Mist. Break up stuck convoys ?

[Wrecking Crew]

Hi Grimes,

I've been reading through the Mist & Lua documentation for a new mission and got an idea to throw out...

 

Would you think about a mist function that would detect when units of a group are stacked on the same coordinate, and then disperse or transport them? Maybe they could be dispersed in the direction of the group's route.

 

 

When I run into this condition in a mission I can use Combined Arms to enter the stuck vehicles one at a time and drive them out of it, sometimes with the 'C' autopilot key.

 

---

 

A second idea would be to detect a unit of a group where the distance is > x and the unit is not moving toward the group leader. This would be for those individual units that get stuck on the side of a bridge.

 

WC

[Grimes]

Either is doable but both suffer from the same sizable drawbacks.

 

1. All teleportation of units is essentially a trick of despawning the old group and spawning a new group. We can't define new units ammo or health. So any group that got stuck and teleported would have full health and munitions. I actually have a fair number of scripting functions complete for joining and splitting groups, but I haven't come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with the munitions, and more critically the health.

 

2. Due to the above point, mist would need to keep track and be aware of each groups route. Every once and a while check if a group is stuck and then respawn said group somewhere nearby that they wont get stuck again, and then assign a new route based on their old one. This would only work with mission editor defined routes as there is no way to "grab" the current route data that could be assigned to a group via script or Combined Arms.

[Wrecking Crew]

Either is doable but ...

So any group that got stuck and teleported would have full health and munitions.

 

I'd go with what you have.

 

np the full health and munitions. 99.99% of the time these units are waay behind their objective. Also np for any CA paths. Just get the group going again.

 

WC

Edited October 25, 2014 by Wrecking Crew

[Wrecking Crew]

I understand why you wouldn't want to clone a group w/o all its data. Besides, that would mess up further event logic that is based upon the group's original name.

 

What about this -- could the stuck units' Autopilot be turned on for a bit, instead of cloning or transporting? That might get them going again.

 

WC

[FSFIan]

What about this -- could the stuck units' Autopilot be turned on for a bit, instead of cloning or transporting? That might get them going again.

 

Lua scripts can only ever control a group as a whole. There is no way to control an individual (ground) unit, because (for ground units) there is only one Controller object per group.

 

I don't know what happens internally when you enter a unit in Combined Arms, but I guess it changes the controller of that one unit to the CA player. However that works, there is no way to do this from a script.