How to create land fire / ground fire

[Geleitzug]

Hope there are some mission builders familiar with the ME in much more detail then me that can help - I am just completely new to that and struggle a lot with the function of the ground effects...

 

My idea is to create land fire / ground fire in the target area before the bomber group ingress the target zone, so that for night bombing missions the target is already visible//recognizable quite early before approaching the target (which would help a lot for navigation). 

I tried to select the land fire / ground fire objects from the "effects" section and placed it around the ground target, however, it didn't work, when approaching no ground fires were visisble. I linked them to an entity (flak or search light nearby) but it didn't work either. Is there anything I missed to do in addition (e.g. place a trigger) and if yes, how should I do that - any help is highly appreciated.

[CzechTexan]

I suggest looking at missions made by others (or Quick Missions) which has fire, such as "city fire", and copy/paste that into your mission.

[Jaegermeister]

You would need to place a trigger of some type such as a timer, waypoint, check zone or mission begin and target a Command:Effect MCU.

That Command:Effect would need to be object linked to the effect you want to trigger with "Start" selected in it's advanced properties box. (It can also be "stop")

The effect has to be saved as a Linked Entity which is done in the effect properties box when you select it. You cannot object link to anything that is not a Linked Entity.

 

When placing an effect with this logic, it will need to be a looped effect or one that does not have a looped option. The city fire smoke column is visible from a long distance, depending on your graphics settings, but it also takes up a lot of CPU cycles so you will have to balance that equation depending on the mission

 

 

 

[Geleitzug]

On 8/14/2025 at 5:21 AM, Jaegermeister said:

You would need to place a trigger of some type such as a timer, waypoint, check zone or mission begin and target a Command:Effect MCU.

That Command:Effect would need to be object linked to the effect you want to trigger with "Start" selected in it's advanced properties box. (It can also be "stop")

The effect has to be saved as a Linked Entity which is done in the effect properties box when you select it. You cannot object link to anything that is not a Linked Entity.

 

When placing an effect with this logic, it will need to be a looped effect or one that does not have a looped option. The city fire smoke column is visible from a long distance, depending on your graphics settings, but it also takes up a lot of CPU cycles so you will have to balance that equation depending on the mission

 

 

 

 

Thank you Jaegermeister, your advice helped a lot, now I could get it working even though I have still to play around a little bit with the different types of fire effects. Actually the city fire effect doesn't convince me for what I am expecting (huge from far distance aleady visisble fires), maybe the land fire effects will be more impressive instead...