Would it be possible to have green and red flares fired from the airfields to respond to the 'request permission to land' radio calls ? Or if not, just colour lights on the ground to let you know what te situation is.
This would greatly help when coming to land on a busy airfield, allowing the player to see if the way is clear or if another plane is already on final. I lost the count of the times I was startled by an AI turning right in front of me at the last second and had to either make another pass or land on the taxiway...
Cheers
Nico
unfortunently that would probably have to be hard coded.
of course, people said you couldn't make a clickable cockpit or import our own 3d models either
so I'll just say its doubtfull we'll see that very soon
I was thinking such a MOD would be of interest to the OOF team in particular, as it would be highly unrealistic to have radio comms between airplanes and airfields - even more so between planes - in a WWI scenario.
Back then soldiers on the ground could only transmit messages to airplanes flying over them by firing flares or using explosive shells fired straight up (makeshift primitive flak if you will) according to a pre-determined code ( Two shells at 12 o'clock high fired at small interval would warn a pilot two ennemy fighters were coming in fast on his tail etc... )
Eddie Rickenbaker's book is full of such anecdotes where German artillery would spoil his surprise attacks on unsuspecting observation planes.
I think it would be great for OOF if someone could find a way to link radio calls to flak/flares effects to simulate this primitive ground-to-air communication system. If you think about it, there is radio call preceding nearly each major AI action : landing, attacking, getting shot down/scoring a kill etc... so I'm thinking someone with programming abilities could probably figure something out.
Just and idea...
Cheers
Nico
well, it may be not as complex, but perhaps we could modify the searchlight to be a kind of warning?
perhaps the texture and "beam" mesh could be edited and animated respectively and so resemble an animation of a star shell or whatever they had? this way, because a search light starts vertical, it could fire one round at the start when an enemy plane is in range, and then delay for a while
or, if we have the ability, make it so it does not look for the enemy plane but continue to point streight up?
as far as landing, it seems to me that it would have to be java'd
however, a work around (and probably a good thing even if we can make signals) would be to have our AI modders make the plane fly rather low over the field prior to landing, to check if it is clear.
well if you put a friendly searchlight it won't go looking for targets it will just point up untill any enemy comes within range
