Aircraft Carrier slideyness

[Stilton]

I couldn't think of a great way to describe what's happening other than 'slideyness'.

I am trying to make a basic static house object in the shape of an aircraft carrier.. I was having problems with the collision mesh not being there on the deck, so i have divided the deck up into boxes on the collision mesh so that from my limited testing so far anyway i can now run along -parts of- the deck and land a chopper on it...


But at points my character seems to get stuck and slides across areas of the deck, which results in death as im testing the boat on land - I believe this is at the seam points of the different 'collision boxes' in using (and i have just tried overlapping these collision boxes and it didnt help - sniff)


I'm importing the basic boat model from 3dsmax and as i say it's just a basic house static object with a config taken from brrseb's tutorial on making a crate, because all the config stuff is a bit wahey
But if anyone knows a fix to what im experiencing or knows what might be causing it, i'd appreciate the help


a little more info, i dunno if its related to this problem..
despite being able to 'land' on the carrier, and turn off the engine and 'eject' the option to 'get-out' doesnt appear.


thanks if anyone can help with my slippery-deck phenomenon

[RKSL-Rock]

Have you created a roadway LOD?

[Stilton]

a roadway LOD you say...

..time to go read more i guess any references you could point me to ? if you have any at hand

(wasnt mentioned in the tutorial i was doing, but i suppose that's for opf, thanks ill start looking there)

[RKSL-Rock]

a roadway LOD you say...

..time to go read more i guess any references you could point me to ? if you have any at hand

(wasnt mentioned in the tutorial i was doing, but i suppose that's for opf, thanks ill start looking there)

Yeah you will need a raodway ... his is just a simple face covering the areas that you want to walk on.

[Stilton]

Wow, was that easier than i thought it'd be...


Right now i come to my next problem.. I've been up all night so i got an endurance thingy going on

I think because my aircraft carrier was too big, the roadway LOD hit it's limit (i appeared to drop off the end of the runway even though there was roadway polys covering that area) - So after more reading about people are talking about splitting the mesh up and combining it later using scripting.. to get around it..



So i have already sliced my mesh down the middle and seperated the 2 files, and with 2 addons... and i've put them in the editor and used a funky script in the initialization like:
<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">this setpos &#91;&#40;getpos Tc01F select 0&#41;-63.25,&#40;getpos Tc01F select 1&#41;-3,&#40;getpos Tc01F select 2&#41;+0&#93;;[/QUOTE]

To put the rear of the aircraft carrier offset at the right place compared to whereever i place the Front of it (i suppose this will mess up if i do it this way and rotate it, but for now.)
My big problem is, if this is the right way to get around the limit of the roadway LOD /collision size, how exactly do i combine the 2 models, because when i get close to the seam inbetween the 2 statics my character just seems to drop down inbetween the 2 models.

There is no &#39;gap&#39; for him to fall down however, he seems to fall into the model and i have even tried adding extra roadwayLOD&#39;s on both sides to give each side an extra cushion near the seam of the 2 giant objects, but i still fall through..



cheers to anyone who knows where im going wrong

[Bern]

I had the same sort of problems when I started out building my Sydney Harbour Bridge. I found (basically by trial & error) that if you make your roadway LOD any larger than about 65m in length you get problems with falling through gaps that aren&#39;t there.

I decided to stick to 50m or less, and it seems to be (more or less) working. I say "more or less" because I&#39;ve still got some strange problems with one of the parts, where some vehicles get "stuck" or slightly sink into the surface - it depends on the vehicle, though - HMMWVs sink slightly and slow down, Datsun utes get completely stuck, Hilux utes don&#39;t even notice... Foot soldiers have no problem, though, and I don&#39;t know about choppers, but I suspect they&#39;d be fine.

How big are your two "halves" of the carrier?

[[APS]Gnat]

The limit is about 64 meters, and that includes the diagonal, so limit your sections lengths to about 50m as Bern suggested.

There is no other way around this, we had all the same problems with the OFP Nimitz carrier, and even when ported to ArmA all the same issues persist.
Use a script to place the bits, dont use the INIT field etc.
All bit must be placed in 1 run of the script, because the WAVE HEIGHT can effect the *exact* height of the deck.

** Make the ROADWAY LOD surface a little above the Decks GEO LOD "deck". This usually removed the "collision" issues for wheeled and air vehicles.
i.e. Have the RESOLUTION and ROADWAY lod "decks" at the same height, but push the GEO Lod deck down about 0.2-0.5 meters out of the way.

Ensure you check that the decks for each separate peice (p3d file) line up by copy-paste the deck from 1 to the other to see that they line up exactly (vertically), then delete what you just pasted after the check.
Have them overlap horizontally a bit (~1m). It wont cause a problem and usually stops people fall-throughs if you haven&#39;t exceeded the 64m size limits.

Best of luck

[Stilton]

Wow thanks for your replies... it&#39;s great to hear other peoples experiences and know that i&#39;m not the only person who&#39;s come unstuck due to this


Well, it&#39;s not great, but at least it doesnt make me feel stupid.



This does though *** - ***I don&#39;t know what size my &#39;carrier&#39; is.. because im building it in max, ***then i import the 3ds

and in the scale settings i have it set to *** 2 ***: ***1

But i&#39;m really not too clued-up on how to use O2.. i&#39;m sure it tells you the ingame size of your models somewhere but if anyone can point me ot that ***


cheers for all y&#39;all help everyone, it&#39;s really appreicated.


[edit much]
Also, i have split it up like you suggest Gnat and it works good but i&#39;m curious if there is a better way to have it all connected together at runtime?

Because my current way of using the script in the Init is trial and error at best and only works with having the rotation of the FrontDeck as it is, if i were to turn it 90* left i&#39;d have to re-guesstimate that little script..

[Stilton]

My aircraft carrier is progressing...



I&#39;ve practically started again making it bigger :-)

2 issues i&#39;m still having problems with are


- When i land the BI harriers on the deck... they seem to want to fold up their gear... and sit there on the deck parked, but not on their gear.. which is fine, i mean i can manage to take them off again - But it&#39;d look just silghtly better if they didnt fold the gear up on touching the carrier...

What i don&#39;t understand is i am also using MAS Beta 0.2 F18.. And i can land this on the carrier (with a hella lot of practice) and it&#39;s gear dont crumple up on hitting the carrier, i can drive it around the limited parking area there is on deck.

So i&#39;m not sure if this is something i&#39;ve done.. my inability to fly the harrier, or if it&#39;s just something to do with how the BI harriers detect what is solid ground, i&#39;ve never tried a VTOL landing with a harrier onto a building myself..



my 2nd problem is lighting the deck of my carrier...

I have tried lots of variations of lights and i seem to be running into a few problems..

I&#39;ve searched and checked tutorials but i&#39;m curious -


- Is it possible to have a light without having the "spotlight-cone" effect.. because this seems to be the only way to light stuff such as the surroundings..
- if so, how?


cheers

[Franze]

Merging back with the original topic. Stilton, this thread is still good for discussing your problems.

Your first question, the F/A-18E/F is designed to be carrier compatible. It doesn&#39;t use the default gear retraction of the game, instead using it&#39;s own.

I don&#39;t know much about lighting so I can&#39;t offer more help for the second question.