Sink ships after being destroyed

[RafaPolit]

Good afternoon friends!

Sorry if this is a basic question, but I appear to be missing something:

If I put a tank on the map and I bomb it during the mission, it gets destroyed and replaced with charred debris… nice!

If I put a ship on the water and destroy it with bombs (there’s a message confirmation saying the ship has been destroyed and it disappears from the map!), the actual ship geometry is still “decorating” the landscape.  I would actually expect a nice destroying animation and then sinking, but at the very least something that removes the vessel from the water so that other players know there is no longer a target there without having to activate the labels.

 

I’m sure I must be missing something! How do I actually sink and destroy a ship after it’s been in-game destroyed?

 

Thanks for any feedback.

Rafa.

[razo+r]

So far, every ship I've seen getting destroyed actually sunk and disappeared.

[RafaPolit]

Not my experience.  They remain floating, with lots of wholes.

[cfrag]

8 hours ago, razo+r said:

So far, every ship I've seen getting destroyed actually sunk and disappeared.

There may be some preconditions for that. I've seen the sink animation play for ships; at least for some ships I know that if they are in a harbor and get destroyed it's as @RafaPolit describes: they sit there and look quite untouched, even though they are dead. It can be a bit disconcerting if these ships are your objective; it's next to impossible to know if you achieved your goal.

[Grimes]

There is an open bug report for this. If a ship fully sinks it will disappear, however the depth can stop it from sinking. It'll just settle on the sea floor if it touches that before fully submerging. I'm not sure when that change was made but the report was filed July of last year. It makes some of the same points from this thread. For example ship needs to be on fire longer, tilting to the side, and other obvious markers that the ship isn't functional. 

[AKULA_OPTIMUS]

Yea, that bugs me a lot, even more now I´m learning antiship with the Viggen, ships get destroy but they dont sink.

[waterman]

Hi

The ships in shallow water that sink look like they are still active targets , maybe better if they are gone !

i have a method that works , it seams like the ship goes into a sink sequence when hit 1 time , so it must be deactivated on that shot , a combination of trigger zone and unit hits = 1 and explosion at the zone followed by group deactivate.

 It will create an explosion when first shot hits ship and then deactivate the group.

I only just got back into DCS .

Not a bad work around as the ship will be gone on the first hit then explosion and then deactivation and nothing to see here !

see the trk file i have attached - its Normandy 2 on open beta

cheers steve

ships in harbour wont sink.trk

[RafaPolit]

Thanks for this.  I'll look into it.  This was, literally, one month after starting DCS, I was not even subscribed to the topic.  Thanks for the PM.

Since @cfrag's post made sense: if there is not enough "sea" to sink the ship, it should stay on top of the water.  Still, some visuals as to it being "destroyed" would be nice, I have begun placing smoke markers on top of them so as to signal that they are, at least, already damaged.  I remember this working on single player missions, but MP missions appear not to have it, but I would have to recheck that.

Destroying the ship on a single hit is probably not what I'm after, as I believe there is a nice amount of "hit points" ships have and you have to hit them "correctly" in order to destroy them.  So a single hit on a non-critical area I wouldn't want it to destroy the ship.  Still, I'll look into it. Thanks.

[waterman]

Hi thanks for reply RafaPolit

 I have tried it using more than one hit and it does not work the ship seams to get locked into its animated sinking and wont deactivate.

This works as a fun thing and is good for quick easy action scenes and maybe respawn small tugs etc in the harbour for target practice with no dead ships clutter build up.

It only records a hit not a kill.

It could have other uses too.

It is instant fun give it a try !

cheers steve

 

 

[cfrag]

5 hours ago, RafaPolit said:

if there is not enough "sea" to sink the ship, it should stay on top of the water

I wasn't aware that this still is a problem.

5 hours ago, RafaPolit said:

Still, some visuals as to it being "destroyed" would be nice, I have begun placing smoke markers on top of them so as to signal that they are, at least, already damaged. 

That's a great idea, and I've taken it to the next logical step. Enclosed please find a small, light-weight script that you start at mission start. It watches ships that get killed, and places a fire and smoke effect on top of them. If they sit in the harbor and sink partly, the fire still marks them as dead. Then, after 5 minutes (or whatever you enter for value), the wreck is removed. 

Demo mission included. 

Here's the script 

Spoiler

shallows = {}
-- script to remove dead naval hulls that failed to sink
-- once dead, smoke is put over the hull for 5 minutes 
-- and if still in game later, the hull is removed 

shallows.version = "1.0.0"
shallows.removeAfter = 5 -- minutes after kill event 
shallows.verbose = false 
shallows.uuid = 1

-- uuid
function shallows.getUuid() 
    shallows.uuid = shallows.uuid + 1
    return shallows.uuid
end 

-- remove hull
function shallows.removeHull(args)
    if shallows.verbose then 
        trigger.action.outText("enter remove hull for <" .. args.name .. ">", 30)
    end

    -- remove smoke and whatever's left of ship 
    trigger.action.effectSmokeStop(args.sName)
    Object.destroy(args.theUnit)
    if shallows.verbose then 
        trigger.action.outText("Shallows: Removed <" .. args.name .. ">", 30)
    end
end

-- watch the world turn and ships get killed
function shallows:onEvent(event)
    if event.id ~= 28 then return end -- only kill events
    if not event.target then return end 
    -- must be a ship
    local theUnit = event.target
    if not theUnit.getGroup or not theUnit:getGroup() then return end 
    local theGroup = theUnit:getGroup()
    local cat = theGroup:getCategory()
    if cat ~= 3 then return end  -- not a ship 
    
    if shallows.verbose then 
        trigger.action.outText("Shallows: marking <" .. theUnit:getName() .. "> for deep-sixing", 30)
    end
    
    -- mark it with smoke and fire 
    local pos = theUnit:getPoint()
    local sName = theUnit:getName() .. shallows.getUuid()
    trigger.action.effectSmokeBig(pos, 2, 0.5, sName)
    
    -- set timer to re-visit later 
    local args = {}
    args.name = theUnit:getName()
    args.sName = sName 
    args.theUnit = theUnit 
    timer.scheduleFunction(shallows.removeHull, args, timer.getTime() + shallows.removeAfter * 60)
end

-- start
world.addEventHandler(shallows)
trigger.action.outText("shallows " .. shallows.version .. " started", 30)

Hope that this also helps @waterman

Enclosed demo has a 'looker' unit sitting on the shore overlooking the harbor, so you can see the ships sink and settle. These would look nearly undamaged from above unless marked with fire. They then disappear when the "shallows" script removes them. Script is tested only superficially, so if you run into issues, please post here.

-ch

Not too shallow at all.miz

[waterman]

Hi cfrag

Fantastic thankyou !

just ran the mission that works a treat well done

Just a quick question -

Do you have any idea how to change the height of the trains in Normandy 2 it looks like they are sunk down to their axles

cheers steve

[cfrag]

7 hours ago, waterman said:

Do you have any idea how to change the height of the trains

Sorry, no.