Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: oneway on January 17, 2010, 04:36:55 PM
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What are these?
(http://www.cadframers.com/ah/bbs_terrainforum_whatarethese.png)
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^hi
those are the Airborn startup directions! when you choose direction one you come out in that sector which is shown there
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^hi
those are the Airborn startup directions! when you choose direction one you come out in that sector which is shown there
Thank you!
So I would assume the number associated with them are slaved back to a base correct?
In other words, if you were to choose field 90 as your take off base, and choose launch North (keypad 8)...you would spawn in 7.18.8?
Cool...and yet another level and flavor of complexity to handle....
Sigh....
:rofl
Oneway
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Why don't they also indicate the start altitude?
I assume that the terrain designer sets the spawn alt when he includes these in a terrain?
When going over the un-compiled files of a terrain...where is this object noted?
Is it in the OBA file? If not where is it stored prior to compiling the terrain?
What does the text line look like?
Where do we find the altitude of the spawn point prior to terrain compilation?
Oneway
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Wait a minute....
That doesn't make any sense...the annotation must be off by 1 because of the zero based index nature of the underlying field array....
90 on northsea is vehicle base....therefore the tag 90 on the air spawn must refer to array index 90...in other words field A89...
Correct?
Oneway
Edit: That numeric annotation associated with these map elements must not have anything to do with the field ID....as 90 appears multiple times in the northsea terrain....need help understanding this...
(http://www.cadframers.com/ah/bbs_terrainforum_whatarethese2.png)
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Technically any object can be designated an airfield, and any object can be given an air spawn or regular spawn. A vehicle base can be given either, its a matter of assigning an air spawn to that field.
In fact con planes are usually enabled at vehicle bases, the RV-8 with WEP would almost clip the vertical stab on the hanger as it took off.
:devil
Strip
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Technically any object can be designated an airfield, and any object can be given an air spawn or regular spawn. A vehicle base can be given either, its a matter of assigning an air spawn to that field.
In fact con planes are usually enabled at vehicle bases, the RV-8 with WEP would almost clip the vertical stab on the hanger as it took off.
:devil
Strip
So then...
If you look at north sea...with several air spawn points with annotation "90"....then?
I am going to load it up off line and check it out
Oneway
PS: will post back here the results of that testing
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Why don't they also indicate the start altitude?
I assume that the terrain designer sets the spawn alt when he includes these in a terrain?
When going over the un-compiled files of a terrain...where is this object noted?
Is it in the OBA file? If not where is it stored prior to compiling the terrain?
What does the text line look like?
Where do we find the altitude of the spawn point prior to terrain compilation?
Oneway
In the terrain editor map output I dont think it puts an icon for the airspawn or native field. I think they are added after the fact but I could be mistaken though.
The air spawn is listed in the .OBA file, it should be listed as "F01FTE000" or "F01BME000" which is fighter entry and bomber entry respectively. The last three digits will correspond to the unique number assigned to each item in its class. In the object editor and object list in the TE you would select "spawn" to add an air spawn or normal spawn. Once placed you would select FEntry or BEntry, again fighter or bomber respectively. Techinically any object could be labeled an entry, your aircraft would pop out at the object center.
Hope this helps, havent forgot about ya but had some stuff come up, I am free most of the day tomorrow.
Strip
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So then...
If you look at north sea...with several air spawn points with annotation "90"....then?
I am going to load it up off line and check it out
Oneway
PS: will post back here the results of that testing
I could be wrong, just going off of memory but I think they are added after the fact by the map maker in a photo editor.
Strip
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Correct Strip they are added to the CBM by the terrain creator.
The little blue grid corresponds to the spawn locations you select from the tower. From upper left to right and working down from there... NW,N,NE,W,H,E and so on.
The square in the grid that is darker, is the spawn button it is linked to.
Oneway the terrain builder could if they so desired add the alt. to the icon.
:salute
midi
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There is a bug in the north sea map..
Load it up offline...go to field 90....
Choose terrain setup and load out the default field/plane file....
Go into the hanger....choose a vehicle....
spawn sw or west...
end the sortie....
You will find yourself at a new base such as 88
Go back to 90...go back to setup arena and set default fields/planes....
Choose one of the available aircraft...spawn points don't match the air spawns on the map....
Spawn out west and you will find yourself in space at one of the aerial spawns....
The other spawns are missing....
