ChillNG

Edit - slight change to the campaign title Introducing First in Weasels Over Syria - an in development Wild Weasel campaign for DCS F-16C Viper! Set during the 'Operation Cerberus North' story-line, FIWOS will put you into the shoes of a Wild Weasel pilot with the 79th Fighter Squadron as they deploy to support the efforts of the Joint Syrian Task Force in establishing air dominance over northern Syria. As with all campaigns by Ground Pounder Sims, this campaign will feature a custom built ATC system, a complex and engaging story, extensive campaign documentation and highly immersive mission design that will react to your approach and allow multiple ways of completing missions. The completed campaign will also feature the 'Weasel System' - a comprehensive air defense network built into every mission, this system covers dozens of fixed and mobile SAM sites and hundreds of pieces of AAA , all tied into a reactive network that brings units online as you enter their area of responsibility. The Weasel system also includes an electronic attack capability to offer jamming support to the Weasels and many SAM sites have weaknesses built in to every mission, that can be learned and exploited. The Weasel system will allow a blending of complex story led missions with dynamic threat behavior, and will push DCS Viper pilots to the limit as they learn to adapt, improvise and overcome in a high threat environment. YGBSM!

Campaign Updates 24/08/22: Operation Cerberus North: Mission 4 - Adjusted message text to be clearer on task 1, fixed error where accepting CAS task makes it impossible to score 100, tweaked timing of JTAC system to account for higher altitude bomb releases. Mission 8 - Tweaked timing of JTAC system to account for higher altitude bomb releases.

Hey thanks for the thoughts. Davy should call the moment the SAM is detected by the DCS engine, I guess if the MWS isn't going off it's because its not seeing the SAM based on the MWS coverage, there's no scripts covering this so we should just be dealing with stock DCS behaviour.

Sounds like a DCS issue, although I'm not sure exactly what. If the mission log is showing the Mav as killing the radar, then I'm guessing this is what the triggers detected in the mission (they will be looking for the radar to be dead). Sounds like the mission has recorded the target as dead, but the visuals haven't caught up...very strange. You're not using any mods for anything visual are you?

Hi, thanks for picking up the campaign! Yes you are right, the wingman surviving is worth 10 points in mission 2.

There isn't any campaign specific procedure for the tankers, the campaign was developed with no need to AAR, I just left the tankers in case anyone really wanted/needed them at some point. Everything should just be core DCS behavior for tanking - I've just checked the mission and all settings/tasks/freqs for the tanker are as they should be. If the tankers aren't responding I'm not sure why at this point, I'll have to see if I can figure out why. Mission should be more than complete without tanking though, so it'd always encourage that as the best approach as this is how the missions were designed and you'll have a better experience overall.

No I'm afraid it won't work, like the others said the files are encrypted so there's very little you can alter in the editor. That said you are still able to change the player aircraft I think, you just can't save the file. But even then the missions won't work, a lot of the triggers are specific to each aircraft so the missions will break very quickly.

Thanks for the purchase and for the comments! I'm hoping to go with the Apache at some point, it's certainly on the roadmap, once I'm happy that George AI is in a good place and can fit him into my style of mission.

Hi, frequency for the tower isnt 260. 260 is for your flight on the UHF radio. For tower use the frequency in the kneeboard, it will be on the VHF AM radio.

Hi, thanks for the comments. Runway usage, there are a couple of missions where this happens. A few times during development changes I made switched the AI takeoff direction. I decided to leave as is as because there can be a quite a few triggers for the ATC system that might get messed up if I start fiddling too much. Not realistic but it does look and sound cool when you're holding short so I can live with it. Not being able to tank, I really have no clue why. Wondering if this is a new bug with the tankers, I'll have a look into it. Thankfully there is no need to tank as the mission ends there but I'll see if I can spot anything funny going on for those that want to do it. I'll check on that SCUD conversation, were comms before and after all OK though?

Hi, thanks for the feedback, I'll do some digging, not sure if it will be a Core DCS bug, or the Hornet or the Syria map.

Progressing nicely, I expect to have it completed and submitted to ED around the end of September.

