option for map blackouts in the mission editor

[upyr1]

Black outs are an old air defense tactic, and power gets knocked out in war so we should be able to simulate it in DCS

[Tippis]

Should be easy enough with the current model too: just swap the structure textures from the regular nigh-time, full-bright ones to the (equally) regular day-time textures, except they also show at night. The only conceivably tricky bit would be to have it only apply to a trigger zone, and even then, the trickiness is mostly from the perspective of how unreliable things like destruction zones and clear-object zones are in multiplayer.

[upyr1]

2 hours ago, Tippis said:

Should be easy enough with the current model too: just swap the structure textures from the regular nigh-time, full-bright ones to the (equally) regular day-time textures, except they also show at night. The only conceivably tricky bit would be to have it only apply to a trigger zone, and even then, the trickiness is mostly from the perspective of how unreliable things like destruction zones and clear-object zones are in multiplayer.

I figure this would be a multi stage thing step 1 a total black out

 

[cfrag]

If it's a total black-out, daytime textures will probably do. If it's a partial (failing power distribution stations across town, local power generators, etc), it won't. Some kind soul recently claimed in a similar thread that setting the mission's time to 1940 could do the trick (night time textures are set o daytime during war). Haven't tried it yet.

 

[Tippis]

1 hour ago, upyr1 said:

I figure this would be a multi stage thing step 1 a total black out

 

Hmm. The question would be how the other stages would work, then. Or perhaps rather, how logical should they be?

It might still be possible to steal code from the zone destruction trigger, except instead of randomly replacing buildings with their destroyed models on a percentage basis, you'd switch them to black-out (i.e. daytime) textures.

 

If you'd want it to be more realistic, with specific buildings getting grid prioritisation and others always being dark because you'd want to hide them (or because they're low-priority), things would get trickier. Also, come to think of it, I don't actually know how the destruct zone affects things like power pylons and their collision warning lights.

[upyr1]

On 9/10/2021 at 12:59 PM, Tippis said:

Hmm. The question would be how the other stages would work, then. Or perhaps rather, how logical should they be?

It might still be possible to steal code from the zone destruction trigger, except instead of randomly replacing buildings with their destroyed models on a percentage basis, you'd switch them to black-out (i.e. daytime) textures.

 

If you'd want it to be more realistic, with specific buildings getting grid prioritisation and others always being dark because you'd want to hide them (or because they're low-priority), things would get trickier. Also, come to think of it, I don't actually know how the destruct zone affects things like power pylons and their collision warning lights.

I'm thinking have flags for the terrain cells