Spring RTS Engine

I spent all yesterday trying to get aircraft to land on or under water. I managed to get them to travel below the water (And below the land!) using minwaterdepth and a negative cruisalt, but beyond that was totally unsucessful. I tried giving them Canhover, Canfloat, a variety of different min/max water depth settings and it all did nothing.

Couldnt seaplanes land underwater in OTA? How and when was this functionality removed? Is there any way to do it now?

That feature is painfully absent in spring.Somebody write the patch!

You should know that the spring engine can load files from OTA, but the similarities end right around there.
Seaplane functionality was never removed, it was never implemented.

I don't see the logic of having them land underwater, regardless. On the surface, sure, that is a flaw to be rectified, but underwater is illogical and ultimately icing.

By that I mean is that it is icing on the cake. I'm not against it, persay, but I don't believe it should take priority, as I have said on Smoth's forum.

Anyway, you should raise this point in the Feature Request forum.

That was the big draw for using SeaPlanes in OTA, as they could operate like normal planes, but were able to submerge underwater during landings for complete concealment.

Its not like they get used very often, but it would still be nice to have the capability.

I have a patch ready that will at least let seaplanes land ON water, but it's useless unless mod authors actually set the minWaterDepth, waterline, or floater tags for them (XTA doesn't, for instance) so the code can tell whether something is a seaplane in the first place.

If it's small enough please submit it to mantis/the mailing list, modders will automagically start using it if it's available in the official spring.exe

IMHO,it needs a solution, errrr...preferably creating classes of floater=1, for seaplanes landing in the water surface and amphibious=1, for submerged landings.
The trouble, along the very interesting gameplay options that would be created is that a bug already exists.....
ALL planes already can cross the waterline to be refueled be submerged pads, that simply are mobile amphibious pads traveling from a island to other...
Ive discovered it while Im testing these mobile pads for the Limited Fuel & Ammo supply TA-BattleFleet mod tests.
I think that one of options would suffice, plus avoiding the bug, to point the unique caractheristics of seaplanes.
Please Kloot, launch your patch :idea:
VonGratz
http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/BB/download.php?id=1011

Reported.

To modders: set a plane's "floater" tag to true to make it a (surface) seaplane.

VonGratz wrote:IMHO,it needs a solution, errrr...preferably creating classes of floater=1, for seaplanes landing in the water surface and amphibious=1, for submerged landings.

That was my idea! http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/BB/viewtopic.php?t=806

I think that this should be implemented. It's not like you can use the "oh no! Even MORE fbi tags!" excuse with this one.

I know that is your idea!
Sorry, but dont hurry about and.......... its a VERY GOOD idea!

I think that this should be implemented. It's not like you can use the "oh no! Even MORE fbi tags!" excuse with this one.

and.. this comment is also very useful as the tags already exists
VonGratz

Surface-landing seaplanes don't seem all that useful to me, unless you've limited fuel or you're trying to save energy. The submerged-landing planes are far more useful, since they're concealable. I know that submerged fighters are a horrifically powerful defense, since they trick an enemy player into assuming you have no air defense. It's a wonderful trap.

Unless they have sonar coverage on your base. A few subs amongst seaplanes should cause a lot of damage in my opinion.

Committed kloot's one liner:

- Planes can land on water surface if FBI tag floater is set to true.

Is it already working, just only writing floater=1; in seaplanes unit files,or we will need to wait the patch to be put inside of next Spring.exe?
VonGratz

no it's in the source code repository, so it will be in the official next release

I suspected
Maybe a Xmas gift
VonGratz

I had a talk to smoth in the game lobby while the site was down and he informed me it wasnt possible. So i set about figuring out how to make all the seaplanes hover predictably, as an alternative to propose for BA (Not that the BA modders would accept it, i havent even talked to them about it, but i thought id give it a shot). Do you know how hard it is to make a bomber with gunship movement and a 'dropped' weapon fire predictably? Took ages to get it working.

Serves me right for making a workaround when the functionality can just be added by the developers. Ahaha.

Oh well, nice to see that sort of attention being paid to the community.

both...
TA traditionalist need land underwater feature but stuff like 1944 and maestro/GZ WD need landing on surface (for stuff likes PBY catalina, beriyev albatross etc). Oh and add Ekranoplane too (really fly over water but wont move over the land).