How to burn wrecks?

[Hillslam 0]

I've been polishing a mission where I have various wrecks scattered (the static objects like the bmp and m113 and jeep wrecks) and I like to have them still smoldering or on fire.

For the smoldering ones I use a campfire embedded down into the ground with a negative Z or such, but for the larger ones I wanted more substantial smoke. I also wanted to give the appearance that houses were burning.

For that I used a Ural Fuel truck, and set its damage to 1 in its initialization line. I can then either embed the truck inside houses or underneath vehicle static wrecks for a really nice effect. That works great except for a problem: whenever a grenade goes off near said burning thing, the Ural "pops" back up to the surface and is now sitting there beside the house or the m113 wreck, still happily burning away. Obviously it kills the illusion.

Campfires don't have this same issue, they seem to stay planted.

Couple questions:

- Is there any way to plant a Ural truck such that events like nearby grenade detonations don't move it?

- Is there any other way to place the fire burning effect of a destroyed vehicle onto the map without having to use a vehicle object at all?

- How long do the fires burn? It seems the fuel trucks burn the longest (and the sedan seems to burn the shortest). Is there an easy way to keep said fire effect going without constantly setting the object it's attached to's damage to 0 then back to 1? (It explodes again each time I have to do this)

- Is there a way to destroy vehicles in their initialization without that initial explosion? Right now I "destroy" all my vehicles way across the map and use a setpos to put them into position after they've popped. The tradeoff is that while the player doesn't hear massive explosions going off as soon as they enter the mission, I can't place any of these wrecks in direct line fo sight at mission start or they'll see them "wink" into existence right in front of their eyes when the trigger moves them into position.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[MehMan 0]

This could help you

But you'd need to figure out the smoke name for the fuel truck. After that I'm guessing it'll be easier.

[Hillslam 0]

Yeah, I've placed smoke on vehicles before with smokeshells and such. Its not the same effect as the true destroyed vehicle burning effect.

Too bad thats not callable as an object. At least not that I've found. I'd love to hear that someone's found it though.