Autonomous CAP and GCI AI fighter script

[Stonehouse]

The script expects the zone to be over the airfield as it uses the position of the zone to calc stuff.

 

Not sure on the last one, I expect it may ignore the extra zone as it's only looking for redCAPzone1 to 3. It does a string concat to figure out the name.

 

Ok will double check the mixed country thing when I get a sec. Do you have a simple example mission where it goes wrong?

 

@Snafu, ok I will think about that, I would like to keep the linkage to yourself and the other contributors very clear if possible, a new thread will tend to disconnect that but I know what you mean - it's a huge thread now. There was also talk about stuff like github for this although I don't know what is involved in that sort of thing.

 

Cheers,

Stoney

Edited January 8, 2015 by Stonehouse

[Rivvern]

The reason i want mixed countries is because USA don't have F-4s as CAP.

I have deleted that mission i think. But i could easily edit my current mission and get back later.

EDIT: When i tried to have German F-4s in this mission it worked!

 

I do have some problem with the new script though.

I cant get GCIs to spawn and the enemy CAP doesn't engage.

 

I dont expect you to check it. But if you do. Here is the link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16996823/2015/GCICAP%20MIG21.miz

Edited January 8, 2015 by Rivvern

[Stonehouse]

No worries Rivvern, probably won't get to it today as hoping to get out to the movies and dinner with friends but will have a look over the weekend sometime. If you solve it first just let me know I don't need to check it anymore.

 

Cheers,

Stoney

[Stonehouse]

Hi Rivvern,

I can't see anything wrong with your setup but you do seem to have uncovered a bug so doing analysis and debugging at present.

 

By the way you may want to let the Hawk dev team know they have an issue with a Hawk spawned using the Coalition.addGroup method as used by this script. When the aircraft is ramp started but forced to the runway in single player as per the normal DCS method all Hawks spawn on the runway with the canopy open and it stays open - at 10000ft, in combat whatever. Poor pilots. Lol too disturbing for me so I have changed them to German F4s in your mission just to double check the country thing.

 

Let you guys know when I've got it sorted but perhaps stay with the old version for a little while longer.

 

Cheers,

Stonehouse

[Rivvern]

Thanks for checking. I think I've triple checked everything by now. Also got German F4s now when i got it working.

 

I noticed the canopy bug as well. Reported.

 

Let me know if i can help you track some bugs.

[Stonehouse]

Ok corrected version below. There were several issues found through testing with Rivvern's mission. Basically my own test mission was simple for repeatability and didn't cover the same situations Rivvern came up with. Faults lay in some incorrect table indexing, poorly defined conditioning for logistics in one part which affected GCI spawns when it shouldn't have and a bug in the airfield wreckage cleanup routines.

 

@Rivvern, if you could please retest with your mission and see how you go that would be great. A slightly modified version of your mission ran ok with continuous action, CAP & GCI launches with GCI reports for about 4hours before I killed it so I could use the PC for something else.

 

 

@Snafu please update your first post when you have time. I will look into putting this up onto github soon at which time you can just update the first post again to point to appropriate github location and that should be that, leaving this thread purely for discussion of usage of the script and people's problems with using it.

 

Thanks for your patience. Hoping this one works for everyone.

 

Cheers,

Stonehouse

GCICAP20150111.lua

Edited January 11, 2015 by Stonehouse

[Marioshata]

Hey Stonehouse,

I experience the same issues on my mission as Rivvern. The CAP flights spawn OK, but the GCI flights don't. From my observation the script doesn't detect the intruders that cross the border even when the enemy planes pass right on top of the EWR. No GCI message is displayed. The problem is connected with CAP flights not engaging intruders as they are just not there for the script. I did the stripping of the mission to see where it goes wrong (conflict with other scripts and other possible reasons), but without luck. However on the GCI CAP script demo.miz with the latest version there are no problems whatsoever. Really odd and such a shame :(

 

Script was updated as I was typing, gonna test and report if problem is solved!

 

Update: Everything seems to be working now! Finally the light at the end of the tunnel :D. Thanks Stonehouse! Is it now possible to implement the every sec freeze fix with this latest version?

