Active Slot Balancing

[Pikey]

I've been working for some time on this as a new scripter and thought I'd see if folks were interested in the concept and what things you can achieve with higher level programming environments like MOOSE.

 

The 'use case' is born from my friends moaning at me in Multiplayer games about the CAP or Air Defences being too hard. My response is always, "Well, if no one turns up to provide CAP or people want to fly something else, I can't really change the mission at short notice, can I?"

 

Or can we?

 

The first limitation to this, since it's a workaround to an existing or new DCS bug that there is no event triggers for MP client births, is that we have to cycle through client slots on a schedule, which is painfully long, and if done wrong will tax CPU cycles. But that's what we work with in this game.

 

What this demo shows is the ability to dynamically, inside the same mission, scale the AI presence to the slots you occupy. This goes for mid session. So if you have AI CAP spawn against your fighters, I'm looking to RTB those fighters should the CAP leave slot. If you spawn in a helicopter, you don't want CAP chasing you down. You don't want hard SEAD targets in your F5. You don't want empty skies in your Mirage. This suits not only training servers but existing missions where you might want to try the same thing, but fly CAP in a F5, not a Mirage.

 

 

The script is complete for the proof of concept phase but still under development in terms of optimisation and ease of use. I'm not sure it's ever going to be an easy implementation as there are too many choices to make, but if I get to the point where I can share it or the right people are interested I am happy to share my progress.

[dannyq8]

This is awesome and just what I need.

 

I've got a MP mission for Normandy in planning and this would be the ideal solution to allow me to set it up as I have imagined it. It has always been a problem that I have come across, having the right balance of enemy forces vs human players.

 

This could be the solution to all the missions I have created, please continue to develop it and release it.

[Pikey]

Note it is in MOOSE which has functions that wrap the DCS functions and therefore can seem alien. I can give you the sample mission I made, the code is 200 lines long but it's quite readable and mostly contains a lot of Spawn objects and if statements. You can swap around the groups if you call them the same way without needing to look at the code and probably get by depending on your knowledge/time. If learning just some basic MOOSE for spawns is of interest pop to the Moose slack channel and you can ask questions, there are a bunch of helpful developers that take the time to help. PM me if any of that is of interest, I like helping out.