flight.dat

GTA III's flight*.dat map

Vice City's flight*.dat map

The flight*.dat files controls the movements of NPC flying vehicles in GTA III and Vice City. These files are located in the .\data\paths folder in the GTA III and Vice City directories. The following files control these flying vehicles:

flight.dat	Airtrain
flight2.dat	DeadDodo
flight3.dat	DeadDodo used in "S.A.M."	Police Maverick
flight4.dat	DeadDodo used in "A Drop In The Ocean"

These flying vehicles are not solid so you cannot collide into them and there are no drivers in them. DeadDodos can be destroyed by shooting a rocket through the plane. In an early GTA III commercial, the Airtrain is seen being destroyed by the rocket. This feature can be enabled through Silent's "Destroyable Airtrain" mod.

Format

	Type	Description
Section 1: Number of path nodes
A	integer	The number of lines that are to be read from the file.
Section 2: Path nodes
A,B,C	float[3]	X, Y, Z coordinates, each line linked to create a path

For flight.dat in GTA III, if the point is below the ground, the game internally replaces the z-coordinate with the ground z at that point. In Vice City, the game internally replaces any z-coordinate below 14.0 with 14.0. This is primarily used to determine the landing and takeoff points and allow aircraft to taxi on the surface.

Mission script

These opcodes can be used in GTA III to spawn and check the Dodo along the flight paths.

• 033A, spawns a Dodo to follow the path from the flight3.dat file
• 033B, checks if the flight3 Dodo has completed the trip
• 033C, checks if the flight3 Dodo has been shot down
• 0358, spawns a Dodo to follow the path from the flight4.dat file
• 0359, checks if the flight4 Dodo has been shot down
• 035A, gets the coordinates of the flight3 Dodo
• 03A6, gets the coordinates of the flight4 Dodo