I'm trying to create the Omaha beach except I wanted the players to spawn somewhere other than a static boat on the shore. I had this idea of having the player spawn in a moving landing craft with a shut door. When it reaches the shore the door opens and you have to run out. Just wanting to know how I could do this. Here's what I have.

1. Player spawns in in a black room with a teleporter just below which teleports them into the craft.

2. Craft is a prop_dynamic on a func_tracktrain and when it hits the shore an animation plays or just a func_rotate (or whatever) plays.

3. A 5 - 10 seconds later a shell hits the craft causing it to explode and free up space for a new craft.

Except I have an issue with it.

How could I make the craft respawnable?

All suggestions are welcome

firstly the teleporter idea is going to cause problems as if lots of players are teleported all at once, they will mash together and get stuck..
a really simple solution is this:

have the player spawn on a troop ship, then down a ladder is a boat that leaves for the beach, it arrives, all the troops run off, then the boat drives back to the ship.

this reminds me of a map name dod_casablanca in 1.3 is the same thing that u are talking about.

Um, i would just have the players spawn in the aproaching landing craft for the first wave then in the stationary one at beach every time after that
Simply because once axis spawn it will be pretty much impossible top make it to shore alive if u have to wait for the door to open, this might be more releasetic if there were more players than 32 but with such few people it owuld just be a meat grinder andn ot much fun to play

I was planning to have the pillboxes alot further back and with a heavy dose of fog in the level. So you can barely see it happening.

This might be a solution that wouldn't look so bad as long as your explosions were big enough to cover the boat.

Have the train track go from your starting room to the beach, then during explosion get the boat to move again to another func_train track underneath the ground, have it go back out to the ocean still under the ground then re-appear on surface where player can't see, then tell it to continue to the start position again.

The only thing with this is, I'm not sure how to tell the func_train tack to hold the model stationary for a time frame at the beach, then continue along the track. (that goes underground)

This way if your explosions are big enough, no player will be able to follow the model underground.

You would probably have to use the Ship at sea as your staring point, and players would have to wait for the next boat to come back before jumping in it.

You could also Tie a brush to the model that covers the ramp and have a minor explosion (one that does no player damage) or something destroy the brush so players can exit the boat once it reaches the beach.

A boat would be good, maybe have some guns to fire off the ship to fire at the beach.

If you're going to have working landing craft and that much water, how much rendering power is going to be left for the rest of the map? The prominent beach map(the name escapes me) had no end of troubles with the water.

Hmm I've come up with an easier idea. Have the LCVP a prop physics with thrusters on the side and a UI so you have some control over it. Then I would need to edit the LCVP and create a door animation. Then go back to the UI and have a button that plays the door open animation. Then I would create some no draw boxes around it with a minimum damage level of say 100 so a rocket or a well placed grenade would set off an env_explosion inside it.

As for the rendering problem. How well does the source fog help framerate? I would have thicker fog at sea than on the land too.

the problem with that is that the stock landing craft models in dod do not float . . . and if you used brushes you would get water bleeding through the hull unless you had it's prop type set to wood

Just make them prop_dynamics attached to func_tracktrains

Ok I did something like is ages ago for a beach map I was making for source.

this is what I did -

- I got the stock dod source landing craft animated to have the door open/close
- Using a func_traintrack and paths I made the Landing craft (Using a prop_dynamic) follow them into the beach
- Once the land craft touched the final path_track I made it stop then play the correct opening animation through the I/O system.
-The spawns I placed into the landcraft at the start of the round and also placed a trigger_once around them so that when the first person spawned they set the trigger off to make the landing craft move after around 10 seconds to give everyone time to spawn, then the spawns where also disabled.
-finally once the first wave of landing craft made it to the beach I disabled the entire func_traintrack and path system and left the landing craft where they where.

Hope that helps :)

Hey Sly, could you send me the animated landing craft?

I relaly need them with the ramp openable for my upcoming beach map

I can't access it atm, it's on a spare hard drive which is packed away as I'm currently in the process of shifting houses (Doing that tomorrow infact).

When I get it unpacked I'll see if I can find it