Exorcet
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Posts posted by Exorcet
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8 hours ago, Bowie said:
Run a track around one side of the mountain, then back it out and run it around the other side.
One would just need engagements(combat) prepared on both sides, for both the true track and waypoint advance, mitigating the backout.
Yes. To set up multiple routes in DCS, you need to make a very long string of waypoints covering all the possibilities and then use a trigger to push the AI to a specific waypoint to skip the sections of the route that you don't want it to fly. Ideally at the end of every individual route you also have another switch waypoint command pointing to the landing area.
I've set this up in a few of my own missions, but it can be a cluttered mess and it's easy to lose track of what's happening. When it works, it does work fairly well at least.
A better option may be to have special points than any unit can reference:
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8 minutes ago, Lidozin said:
That said, I’d like to remind everyone that the original goal of this analysis was not to examine AI behavior in terms of tactics or input realism, but simply to test the claim that the AI “doesn’t obey physics, or has physical performance beyond what a player-controlled aircraft can achieve.” The flight test results suggest otherwise. Let’s avoid shifting the discussion away from that specific and measurable question.
Indeed, however dogfights are more complicated than flying at a constant condition as in test fights. I don't think a solid conclusion can be reached from matching static testing alone. It may be that the AI doesn't pull any more g than it should while it also simultaneously doesn't feel some of the design limitations of the aircraft (as is the case for props without a doubt) or that the AI's physics violations are limited to specific actions, such as transient maneuvers or its reaction to an adversary.
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Interesting discussion and nice to see someone attempt to bring data into this. However I wouldn't say that comparing the envelope and turn performance is definitive. I think at least some of the issue with the AI comes from transient maneuvers and edge of envelope performance. The AI never seems to struggle near stall. It's especially visible with WWII fighters as they can maintain a perfect climb under full power at virtually zero airspeed and not have to deal with the torque effects of props at all, nor cooling issues as far as I can tell. From experience the SFM also seems to do weird stuff during transient maneuvers. For example I'm not sure if there is any performance hit to holding max sustained turn while also rolling for the AI. The AI also seems to have unnatural abilities when it comes to changing speed, like somehow magically decelerating while the afterburner is engaged. Stuff like that may not show up in simple flight tests.
It's also compounded by AI super SA. They know your speed at all times and will react to any change to your maneuvering even if they shouldn't be able to detect it.
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On 7/2/2025 at 3:57 PM, Bowie said:
CFS2 - had a 'dice-roll' waypoint, with an 'A' or 'B' outcome.
Unique routes were propagated for both from that point.
eg:
Route leads to a mountain.
Variable Waypoint originates randomly selected 'A' and 'B' routes, say left or right around the mountain.
Or, say, dive-bomb the airfield, or low-level attack the tank farm.
Or, say, attack from the East, or attack from the Southwest.
All possible with a Variable Waypoint.
Bowie
I see, yes some expanded options like that would be nice. All of that is technically possible in DCS with the switch waypoint command, but it can take a lot of work.
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6 hours ago, Silver_Dragon said:
Dollittle raid was launched from USS Hornet by 16 modified B-25 Mitchell, that only take off form them, others as P-40, and P-47 was carried aboar and use as ferry to reach near bases when that aircrafts take off from carriers and landing on land bases. If launch outside a base range, has lost on the sea.
Sure these were special occasions with many limitations, but it's up to the mission maker to construct the scenario.
I do understand the reasoning behind some of the ME limitations like only carrier aircraft on carriers and ships only on the sea, but they don't need to be enforced all the time. Things like that should be toggles ideally so that unusual situations can be created when the need arises.
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2 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:
The kneeboard could always be improved, but horrible? really?
