Helicopter Escort - Heli following a convoy.

[toadball 35]

Working on a convoy escort mission and have run into a problem with my concept.

The concept is thus:

You are an X man squad from group Y and you have been plonked in a helicopter of type Z to escort convoy C. My problem is that I, to my knowledge, have no way to have a helicopter follow units on the ground from the side i.e flying parallel to the mid vehicle/s.

To complicate matters my intention, as in any convoy orientated mission, is for the convoy to have an altercation with some undesirables along the way thus forcing the helicopter to drop the players of close by and to provide security.

Any help would be appreciated as I'd rather have this set up than the usual set up of having players in a truck in said convoy which can in some cases lead to complete chaos (not always a bad thing imo) when s.h.t.f. and generally involves a lot of boredom prior to the shooting.

[f2k sel 164]

I did something like this a while back and it looked better than I thought it would.

I don't have time to rewrite and test it but it goes like this.

Attach an invisible object to the vehicle tank or truck, I think I used a pallet and in the init put

palletename hideobject  true

You then need to attach the heli to the pallet by placing this in the init

heli attachto [palletename,[50,0,0]];tracking = true

You will then need a little bit of repeating script and call it with

null=[] execvm "track.sqf"

script would be.

While {tracking} do {
palletename setpos  [getpos tankname select 0,getpos tankname select 1,40];
sleep 0.2;
};

When you want to end the script just use tracking = false in a trigger

The reason I don't attach the heli directly to the tank or truck is that all movements would be echoed by the heli and it just looks wrong.

I've not tried it for a while so I'm not sure it's 100% right.

Edited September 28, 2011 by F2k Sel

[jakerod 254]

Working on a convoy escort mission and have run into a problem with my concept.

The concept is thus:

You are an X man squad from group Y and you have been plonked in a helicopter of type Z to escort convoy C. My problem is that I, to my knowledge, have no way to have a helicopter follow units on the ground from the side i.e flying parallel to the mid vehicle/s.

To complicate matters my intention, as in any convoy orientated mission, is for the convoy to have an altercation with some undesirables along the way thus forcing the helicopter to drop the players of close by and to provide security.

Any help would be appreciated as I'd rather have this set up than the usual set up of having players in a truck in said convoy which can in some cases lead to complete chaos (not always a bad thing imo) when s.h.t.f. and generally involves a lot of boredom prior to the shooting.

I always used to group the helicopter a guy in the back of one of the trucks back in OFP. It looked pretty nice. Although the post above mine may be better for you. I don't really know how to do the whole dropoff thing other than maybe setting the flyinheight to 0 but that might be bad depending on what is below the chopper at the time and how fast it is flying.

[sander 14]

Hi,

To have the helicopter drop off the troops in the back I would suggest to make a trigger, for example if the convoy is BLUFOR and attacked by OPFOR one where OPFOR is detected by BLUFOR, and place unassignvehicle statements for each named unit in the cargospace of the chopper in the on activation field. This would lead to the helicopter looking for a suitable landing point to drop off the passengers and then continue flying around. On fulfilling another condition in a trigger the named units in the airmobile unit could be reassigned as cargo with an orderGetIn command as well to have the chopper land again to pick up the infantrymen.

As I assume the airmobile group is consisting entirely of players the alternative is the player group leader simply ordering all his subordinates to disembark. This will lead to an AI pilot, even one not in the player squad, flying the helicopter to descend for disembarking the units. The same works for getting on board again, have the squad leader order his subordinates to embark the chopper. Though the most simple method of dropping and reembarking troops it has a catch though: if there is only a single player left, with no AI or other player in the group, the AI cannot be persuaded to display this behaviour. Therefore it is in my opinion preferable to use the unassignvehicle and assignascargo/ordergetin true method.

Regards,

Sander

[DirtyDel 14]

On 9/28/2011 at 1:11 AM, jakerod said:

I always used to group the helicopter a guy in the back of one of the trucks back in OFP. It looked pretty nice. Although the post above mine may be better for you. I don't really know how to do the whole dropoff thing other than maybe setting the flyinheight to 0 but that might be bad depending on what is below the chopper at the time and how fast it is flying.

I did what this guy described this morning by grouping the heli to a member in the convoy vehicle, it worked perfect; the heli was circling the vehicle as the convoy moved. then I reloaded the mission to make changes and didnt save the original grouping, I cannot recreate this. I just spent two hours trying to figure this out. Anyone have any ideas? I keep having the heli command guy to disembark convoy and get in heli, or if higher ranking member is in convoy vehicle, the heli moves above it and stops all movement.

[dalber24 122]

Did you try to remove all the groups and redo them again?