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Airport vehicles

Paavo

Paavo

Resource contributor
Messages
192
Country
estonia
Hi all,

does anyone have even slightest idea how to add custom-made airport vehicles (such ass baggage loaders)?

I'm trying to build a moving stair (you know, the ones you can see at smaller airports -- built on a truck) that would drive up to aircraft and then rise or lower the stair to fit with the door.

It is possible to read the position of aircraft through SimConnect and get the offset of main exit from aircraft.cfg and then calculate exact coordinates where the truck should drive. This approach has two problems:

1) there's no way to adjust the height of the stair. In the old days, this would not have been a major issue since we could use user variables to interact between a module and scenery;

2) objects created through SimConnect seem to have some kind of a anti-collision system, which I don't know how to turn off. The truck stops very far from the aircraft.​


However, there must be a solution. The default baggage loader is able to:
1) drive up to aircraft's door, and
2) rise its loader arm to a suitable height.​

I studied modeldef.xml and found animated "baggageloaderarm" part, which depends on (undocumented?) SimContain.BaggageLoaderArmAngle variable. This is another small, but perhaps important piece in a puzzle I'm trying to solve.

Well. Does anybody have something to add, some knowledge to share, maybe even a solution? I'm especially interested in comments from ACES.



P.S. The moving stair is a obsession of mine and I'm not willing to throw it away without a very good explanation why it can't be done. : )
 
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Paavo said:
It is possible to read the position of aircraft through SimConnect and get the offset of main exit from aircraft.cfg and then calculate exact coordinates where the truck should drive. This approach has two problems:

2) objects created through SimConnect seem to have some kind of a anti-collision system, which I don't know how to turn off. The truck stops very far from the aircraft.
Click to expand...


1. Yes you can get latitude and longitude and alt from simconnect for your aircraft. - I think you can also get AI aircraft information if you can get their simobjectID. The traffic map program in the traffic tools does this.

2. Maybe some of the simObjects are created with an invisible box around them - this triggers if they are shown in the scene. Just a thought as to why some pass right through your aircraft and some stop short.

Does your aircraft config file have an exits section to show that the aircraft has cargo doors, or exit doors.

[exits]

number_of_exits = 2

exit.0 = 0.4, 41.3, -6.0, 4.0, 0
exit.1 = 0.4, -74.00, -4.5, 0.5, 1

examples from SDK aircraft config
Ron
 
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