Aurora landing vertically on the airfield

[Skyaero42]

Prerequisites

• I have searched for similar issues and confirmed this is not a duplicate

Game Version

• Command & Conquer Generals
• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour
• Other (please specify below)

Bug Description

An aurora that lands on the airfield normally circles twice to lose altitude to land on the airfield. In this case, the Aurora flies straight to the airfield, loses half the altitude and then slowly descends vertically.
When it descends vertically, it can be shot at by ground units.

Reproduction Steps

Replay and map:
Aurora.zip

It occurs for the blue player at 9:20 - 9:30

Additional Context

No response

[Caball009]

Replay

vertical_landing_replay.mp4

Visual imitation of the vertical landing

vertical_landing_imitation.mp4

You can imitate the vertical landing quite easily if you change this code from:

GeneralsGameCode/GeneralsMD/Code/GameEngine/Source/GameLogic/AI/AIPathfind.cpp

Lines 5704 to 5705 in 2c26a90

	Coord3D adjDest = *to;
	if (checkClips) {

to:

Coord3D adjDest = *to;

static float multiplier = 1.5f;
adjDest.z *= multiplier;

if (checkClips) {

It's not clear to me what went wrong in the replay, but I think investigating what happens in the above function at frame 16855 is a good start.

[DrGoldFish1]

In the clip the aurora didn`t do the spinning animation to lower his position. So instead it tries to dive but is unable to go nose down to land properly on the airfield and it then hits the taxing locations where it will switch to taxi locomotor. So the plane slowly descents until it has reached the right height for taxing.
So I think there is a landing animation being skipped here.