Why would planes be enabled in the first place from 90?...another question for another day
I am gonna test the spawn outs from 89 (n-1)...and I will bet ya the remainig aerial spawns (map annotated) are available from there....
More than likely another zero based indexing failure....
Bug Bug Bug....
Bugs in the air spawn stuff
Oneway
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Its not a bug...
It is a quirky design feature of the terrain...
The terrain designer enabled those air spawns from a few select fields...irrespective of whether or not they were airfields....consistent with Strips initial post
Probably to facilitate the use of the map on its initial release...and predicated on the design of a scenario...
Though odd...not a bug...thus the monikers associated with air spawn points are not in anyway indicative of the field type in which they are associated with....further, there other fields that slave into the spawn matrix so designated in this example as "90"....
I have neither the time or wherewithal to find out which ones share the same slave....
This is a curious feature of the terrain editor...
Still the question remains...air spawns notated as 90...on the northsea...show spawn points from the orginiating field as being keypads 4, 7 and 8....
Yet enabling aircraft at 90 only yields a spawn choice of West and North for aircraft....
Who owns the missing keypad NW 7 ?
Oneway
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There is a bug in the north sea map..
Load it up offline...go to field 90....
Choose terrain setup and load out the default field/plane file....
Go into the hanger....choose a vehicle....
spawn sw or west...
end the sortie....
You will find yourself at a new base such as 88
Go back to 90...go back to setup arena and set default fields/planes....
Choose one of the available aircraft...spawn points don't match the air spawns on the map....
Spawn out west and you will find yourself in space at one of the aerial spawns....
The other spawns are missing....
Why would planes be enabled in the first place from 90?...another question for another day
I am gonna test the spawn outs from 89 (n-1)...and I will bet ya the remainig aerial spawns (map annotated) are available from there....
More than likely another zero based indexing failure....
Bug Bug Bug....
Bugs in the air spawn stuff
Oneway
Oneway there's not a bug in the air spawns at V90.
Not sure why you are changing the field/plane load out's when the builder already set the planes that are allowed to spawn from that field.
When you select a vehicle and spawn to the SW you are spawning at the vehicle spawn that is close to A88, there for when you /.ef "end your sortie"
you are at field A88.
In the Northsea terrain there are 6 air spawns at field V90 3 of them are fighter spawns and 3 of them are bomber spawns.
So when you go to the hanger and select a P-47 for instance "which is one of the planes the builder had enabled".
Then in the tower you will only see 3 air spawns and the "H" hanger spawn.
Hope this clears things up a little for you.
:salute
midi
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I am confused....
Why would the designer do this in the first place?
It makes no sense....
You have an airfield less than a sector away...
Further...I am setting the planes/fields to default for the purpose of discerning whether or not they are airfields, ports or vbases to use in another program....
I find it confounding why a designer would do such a convoluted thing as assign aircraft rights to a vbase...and as it is now obvious...the game will override his decisions if you choose default setup in cm tools - fields...
What logical reason could explain why terrain designer would create a vbase and then allow its use as an airfield for a special event? (which of course requires that *fld and *pln) are not present when loading the terrain offline?
Yet another layer of obfuscation ...
Scratching head at this point
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Welcome to the world of terrain building....
It could be that the airspawns were added manually in a text editor and the designer was bitten by the zero equals one issue.
Strip
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Sorry I got called out on an emergency.
I miss spoke above in the sentence "Then in the tower you will only see 3 air spawns and the "H" hanger spawn." it should read Then in the tower you will see 3 spawns The "H" spawn is also
an air spawn.
The reason for adding the air spawns to a Vbase is because on an air field such as the large airfield all the spawns are already taken
by the spawns on the runways.
There for it's much easier to just add air spawns to a vehicle field.
edit: Also when adding air spawns to a vbase, the first one is always attached to the "H" no matter where it's placed in the terrain.
:salute
midi
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I am confused....
Why would the designer do this in the first place?
It makes no sense....
You have an airfield less than a sector away...
Further...I am setting the planes/fields to default for the purpose of discerning whether or not they are airfields, ports or vbases to use in another program....
I find it confounding why a designer would do such a convoluted thing as assign aircraft rights to a vbase...and as it is now obvious...the game will override his decisions if you choose default setup in cm tools - fields...
