Landable Helipad

[Guest RollerBall]

Hi, Happy New Year all!Been monitoring all the posts on the new SDK and playing around with the XML stuff. One strange little thing I've noticed.There are 2 rigs - gen_rig01 and gen_rig02. The second is one of those objects that won't appear but gen_rig01 (GUID 4a5ceec84f2a9e27f12ee7a40f0c856c) works fine.In experiments when I placed it on land, the helipad was landable.However, as soon as I placed it on water it wasn't!Any idea why that should be? Seems to defeat the object a bit:D

[Guest sapper42]

Gday mate,I have placed 20 Rigs via the instructions in the new SDK in 1 BGL file all hard the hard surface and all were on water. i even added an Aircraft carrier and that was allso hard surface.the GUID i used is < c545a29e11d2e2ec1000849c2ae60c5a > , have you tried that one ? Darn now i cant remember if thats the Carrier or the Container hull. do you have the GUID handy for the Rig that doesnt work ?rgds Jeff

[Guest RollerBall]

Hi JeffYeah gen_rig02 is GUID 5c55111b4e1b5620af15409073f620a2. I agree that the carrier works fine on water and stays landable.The GUID you give is for the VEH_water_eastcoastcarrier1 and all the ships I've tried so far except for the carrier give a building crash at any speed if you try to land on any part of them. But I haven't yet tried em all.

[Guest sapper42]

I cant even get Rig #2 to show, could be that its area specific maybe as it didnt display in Australia. ill test further tonightrgds Jeff

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi RollerBall.I don't think gen_rig02 is even in FS9. The list MS gave us wasn't right.I think you have found a bug in the coding for the helipad on gen_rig01.If they can get the carrier's pad to work, why wouldn't the oil rig's pad work over water? Very strange.We might be able to get it to work by biasing the rig's refpoint over some land, but that would give you a range of +/- 32767 meters ( I think ). Another option might be to put an LWM land poly under the rig ( ... maybe just to cover it's refpoint ). In the ocean, it would still appear as water, as the landclass would be #100.It seems like a lot of nonsense to me. I had hoped we could make a Gmax pad with the new MakeMDL and stick or attachpt it anywhere, but we'll have to see.Dick

[Guest sapper42]

Now theres a Thought Dick ! maybe Rig #2 isnt in FS9, that would explain me flying sround for an hour looking for it lol.rgds Jeff

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.Bad news about gen_rig01.The helipad has a lat-long bounds. I can place it in the Gulf of Mexico, and the oil rig's pad is fine. I place it on land ( or ocean ) in Africa, and it's no good, even though the object displays fine.It would need more testing, but I think the problem is with the object... but not absolutely sure.Dick

[Guest RollerBall]

Thanks for that DickThis whole business of bounds is becoming a heck of a nuisance. MS could do us all a great service if they went back to this SDK, corrected all of the code errors it contains, took all of the objects out of the spreadsheet that don't apply to FS9 and looked at the rest to see which they should make 'unbounded' general objects.After all, they have all the info and I can't see why this should take one guy more than a coupla days at most.They haven't done us too many favours so far.Should I hold my breath?:(

[Guest sapper42]

If ive nothing better to do this weekend, i might find time to have a go at working my way through the GUID list and if itll show up in Australia ( besides Sydney scenery ) then it should with luck show up anywhere. One line of thought tho ref the miscreant OilRig, one wonders if the advanced building Hard Surface method would apply for a hard surface as i have noticed that when i placed an FSDS object at the same co ords as an FS9 object, the FS9 object totally overwrote the FSDS object and one would pressume the same would apply for a scasm coded object such as a macro or advanced building. I had a Custom Rig at the same Lat Lon as an FS9 Rig with the FS9 Rig placed with new SDK and the Custom Rig wasnt there.Jeff

