Moving lights

[tazmania720 16]

Good morning,

I don't know much about scripting other than adding basic lines to the INIT block of objects/triggers.  I'm looking for a way to make the lights at the end of a runway to blink/move towards the end of the runway, similar to what they do at a real airport.  

Thanks!

[tazmania720 16]

Anyone?  I know it has been several months, and this will be the last time I ask this.  I think this would be an awesome addition to any map with an airfield.  Thanks.

[davidoss 550]

There are some blinking lights in arma. Put them in editor and watch.

[tazmania720 16]

I know that but I want them to blink in a sequence, again, like the end of a runway blinking into the runway center.

[davidoss 550]

Its could be done by enabling /disabling simulation or hide objects in a sequence.

[destruktoid 16]

I would suggest having a script which removes the exisiting ones at mission start and replaces them with a delay between each in the order which you would like them to flash. An alternative would be setting their damage sequentially to something like 0.98 which I believe is enough to turn them off.

[jwllorens 43]

If you want to accomplish something like this and you are new to scripting, then your first step is to break down what you want to do into the smallest individual tasks you can.

 

In your case, you want runway lights to turn on and off in sequence.

 

So break that down.  What do you actually need to tell the ArmA engine to do in order to accomplish that?

 

 

 

Well, the first task seems pretty obvious to me.  You need to obtain references to the objects (the runway lights) themselves.  You can't do anything to them if you can't reference them.  Then you need to organize them by distance to the end of the runway.  Then you need to calculate a time to toggle whether they are on or off based on their distance from the end of the runway.  Then you need to toggle whether they are on or off at this calculated time.

 

 

 

Start with the first task.  Do a little research about nearEntities, nearestObjects, and other similar commands on the BI wiki and choose one that you think is most suitable for returning a list of runway lights.  (hint: you need to find out what the class names of the runway lights are to pass to the command (dig around the 3DEN editor for runway lights), runway lights are probably NOT considered "alive" (but they might be so don't write off a command alltogether!), and you are going to want the runway lights to be ordered from nearest to furthest in the list returned by the command (but remember you can sort the list by distance if the command doesn't do it automatically if you have to)).

 

 

Do that, and then you can actually start trying things.