Petition: Aircaft Functions

[crassus 0]

Included in the many great aircraft add-ons are an impressive number of equally great scripts which enhance their functioning. I'm wondering if it's not too much to ask, in the spirit and format of JAM, and CAVS, add-on builders to pool their scritping efforts into one standard package and make it available to the public.

Some of the great enhancements we've seen:

1. Landing gear tires that roll.

2. Nose gear that rotates, in synch with rudder. (If someone can crack the inability to have both nose gear that rotates and has tires that "turn"....)

3. Ejection seat sequence, including jettisoning of the canopy (if part of the real sequence), then after a slight delay, the seat(s) ejecting.

4. Expendable stores and ordnance. We've seen add-ons with fuel tanks we can jettison--why not include the ordnance?

5. Afterburner: Why not use Vektorbossen's Afterburner script, removing the trigger from the Action Menu (A.M.), and putting it on the keyboard?

6. Get in/get out: We can open and close the doors, hatches, etc. In one aircraft, DKM's Havoc, the player could not get out ("Get Out" was not available in the Action Menu, the aircraft probably "locked" enabling this scripting) until the canopy was opened. How about the following:

a) Player cannot get in nor get out unless the door, hatch, etc. is opened using the A.M.

b) Link the door opening scripts and animations to a new "Get In" Action. In other words,

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">i.   Player moves up to the correct spot to embark the aircraft.

ii.  "Get In" appears in A.M.

iii. Selecting "Get In" calls door open anims and moves the player into the aircraft.

iv.  "Close Door" then becomes available in A.M, along with "Get out", as long as door is still open.

c) For those aircraft with "odd" embarkation points:

Quote[/b] ]i.  World War Two fighter aircraft: F4 Corsair,etc. on which the pilot must climb the wing to enter the cockpit: include b. above plus actual climb in/out anims.

7. "Realistic" engine start and shut down sequences. Some with animated pilots!

8. Rappelling/fast roping; rescue harnesses; animated winches, etc. (Anyone working on SPIE or STABO?)

The above list includes those functions which are currently part of add-ons we now use. Also included are my humble suggestions, ideas which may increase further the immersion we get when using the add-ons. I'm hoping, based on the generosity of our esteemed add-on gurus, that those functions (scripts, anims, etc.) can be made publicly available, in a single package, in much the same way as JAM.

[hardrock 1]

2. Nose gear that rotates, in synch with rudder. (If someone can crack the inability to have both nose gear that rotates and has tires that "turn"....)

Impossible, especially for those addons with two rudders, as only two rudders are possible and the turning nose gears nothing but a "second rudder".

Also it is impossible to have turning nose gears with animated wheels in OFP.

[Footmunch 0]

It would be interesting to know how many of these are handled 'natively' in ArmA...

[vektorboson 8]

Also it is impossible to have turning nose gears with animated wheels in OFP.

Quote[/b] ]What you want to do is possible, depending on your imagination and the way you implement it

You still can animate the texture on the wheel instead the wheel itself, and thus free up the animation for the turning front gear.

@Crassus

Most of the stuff you demand has to be implemented per addon, as opposed to your JAM-like pack, which btw already exists: It's called ACES  

[crassus 0]

Quote[/b] ]Impossible....

That's the spirit.  

Quote[/b] ]Also it is impossible to have turning nose gears with animated wheels in OFP.

Exactly why I stated, though rather open-ended,

Quote[/b] ] (If someone can crack the inability to have both nose gear that rotates and has tires that "turn"....)

Quote[/b] ]Most of the stuff you demand has to be implemented per addon....

This I understand. I'm asking that those juicy functions (scripts, animations, etc.) listed above, with or without those recommendations I'd made, be packaged separately and made available, allowing other add-on makers to incorporate those scripts, animations, etc. into their birds.

Quote[/b] ]as opposed to your JAM-like pack

. Using JAM was a bad analogy, I guess.

Quote[/b] ]It's called ACES

From reading the Description at the ACES page, it deals mostly with weapons standardization.....And what your group is doing for such standardization, I'm asking be done, either individually by the add-on makers who've already done the work, or by the makers getting together, even if only temporarily, in some sort of Unified Aircraft Functions Project; or Combined Aircraft Functions Group. If I may paraphrase part of your group's mission statement:

Quote[/b] ]Thus the addon maker has a lot less of work, since he doesn't have to make his own tire animations, engine-start/shut down scripts and sound files, get-in/-out animations and scripts.....

Look, I realize all of this, my posting here, may be tedious to some, and I was content to just let this thread die, but I believe sincerely in how beneficial to other add-on makers, would-be and established, this will be.

[vektorboson 8]

Quote[/b] ]as opposed to your JAM-like pack

. Using JAM was a bad analogy, I guess.

No it wasn't a bad analogy, you misunderstood my sentence here

Quote[/b] ]

Quote[/b] ]It's called ACES

From reading the Description at the ACES page, it deals mostly with weapons standardization.....And what your group is doing for such standardization, I'm asking be done, either individually by the add-on makers who've already done the work, or by the makers getting together, even if only temporarily, in some sort of Unified Aircraft Functions Project; or Combined Aircraft Functions Group. ...

The ACES project will indeed sport aircraft functions and scripts, as you stated, but I don't think that most (not all) of your suggestions should be implemented in ACES, but in the addon itself. Well that was one of the intentions when ACES was founded; I don't know the goal right now as I am not an active member.

Of course the best'd be if BIS included such functions in ArmA directly (in good old compiled C++).

Quote[/b] ]

Quote[/b] ]Thus the addon maker has a lot less of work, since he doesn't have to make his own tire animations, engine-start/shut down scripts and sound files, get-in/-out animations and scripts.....

Look, I realize all of this, my posting here, may be tedious to some, and I was content to just let this thread die, but I believe sincerely in how beneficial to other add-on makers, would-be and established, this will be.

Of course, some ideas/stuff can be standardized by ACES, some not (but they can be of course parametrized).

But as much as I am a "feature-whore", I am also for performance and I am against action menu clutter (therefore I made my afterburner-script in the first place).

But there are solutions for many possible actions without to clutter the action menu.

And of course, you should ask yourself about some features: Are they really necessary? Are they worth the performance drop? Do they improve gameplay? Do they annoy the player?

[hardrock 1]

Quote[/b] ]Impossible....

That's the spirit.

Nah, it's just that I dealt a lot with many of such features and I'm quite a pessimist by now. You have to weigh performance with features, and sometimes it's so complicated to implement features (though not impossible, I chose a hard word there) that it doesn't make sense, as no-one would either notice them or they wouldn't do anything for playability.

[crassus 0]

Yeah, I did neglect to factor in performance. And I am a "feature whore" myself, anything that'll add to the immersion, but not so much that it becomes tedious.

Happy New Year!