I thought I'd quickly throw together a couple simple missions where I could practice some basics like landing, tanking, etc. Life is busy and I can go long stretches without simming so putzing around in simple missions like this would be helpful to knock the rust off. I'm using the ncape map and started from Bardufoss. I put together a mission where I take off with my wingman. Once we hit WP 1, a flag triggers a two ship flight of Norwegian F-16's to take off. Their way points are in a box shape that takes them East, North, West, South then East again to land at Barufoss. My waypoints are identical but what I'm doing is just practising joining on, and formation flying with the F-16's. So far so good. The last WP for both me and the F-16s has an action of Land. The WP markers are right on the threshold of the runway. The F-16's seem to land without any problem. Here's where my problems start. First off, when I bring up Radio 2, the only option available is Request SAR. The Tower Sub-menu is greyed out so I can't request a landing. I land anyway, but my wingman orbits my position. When I use Radio 1 and tell my wingman to Return to Base, he buggers off to I don't know where. In one of my replay's I tell him RTB before I land and I follow him. He flies to Bodo where he lands. While I'm near Bodo, I call up Radio 2 and the Tower Sub-menu is available so I can request landing. Now I'm wondering if there is something special about Bodo especially since the training missions from stock JF18 seem to use Bodo. So I've re-done this mission basically the same way but using Bodo as the airfield. The same thing happens at Bodo. The wingman has defected I think to Kiruna in Sweden but I can't be sure. And there is still not a Tower Sub-menu when I'm near (or even above) Bodo.

Hopefully there's still some of you with JF18 experience around that can help me. I'd like to know a) how to make my wingman land with me and b) how to make the Tower Sub-menu appear in Radio 2.

Thanks,
Wizard

It's been a long time since I wrote the code for it so I might start confusing games but this is what I remember about it. I'm guessing that the airfield is on the wrong side of the "fence" and so is either considered an enemy or neutral airfield and so not considered as valid landing options. I believe Pure AIs will assume their waypoint information is correct but if I check the airfields the F-16s might have been neutrals so wouldn't engage you but could land at the field. I'm leaning towards me having the AIs assume the waypoints are correct to not restrict mission creators if I didn't have to. I think your wingmen only use the waypoint information for what to attack and then follow your lead for everything else. If there's not an allied airfield within a certain range then the Tower stuff won't show up. This keeps things like having a Player accidentally telling their wingman to land at an enemy airfield if they hit the wrong things. I'm not sure why Bodo would show up in one case and not in another unless the fence settings were changed. I only really dealt with the Mission Builder at the beginning of JF-15 and don't remember how fences were set up but if you can't find it I'll try to get in touch with one of the other guys and see if they remember.

I hope this was of some help,

Elf

This was very helpful! I checked the fence settings and Norway was checked off. I unchecked it, saved the mission and flew it. Right away the tower options in Radio 2 appeared. The Norwegian F-16s land normally at their last waypoint. Then I got clearance and landed. And then my wingman landed all by himself without any other instructions from me. I am a super happy Super Hornet pilot again. I'm not sure what happened in the one replay where I had a tower option for Bodo but I couldn't recreate it so I must have done something different that time around. But regardless, I think you've solved my problem. Thank you so much for taking the time to post. I still think it's awesome that one of the original devs still contributes to the community. My hat is off to you sir!

Wizard

Wizard43
Which version of windows are you using?

Fuzzy

You're very welcome. I'm glad the information was of some use and I remembered things correctly. :-)

Elf

I have an old Win XP Pro computer dedicated pretty much exclusively to F/A-18.

Wizard