Opinions and help: explosions/attacks on beach as boats come in

[Lexen 10]

Okay, I've looked at various IED scripts and they don't really fit what i'm trying to accomplish.

I've got a team coming in at night to Elektrovadozsk(sp?). While they are coming in, I have some tanks and other armor being hit by helos. This makes for some wonderful night explosions and gives great ambiance to the start of the mission.

I put actual armor down and let the AI driven helos attack them. The players, upon reaching the beach, are supposed to search several areas (randomly generated) to destroy a shipment of <insert bad stuff here>. The helos will attack the area i'm telling them to, and are supposed to fly off once there are no more opFor present in a very specific area.

What actually happens is that the helos come in, attack the armor, then begin attacking other enemy emplacements that are there (which are for the players to deal with). I know (or at least I don't think I can) I can't stop this. So, I put a command in the trigger to remove the helos ammo once the condition was met. Turns out to be the wrong command...

h1 setAmmoCargo 0;

isn't it... h1 setAmmo 0; ??

Every other test run i've done, the helos either go right for the armor, or they fly past, turn around, hit the armor and take out enemy AI that is meant for the players to deal with. Sometimes, they take out more enemy AI then turn their attention to the tanks.

So, i'm looking to do something that will blow those tanks up in a massive show of bombing that will give incredible ambiance and set a backdrop to the mission.

I was thinking of turning off the helos ammo through the interface and simply have them fly over the scene and use a series of triggers to set off bombs around the armor to destroy it as the players are driving in.

How would you do it? Please understand that i'm not the most advanced editor out there and that i'm looking for simplicity. (I do understand that I could set a trigger to turn the armors health to 0 but I want a bigger explosion). An IED type script seems ideal for this but there would have to be a minimum of 15 explosions, and (being a novice) I don't know how to time them separately so the mission won't start with one big explosion (as in all 15 going off at once).

Sorry about the long thread and thanks for any opinions on how you would go about this.

[stephen271276 10]

Try setting helos to setCaptive true once they have destroyed your targets? Am sure they wont engage anybody....

Worth a try!

Plus the enemy wont engage them either

[Lexen 10]

I ended up using what essentially is an IED setup. I just put down a boatload of triggers to destroy stuff and/or add explosions as ambiance to the insertion.

I changed the helos to harriers, turned their ammo down to practically nothing, and then set triggers to just blow them the hell up when the players reach the beach.

At least this gives me the ability to control everything that needs to happen.

[dwringer 9]

Instead of blowing them up,you can deleteVehicle them from a position out of sight of the player, to avoid needless exploding harriers in the sky.

Also once your airstrike targets are destroyed, you could (in addition to "setCaptive true") do a "disableAI 'TARGET'" or something like that, there's also one for firing I think but I don't really remember how exactly to use these commands. Doing a search for "disableAI" and experimenting with the available commands should be more than enough to stop the planes from attacking things.

There's a thread around here somewhere about being a player gunner in an AI controlled UAV which discusses the issue, though I'm afraid all that was discovered is that the game's default behaviour is quite screwy.

[Lexen 10]

I didn't know there was a delete vehicle command. I'll try that out.