FYI, we're working to make drivable tanks & aimable/shootable AA an important part of the forthcoming TWC multiplayer campaign. We've been testing and it all works OK and adds a lot to the campaign.
This issue came up in a separate thread and I posted there how to use vehicles/tanks/AA/artillery from a user's perspective. But I thought it might be helpful to post the needed info from the perspective of a mission builder.
As a mission designer, what you need to know about vehicles, AA, and artillery:
* Only some vehicles/AA/artillery are playable/usable by the player. I'll post the list below in a separate message.
* Unfortunately you can't add vehicles or artillery to the the list of aircraft the player can spawn into at a spawn point. This would be the easy/logical way for players to spawn into a tank, vehicle, or artillery and was working in some TF versions, but not in 5.0 currently.
* What you do instead is, you place vehicles, tanks, AA, artillery etc (the type that are known to be player-usable) in your mission file the area of an existing spawn point. I believe the allowed distance from the spawn point is 10km. Just place them as regular AI vehicles. You will need to enter at least two waypoints for them. You can either give them two waypoints very close together (the vehicle will drive to the endpoint and then just stop and wait) or set the "timeout" for the first waypoint for something like 12 hours (the vehicle will stop and wait at the first waypoint for 12 hours).
* The player uses the (somewhat complex) instructions from the post linked above to enter the vehicle or artillery: Spawn into an aircraft at the spawn point, go back to the "flag screen", select "Everything", select the vehicle/artillery position desired; click to enter that position.
* If you (for example) want a special "Tank Spawn" area that is for tanks & artillery only (not aircraft) unfortunately there is no way to do this directly. You have to just enter a regular aircraft spawn point with at least one actual aircraft in it. What we have been doing is using aircraft like the Tiger Moth or maybe ME 108 as "stub aircraft" where the player jumps into that aircraft, then goes back to the flag screen to select and enter the artillery or vehicle to enter. That leaves a Tiger Moth sitting unused on the field for a little while, which usually isn't a problem.
==> If you want to make one of these special "Tank Spawn" areas somewhere on the map away from an existing airport, you'll have to define and add in Full Mission Builder at least two things: #1. The Spawn Area as explained above #2. The associated Airdrome and Airdrome Points. These are the places where your Tiger Moth (or other aircraft) will actually spawn in. If you don't provide these, the aircraft will spawn in on the nearest defined airfield on the map, which may be too far away from your tanks/vehicles/artillery for them to be accessed by the player (range is about 10km).
Usually I will draw something like 4 spawn-in points on the airfield/airfield points area I'm making to go with the Tank Spawn area.
Link to quick instructions for drawing airfield points in FMB: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=38743
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