Air-dropping ground forces like Anubis did?

[cfrag]

There's this awesome Herc mod (which - yay!! - will be mine when it comes as a full module to DCS) from Anubis that had an interesting ability: it could drop paratroopers (and even cargo, but let's keep it simple). Now, I dimly seem to remember some official DCS footage (WWII) displaying similar air drops. I want to implement the same, but ham-fisted me can't figure out how to do that with plain DCS and Lua. Is there a way to spawn parachutes with armed units hanging from them that float to the ground? I tried to spawn a pilot in mid-air, but my experiments ended in nothing more than a few goofy grins and a shrug.

Does anyone have an idea how to spawn paratroopers in mid-air without resorting to a mod (pure Lua is fine, though)?

[HungryCoyote]

batumi drop.miz

This does exactly what you want, both troops and vehicles.

@cfrag

 

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by HungryCoyote

[cfrag]

2 hours ago, HungryCoyote said:

This does exactly what you want, both troops and vehicles.

Thank you so much - it seems the mission requires the Herc, though.

[HungryCoyote]

Did I misunderstand you post? I thought that you were trying to drop units from the Herc.

 

 

@cfrag

Edited November 4, 2022 by HungryCoyote

[cfrag]

1 hour ago, HungryCoyote said:

I thought that you were trying to drop units from the Herc.

I want to do it like the Herc, but without it. I'm deeply impressed by Anubis' work and would like to replicate the para drops - if possible - in plain Lua, without the models tht came with the Herc mod.

[HungryCoyote]

Ah, I see. Can't help you there. I know nothing about writing lua.

[PravusJSB]

Yes I do that in XSAF mission, drop para-troopers from an IL76. It's not easy and goes into some granularity, I can't really post my code here but I'll try have a look at it when I'm home this weekend to see what the key bits are. This is not an ME capable thing but with some Lua you can make it happen.

[Grimes]

The Herc mod cheats because to the game each paratrooper is actually a "bomb" that is dropped by the aircraft. Actually anything you airdrop via the mod is a bomb, its just with paratroopers it drops 30 for how long it takes. Then with the scripting it tracks each dropped objects position, when low enough it effectively swaps the objects by deleting the bomb object and spawning the appropriate ground unit. 

Best you can do is fake it with something like spawning signal flares when it does a paradrop for the visual sense and then however you want to code it to spawn ground forces accordingly. The only thing you can spawn in air with a parachute is the illumination bomb. https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_func_illuminationBomb I don't remember if those still fall through the surface in MP for eternity or even if you could track it to know the altitude so you can spawn a ground unit when it reaches the ground. I think it falls at a fixed rate so its easy enough to do the math. 

[cfrag]

10 hours ago, Grimes said:

Best you can do is fake it with something

Thank you so much, @PravusJSB and @Grimes. What made me wonder is that air-dropping paratroops was kind of a big thing in WWII, and I was sure that DCS had provisions for it someplace - that merely stupid I was unable to find it. 

Here's hoping that a future version of DCS support air-dropping - the Herc is coming after all, and I've already reserved some space at the bottom of my DCS home screen

 

[PravusJSB]

So in a nutshell, you need to build up the aircraft and the troopers data structure and all the actions the should happen after activation/spawn before spawning anything, you need to create a set of troops (I make 3 groups of 4 troops) set as late activated and already with points from drop point to location thereafter, each group with this task line...

["task"] = "Без задачи",

Spawn those into the world and hold on to the ID's.

Create an IL76 (not tested with other aircraft, but the IL76 rear loading bay doors will open to allow the troopers to jump out), then the task for that aircraft looks like this...

["id"] = "ComboTask",
        ["params"] =
        {
            ["tasks"] =
            {
                [1] =
                {
                    ["enabled"] = true,
                    ["auto"] = false,
                    ["id"] = "ParatroopersDrop",
                    ["number"] = 1,
                    ["params"] =
                    {
                        ["groupAttack"] = false,
                        ["paratroopersNumber"] = 100,
                        ["attackQtyLimit"] = false,
                        ["attackQty"] = 1,
                        ["attackType"] = "Carpet",
                        ["groupsForAirdrop"] =
                        {
                        },
                        ["altitude"] = alt + terra_height,
                        ["groupsOnBoard"] = groups,
                        ["carpetLength"] = 500,
                        ["altitudeEnabled"] = true,
                        ["y"] = pos.z,
                        ["x"] = pos.x,
                        ["scriptFileName"] = "",
                        ["altitudeEdited"] = true,
                    },
                }, 
            },
        }

Add the objects returned from spawning the troopers into 'groupsOnBoard' with that task on the point of the route you want the troops to exit the cargo deck.

The aircraft needs a->b route and use a zone and trigger on the route point with the combo task above to activate the groups on board (I think.. I can't recall if it needs that or the combo task on the aircraft does it all for you...).

It took me a while to get this working but in the end you can make this happen, in SP or MP and will sync with all clients;

Its not easy to extract this from my code and post it up because of integrations and dependencies but I've attached a .lua file with some more detail that might help. I can't recall if the code in there works out of the box but certainly it looks nothing like how I got it to work in the end lol.

one_plane_airborn_4sq_red.lua

... oh if you need any help hit me up on Discord.

[cfrag]

Thanks a lot, @PravusJSB! Can't wait to have a look

 

[Grimes]

Yeahhhh I'm not sure that is meant to be live as the main tasks which allow you to create the tasks in the editor are hidden. But hey if you get it to work and it doesn't crash then more power to you. 

[rayrayblues]

On 11/5/2022 at 3:28 AM, cfrag said:

What made me wonder is that air-dropping paratroops was kind of a big thing in WWII, and I was sure that DCS had provisions for it someplace - that merely stupid I was unable to find it. 

For WWll, you can drop cargo from the C-47, however, they de-spawn when they land.

 

Oops, my bad. I forgot; this is a user mod called DC-3 Cargo.

The vanilla DCS Version is called C-47 and does not have this feature nor even any other skins.

There are other mods like C-130 and CH-47 Chinook that can drop paratroopers and cargo.

Hardly WWll compatible.

You are right. DCS does not offer this in any of their vanilla mods.

Edited November 8, 2022 by rayrayblues

[Dangerzone]

Just a thought - Surely ED be working on this for the official C130 module coming out?  If ED are going to add this as a function for the C130 - then it would make sense to also have it available for a trigger for AI aircraft at the same time - so maybe it's an opportunity now to get ED on board as a native option? (Alternatively if ED aren't going to support this as an option for the C130 I for one would be quite disappointed). 

[DoctorNo]

Wow this is awesome, I wonder if you can just replace the ["type"] = "IL-76MD", with CH-47 mod and it'll work?