It is not horrible, it is horribly unfriendly, and I don't think that's hyperbole. An interface for it should exist in the ME at the very least. Having to manually edit files is very tedious and not the most obvious way of getting the kneedboard setup. The mission editor briefing at least used to allow a simpler option of somewhat replicating the kneeboard for less effort (but also less capability) but then for whatever reason a forced paused was added to that making realistic use of it impossible. Thankfully that can be disabled through Lua editing, but for whatever reason it remains overly difficult to get simple mission information presented to pilots in a realistic way.
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58 minutes ago, Honez said:
I would like to see an integrated knee board editing tool inside the mission editor. Right now you either have to use a third party editor or go deep into various directories and add graphic files etc.
Absolutely. The kneeboard is horribly user unfriendly for how important it is.
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Definitely not a fan of wheel menus at all, though I do appreciate getting an update for communications finally. If possible, arranging the new updates in a smaller linear menu would be a nice option.
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I very much appreciate having accurate controls for an aircraft. It helps with immersion, training, and proficiency. If I could, I'd have a cockpit for every module. So as far as is it beneficial to get accurate controls, absolutely. Is it worth the cost? That's a personal question.
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2 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:
Sounds like an abandoned cheat code originally meant for developers. It's not in any official documentation. It does sound useful for testing AI stuff, but I think even ED might have forgotten about it at this point.
It seems intentional. It only works on flyable planes and then only those in your own coalition. It is unfortunately undocumented, but that's not uncommon in DCS. Functionally, it's great as a tool to get around AI wingman silliness. Set your own plane to orbit and then take control of a wingman to go shoot something they refuse to do through radio orders. As it's not the topic here though, I guess enough has been said about it.
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On 5/24/2025 at 11:18 PM, Bowie said:
The other issue is an Alternate Waypoint Trigger, and the ability to provide an alternate route.
A or B.
Turns Four(4) missions into Eight, plus the unpredictability.
Multiple Alternate Waypoint Triggers?
1,2,3,...
One mission, infinite variably engagements.
Bowie
I'm not 100% sure what you're asking for here, but there is a switch waypoint trigger which can be used to create alternate routes.
From my experience it can be a little cumbersome, but it gets the job done.
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I have not had a chance to try QAG due to being a few versions back in DCS, but absolutely support this. Forcing a mission ending seems redundant when there is an end mission button already. Definitely add some way to disable auto ending the mission.
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12 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:
I think you can implement that as a script if you really want. ED is quite explicitly not interested in magic AAR, though.
I'm not aware of a way to transfer fuel through scripting.
18 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:Not doable, AI FM is different from the player, and the engine probably isn't set up to support swapping FMs in real time.
Forgot to mention before but this has been in DCS forever. R Alt + J. Will swap AI and player flight model or vice versa. Extremely useful for a number of things, but unfortunately bugged. It seems like no one knows about this which may be contributing to its poorly maintained state.
It is (or was) an amazing tool for dealing with wingmen oddities or letting you continue long missions after a loss of aircraft. Maybe a bit off topic, but there is a thread reporting the bug that could perhaps use support:
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4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:
Unlikely. This feature would just be too complex to implement. Yes, it's hard (especially with low end hardware), but learning to fly proper formation first helps a lot.
There are tons of ways to do it, it shouldn't be difficult at all. We already have proximity refuel/rearm for ground units for example.
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Is there any reason why you're uploading these as separate missions and not as a campaign?
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6 hours ago, Eole said:
- otherwise a simple saved function I choose my nations blue/neutral/red then I saved them with a name of my choice and ir can be loaded as I want to edit a new mission.
You can do this:
Open ME
Set nations
Save mission
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On the subject of air traffic though, we might also want some tweaks to coalitions and the identification of units. If I recall the last time I tried to add neutral aircraft to a mission, AWACS insisted that they were hostile. It seems like the logic used is "if it's not on my team it's the enemy" which creates all sorts of problems. Not sure if this has changed as after that I kept neutral units to a minimum.
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And as always these things tend to have value in testing and debugging.
Want to find out where the cutoff time is for different units to have daytime vs nighttime visual detection? Easier when time is frozen. Want to see what the lighting conditions are across the map without having to constantly quit the mission? Freeze time.
