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I've uploaded a new batch of missions, you can read about the changes here: https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2892338&postcount=26 In summary though, two more flyable airports and tweaks to failure times, flight distances and the kneeboard.

Hi everyone, today I've added missions for the MiG-15! I've also added Mozdok and Mineralnye-Vody to the list of flyable airports for both aircraft and tweaked failure times and average flight distances. There is also now a dedicated kneeboard page just for the radio information. Which means that longer flight plans don't get shrunk when displayed on the kneeboard. All flights have been re-genearated, so all the Sabre ones are new too.

Same here.

Thank you Panthro! your do some cool flight sim stuff too!

Thank you Spirit!

Oh right! that's a good idea. I have a long way to go with just making them better though. Is there anything in particular that would be needed to chain them together that way in the campaign builder?

Of course, the generator makes many flights, you never know if the flight you are trying has a failure or not. They are assigned randomly. Some flights have failures, some bad weather, there are lots of variables that the generator changes. What kind of conditions you have in a particular flight depends on the difficulty of the mission. The specific thing you mention, the desire for unpredictability, is the reason I'm making the generator! If you have the time read the second post in the thread I linked to above, it goes into my motivations in more detail.

HI all, I've started work on getting the system going with the MiG-15. I'd love some help with working out some interesting failure modes for the aircraft. Here is the thread I've started about this in the MiG-15 area of the forums: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=2890112#post2890112

Hi everyone, I've started work on making my 'Interesting Missions' system create missions for the MiG-15. You can read more about the system here https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=172869 What I need help with is coming up with some interesting failure scenarios for the MiG-15. I'm looking for things that can be realistically failed before start-up, and things that can fail during flight. What I don't want is to fail the aircraft in a way that isn't fun, or doesn't promote good piloting. So for example, killing the engine right after take-off without warning isn't a lot of fun for the player. There is nothing they could have done to get themselves out of that situation, and now they've wasted a lot of time with reading a flight plan, start up, taxi etc. Having the aircraft start the mission with a non-working oil pump, THEN failing the engine right after take-off is fair game though. The player should have checked the gauges while starting the engine. Here are a few example failures from the Sabre to give you an idea of what I mean: The utility hydraulic system is failed at the start, gear won't go up after take off if not spotted, but easily spotted if you are carrying out the checklist. There just isn't enough fuel in the plane, you can start and take off, but c'mon, surely you checked the fuel level right? The oil pump is failed when the mission loads, then around ten minutes after that the engine fails. The oil pump fails during flight, the a few minutes after that the engine fails. If the player is looking at the gauges during flight they will spot the oil pump failure and find an alternate landing site. Multiple electrical failures, sometimes they are just one system, sometimes they cascade. So that's the kind of thing I have in mind. Their purpose is to make the random missions more interesting, but not unfair. Can you help me find similar things for the MiG?

Hi all, I just wanted to let you know that mission #434 from the current batch is really interesting. I tried when I was in a hurry and it didn't go well, I landed safely, but I shambled it up in a whole bunch of ways. This is probably one of those 'don't fly' missions but I figured that the weather would be ok at the destination. Anyway, no more spoilers. If you want to try it here is the direct link https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2693052/Published%20Missions/Interesting/Flight-0434%20D09%20.miz And here is a link to download my track of it. I screwed up in a whole bunch of ways, probably an example of what NOT to do, down to flicking switches at the end of the flight when I really should have done it five minutes earlier. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2693052/Tracks/Flight%20434.trk

Thank you!

