Custom aircraft gear

[Sefe]

Hey dudes, good news. I've found a way to make aircraft landing gears retract to any desired direction. If you want to learn how this

can be done, check out my tutorial here.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.

[Stalker]

Maybe you will find a way how to make Mi24 gear retractable

[Sefe]

You can do this for fixed wing aircraft because OFP has the built-in option for retracting aircraft gear. BUt for helicopters OFP lacks this option. Therefore, this method won't work for helicopters.

[Messiah]

aaaah, cool - this means my/BAS Predator UAV will work properly. cool.

[Eviscerator]

apparently you can actually do helicopter gears with the new gear event, quote from kegetys:

"Using the gear event it would be very possible to make a properly working retractable gear with any custom animation, without the need to get out first."

Sefe maybe you could use your knowledge of working with the gears and try it on say the blackhawk? (the real thing doesnt actually have retractable gears but its the only helo i can think of without skids that can be edited)

[Sefe]

Well, the animation part is not the problem. You can create those animations in helicoper models, too. But although Kegetys defenitely is the better addon editor than me I disagree with him that the gear event also works for choppers.

The property in the config file that makes aircraft gear retractable is

GearRetracting=1;

This line has no effects on helicopters. Hence you will never have "Gear up" in your action menu which leads to the fact that you'll never have the gear event for choppers. If Kegetys can make the gear event for choppers work, I'll be the first one to congratulate him. But I wasn't able to do so.

The other way I could think of is to add the gear up/down option to the pilot via the getIn event and remove it via the getOut event or (even better as you wouldn't have to provide scripts with your addon) add a custom action to a selection in the chopper. This, however, can't be done due to a bug in OFP. I've already sent a bug report in the official forums. but nobody seems to take notice of that. Maybe someone who has a better connection to BIS can make them aware of that. Without the bug, my answer would be: Retracting gear for choppers? No problem!

So, retracting gear for choppers is only a bugfix away.

[danimalhanke]

I realize that my commercial pilots licenses probably doesn't belong in OFP but, landing "gear" (not gears) should retract to the front for one reason. If it were to malfunction in a real aircraft we pilots want the slipstream to pull the damn thing into position.
I know this is a small point and it is only a game, but if you are looking for realism (as we all are or we wouldn't be playing OFP) then retract the nose gear forward.
And helicopter pilots don't wear parachutes, but that's another issue for another time.
danimal out

[DeadMeatXM2]

well realy mate it depends on the aircraft - some have the gear retracting foreward: e.g. most civilian a/c with retracts.

but a lot do have the gear retracting inwards/backwards/outwards

e.g. F4 phantom gear retracts inwards - towards the centerline

Harrier - main wheels and outriggers retract backwards

....and i cant think of one which goes outwards - but there probably is....

so really the type of aircraft depends on the direction of the retracts....

ant its true helicopter pilots dont wear 'chutes, neither do passengers....its annother of the annoying hardcodings by bis.....

[Sefe]

This is just a sample. I did no research about the real thing. I just wanted to demontrate that each direction is possible.

[Jus]

Nice tutorial, except one thing bugs me: if the plane starts in flight, the landing gear are still lowered. How to fix this?

[Skaircro]

Technically the game considers the gear to be up, it is just that nothing has triggered the custom animations to reflect that.

If you run an init script the checks if the plane is in flight at the start, and then executes the animations if it is, you can get around this problem.
You may see a brief second where the gear is being raised but it does fix the problem in a simple way.

[Thorne]

About the chopper gear not working, none haven't suspected that the gear part of the model must be named properly?