An invisible physical object to collide to

[IckyATLAS]

I try to create an object that is not visible but which has a physical existence so that you can collide on it but you won't see it.

I know that there have been such instances on vehicles colliding with unseen objects.

What is the best approach to have this type of object on which a vehicle or a taxiing plane can collide.

I did some tries with fake vehicle or even a real vehicle but deactivated and it did not work.

 

[kraut1]

1 hour ago, IckyATLAS said:

I try to create an object that is not visible but which has a physical existence so that you can collide on it but you won't see it.

I know that there have been such instances on vehicles colliding with unseen objects.

What is the best approach to have this type of object on which a vehicle or a taxiing plane can collide.

I did some tries with fake vehicle or even a real vehicle but deactivated and it did not work.

 

What about a very or total transparent skin?

I try currently to convert skins from planes to static planes.

I found a primitive workaround with different online converters.

But when I tried to convert it directly only with Gimp (I have absolutely no knowledge about Gimp) the result was a partly transparent skin.

I suppose, a skin specialist could create a transparent skin.

 

[Jaegermeister]

3 hours ago, kraut1 said:

What about a very or total transparent skin?

I try currently to convert skins from planes to static planes.

I found a primitive workaround with different online converters.

But when I tried to convert it directly only with Gimp (I have absolutely no knowledge about Gimp) the result was a partly transparent skin.

I suppose, a skin specialist could create a transparent skin.

 

 

There was a bug at one point where certain invisible planes were flying around and you could only see the exhaust, but that got fixed pretty quick.

 

If you make parts of a skin invisible, the internals like the engine and landing gear are still visible. I accidentally did that once.

 

The Devs also managed to accidentally make invisible roadblocks in TC, but that was also not intentional and got removed.

[IckyATLAS]

I tried also with fake blocks, but it did not work. Ok then no real clean solution. 

[Jaegermeister]

Yeah, fake vehicles are the only thing I know of that are invisible and it sounds like they have no physical structure.

[Zooropa_Fly]

There are, or at least were, one or two objects that have invisible areas around them that you hit like a brick wall.

I think the palace-like building 'Rechnoy' and maybe some 'bridge sections' were culprits from memory.

Happens on my 'Twilight Zone' map which is available to download.

 

It's probably not what you're looking for though Icky.

 

S!

[AEthelraedUnraed]

It's possible to create a copy of the Fake Vehicle, then attach a custom collider to them. Colliders are in a plain-text format so you can just edit them with notepad if needed.

 

I have some experience with this a couple of years ago, when I tried to create an "ambush" tank mission where firing the first shot as a player would trigger all friendly and enemy vehicles to become engageable - hence attack each other. Since there's no "OnMainGunFired" event I tried to do this with a custom invisible collider object; however I never got this to work satisfactorily where the collider would both detect the shell collision yet not influence the shell trajectory/damage nor show any shell hit effects. I'm sure that with a bit more work I'd have succeeded, however I lost interest in the project and I don't think I still have the files.

 

It should be possible though, and in theory it should be possible to include this object along with the mission so that Mods On isn't needed.

Edited June 7, 2024 by AEthelraedUnraed

[AEthelraedUnraed]

On 6/6/2024 at 12:59 PM, kraut1 said:

What about a very or total transparent skin?

I try currently to convert skins from planes to static planes.

I found a primitive workaround with different online converters.

But when I tried to convert it directly only with Gimp (I have absolutely no knowledge about Gimp) the result was a partly transparent skin.

I suppose, a skin specialist could create a transparent skin.

Unrelated to this thread, but your issue is probably that the static objects use a different shader. The flying planes use the alpha channel for their specularity (i.e. "shininess"). It's quite possible the static planes use a different shader where the alpha channel is used for transparency.

 

To edit the alpha channel in GIMP, in the Layers menu, right click the layer of which you want to edit the channel (in this case it's probably easiest to first collapse all layers: Image->Flatten Image). Click "Add Layer Mask -> Transfer layer's alpha channel -> Add". Now using the "Show Layer Mask" and "Edit Layer Mask" options (again, right click the layer), you can specify if you want to see/edit the colour channels or the alpha channel. In your case, you'd probably want the Alpha Channel to be completely opaque, i.e. black.

Edited June 7, 2024 by AEthelraedUnraed

[IckyATLAS]

On 6/7/2024 at 3:11 PM, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Colliders are in a plain-text format so you can just edit them with notepad if needed.

Very interesting info. I had no idea this existed, and I do not use mods so this could be interesting.

But I have no idea how this works.

 

But here is the scenario I was trying to set-up.

 

When you have a runway that is full of craters (ground objects) after a bombing of the airfield (in a previous mission), then landing or taking off becomes tricky as you must avoid them.

 

In the normal case these ground craters have no physical structure so you can just go through them.

 

The idea is that if you end up into them using an invisible collider then you could get some damage.

 

Another way of doing is to have on top of the crater a check-zone (half spherical diameter of the crater) and a MCU Damage command that will damage the airplane, But unfortunately you can explode it, there is no intermediate damage, and it must be an AI plane. This does not work on the Player plane. You cannot destroy a plane you are in with MCU Damage.

 

Back to start.

 

 

Edited September 2, 2024 by IckyATLAS