Edited January 11, 2015 by Marioshata

[Stonehouse]

Hi Marioshata,

Snafu did some more work on his freeze fix and hit a dead end with it as with more testing he found lots of issues he could not resolve. In the end he simply changed the frequency of the scheduling of the interceptmain function to +15 sec from +1 sec and removed the debug calls and stopped work on splitting the interceptmain function into separate scheduling for each function.

 

I've included his timing change and also changed the way debug works in the new version to give the same effect as taking the calls out.

 

So.........theoretically the new version should have the same end result as his changes. Give it a go and see how things are but unless it's a really drastic problem with the freezing for a lot of people I hadn't planned to try to pick up where Snafu's change for separate scheduling left off as it would most likely lead to an extensive rewrite and retest. At best it would be a long range change to develop on the back burner so to speak.

 

Best wishes,

Stonehouse

[Rivvern]

Did a 9+ hour test. Borders and CAPzones are a bit too close think. New version of the script worked much better! Will run a new mission to see what happens this time.

 

Issues:

Red side stopped flying after 4 hours. Blue stopped at 9 hours,

There seem to be an issue where CAP flights get waypoints on the edge of map.

AI cannot fly at higher altitudes. Will just go high alpha and go burner until they fall out of the sky. Is this a speed issue?

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16996823/2015/Tacview-20150111-182651-DCS.acmi

74mb

Edited January 12, 2015 by Rivvern

[Stonehouse]

Ok that's interesting. Is it to do with the borders perhaps? I noticed you took in a lot of real estate outside the maps developed areas. Perhaps try a version just on the coastal plain between Batumi and the town at the far north?

 

Don't know about the AI and high altitude, remember the CAP alts in the script are in metres not feet - have you made them too big?

 

I'll try running something on my smaller test mission overnight one night this week and see what happens otherwise it will have to wait for the weekend to get timeslots like nine hours.

[Stonehouse]

Hi Rivvern,

Are you sure they are CAP flights getting waypoints on the map edge or GCI flights? You should be able to tell if you click on the aircraft marker in the F10 map view and check the descriptive text in the lower left.

 

It's just that looking at the waypoint generation code for CAP flights they are forced to stay within the CAP zone unless they are off on an intercept or RTB. So I can't see at present how the CAP flights could wander off while on station.

 

Basically I'm trying to isolate the function creating the waypoints that send them wandering off the map. That is what you meant yeah?

 

I will review the speed settings on the waypoints too as perhaps they are too low. I did notice that ["speed_locked"] = true so perhaps that is the cause of your stalling aircraft. Also what terrain was under them at the time? The waypoint altitude is random between min and max height specified at the start of the script plus land height at the waypoint position. So potentially if the max was left at my default of 7500 and there was very mountainous terrain underneath it could easily end up well over 10000m which could be service ceiling for some aircraft.

[Rivvern]

Yes. You can see it in the Tacview file i linked to. One red and one blue CAP flight takes a trip to the edge of the map. I think they turn around when reaching Bingo fuel state.

 

Will let the mission run for another night and see what happens.

[Pikey]

Hi, i get the debugging in the attachment but ive set debugging off. Do you know how to stop the message to the screen (and what it is?) It counts forever.

 

cheers.

[Stonehouse]

Hi Pikey,

If you edit the script and go down to line 258 you will see the following lines:

 

 

local debuggingmessages = false

env.setErrorMessageBoxEnabled(false)

 

 

They should be as above - ie false to turn debug off. Really the first one is the important one as the second one is to say whether or not a error/warning message box pops up on screen and you are actually getting debug messages which is controlled by the parameter debuggingmesssages being set to true or false.

 

If that doesn't work only thing I can think of is that you've somehow changed the conditions on the debug statements in function interceptmain and as a side effect the above parameters aren't controlling debug statements anymore.

 

If you have the lines above set to false and you still have issues then do a post here with your mission attached and I will have a quick look to see what is going on.

 

Cheers,

Stonehouse

[Stonehouse]

@ Rivvern, check your pm please

[SNAFU]

Yes. You can see it in the Tacview file i linked to. One red and one blue CAP flight takes a trip to the edge of the map. I think they turn around when reaching Bingo fuel state.

