Why Does Ai Set Task Kill the Waypoints of a convoy?

[MTrenda]

Ok, here goes a long tale. I am building a mission where two convoys (more in the future) are traveling up from Senaki on the road to Gudauta. As they travel up the road they are engaged by enemy in random locations using Mist teleport to random zone. in order to detect I am using LOS by mist.

 

Here is the Question:

when they run into a group I have three action triggers go off:

Hold

Weapons hold

FAC

These are all AI push tasks

When they are done with those enemy the next action trigger is to

return fire

this is a AI Set Task

this is done to make sure that there are no outstanding FAC tasks In the queue because I was having the convoy really having issues with three version of the fac task running because as you killed troops LOS would turn on and off generating a confusion in the FAC sequence.

 

Now my understanding is that if you use a AI push task - This adds the task to the list and places it at the top of the list to do.

AI Set Task replaces all tasks with just this one.

 

When I did this set task the convoy failed to move to it's next waypoint as far as I can tell the entire path the waypoints defined in the mission editor is gone. if I change the set task to a push task then the convoy continues on with it waypoints.

 

LOS Variables are:

altoffset = .2

interval = 4

radius = 1258

for both units (Red and Blue) and both LOS routines.

 

Issues:

1. Why does the "AI set task" wipeout the group waypoints. This does not seems like an ideal part of that function.

2. If the Convoy is getting fired upon why do they need to be with in LOS to FAC the group. if they are not we get a "no further tasking you may depart." message. Yet mist LOS obviously knows they are there and the convoy knows they are there because they are getting shelled constantly.

it seems jtac could send a call out - "taking fire from north east 1500 meters from our location", "Small arms, light armored, heavy artillery"

3. If jtac is already in a FAC routine, why spawn another routine for the same group, it just seems to be fubar'd.

 

I am a really nube to mission building but it seems that jtac is really particular about it's parameters to call in an air strike. it seems to me that it a matter of a table containing the units within a certain radius, each group is a separate jtac so each one kicks off the routine in order of distance from jtac from Least distance to greatest distance. The routine is numbered by phases so the table is updated with the jtac phase it is in. 0- contact jtac 1-9-line, 2- remarks, 3-9-line read back and so on so if someone was to come in and get the jtac in mid stream they would pickup where the jtac left off. if they wanted to restart the sequence there could be a command "Request 9-line again." This resets the first group in the table to a status of 1 and the routine starts again. as for the rest of the groups in the table they should be at status 0 until they have been called up.

 

After all this it is more then likely my mission skills, but it should not be this hard.

 

attach is the test mission for this scenario if anyone wants take a look

ConvoyTestV2.miz

Edited January 11, 2015 by MTrenda

[Grimes]

1. AI set task creates an entirely new "mission" task for the AI, the route is part of the mission task. It is more useful when used directly with lua, but there are mission editor only uses where it is applicable. Namely stationary groups or with aircraft. You could set "stop conditions" for your FAC tasks to stop them from being executed. Basically on the trigger you would use Push Task> ROE return fire you could also set a flag to true, which would be setup as a stop condition on the FAC tasks.

 

2. So a couple of things are at play here. The biggest thing is that aside for EWR and aircraft with datalinks, the AI don't really communicate with each other. Thus they are entirely reliant on their own "sensors". In the case of a ground FAC, it must have visual on a group in order to use the FAC interface. Additionally mist doesn't actively interact with the game world as an extension of AI behavior in terms of making decisions for the AI. It could, but a function would need to be written to do that.

 

3. I'd need to do some tests to figure out whats going on with a FAC task in a group of more than one unit that has different LOS on different threats.

[MTrenda]

Grimes,

 

thanks for the reply, I really enjoy using the mist functions they are great. you have done a great job in expanding the mission creation ability in DCS.

 

Will keep messing with it. to see if I can get some consistency with it. The is definitely in the jtac routine it confused way to easy. sometime responds and sometime does not. repeats commands and others times says not targets as they are getting shot at. Hopefully we can get some attention to this area after the 2.0 deployment.

 

Awesome work.

 

thanks again,

 

76th Falcon