What logical reason could explain why terrain designer would create a vbase and then allow its use as an airfield for a special event? (which of course requires that *fld and *pln) are not present when loading the terrain offline?
Yet another layer of obfuscation ...
Scratching head at this point
These terrains are also meant for the AvA, and other SEA events which don't want airspawns most of the time. By default, aircraft are not available at a V-base, so the airspawns are automatically disabled unless the host enables them on purpose so it's not a bug (also see midi's post). It's a choice the designer made to assist the hosts.
What discrepancy in the spawn field numbers or direction did you find in the northsea oba file??
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These terrains are also meant for the AvA, and other SEA events which don't want airspawns most of the time. By default, aircraft are not available at a V-base, so the airspawns are automatically disabled unless the host enables them on purpose so it's not a bug (also see midi's post). It's a choice the designer made to assist the hosts.
What discrepancy in the spawn field numbers or direction did you find in the northsea oba file??
90 is Knight vbase located in 16.14.2/5 and has 3 air spawns located: 7.18.8, 7.10.7 and 9.3.4
I stumbled across this by using the system generated *.pln file for northsea...and terrain designers *.pln file and comparing the list of base types reported back by using a function that among other things, sniffs out whether a field is a typical airfield, a port, a v-base or a CV...
I found it odd that the terrain designer would embed aircraft capability in a vbase when a nearby abase would have sufficed, though I could understand the use of the vbase 90 as the airspawn base if the use of A89 was slated in parallel for active use and the setup was to include 89 as normal non-spawn airbase for the purpose of defending V90...under that circumstance it somewhat makes sense but not entirely seeing as nearby 88 could also serve as the rear defense base cover 89 instead ...and then use 89 as the airspawn base...
Oneway
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Welcome to the world of terrain building....
It could be that the airspawns were added manually in a text editor and the designer was bitten by the zero equals one issue.
Strip
It happens often when using zero based indexing but in this case it is not...in fact V90 is the source of those air spawns...
There is a zero based index error in counting on the special events Totals Kills reported on the log pages though....TotalKills always reports 1 less than the actual total for both teams in the team summaries....
Oneway
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edit: Also when adding air spawns to a vbase, the first one is always attached to the "H" no matter where it's placed in the terrain.
:salute
midi
That is interesting in as much as the 3 air spawn icons on northsea do not indicated H as a keypad choice....in the case of this map, the choices are keypads: 8, 7 and 4...
Though you are entirely correct in as much that when loading up northsea and going to V90 and enabling aircraft...the choices include H, N and W...H is only available to fighters and it represents the air spawn in 7.10....and though the icon would indicate a spawn in the North West at keypad, 7...you are in fact deposited in the center of 7.10 at kp5...which of course is consistent when choosing H from 90 as your spawn out...one would expect to spawn in the middle of that sector...
Oneway
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This terrain designing stuff makes me scratch my head and want to drink beer before lunch....
:confused:
I just also put 2 and 2 together to arrive at: the spawn points can be anywhere on the map or within a grid, the keypad choices so chosen have absolutley no bearing on where in the sector you spawn out...
One more quick question on these things....
In the Var/DoD file their are object settings for hardness, down time and a hardness multiplier for these entry points...Is there some sort of funky setting when building a terrain that lets them become visible and destroyable?
If not...why do they have settings like a normal object?
Perhaps they just inherit from a core object type that exposes these property settings....
Oneway
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Nothing short of redesigning the object can change whether its visible or not, in theory they could be set to destructable though.
At heart spawns are just invisible objects with similar properties to regular objects.
Strip
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Nothing short of redesigning the object can change whether its visible or not, in theory they could be set to destructable though.
At heart spawns are just invisible objects with similar properties to regular objects.
Strip
Yep....
The principal of object inheritance in program design often finds the descendant exposing properties, methods and events that have no meaning in its extended / new role...often this is done to avoid redundant code, but has the opposite effect in terms of reflecting back on ancestor type...
I couldn't possibly conceive of any human logical reason why a spawn point (ie entry) has the ability to have its object hardness and downtime's settable...
Though thus it is and shall be...
Thanks....
Oneway
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I build terrains & Oneway makes my head hurt. :confused:
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Correct Oneway. When spawning from a field you have 9 possible spawns that correspond to the key pad
7 8 9
4 5 6
1 2 3
Depending on the base used (or custom based created) any number of these can be active and control spawning. Normally a designer tries to link up a position with the direction you spawn ... basically the 7 position would spawn you to the NW. But nothing forces a designer to do so. Sometimes a designer might not do so for design reasons and have things work differently because he needs the spawns.
