I've been having great fun building AI aircraft over the past couple of months as a change from scenery design. There's much to learn but I am getting there. I have a question though, that I would dearly love the answer to, particularly if there is a workable solution. With a flyable aircraft, the user obviously decides when to retract the undercarriage with a key or button push. With AI aircraft, gear retraction often takes place a long time after take-off. By the time that happens, My LOD_30 has kicked in and that has no undercarriage in the model so the gear just disappears instantaneously. For an aircraft like a Spitfire or a Lightning scrambling, that very dramatic animation is lost. Is there anything that can be added to the aircraft.cfg, or anywhere else please, that would cause the gear to retract at a much earlier stage and thus make use of the animation?

Thanks in anticipation,
John

AFAIK, the retraction/extension sequence is contolled via the FS9 AI engine. You can alter the time it takes for the animation to run but that's all that I know how to change.

Thanks Mike. Yes I know how to change the duration or the order of leg retraction in the aircraft.cfg file, but it's the time when the retraction starts that I would like to influence. As you say, that's probably a function of the AI engine and presumably is not accessible for change, particularly for individual aircraft.

John

You could certainly build it into a model using xml to control the animation, not sure what you'd use as a trigger though.
Radio altitude? flap percentage? airspeed? or a combination.

So it's possible, but I doubt it'd be worth the effort.

John, you could certainly xml code the gear as Drew said. You could link it to speed or height above ground level, so that once the aircraft reaches a certain height the gear wil come up, however you would probably want the gear to come up very quickly after take off but still come down a long time before landing so a speed link would probably be better.

The only thing I can suggest is to actually add a simple gear model to your LOD_30 that still retracts. This way you will still get the effect you desire. It only needs to be a few polys.

Nick

Thanks for the XML suggestion. I think Nick's solution is probably the easiest to achieve so a simple gear retraction in LOD_30 it shall be.