not further out. If you have no wind or the wind is perfectly on the axis of your runway then you have to test if the AI turns left or right but if it is in the wrong direction then you can do nothing it will always turn that way. So if you want it to turn left then the wind has to come from the left, and if you want it right then the wind has to come from the right (at the flight altitude) when looking straight down the runway in the landing direction.

 

In these examples I always use an active airfield object with a ground taxi circuit.  

 

There is an additional element to consider and that is important. You can have multiple Airfield objects with different ground taxi circuits. But to have a clear controlled result only one must be active when you Trigger the Land Command. At that moment the AI will connect the flying plane with that airfield object and after landing it will use that ground taxi circuit.

 

You can have more than one active airfield object each one associated with a different plane, and have multiple planes going around the airfield at the same time and doing different circuits. It works but there are a lot of constraints in designing the circuits and the distances between the Taxi Points are important to avoid chaos. To stop a taxiing plane just deactivate the corrsponding Airfield object and issue a Force Complete Command to the plane at the same time.

 

Still a lot of possibilities here.

 

 

 

[BlackSix]

It depends on wind direction in the current mission.

[IckyATLAS]

Yes correct in the current mission. The problem is if you define a wind direction to suit an airfield and you use other airfields in the same mission then it may not go as you like on other airfields with different orientations and there you can't do anything. 

[BlackSix]

Yes, this is a problem when you need to land different groups at different airfields. If you are creating a single mission, it's first of all recommended to set the wind so that the player's group will land correctly on autopilot, as you need. The landing of AI groups in this case is already secondary.

[ilmavoimat]

I don't know about AI but most of the on line flyers seem to have great difficulty in finding the runway!

?

[JimTM]

54 minutes ago, ilmavoimat said:

I don't know about AI but most of the on line flyers seem to have great difficulty in finding the runway!

?

 

...except when I'm on short final.  

[Gambit21]

10 hours ago, IckyATLAS said:

Yes correct in the current mission. The problem is if you define a wind direction to suit an airfield and you use other airfields in the same mission then it may not go as you like on other airfields with different orientations and there you can't do anything. 

 

Goes without saying.

As Alex said it’s the player flight/airfield that you concern yourself with. Anyone else can be deleted if necessary.

[IckyATLAS]

10 hours ago, BlackSix said:

Yes, this is a problem when you need to land different groups at different airfields. If you are creating a single mission, it's first of all recommended to set the wind so that the player's group will land correctly on autopilot, as you need. The landing of AI groups in this case is already secondary.

Yes okay, but no. Not so simple if you have two indipendent AI flights plus the Player one and these will cris cross each other, then you see the issue. In my case the priority is one of the AI flight because these are heavy planes loaded, that do not react quickly, fighters can handle both directions more easily. And the Player flight here is as well dependent on the AI flight, this is why it has to be perfectly mastered. My scenario is pretty complex but after many hours now it works so I am ? 

 

[JG7_X-Man]

@IckyATLAS  I used the B-25 combat box @[DBS]Tx_Tip created as blueprint to create serval single player missions with large AI flights of landing aircraft after a mission (18 B-25s landing at Melsbroke, 8 Fw 190A landing at Fürstenau and another 8 Bf 109G-14s at Plantlunne). The trick is to not have the ground wind speed more than 1 - 3 m/s.

 

[Gambit21]

5 hours ago, IckyATLAS said:

Yes okay, but no. Not so simple if you have two indipendent AI flights plus the Player one and these will cris cross each other, then you see the issue. In my case the priority is one of the AI flight because these are heavy planes loaded, that do not react quickly, fighters can handle both directions more easily. And the Player flight here is as well dependent on the AI flight, this is why it has to be perfectly mastered. My scenario is pretty complex but after many hours now it works so I am ? 

 

 

Sounds to me like you're creating an unnecessary and avoidable problem in the landing pattern, then trying to solve said unnecessary and avoidable problem.

[IckyATLAS]

4 hours ago, Gambit21 said:

 

Sounds to me like you're creating an unnecessary and avoidable problem in the landing pattern, then trying to solve said unnecessary and avoidable problem.

Maybe you are right, but let stay positive, in a way this has allowed me to experiment things and learn more about the deep innards of this Mission Editor. 

[Gambit21]

3 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

Maybe you are right, but let stay positive, in a way this has allowed me to experiment things and learn more about the deep innards of this Mission Editor. 

 

Never a bad thing

 

[IckyATLAS]

7 hours ago, JG7_X-Man said:

@IckyATLAS  I used the B-25 combat box @[DBS]Tx_Tip created as blueprint to create serval single player missions with large AI flights of landing aircraft after a mission (18 B-25s landing at Melsbroke, 8 Fw 190A landing at Fürstenau and another 8 Bf 109G-14s at Plantlunne). The trick is to not have the ground wind speed more than 1 - 3 m/s.

 

That one sounds interesting, I was over that value. Potentially new tests to do.......

[JG7_X-Man]

I am very interested in your test. I my current mission build, It's a "perpetual single mission".

 

I have 1 of 6 trains that spawn at random locations. When a train is spawned, an attack group will randomly spawn at one of 2 bases, taxi, takeoff, destroy train and head back to base. Once the train is destroyed, another will spawn triggering another attack group. I will add more and more groups until there is a significant fps loss.

 

The idea here is over a few hours, you will have multiple air groups trying to land, taxi and takeoff all at the same time - creating a bustling airbase.

[IckyATLAS]

3 hours ago, JG7_X-Man said:

I am very interested in your test. I my current mission build, It's a "perpetual single mission".

 

I have 1 of 6 trains that spawn at random locations. When a train is spawned, an attack group will randomly spawn at one of 2 bases, taxi, takeoff, destroy train and head back to base. Once the train is destroyed, another will spawn triggering another attack group. I will add more and more groups until there is a significant fps loss.

 

The idea here is over a few hours, you will have multiple air groups trying to land, taxi and takeoff all at the same time - creating a bustling airbase.

You cannot spawn flights only individual planes but yes you can spawn multiple indipendent planes as an attack group.

All these planes will land using the same ground taxi pattern. You will have on plane landing at a time and many many planes turning around the airbase queing to have the right to land . Once landed they will roll according to the taxi pattern and then disappear. If there is no taxi pattern they will stop in the middle of the runway and then disappear. You could have multiple taxi patterns with multiple airfield objects when starting from different parking places and it works. However when you have multiple planes in air, then I do not know how you can connect different landing and taxi patterns to different planes. That is a test I have not made yet.

Edited March 10, 2022 by IckyATLAS

[Gambit21]

8 hours ago, JG7_X-Man said:

I am very interested in your test. I my current mission build, It's a "perpetual single mission".

 

I have 1 of 6 trains that spawn at random locations. When a train is spawned, an attack group will randomly spawn at one of 2 bases, taxi, takeoff, destroy train and head back to base. Once the train is destroyed, another will spawn triggering another attack group. I will add more and more groups until there is a significant fps loss.

 

The idea here is over a few hours, you will have multiple air groups trying to land, taxi and takeoff all at the same time - creating a bustling airbase.

 

FPS is not your limiting factor, Time Dilation kicks in well before then.

Keep this in mind. I've built several "all possibilities exist" maps/missions...my "Endless" missions I call them and I can tell you from experience that you want to be very smart and judicious with your groups. I know what you're trying to do, but the game engine will only handle so much before time slows down (while FPS remain the same)

 

Delete/deactivate anyone you don't need and be mindful of what the player will directly experience.

Edited March 11, 2022 by Gambit21