halo units staying in a certain position is it possible

[trinec]

Was wondering I didnt find anyting in the forum on halo units in reference to after being ejected from a plane making a formation in the air for example staying in a circle formation while floating to the ground for a certain amount of time.  I am using lasers pararescue soldiers it seems as though they are flying in a v formation .  Any help is appreciated

Thanks

Trinec

[RichUK]

Hi Trinec...

I have never personally seen anyone achieve that, but it is a nice idea, although I suspect it would take a major excercise in advanced scripting and/or functions to get it to work.

I did some experimentation a while back as part of a rather over-ambitious mission that I started creating in January last year (!).  I successfully managed to script a way to get an aircraft to crash land and take off from an "unsupported" OFP airfield (only one is properly enabled for each island).  After the plane had taken off, I wanted to invisibly transfer the crew into another plane, that was following normal waypoints, so I scripted a way of setpositioning the plane very high, ejecting the crew then forcing them into the new plane (all normally hidden by an information screen).  When trying to get the sripting correct, I put a long delay between when the crew were ejected and free falling over the ocean, before I moved each one into the new plane.

...this got me think about the posibilities of trying to do the sort of thing that you are trying to achieve for a different sequence (although I did not pursue it at that time).  One of the main problems that I have not found an answer to yet is how to change the "attitude" of an object other than a plane (like a falling unit, or even an object like a notebook placed on a table).  To be able to get two or more falling units (or other objects) to be put in any sort of formation, it would need a very fast acting script (or preferably function) that could position each one so that its "attitude" (e.g. the direction of a line pointing from the units feet through his head) could be pointed in any direction in "3D Space" (or to any point on the surface of an imaginary sphere centred on the unit).

I will try and do a bit of research, but someone else my know something useful...

[trinec]

Im not great at math unfortunatly but I had the idea of a circle and having the units stay in a certain part of the circle were each one has its own slice of the pie an even space of the circle but with a unit not having the ability as of now to have any kinda of thrust to propel them to the formation especialy when they are thrown out of a plane they come out one after the other and then the units get seperated.

 Or if you do it the ugly way they all eject at the same time on top of each other. So far it seems like they do fall at the same rate if they just start in the air and not being thrown from the plane.  I did see a script for making units form a 360 on the ground I think it was called kmkhasty360 something like that but thats alot different then having them do it in the air  ;D

[Komuna]

Hi, trinec.

   Well, that's quite easy to achieve, but requires some work with maths, indeed.
   Here's a sample mission with a quick script I made that exemplifies usage of trignometry to achieve the effect. However, the effect is not perfect and looks a bit "static". I added a random offset value for positioning purposes. By zeroing that offset, the circle will be perfect -- and quite unrealistic. In order to make the effect prettier, it may be added a smooth and progressive variation of the units relative positioning, perhaps based on the offset value -- it basically consists on progressively changing the units' position between relative positioning values (check ECP's relative transitions for that effect). I'll leave that to you.
   By the way, and since you're probabily going to use this effect on actual HALO drops from planes, you may look deeper into the relative positioning transitions in order to move the HALO units from their positions upon ejection to their respective positions in the circle formation. Good luck.

P.S.: It feels so good to be back home.

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[trinec]

Ah that looks really nice I appreciate it alot.  and Ill look into  ECP's relative transitions one problem I  am having with the script is that when the unit lands on the the ground my ofp locks up and throws an error message.  Thats the only time it happens is right after the player unit hits the ground after free falling.  Any ideas, error message below


An unhandled win32 exception occured in FLASHPOINTRESISTANCE.EXE[132].



Thanks
trinec

[Komuna]

   Hmm... I reproduce that too. It's not related to the script I wrote, since it exits before CTD; it's not ECP related, since I don't have to be running ECP in order to have CTD.
   Noticed when CTD occurs? It occurs exactly when the last paratrooper hits the ground -- and his parachute disappears. OFP is crawling with model handling bugs, and this could be one of them. Otherwise, it could be some bad procedure in Laser's [Voyager's?] scripts.
   If you check the BI Forums, you'll probably find reports on this bug in Laser's release thread. It may have even been solved. But, know what, I'm feeling too lazy to click the BI Forums link and check it by myself.

Good luck.

[trinec]

Well I did look thru the bis forum and I didnt see anything their about model errors.  Guess I could  bring it up in that forum see if laser knows anything.