Spoiler
had to use “community related” category for this since it doesn’t really belong to any nation.
Airfields in War thunder are a core part of various gamemodes, a simple flat area littered with strips, tents, hangars are many other miscellaneous objects. Works very simple too, just drop your aircraft with your pilot in one piece, a timer counts down, screen fades to black and you find yourself at the start of runway squeaky clean and with probably a nice air refreshener, if you had somewhere to hang it.
Is this wrong? No, it is mechanically excellent and while realistic terms it is completely bonkers (1 minute to glue a +1 ton tail section back is record time) we can add some little detail here and there to improve the experience of airfields a little more remarkable.
We’ll do so by adding more life to them, to achieve this we will make a new NPC, it will be a small vehicle to pull some carts with bombs, rockets, missiles, mechanics, ammo boxes and a fuel cart. And drives towards you when land
how about a David brown Mk.2 tractor? or a Clarktor 6? or just a random truck in military colors. The choice is up to the devs to which of these is the cutest one when driving towards you
Of course these tractors would have 2 versions, one for each version of the airfield.
aircraft past rank VI would see more modern and specialized vehicles of this class, while lower ranks would have the chance to just see a plain truck.
These tractors would spawn in groups of 2, both with a fully loaded train of carts behind it and these pairs will be scattered around the airfield.
When a player “lands” within an airfield’s repair zone the 2 nearest tractors will drive their way into their location after a small delay of 1-2 seconds, if the “Target” has any secondary armament the cart’s model will swap to display it, stopping within 5 meter of the aircraft. After this an undetermined amount of ground crew will dismount and slowly walk up to the aircraft in a similar fashion than the carrier NPCs do currently (these NPCs can be found in the carrier takeoff and torpedo tutorial).
Once the repair is over and the player teleported away, the dismounted crew will walk towards the carts and despawn(no one is near to see an intricate animation), after this the tractor will drive all the way to their original position and despawn any carts, this is to avoid a a bunch of carts to stay in the middle in the runway.
And the cycle will repeat when another aircraft lands, or until the carts are shot and detonate, in which case they will respawn after a set amount of time in their original positions.
- Yes
- No
1- These little tractors do not affect repair time, they are merely cosmetic.
2- Killing these tractors don’t reward or penalize any SL.
3- In case these tractors are killed they will respawn.
4- The pathfind AI should hopefully be very simple since airfields are very flat, it won’t apply much strain on servers, pathfind is just needed to avoid driving into a structure, AA emplacement or a player.
5- The animation for both the tractor and dismounted crew should also be very basic as to avoid needing to make dedicated animation for each aircraft and situation.
6- The carts also should have pretty basic physics, we know how poorly WT handles carts
hopefully you people can think of which vehicles can take this role or try to make them actually have a function instead of just be something to look at while you repair/rearm/refuel.