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Guys.Sorry about the plain text, but I wanted to show the XML code.This will make a simple airport, designate a helipad, and place the scenery object ( oil rig ).===========================<?xml version="1.0"?>==============================I don't think the helipad element is needed, and that just seems to draw the "H" and a circle.The rig now has an ID ( RU01 ), and you can use the go airport menu to get there, and view it from the "tower".This is probably the best way to do helipads in FS9 ( if your reading this J. R. ).To move this around, you'll need to give new lat's and long's, and give it an appropriate ID and other airport info.If the code is separated into 2 XML files ( one for scenery and one for the airport ), AFCAD2 should be able to read the airport.Dick

[Guest JR Morgan]

6:59 PM 12/30/2003Hi Dick..Thanks for the Aardvark code. Yes, I would agree that where possible for FS9, we would be better off not using helipad hardening techniques derived from AdvBldg or SCASM techniques when and if XML hardening is available. The Oil Rig's hardened pad is a good example of a handy, pre-hardened pad. In testing an XML Helipad at Aardvark, I discovered I could not code the pad to allow hardly any offsets and it is not hardened. When trying to place it higher than approx 12 meters MSL, it would not appear and it seems to have some visibility problems anywhere you put it -- so at this point I think the XML pad exemplified in the SDK doc needs lots of (MS) work. The syntax is wrong for helipad color options because presently, per error reports, although recommended in the SDK, no red, green or blue color-mix code is allowed.It's starting to look to me like the elevated hard surfaces in XML objects are strictly a characteristic of each object itself. Surprisingly, the small square building on top of the Oil Rig's center structure is hardened and heli landable.Here's the code where I inserted the Helipad into your Aardvark macro:======================================<?xml version="1.0"?>Here a a couple of pics showing the hardened superstructure shack and the XML pad at about sea level under the rig:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/55428.jpg

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi J.R.Happy new year!I think the XML helipad code is basically "eye-candy". It's too bad MS didn't give us more room to place our own textured polys. I don't think they show up in the GOTO as a runway unless they are declared as runways. AFCADing a complex airport might show us some coding tricks in the defaults.I'm not real thrilled about every object ( and poly ) being required as a library object in FS9! And this will be a setback to 3rd party ( non-Gmax ) users until the new MakeMDL code is understood... so there will still be a use for the older SCASM/BGLC based code for a while. FS10 will probably force a change. Eventually, I'd hope to attach a reliable hardened area to a thin Gmax pad library object in FS9 code... then we can put it wherever we'd like. Maybe we could even use a transparent texture for that object, making that pad invisible. Until then, we have XML and our pre-FS9 advanced buildings.I'm sure there will be the usual arguments over the XML "helipad runway" ( it's square, it's too big, it's not attached to the object.... ). But the XML runway is hard as a rock and allows it to be seen in the map and accessed via the GOTO Airport menu.Dick

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.I've been trying to place XML runways... and I don't have the success I had placing them on the oilrig! They just didn't want to harden!The trick is that the airport sets the elevation... not the runway. Each "pad' would need to have it's own Airport ( and ID ).Dick

[Guest RollerBall]

This seems to be all becoming a bit problematic.I've now been playing with the carriers. First thing I find is if you change the scale to anything other than 1.0 they lose their hardness. Can live with that although it would have been nice to be able to make em a bit bigger (they're hardly super-carriers!).I then decided to use AFCAD2 to place a runway on one of them with a bit of adjacent parking.Don't seem to be able to make the runway invisible. Setting the texture to unknown makes it appear as grass.Also most seriously the sea slopes up steeply from sea level to the level of the carrier deck. (Also, take a look at Meigs - the sea does the same there and presumably it will do wherever you have sea adjacent to an airport/runway facility).I'm gonna have a go with Dick's suggestion of placing an airport and runway on top of a carrier using XML coding - but what's the bet the sea will still do exactly the same.It would appear that there are some quite serious problems with this new approach of combining facilities and visible elements in the one file. So far I don't much like it! :-(http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/56137.jpg

[Guest tdragger]

It looks like what's happening is the runway and parking spots are adding their flattening polygons to the terrain engine and these are being stiched in to the terrain (water in this case). This is a change from FS8 where you needed to add a surface explicitly. Now it's done automatically. Obvisouly the facilities schema was not meant to be applied in this way!