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Adding background activity by area would be really nice. We do have civilian traffic already, but it's a bit weird when it decides to keep driving through a chain of Mk84 explosions. Having it be disabled within a radius of combat activity would make it look a bit more authentic. X-Plane also randomly spawns police vehicles with flashing lights that move faster than normal traffic. These are pretty visible from aircraft and could be a nice touch in DCS.
Powergrids having an effect on lighting, or the ability to enforce black outs would be another nice feature. Hit a powerplant, nearby city goes dark. Maybe a few lights come back on with backup power.
Civilian air units need an expansion and it would be nice to have some kind of optional automated civil traffic.
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On 9/3/2021 at 1:02 PM, AndyJWest said:
As for rewind, I don't think that is possible without a fundamental rewrite. As I understand it, track files essentially 'play through' a mission, and consist of data on the initial situation, followed by user inputs. If that is all the data available, it simply isn't possible to 'rewind' to arbitrary points in the recording.
I know this is an old post, but physics doesn't care about the direction of time. A track system like this essentially has rewind built in by default, barring some kind of other limitation like the lack of the ability to reverse the inputs, or perhaps more realistically the lack of the ability to generate inverse events, ie the sim knows how to set a plane to "dead" after it is hit, but it doesn't know how to reverse the dead event and respawn the weapon that killed it (which would have been deleted after the kill event). That said, free flights without crashes wouldn't have this issue, so it may be easier to at least introduce a rewind feature that is limited to such a case.
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On 3/21/2024 at 10:09 AM, BIGNEWY said:
Hi Exorcet,
thank you for the PM, we will take a closer look, but our initial test show our data is correct.
We will check for drag issues or other anomalies.
thank you
Any update on this?
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On 4/21/2025 at 3:08 PM, NineLine said:
I havent heard anything, I will chase it up again.
Any news?
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On 5/16/2025 at 6:54 PM, CommandT said:
I’ve tried different things like cancelling the SEAD task and setting “attack group” or “search then destroy in zone” but those yield no better results.
Always delete the default task for any kind of complexity. For SEAD I'd use Search Then Engage in Zone and couple it with an orbit so the AI flies over the area instead of just moving on if they don't see anything. As stated above the "Search" tasks require the AI to find a target. This depends on their sensors, the enemy, and the size of the zone to search.
You also want to make sure that the AI has jettison weapons disabled and has the reaction to threat set to Evade Fire. This means that they will only react to being fired on and won't drop weapons (including ARM) when fired on.
Jettison and Evade Fire are option that can be set at the takeoff/starting waypoint. Search then Engage should be set as en enroute task somewhere near the target and Orbit should be set as a task under Search Then Engage so that the search takes priority over the orbit.
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Radar never use is an existing option, but there is no similar option for RWR. I agree that features like this would be useful.
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Best way to generate random numbers in lua script
in Scripting Tips, Tricks & Issues
Posted
Not exactly what was asked for here, but I've also wanted some randomization for spawn times and came up with a low tech solution using triggers. Normally the random trigger only allows integer probabilities, which isn't all that useful because it amounts to a few minutes of variation at most. However these can be stacked and after stacking you can work out the math to figure out the time range at which you can highly expect a spawn. Example:
This image shows the timings for 7 stacked random triggers, one set to 10% and the others 100% (so effectively one 10% random). Then I have a breakdown of the trigger success change by the second, minute, and hour. I vary the initial random triggers until I get a ~99% probability of success at the time I want.
For example if I wanted a trigger to vary up to 24 minutes I'd maybe set the random values to 4 and 8, corresponding to two random triggers of 4% and 8% stacked together in the ME and get this:
You can also put an OR condition in your trigger to force the spawn at the end time if you don't like relying on 99+% probability instead of 100.
Spreadsheet attached for anyone who might find it useful.
DCS_Random_Trigger_Probability.ods