 

Will let the mission run for another night and see what happens.

 

In an earlier version and also in the my AFAC script I had the same issue and I think it was related to the function controller.resetTask().

 

At some point, when the task of an AI was resetted and a new one was generated, the AI just continued straight on to a random point at the border of the map.

 

With the AFAC script was the only way I could reproduce this bug. With this CAP script, I couldn´t really reproduce the bug.

 

For the "Debug" Function, I recomment to disable all the calls of the function (press CTRL-H in Notepad and replace all "Debug" with "--Debug") once you are fine with the results. Calling this function so often, as it is done in the script, really decreases the overall performance - at least for me... ;)

Edited January 14, 2015 by SNAFU

[Pikey]

@Stonehouse - thanks - mission attached, its deffo set to false. There are a few scripts, mist should be latest from github, I used the IADS script and a civ aircraft script so there's potential for conflict.

 

@SNAFU - I'll try commenting the function calls out, seems an obvious potential solution :)

 

Thanks for the responses, I would be interested to see if its something silly in the function or something i've managed to achieve through stupidity:pilotfly:

georgiantemplate.miz

[Pikey]

the find&replace all did too many weird things and broke that script. eg env.setErrorMessageBoxEnabled(false) --set to false if --debugging message box, shall not be shown in game

 

local --debuggingside = 'blue' --set side for which tracking messages shall be printed, use 'both' if you want --debug messages for both sides to be logged

[Pikey]

Fixed by hand. it's where the if statement had two lines, also errors on the function. Removed them but it's still processing the logic of the "if" even though doign nothing so it's not worth sharing since there's nearly 4K lines of code to go through.

[Stonehouse]

Hi Pikey,

I had a look at your mission and I used 7zip to unpack it and look at the version of the script actually being used in the mission and found that you had debuggingmessages = true. This is the cause of your problem.

 

Not sure if you are aware of it or not but the miz file is essentially like a zip file and contains the mission file, warehouses file, options file and also each of the script files used by the mission. Plus any pics or sounds used in the mission.

 

So if you make an edit to the script and want to get that change to be effective in your mission you actually need to go into DCS mission editor, locate the DO SCRIPT FILE action for that script, delete it, save the mission, re-add the DO SCRIPT FILE for the script and then save the mission. This "refreshes" the copy of the script in the .miz file created by the mission editor. It's very easy to get things out of sync.

 

Hope the above helps,

Stonehouse

Edited January 14, 2015 by Stonehouse

[Pikey]

thanks! It's funny, I was reloading scripts a lot and didn't know this until very recently about the "cached copy" of the script. I've had some very confusing times ;)

[Stonehouse]

In the interest of making life easier for everyone I've (with some feedback and assistance from Snafu and Rivvern) moved the script onto GitHub. As part of the move I have also finally written up a user guide and Rivvern is looking at creating a checklist/quick start/memory aid one pager for people who have used the script before but need a memory jogger to make sure they've done all the bits. Access is via this website http://457stonehouse.github.io/GCICAP/

 

Snafu could you please update your first post when you have a spare moment? Thanks.

 

This thread remains now for support and discussion use and all releases will be via Github.

 

Hope this works well for everyone.

 

Cheers,

Stonehouse

[dooom]

This is awesome Stone! Thanks a million for this work!

 

It will be so easy to make 2-3 templates with this now. CHEERS!

 

FYI, SNAFU's link on page one is linking to the message reply function as opposed to your update post.

 

 

.... and now for a celebratory "Woot!" :pilotfly:

[SNAFU]

Ups, corrected.

[dooom]

hey gang - i replaced the older version of the script tonight with the new one and observed two things -

 

1) one of the fw190 cap flight immediately crossed the front and headed straight south to edge of map - blue did not engage.

 

2) later a second red CAP crossed the front and was engaged by blue cap. I crossed the front as client and red GCI spawned at Nalchik but would not taxi.... subsequent GCI spawning would only stay in parking and not taxi for takeoff/intercept . this was observed at both nalchik and vaziani.