I've uploaded a new batch of missions, you can read about the changes here https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2888813&postcount=14

Hi everyone, I've made some changes to the mission generator and have generated another set of 600 missions. These replace the older ones. In reality pilots don't get to jump in an aircraft and fly around willy-nilly. At least not most of the time. I wanted to add a bit more structure around HOW you fly the mission, after all, a challenge is interesting, and you can't have a challenge without restrictions. So I've made the flight plan much more accurate and added a scoring system to judge how well you keep to it. You are scored on how well you keep to the take off time and the landing time. The mission briefing now tells you both of those. In the Sabre take off is set to 10 minutes after mission start, landing is set to 10 minutes after your flight plan shows you arriving at your last waypoint. In reality you will spend most of those minutes getting up to speed and climbing after take-off, but you have some flexibility there. If you keep to the flight plan you should have enough time. I struggled for a while over what to do about True Air Speed versus Indicated Air Speed in the flight plan. I played around with including both but I wasn't happy with the result. So in the end I've made the flight plan show you True Air Speed, which you should read as speed over ground, it's not wind corrected. Then, I've also added a radio menu option (Other->Flight Plan) to tell you both your actual ground speed in the sim and also the mission time down to single-second accuracy. The radio menu also lets you see your next mission goal and your current score. There was a bug that didn't show take off and landing airfield altitude correctly, that's been fixed. I also included briefings for the actual briefing screen and a quick one in-game. They remind you that you don't need to fly every mission. That some are just too difficult and you have to use your judgement as a pilot. Hope you all like the updates! let me know what you think. From now on, although I try to improve the 'game' mechanics further, I will mostly concentrate on adding new flyable aircraft to the generator.

Thank you Stonehouse, background activity is already there, in the current version I think there are 10 other flights in the world with you. They fly between random airfields. I don't want to zip up the files because, well, for one it would be huge, but most importantly I want to encourage people to download files from the dropbox site often. I will continue to update the missions and I would really like people to be using the 'best' version! If you really need a bunch of them for some reason then let me know what you need and I can try and work something up for you. So I could make a bunch of them at a particular difficulty or something like that.

Absolutely! I hope to do the Mig 15 next.

Thank you!

Thank you JLX! the Mig-15 will be next I think, I would like to add a lot of fixed-wing modules quickly before tackling helicopters because for helos I'll need to add Farps and that will take a little bit longer. My biggest delay at the moment is that I need to know an aircraft well enough to work out what failures are realistic and what their effects should be.

Great! let me know what you think.

Thank you! I really hope you enjoy these.

Rivvern, none, you just fly between two airports. My experiment with this project is to see how interesting I can make really, really simple missions.

Pikey, you are right in that it would be better to randomise in-mission. But as far as I know there is no way to randomise weather and start times, or a way to put images into the kneeboard.

Hi everyone, long story short I made a thing that made 500 missions for the sabre. The long story is here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=172869 This could be an interesting flight! The 'Interesting Flights' system is a generator of sort-of-random missions aimed at making sure you never have to fly the same mission twice. They are interesting because you don't know what's going to happen in them. Every mission is different. The flight plan for each mission is generated just for that mission. There is no combat but there IS scoring. The flight plan is complete, well annotated, and can be found on your kneeboard. The aircraft radios have the required frequencies loaded. Below you will find the download link, there are 100 missions in the 'annotated' directory. Their filename gives you some clues about what will happen during the mission (format explained in the post linked above). There are 400 missions in the 'interesting' directory, they don't tell you anything except their difficulty. The missions are for the Sabre. The message linked above explains the system, its goals, and what you will find in each mission. It's fairly long! I hope you enjoy it. Mission Briefing Look at the weather forecast on your kneeboard, then checkout the flight plan details. The aim of these missions is to get the aircraft safely back on the ground, sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, sometimes you shouldn't even fly. You'll get a higher score if you meet the take off and landing times shown in your flight plan. Down to the second. Make sure there isn't anything wrong with your aircraft during startup. You are not supposed to complete all the 'Interesting Flights', for many, you shouldn't even take off! A lot of the higher numbered flights are just not safe. Make sure the weather and your aircraft are suitable. If not, download another flight. Or download a bunch of them in the first place so you can go trough them quickly. There are plenty there, no reason to ever fly one twice. So don't, they are a lot more fun if you don't know what's going to happen. During the flight you can use the 'F10' radio menu to find out: Your score for the mission so far. What you are expected to do next. Get a helping hand by seeing your ground speed and the elapsed mission time down to the second. You will not experience or see any combat during this flight. 'Interesting Flights' uses the MOOSE scripting framework and Open Maps. WHERE TO GET THE MISSIONS FROM Please read the thread linked above if you don't know what this is all about! You can download the missions from a shared DropBox folder here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mzic1uoxnyofgm3/AADJTks7pN0nmj1CqpmqUy5oa?dl=0