Only change I'm aware of is MANPADS are a little more dangerous now than they where when the campaign was built, that said they're still totally defeatable with the proper maneuvers and flares. I've not had any other reports from Persian Freedom recently about the difficulty (did have a few last year, but they were in the minority) but if there's a consensus out there that it's got more difficult I'll certainly look at the number of MANPADS, I have had to make a minor addition to Cerberus North recently for the same reason. That should be the only difficulty change though, I had to make some changes a while back as ground AI developed a better aim but those issues don't apply or were already fixed in the missions you mentioned.

Just tested, couldn't reproduce and all worked ok for me. Few thoughts...the message to switch to Razor 3-1 should stay on screen until the radio is set and space-bar is pressed (until it expires after 5 mins anyway). If the message clears and you get no comms there's a problem with Razor themselves, I didn't see any issue just now, but the possibility always exists for the AI to do something dumb like crash into the sea. If the message doesn't clear when you press space-bar it's because your radio is set incorrectly. If you get the scenario where the message clears and you get no comms, let me know and I'll do a deeper dive into the AI behavior.

Sorry which mission?

I'll look at tweaking the timing, I thought I had allowed enough time for a longer drop but guess not in your case!

The scoring zones are close to the way-points, but not always exactly on them. Generally speaking if you are in the valley above the river you should be in the zone. The easiest places to lose points are on WP4 (the tight valley turn where you can go over as an escape maneuver), there is a scoring zone soon after this turn. WP5 can also be tricky as it is easy to lose the river in this area. Unfortunately tracks are never much good for this sort of thing as they don't record your flight, just recreate the control inputs, so error creeps in and on a low level replay will absolutely put you into a valley wall.

Have to admit I built this mission a long while back so had to double check the conditions I set, turns out to complete the mission with a basic score (60) you just need to kill the radar. To pick up an additional 20 points the launchers need destroying as well.

Hi, there's a few ways to approach the Migs, but I'll caveat this all by saying I haven't flown this mission since the AI A2A update so AI behavior has probably improved a little. As always in my campaigns, not fighting is an option, so you have the option of not engaging and just going home...but of course this would be bad for the Tornadoes, not to mention boring so let's assume you are going to engage. You have a few A2A tactical options available to you in this mission. You also don't need to kill the Migs, after 3 minutes they will disengage and look to bug out, so if you get in a turning fight with them you may be able to wear them down this way. Hope that helps!

It's something I'll keep an eye on in the long term and look to do if we never get a fix or performance increase through updates. Unfortunately it's not a simple case of just moving the player starting position as there are lot's of triggers tying into this particular hangar that the ATC system and AI movements around the base use. The takeoff order of AI jets can also be an issue, it's a carefully choreographed performance around the base a lot of the time. This all means it will take quite a bit of time and any changes will need a lot of testing and tweaking to fix.

Just to confirm have retested, and all low level scoring zones triggered ok.

Hi, sounds like departure was ok so most likely culprit is not being low enough when on the low level run given the 4 points deducted. Don't worry about the speed too much, the score doesn't take this into account, just focus on being low, IIRC the 150 feet isn't the be all and end all, I tried to set each scoring zone so that you just had to be below the level of the valley walls. I don't remember ever having an issue with the score during testing but I'll do a quick test soon and make sure I didn't put any errors in.

Hi, score break down is as follows: 60 points for completing the mission. 20 points for killing all 4 Silkworm launchers. 10 points for killing the secondary targets. 10 points for killing 50% or more of the boats. If you only got 80 then I guess it's a combination of either not killing all primary targets or you failed to takeout the secondary target and boats. It is possible to still get a thanks from the navy if you only killed 33% of the boats, the audio is different to the best outcome, and you don't get the points.

Just had this shared on my discord, I always forget that Tacview can be a real performance hog. With the complexity of the missions in OCN this could be having quite a big impact. https://tacview.fandom.com/wiki/FPS_Loss_While_Recording_Your_Flight_in_DCS_World#Why_is_that?

OK thanks, be good to hear how you get on. I'm really hoping when mulitcore and vulkan land we're going to see more consistency here.