Air Control Zone

[RT-SuperTron]

Hm..hm.Hm..Lets say that we have  2 F14 fighters in a group and we want them to go on patrol, in a grid that is 5km by 10km.
Now that dos'nt seem to be a problem as long as you can place your WP on the MAP above an island, but lets say that you want the Fighters to patrol an area out side the MAP. How do I tell my Fighters that I want them to go 5 km straight East then 10km straight North, on the east side of the island ex. nogova, so that they cover a box 5 x 10 over the sea.

[RT]SuperTron

[KTottE]

Why do you want your planes patrolling outside the actual map area?

To my knowledge, there's no way of controlling units outside the map. I mean, the coordinates stops at the edge of the map, don't they?
And as you said, you can't have WP's out there.

Oh, wait. I just had an idea.

Make your air control zone on the map, as in over the island, and set it up just the way you want it. Then select everything, and move it outside the map. Units, waypoints and triggers still exist off the map I think.

Am I making sense?

[RT-SuperTron]

Hmmm
Your idea of moving the WP is actually not that stupid.

Why would I want to play out side the map Area. Well I love space and Airplanes need space. Further more I did some tests a while ago to see how the coordinates would react if you left the map.

Since my files are to big to fit in here, I would like to mail them to ho ever wants to lok at the facts.

Light Description: If you take an airplane and fly away from your units on the beach, you can of course use them to measure the distance there is from your position to home/base.
Now in my case I used the Tornado and flew of to the west to make this test. As you can see on one of the pics im flying in an altitude of 10000m and I am more than 371km from home. I actually turned after 500Km because the graphics started to "jitter".
In the other pic I used the GPS to track map coordinates, and to my big surprise they keep cycling BUT, they will start in an grid field called ZJ and range from 00 to 99.

Conclusion: Since im able to fly as far from base as I want to, I can conclude that when the coords starts over it is a new set of coords every time, and not like in old games the same landcape that keeps looping.

The Idea: Since there is so much water around the islands and the naval units (at last) seems to be in high priority, I am starting to play with some old ideas. NME or own forces comming in from way out on the sea. And now where the Flyinheight command works with airplanes it is extremly funny to make some "Naval jets" patrol in boxes, very low, and very slow, untill they spot a bogey and intercept him. In this way we can now make a more safe PB (PatrolBox) for AWACS which could soar around 25km from the shore.
My problem here is that i'm not a hardcore scripter so I can't figure out how to place WP with a script. There must be a way to script a unit to move a certain amount of meters in one direction and then in another.

[RT]SuperTron

[Crassus]

If I may, I'd like to take a look at what you have....send to golon67212@cs.com

But here's a suggestion. Set up a quick script to get the coordinates at which you wish to place the waypoints. When you have them, rather than using mapped waypoints, why not script the route, e.g. Strawberry5 move [<x, y, z coordinates>]...@unitReady Strawberry5...Strawberry5 move [<next set of x,y,z coordinates>]. I'm assuming this is a unit not in your group, meaning not under your direct control
 
shameless plugunless of course you use Spinor's Command Engine....
 
and that you'll be using another script to detect for and report the presence of enemy a/c.

 ???Does this make sense? Does it help?

[RT-SuperTron]

Crassus you could not be more right.

why not script the route, e.g. Strawberry5 move [<x, y, z coordinates>]...@unitReady Strawberry5...Strawberry5 move [<next set of x,y,z coordinates>]. I'm assuming this is a unit not in your group, meaning not under your direct control

They wont be in my group. I am thinking of anything from ships to a small Sqrd. of helis or more likely some F14-16-18 making patrol routes out side the actuall map.
I know that some people may still think that this sounds stupid, but it is not.

Since we are getting more and more cool stuff to play around with the idea of an simulated out side attack by special forces, seems to get more and more fun.
Exmpl. imagine that you place some NME Naval and Air units way of shore, say 30km. Now like in any other mission they may have some targets or some "things to do" on your island that would make your life a little more unpleasent, and by placing them way off the map you wont just be able to locate the them, go in and destroy there main forces.
In a "NORMAL" OFP mission, there could be a fast insertion of SpecOps on the beach, and there chopper would retreat to another point on the map. How ever, with "very little" training it is actally possible, to track down/detect and destroy this vehicle, -(as OFP looks now),- there only way of the island.
This is where the fancy part of my idea kicks in. Since the "Actual" NME is NOT on the "Actual Visible" map, you will have to set up some precursory conditions in form of "VERY HARD" Forward Intelligence and area patroling on land and sea and in the air.
Missions as they are can sometimes be hard to accomplish based on the limited time you have to react or the limitations there might be in armory and ammonition. But when you have limited information about the NME you are in trouble to over your head.
MP exmpl. You could make some larger MP missions where one of the teams had a Supply boat like the new LSD a few km of the map. There mission could be to Destroy/Attack/Seize some cities or military material in different points on the island, actually a lot of -"Hit and Run" like- situations.
The other team would have a hell of a time, figuring out how to protect these facilities with the current amory to there disposal, and they would have to use a lot of "smart thinking" and skill to prevent the NME from beeing succesfull. One way of doing exactly that would be to monitor where the NME come from and "calculate" a counter attack by tracking down and destroying there Supplyship without getting detected.

Now this is still work in progress, and I am sure that we will find plenty of ways to use our -(still)- unused space around the islands.

[RT]SuperTron