Hi everyone, I want to tell you about a project I've been working on. This is going to be a bit of a long post but please bear with me while I explain where I'm coming from. For a while now I've been wondering, how interesting can a super-simple mission be? START OF LONG RAMBLE So let's say we are going to be flying between two airfields, how interesting can that be? Because let me tell you, if I could go down to the local airport right now and jump into a ratty old Cessna and fly it around for a bit I would think that is SUPER interesting. If I load up a mission in DCS and fly a Sabre between Batumi and Kutaisi, well, that's not as interesting. Notice that I am not talking about fear here, I would be much more scared in the Cessna than in DCS because the Cessna flight is REAL. I would be scared in a roller coaster, but a roller coaster isn't very interesting once you know what's going to happen. So what is it that I personally would find interesting about a local flight but I don't find interesting in DCS? Well, in a real flight there is a lot of uncertainty. I may get bad weather and have to climb above the clouds, then I may have to descend through those clouds and worry about icing. Maybe when I go to the airport it's foggy and I have to taxi around in low visibility. Or maybe it's dark and I have to think about how to fly the aircraft at night, maybe I have to fly through cloud layer again but now it's pitch black in there. And now the generator warning light comes on. I read a book about Warthogs in the gulf war. At the start of a book an author will normally write about something REALLY exciting in the book, something to hook the reader. This book started with a story of a flight of A-10s ferrying in to the theatre in the middle of the night, huddling close to a tanker, they fly into a thunderstorm and a lightning strike hits one of them. All the electrics on the plane fail and the pilot loses track of the rest of his flight, thrown up and out of the thunder storm he has to bring up the electrics for his plane one at a time in the dark and then find his flight again. It was riveting, and there was no combat. That guy had a really interesting day. One of the factors that makes a flight interesting for me is not knowing what's going to happen. Let's say I make up a mission to replicate the Cessna flight I described above, an F-86 flying between two airports, I set up fog, I set up an overcast, start the flight in the middle of the night and set the generator to fail in the clouds. It just got boring for me, I know exactly what's going to happen. Pretend someone else makes that mission and gives it to me, they say 'have fun! it's real interesting'. The first time I fly the mission it really is. But the second time? not at all. Some uncertainty can be approximated in DCS. You can have random failures, but to make failures interesting they have to tell a story. If you lose the utility hydraulic system in a Sabre, the alternate system can take over so it's not an issue. A totally random failure system stops there. The real interesting part is if you know that often, not always, but often, when you lose the utility you also lose the alternate after a while. Now you're looking at that pressure gauge like a hawk, where is the nearest runway? do you divert or continue on course? It's probably going to be ok, but dammit, that alternate does fail a fair bit too. What you can't randomize in a normal DCS mission is weather, or the starting time, or the start and end locations for a flight. So that's one of the factors that make a flight interesting for me, I don't want to know what is going to happen. I would like to sit down and get given a flight, I may want to chose how difficult it will be, but I don't want to chose the weather, departure airport, time, destination etc. Do you know what else I find interesting about the Cessna flight? I have to know my plane, and use it fully, to get to my destination. I have to know how to navigate it, what can my communications systems do? what navigational aids can I use? If we forget about the more modern aircraft in DCS, just getting somewhere safely CAN be difficult. In bad weather or night conditions the only things you probably have are a couple of needles, and you have to really know how to use the boxes they are connected to, otherwise they won't point in the right direction. To make them work right we need a flight plan, a plan that takes us from point A to B, annotated with the relevant navigation and communication frequencies for the aircraft. Also we need to have the radios set up in the aircraft so that we can use those frequencies. For a lot of aircraft the only way to set up accessible frequencies is in the mission editor. If we don't have those tools, the flight plan and set up radios, we have to resort to the map view and that can really break immersion. There is nothing wrong with using it but we should have the option to NOT use it too. THE POINT So now, after all that rambling, we can get to the point. For me, an interesting 'fly from A to B' mission in DCS would: - feel different every time, shuffle weather,time,failures and where 'A' and 'B' are. - have a flight plan on the kneeboard that gets me from the starting point to the destination using only the aircraft's systems. - be challenging but fair and won't waste my time. WHAT I'VE GOT SO FAR So why did I just write all this? well, I'm a developer for mobile devices and I wanted to learn more about web technologies. I needed a pet project and so I'm making a thing that makes the missions I just described. It's software that runs on my computer and reads in DCS mission files containing units, paths and triggers. They are used as templates in generating randomized flights. Lots of randomized flights. Hundreds. You see, that's the only way to make sure you never know what you are getting, you never fly the same mission twice. You get one, you fly it, whatever happens, you get another one. It picks a couple of random locations from the Black Sea map, one's your starting point, the other's your destination. They're about the right distance apart to make an interesting flight. Then it uses a pathfinding system to build a flight plan for you. It finds the relevant frequencies for your waypoints and puts it the annotated flight plan on the in-sim kneeboard for you. If the aircraft needs it, it loads up the radio with the correct frequencies. Then it has a look at how difficult this flight is aiming to be and sets up the weather, time and aircraft failures appropriately. Finally it sprinkles some other flights around the map. Easy missions are always relatively easy. You may get a failure but it won't be a bad one, it could be cloudy but not too much, it probably won't rain and it will never be night. Hard missions can be super hard, or they can be easy. You never know. You could load up a mission and find it's a flight in the middle of the night, overcast, and you have an oil pump failure halfway there. Or you could get a beautiful sunny day and have an easy flight. You never know. You could have a beautiful sunny day but on the way there you start losing your electrics one by one. I hope you all enjoy the missions the system generates.

