Guiding user flight

[Jgal]

Hello,

I am trying to provide a user with markers one at a time to guide them to fly a path in order.

I am using Points of Interest to guide the player through a course. In the documentation it says I should use the PointOfInterestActivationAction to change the Activated property of the point of interest, but I could not find the PointOfInterestActivationAction in the Catalog. What I am doing instead is I've set rectangle area triggers under the points of interest and when they're hit, I deactivate the correlating point of interest using the Object Activation Action, which makes the next lowest point of interest the current selection. To force the user to fly the path in order, I have all the proximity triggers initially deactivated except the first one. As each proximity trigger gets hit, it deactivates itself and activates the next one, this way the user cannot skip any points along the path. This works, but is very messy...

Is there a cleaner way to achieve my goal?

I have looked into setting up a RaceCourse of VolumeRacePoints, but it looks like I will still have to handle either moving a single PointOfInterest from VolumeRacePoint to VolumeRacePoint or having a point of interest at every VolumeRacePoint and deactivating the hit trigger's correlating PointOfInterest. It seems like I will also still have to handle only keeping one VolumeRacePoint active at a time to avoid firing actions out of sequence if the user strays from the order.

If someone could point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.

[davidk64]

I'm a beginner at SimDirector but have managed to code a DotNet WinForms app that dynamically generates a circuit scenario at the user selected airport. I used the same approach as you except using the gate object with a rectangle round it. I'm not sure why you describe it as messy? Do you mean the visualisation screen with all the objects and the connecting lines is messy? To me the approach of activating/deactivating gates/points of interest in sequence seems logical.

Anyway I checked the doco and SimDirector and agree the point of interest activation action is documented but seemingly can't be selected. I went into one of my object xml files and changed "SimMission.ObjectActivationAction" to "SimMission.PointOfInterestActivationAction" and loaded up the scenario and no errors were reported in the "ObjectLoadErrors.txt" file that appears in the user "Prepar3D v5 Files" folder. The gate it was pointing to still got activated so I suspect if it was pointing to a point of interest that would have worked as well.

So as a last resort you could create your scenario using ObjectActivationActions and then edit the xml file afterwards in a text editor.

Are these scenarios themed in some way? Are you planning to publish them? I'm glad to hear of another person working with SimDirector!

[Jgal]

Hello!

Thank you for your response.

I guess I was just hoping there was some higher level object for guiding users that I had missed that would take care of the activation/deactivation for me on hit. By messy, I mean it just makes it a pain to add or remove points as the visualization is becoming quite hellish lol

I'd be super interested in checking out your WinForms app, if you don't mind sharing.

Thanks for the tip about just changing the xml to use the PointOfInterestActivationAction, I gave that a try and it worked.