Player HUD displays distance to AI in meters?

[FrankManic 13]

I'm putting together a quicky mission. Real simple - A small CSAT team is trying to escape the city with vital intel. Run them down and stop them before they reach their escape vehicle.

Thing is, this is sort of a 'Hide and Go Seek' mission, and I thought "Wouldn't it be cool to rachet up the tension by displaying how close, in meters, the AI are to their objective? The idea being that as the AI close in on their escape waypoint (and a mission failure) a counter on the player's HUD is ticking down the meters to zero.

The thing is? I have absolutely no idea what so ever where to even *start* with such a thing, or if it is possible. I assume it would involve creating a script that would check the distance between the AI and the objective marker at intervals then display that to the player's screens somehow, but it's sort of beyond my abilities right now.

If anyone would care to advance an idea as to how it might be done I'd love to hear it! It's certainly not necessary for the mission, but I think it'd be a fun feature.

[Larrow 2800]

Heres a quick way to show it in a hint....

h = [] spawn {
while {true} do {
	hintSilent format ["CSAT are %1 meters from their objective", floor ((getMarkerPos "CSATobjective") distance (leader myCSATgroup))];
	sleep 1;
};
};;

Then in one of the CSAT units put this in their init..

myCSATgroup = group this

and create a marker at the CSAT objective called "CSATobjective"

Gives you a rough idea , then its just down to making a UI to display this value rather than using the hint.

Edited June 7, 2014 by Larrow

[FrankManic 13]

Thank you! I'll get to work. : )