Being airships can not land except at the Heliport for Airships, maybe add the ability to load/unload while in the air? Note: I also have the helicopter mod loaded.

warrenc wrote:

Being airships can not land except at the Heliport for Airships, maybe add the ability to load/unload while in the air? Note: I also have the helicopter mod loaded.

我没理解你说的这个功能是什么?你描述一下?
现在不是能够空中卸货吗?他可以给建筑矿山等运送货物啊,
I don't understand what feature you're talking about. Could you describe it?
Isn't aerial unloading available now? It can transport goods to construction sites, mines and other locations.

wtmxhyy wrote:

warrenc wrote:

Being airships can not land except at the Heliport for Airships, maybe add the ability to load/unload while in the air? Note: I also have the helicopter mod loaded.

我没理解你说的这个功能是什么?你描述一下?
现在不是能够空中卸货吗?他可以给建筑矿山等运送货物啊,
I don't understand what feature you're talking about. Could you describe it?
Isn't aerial unloading available now? It can transport goods to construction sites, mines and other locations.

There are some places a truck can not get to for loading or unloading. The Helicopter mod bypasses that limitation and can lift and drop cargo anywhere. Your Air Ship as great as it is, is also limited by the same logic the trucks are limited to. Can not access some places blocked by belts/pipes or other buildings. The Air Ships are incapable of flying over buildings. It has to go around them thus restricting its ability to access something surrounded by other buildings or structures.

An advantage of hovering capable flying vehicles is they should be able to access any location trucks are incapable of accessing. Your Air Ships are restricted just like trucks. unable to access locations blocked by other structures.

I did not check if your air ships can fly over land trucks can't drive, over mountains & water.

哦,你说这个问题啊,我稍微加一下代码即可,把飞行高度升高躲避建筑,然后加大寻址,加快装卸.我做了简单调试.
希望你继续测试.直升机mod的特色在于他精细化的设计,对于风力和摆动都考虑进去.而我的飞艇很粗糙.不考虑太多复杂的效果,我只要他飞起来去拉货即可.
Oh, about the issue you mentioned, I just need to add a bit of code: raise the flight altitude to avoid buildings, expand addressing range, and speed up loading and unloading. I've completed simple debugging.
Please keep testing it. The helicopter mod features elaborate design that takes wind force and sway into account. My airship mod is rather basic, without many complex effects — I only need it to fly and transport cargo.

😏

I’ve implemented dedicated high-altitude air routes for the airships, completely ditching vanilla truck ground pathfinding in favor of my custom flight control logic. Cargo unloading can now happen safely at elevated heights.

I fully grasp the issues you brought up—adding this flight system ramps up the complexity exponentially, with far more variables to account for. I’d really appreciate it if you could test v0.5.0 and let me know if it covers all your expected functionality.

For context, the base game’s native truck AI pathfinding is honestly pretty janky and frustrating to work with; there’s only so much I can do to patch its inherent flaws. I’ve reviewed and understand the design philosophy behind the existing helicopter mod, but its core mechanics just don’t translate well to airships, so I can’t borrow its logic.

Helicopters are built to be compact, agile short-range craft with built-in terrain scanning, lead prediction and pre-calculated climb paths. Those lightweight calculations run fine for a single helicopter, but if players spawn hundreds of these flying units traversing the map at once, all that heavy terrain matching and complex math would create catastrophic, unnecessary performance overhead.

My airship design follows a totally different core vision: these are bulky, high-capacity heavy haulers built for bulk long-distance cargo transport. They can handle smaller shipments too, but players will pay a steep fuel cost to run them for light loads.

To keep performance light on every PC, I stripped out all intricate maneuver logic and detailed animation systems. Airships operate on two fixed altitude tiers only:

1. A cruise altitude set well above all in-game structures to eliminate any collision with terrain or buildings entirely
2. A docking/unloading altitude calculated to sit just higher than the tallest nearby structure, within a valid loading range for cargo transfers

I use range-based detection instead of precise point-to-point coordinate checks. Airships only need to descend to the docking altitude to complete loading/unloading procedures. This dual-height system cuts down all heavy runtime computations to a minimum with zero performance bottlenecks.

I’ve logged 12 hours of continuous testing with zero abnormal log spams, and all core basic functionality works reliably at this stage.