I am trying to place an oil slick on a body of water. Since I need to place it
at random locations and possibly move it during the game, I am doing this with
a SimConnect application and creating the oil slick object as a SimObject. The
following code works just fine for placing an instance of my oil slick object:
var pos1 = new SIMCONNECT_DATA_INITPOSITION
{
Latitude = 33.0435,
Longitude = -83.788923,
Altitude = 134.65061,
Pitch = 0.003039,
Bank = -0.001544,
Heading = -176.897159,
OnGround = 1, // IF ANYTHING BUT 1, THE OBJECT DOESN'T SHOW UP!!!
Airspeed = 0
};
wrapper.CreateAiSimulatedObject("MyCompany_Slick1", pos1, epaObj1_targetRequestId);
This version looks bad though because of z-fighting so I need to lift this
object slightly above the water. The logical way to do this is to set
OnGround=0 and give it an Altitude that is slightly above the terrain altitude
at that location. If I place the oil Slick SimObject manually with the Scene
Editor by turning off “Snap to ground” and lifting it up slightly (which is
where the Altitude I’m using came from), it works beautifully. BUT, if I try
to do this in my SimConnect code by setting OnGround to 0, the object does not
appear. That is the only change from a visible run to an invisible run.
This has nothing to do with the SimObject itself because I have tried it with
a variety of SimObjects. All are visible with OnGround=1 but invisible/not
rendered with OnGround=0. I have tried looking at the SimConnect logs and the
output is the same (no errors) in both scenarios. FYI, this is an experimental
project at this point and I started by adapting the Bears sample SimObject
project so the sim.cfg file where my oil slick is defined contains these
lines:
...
[fltsim.4]
title=MyCompany_Slick1
model=Slick1
texture=Slick1
[General]
category=Animal
DistanceToNotAnimate=1500
...
I haven’t seen any documentation that says Animal type SimObjects cannot be
airborne but maybe I missed it. And if that were the issue, it would seem that
the Scene Editor in MSFS would not let me uncheck “Snap to ground” when I
place the exact same SimObject manually. Any suggestions would be greatly
appreciated!