Unstable editor behavior of the Y axis values or altitude of an object.

[IckyATLAS]

We always comment about the problems related to the crashing of the editor in an unpredictable way (when working in 4K) but there is another very annoying issue that I have encountered and this is the erratic behavior of the Y values or the altitude value when using the editor.

 

Disclaimer; I will mention here that the map used is the Kuban map only and I have no experience with other maps. I must also mention that my missions are very large and can contain up to 25'000 items of all kind and are extremely complex. 

 

There are editor items where you can set the altitude or the Y value and where that value matters, that is it has an impact on the related object during the sim. These are principally the Effects (Fire, Smoke, explosions) Grounds, the Trigger Waypoints, Attack Area, Planes. Other items you can set the Y value but the sim does not care, either when running they will be set to the ground level automatically, or they have no effect because these are items that have no visible impact like MCU items like a Counter, Timer etc.

 

I had over time three type of issues that I encountered:

 

1) Impact on Effects that are on the ground

Altitude or the Y value of all the Effects in a mission, in a most unpredictable way are all changed either to the ground value of that effect at its location or to an altitude value that for whatever reason is the same for all and can be around 341 mt or 251 mt . This happens in a very unpredictable way. When it happens it happens to all the items of that category. The visual impact is that you can have when running your mission all the smoke, fire, explosion effects happening in mid air at 340, 250  or so meters which is weird as they should be at ground level. Here it is easier to correct this issue because in the editor you can use the Find Objects tool and select all the effects in your mission in one shot and then set them to the ground in one click using the corresponding button and this will solve your problem. Then you just save your mission and that's it. Even if you have three hundreds of them in a mission it is an easy operation it takes just a few clicks to do but it is really annoying as it happens randomly once in a while.

So the only way to be sure you won't get a surprise is before saving your  mission is to do the grounding operation before saving to be sure your mission file is not corrupted.

 

2) Impact on Effects that are not on the ground but that you must set at a certain altitude. In my case these are the chimney smoke effects. In all my missions on the Kuban map I have chimney smoke that are set on the smokestack of the various factories on the map, not all of them are operational like in true life. Each type of smokestack has a certain different vertical size and is located at a certain ground level depending where the factory is located on the map. But it can also be a house or other type of building. I mean by that that each chimney smoke effect has a unique altitude value to correspond to the chimney or smokestack where it is located. 

In my mission all these chimney smoke effects are grouped by location (you can have multiple smoke stacks in a given city like Krasnodar) and then all the location are grouped again in a top mission group for Chimney Smoke Effects. Each mission has its corresponding Chimney Smoke group that is saved as a group file. I have also to say that to optimize CPU/GPU resources the effects will be activated only when the player is in visual range of the corresponding factory and that he can really see the smoke effect, otherwise it is deactivated. Because these are effects that do not move around but are fixed all the logic of detecting the player in visual range is all set together in the same group of the effects of the given location.

 

This way of doing a good structuring of the mission items has saved my day.

 

When the Effects Y altitude goes bezerk then all the chimney smoke effects are either set to ground or to that bizarre altitude around 340 or 250 meters. Now here you cannot solve the issue easily because you have to set each chimney smoke effect to an exact altitude that is always different. So if your mission has been corrupted that way your are good for some work to set it again right. I have about 40 chimney smoke effects all over the map so that is a very long work. But because I saved the Group I could just delete the group in the mission and import the saved group in my mission file and tadaa all the smokes effects are back at the right altitude and in the right place on the map give and take a few centimeters or say invisible at our scale. But the first time it happened to me you can imagine I had to redo the work and then checked all was correct before saving the group, so that you will import a clean group and not a corrupted one.

To be fair there is an additional operation I have to do. As I said I do detect the player presence in the corresponding area where the player is. In a group all internal links are preserved but not the ones that go to other groups. Here after importing the chimney smoke group, I have to restore all the object links of the Check Area MCUs to the Player Plane In total I have twenty of them. Ten locations and for each location two of them to check player in or out. If you made like me a naming convention of all your objects logical and corresponding to what they are again in a few clicks they gat all selected and you can in one shot or click Object Link all of them to your Player Plane. Just for the record the naming for the Player detection is : Player Entered the Factory Area / Player Left the Factory Area

Easy to select you have ten of each but they are all of the same type MCU Check Zone. That Object Finder tool is my favorite when working on very large missions.

 

The two issues mentioned above happened across all the updates and versions of the sim over the years and at irregular intervals but still on a regular basis, but much less than editor crashes.

 

3) Impact on Planes, Waypoints Attack Area 

This is a new case that never happened before and I suspect it happened on one of the last update but I cannot say which one.I had stopped for some time more than a year or so to work on my campaign missions a few updates passed by. I have restarted work to debug, refresh, update and improve the missions and the story line, by using the new elements that came since over a year ago. There have been changes in the editor like the tactical codes etc. so maybe some changes in the editor internal code may have had an impact. When loading my missions one by one in the Editor I noticed that all the planes, all the waypoints as well as all the Waypoint and Action Icons and the Attack Areas had their Y value or altitude set to the ground value, or 0 when over the sea. That was a major negative surprise. 

Impossible to know why? Each item here has a specific value. Because here we are touching the heart of the code and there are too many group interlinks there is no quick fix. This had me loose a lot of time to set all the missions right. 

 

And forget backups, all my missions are saved in three copies but opened in the editor it's all the same. Anyway now that it is corrected when the missions are reloaded things seem to stay fine. Hope this does not become a regular issue. I did not check however if by deleting the .msbin file and using the .mission text file things would have been better (too late for this time). Anyway as I am reviewing every mission anyway better to reset all the values and sometimes improve them.

 

Now I am having all set to be fine with 5.101 but the work is not finished yet. As for the debugging when I released the campaign I had not played myself all the missions one by one and succeeded them which made some of you finding bugs, and indeed there where bugs. So now before releasing an update of the campaign with an additional new mission, I will fly and ensure that I can succeed (even if it is difficult) the missions.

 

 

Edited April 4, 2023 by IckyATLAS