This could be an interesting flight! The 'Interesting Flights' system is a generator of sort-of-random missions aimed at making sure you never have to fly the same mission twice. They are interesting because you don't know what's going to happen in them. Every mission is different. The flight plan for each mission is generated just for that mission. There is no combat but there IS scoring. The flight plan is complete, well annotated, and can be found on your kneeboard. The aircraft radios have the required frequencies loaded. Below you will find the download link, there are 100 missions in the 'annotated' directory. Their filename gives you some clues about what will happen during the mission (format explained in the next post). There are 400 missions in the 'interesting' directory, they don't tell you anything except their difficulty. 'Interesting Missions' are currently available for the : F-86 Sabre MiG-15 FW-190D9 P-51D and TF-51D Bf-109K4 Hawk A-10C L-39 (C and ZA) C-101 MiG-21 Mirage 2000 F-5E UH-1H You will not experience or see any combat during these flights. 'Interesting Flights' uses the MOOSE scripting framework and Open Maps. The post below this one explains the system, its goals, and what you will find in each mission. It's fairly long! I hope you enjoy it. Mission Briefing Look at the weather forecast on your kneeboard, then checkout the flight plan details. The aim of these missions is to get the aircraft safely back on the ground, sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, sometimes you shouldn't even fly. Make sure there isn't anything wrong with your aircraft during startup. You are not supposed to complete all the 'Interesting Flights', for many, you shouldn't even take off! A lot of the higher numbered flights are just not safe. Make sure the weather and your aircraft are suitable. If not, download another flight. Or download a bunch of them in the first place so you can go trough them quickly. There are plenty there, no reason to ever fly one twice. So don't, they are a lot more fun if you don't know what's going to happen. Fixed Wing Notes During the flight you can use the 'F10' radio menu to find out: Your score for the mission so far. What you are expected to do next. Get a helping hand by seeing your ground speed and the elapsed mission time down to the second. The closer you are to the take-off and landing times the better your score will be. Rotary Wing Notes Helicopter missions are a bit more involved than the fixed-wing ones. They are either personnel transport or sling loads with sling loads having random weights. The difficulty of the mission you pick (the D number in the filename) will affect the KIND of missions you get too. Low difficulty missions have simple tasks, and as the difficulty ramps up so does the mission complexity. The difficulty also determines WHERE the missions go to. At the lower difficulties you will get shorter flights to low-altitude destinations. At the higher difficulties flights can be longer and high-altitude destinations are a possibility. Difficulty still also affects weather, time, failures etc. All the usual 'interesting missions' warnings apply, make sure you can do the mission given the weather conditions, because you have multiple destinations you will need to check the visibility at your different landing points. Use the provided NDB if needed. Landing point altitudes are provided in the flight plan. PLEASE