For instance if I was creating a Germany terrain I might setup a base on the West side of the map and assign air spawns to it to help simulate 8th Air Force bombing campaigns. I might assign positions 9,8,7,6,4,3,2,1 to be air spawns all at the various points east of the base (NE, E, and SE) at various positions and altitudes so that I can have B17 raids coming from different positions for my and other events.
As I designer I could either use 1 base with 8 spawn points or maybe I set 3 bases and only use the 9,6,3 positions to create 9 spawn points for my airspawns. Either would work but depending on the rest of my design I might just go with 1 base. Why? Well because the more objects on the terrain the larger the file size and other issues. So with one base I get 8 air spawns. With 3 bases (while more clean visually to have 3 bases with just the east facing spawns active) I now actually tripled the number of objects put into the terrain (3 times the AA, bomber hangars, etc.).
Normally this is not an issue but say if I have a terrain with say 200 bases or more and say I do some custom object work I might for stability reasons and file size decide to just go for using one base. There is also an upper limit of how many objects a terrain really can handle and remain stable (I forget what it is off the top of my head).
So that is why I designer might just use one base and have spawns go off to places all over the map that might not at first make sense.
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As for why Entry points can be made destroyable or have their hardness increased ... my best guess here is probably a programming decision on how they created and managed properties for objects. Basically as far as I can determine all objects have the same properties which can be modified. However, in this case only HTC (in the MAs) or CMs, AvA staff, or Trainers can actually modify those properties in a loaded terrain. Basically a very small group and there is no reason these folk would ever do so. So my best guess is that they are simply trusting we would not do something like that rather than modify their code or write extra code that turned off this ability of certain objects.
You would have to actually ask HTC to find out the reasons why though. I am just hazarding a guess.
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server lag...
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lame server lag extra posts...sorry
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How do you assign a key pad to an entry point?
I have been toying around with my test terrain...and have observed the following behavior...
If you place multiple fighter spawns on a terrain slaved to the same base...and them leave them at the default rotation 0.00...then key pad 8 (North) is the only active extra spawn direction...and it will spawn you at the last spawn point in the spawn point list of the oba for that field. In other words the game ignores the first spawn added...
If you go in an tweak the rotation of the spawn point the editor/game attempts to choose the next free available spawn direction taking into consideration any previous spawns in the list, as well as the spawns part of the group master that the extra spawns are attached to or owned by...
Is there a way to: Add a spawn point and make work from a specific keypad...and override this somewhat funky behavior of the editor?
Where is the keypad for a spawn stored prior to compilation / build...it certainly is not in the oba unless I am missing something...
Oneway
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By the way...there is a bit weirdness in the use of V Bases for aerial spawns...must have something to do with the size of vehicle hanger opening...
As mrMdi posted above...when it comes to V Bases you are always shoved into keypad 5 (H) for the first aerial spawn...doesn't matter if you mess with rotation...
So in the case of northsea V90...assigning 6 aerial spawns ( 3 fighters, 3 bombers) works...it will not work for formations on the bombers in the case of BTE 000 for V90...
In other words, if the designer indeed wanted to enable 3 bomber spawns from a V Base with formations enabled...he actually has to create 4 aerial spawns...the first one is a dummy spawn...and though it works with formations disabled...will not fulfill his design intent...
Further...if he wants to make sure his fighters and bombers are spawning at the same place...he must also assign a dummy spawn for the fighters...so that the everyone is on the same page in terms of keypad selection at the time everyone spawns out...
Again, providing the intent of the designer was to enable an aerial spawn with formation capability...
Perhaps he knew that and only wanted 2 viable formation enabled spawns that worked seamlessly with his fighter spawns...if that is the case he did exactly what he needed to do...however the placement of the graphic images on the underlying bitmap denoting the spawns from 90 lead me to believe he did not...thus he included the graphic for the spawn at 7.10.5...which is a formation disabled spawn from 90...
All of this nonsense can be avoided by simply not using V Bases for aerial spawn points...
Just an observation...
Oneway
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In some ways it cant be avoided and achieved the desired affect....
Quit your whining about it anyway, just imagine how rough it is when you are actually building these terrains!
:P
Strip