READ THE PDF PROVIDED IN THE UH-1H directory! It provides a backstory for the operation and explains procedures. I've tried to make it short and useful. WHERE TO GET THE MISSIONS FROM Please read the next message down if you don't know what this is all about! You can download the missions from a shared DropBox folder here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mzic1uoxnyofgm3/AADJTks7pN0nmj1CqpmqUy5oa?dl=0 Go into the 'Published Missions' directory, then pick an aircraft. Once you pick your aircraft you will find two directories, one called 'Annotated' and the other called 'Interesting'. The 'Interesting' directory contains a long list of mission files, at the end of each filename there is a 'D' followed by a number. That number is the difficulty level of the mission. That is all you will know about it until you load it. There are 400 missions in the 'Interesting' folder. The 'Annotated' directory also contains a long list of mission files but this time the filename for each mission is annotated with information about the flight it contains. Here are some examples: Flight-0009 D02 1100H 15C CLD2-10 AT5200 WND10 FRM140 This is the ninth flight generated on this run, the difficulty is 2 out of 10. The flight starts at 1100H local time, the temperature is 15 degrees Celsius, cloud cover is 2 tenths, base at 5200 feet. Wind is at ten knots on the surface coming from 140 degrees (you feel it on your face if you look to the south east). Flight-0075 D10 0300H 25C CLD4-10 AT4300 WND18 FRM200 PRECIP FG1300 FAIL_HYDRO_ALT This is the 75th mission generated in this run, the difficulty is 10 out of 10. The flight starts at 0300H local time, the temperature is 25 degrees Celsius, clouds at 4 tenths coverage with base at 4300 feet. Winds are 18 knots at the surface coming from 200 (you feel it on your face if you look to the south west, but don't do it because it's raining). It's raining. There is fog to 1300 feet. During flight the aircraft will experience a failure of the alternate hydraulic system. There are 100 missions in the 'Annotated' folder. I've provided the annotated directory in case you want to try out particular features of the generated missions, but the way I intend for the missions to be used is for you to pick random files from the 'Interesting' directory. Find a difficulty you want to try, scroll down to where the missions at that difficulty are and just pick one. You will find the weather information on your kneeboard briefing, as well as your flight plan and the radio frequency settings. In the kneeboard you will also find a flight map. It's very much like all the other ones in the kneeboard but the one generated by my system also has the waypoint numbers next to them. Ok, now you know where to find the missions and what's in each of the directories. I would like to ask you to do something for me. Have a look at the 'Annotated' directory, get a feeling for how the difficulty ramps up. Maybe try a few of the missions if you want to experience those conditions. Then try a few of the missions in the 'Interesting' folder and let me know what you think. Did you have fun?

Wow! that is fantastic, I love the amount of detail work you have put into the mounting and re configuration of the controls. I like the idea of the two pedal sets being mounted at the same time. That makes so much sense. Thank you for taking the time to post all the detail, it's really helpful.