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For the wishlist: Jester A2A tweaks


Noctrach

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Dear Heatblur,

While I really enjoy using Jester, I find his A2A interaction rather rough. I'm missing some basic functionality that a RIO would provide, and find that interacting with him takes a lot of time in the heat of battle.

This wishlist would add some features to help identify and discriminate targets, as well as reduce the amount of interactions needed to achieve these results.

Lock/Designate

My first suggestion would be a Designate TWS Target function within the STT menu, allowing use of the AWG-9 Next Target functionality to prevent target reassignment or simply to designate a contact on a cluttered scope. This could have the same submenu as the existing Choose Specific Target STT menu.

Secondly, in the STT Lock submenu, I'd like to suggest the addition to cycle MLC on/off and toggle PH-ACT. At 30 miles the 3 degree look-up to disable MLC would require dropping slightly less than 9500 feet, while the range gates on STT allow far wider margins. This would make engagements with the Phoenix in PD-STT much more potent.

Scan Elevation

The current Scan Up or Down menu is basically unusable, providing only 0, ±16 and ±30 degree elevations, which are far too coarse for any engagement outside of 5 miles. The elevation-at-distance menu is a nice alternative, but it requires 4-5 interactions to achieve result.

Using the wisdom of our lord and saviour @Karon over at Fly and Wire I would suggest changing this menu to ±1.6, ±3.2 and ±6.4 degrees elevation. This would provide 5000/10000/20000 feet elevation increments at 30 miles, while having good granularity at longer and shorter range as well. Alternatively 0, ±1, ±2 and ±4 degrees would provide the same increments at 50 miles, at the cost of sub-30 mile engagement potential. 2 and 4 bar settings would allow good overlap between these increments for both options, enabling full use in RWS and TWS modes without risking loss of target.

Having these as cumulative would be the icing on the cake.

Scan Azimuth

This menu is nearly perfect as is, I'd like to propose addition of ±60 azimuth to go along the proposed ELAZ menu.

Radar Settings

Another menu to keep pretty much as-is. This could have the Radar Silent functionality to make room for the ELAZ menu in my wishlist.

ELAZ

This is the core of this proposal: A menu to allow the pilot to select between 2, 4 and 8 bars as well as ±10, ±20, ±40 and ±65 degree azimuth settings. These additions would truly unlock the full scope of AWG-9 functionality through Jester, allowing for better sanitization, detection and discrimination of targets in chaotic combat environments.

Final words

I feel these additions and tweaks would really bring the A2A menu into its own and enable the pilot full control of the F-14 in combat engagements. I'd love to see parts of it end up in the release candidate for the Tomcat.

That said, I understand some of these are made from the RIO perspective and will require the pilot to get a slightly increased understanding of the AWG-9 and its workings. So I'd very much like to hear any pilot feedback on my suggestions as well!


Edited by Noctrach
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I like it, but I would change layout for Scan elevation and Scan azimuth. Go symmetric wherever possible.

Scan elevation 1:Auto, 2:+1.6dg, 3:+3.2dg, 4:+6.4dg, 5:Level, 6:-6.4dg, 7:-3.2dg, 8:-1.6dg

Scan azimuth 1:Auto, 2:20R, 3:40R, 4:60R, 5:Center, 6:60L, 7:40L, 8:20L  

                    

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45 minutes ago, Golo said:

I like it, but I would change layout for Scan elevation and Scan azimuth. Go symmetric wherever possible.

Scan elevation 1:Auto, 2:+1.6dg, 3:+3.2dg, 4:+6.4dg, 5:Level, 6:-6.4dg, 7:-3.2dg, 8:-1.6dg

Scan azimuth 1:Auto, 2:20R, 3:40R, 4:60R, 5:Center, 6:60L, 7:40L, 8:20L  

                    

Good call! 🙂

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  • 2 weeks later...
22.10.2021 в 18:38, Noctrach сказал:

That said, I understand some of these are made from the RIO perspective and will require the pilot to get a slightly increased understanding of the AWG-9 and its workings.

I fail to see the problem with that! If anything, that would prevent pilots from writing checks their RIO can't cash. This is a study-level sim, so it's safe to assume some studying is expected. And who would've thunk, radars in other planes work pretty much the same way, just a bit more automated.

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On 10/22/2021 at 12:38 PM, Noctrach said:

 

Scan Elevation

The current Scan Up or Down menu is basically unusable, providing only 0, ±16 and ±30 degree elevations, which are far too coarse for any engagement outside of 5 miles. The elevation-at-distance menu is a nice alternative, but it requires 4-5 interactions to achieve result.

Using the wisdom of our lord and saviour @Karon over at Fly and Wire I would suggest changing this menu to ±1.6, ±3.2 and ±6.4 degrees elevation. This would provide 5000/10000/20000 feet elevation increments at 30 miles, while having good granularity at longer and shorter range as well. Alternatively 0, ±1, ±2 and ±4 degrees would provide the same increments at 50 miles, at the cost of sub-30 mile engagement potential. 2 and 4 bar settings would allow good overlap between these increments for both options, enabling full use in RWS and TWS modes without risking loss of target.

Having these as cumulative would be the icing on the cake.

 

 

I had a similar request. Is seems to be an easy implementation, just change radar elevation values. And would have a huge impact on life quality.

High.jpg

Deck.jpg


Edited by RPY Variable
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Yesterday I had a situation with two mirages coming hot from 30 miles in front of me, both on the exactly the same location but one at 5k and the other at 43k. I was at 40k. It was on a Fox1 server so I had to pick one. I wanted to shoot the one on top but Jester only locked the one on the bottom. It would have been as easy as selecting "Middle High" of one of my proposals.

So I tried with altitude at distance, started calculating the cone and the distance, with no luck, Jester kept locking the one on the bottom. The mirage on the top shoot me before I could lock him. So I had to go cold and then we ended on the merge... etc etc.

The thing is that with the my radar elevation "middle high" proposal, it would have been solve in 4 seconds. Because all I needed to do is to put the bottom of the scan volume at my same altitude and the rest above me, And Jester would only had been able to lock the guy on top.

The middle high, high, etc... feature, as it is now, it practically has no use. The elevation option should be one of the most useful things of the radar menu. Specially when searching for unknowns. The altitude at distance feature is good only when you know where the bandit is.

I hope this gets implemented sometime. It is just changing some values. The angles are on the images presented.

Here is a link to my original post:

 

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On 11/6/2021 at 1:19 AM, RPY Variable said:

Yesterday I had a situation with two mirages coming hot from 30 miles in front of me, both on the exactly the same location but one at 5k and the other at 43k. I was at 40k. It was on a Fox1 server so I had to pick one. I wanted to shoot the one on top but Jester only locked the one on the bottom. It would have been as easy as selecting "Middle High" of one of my proposals.

FYI you'd have easily detect the top bandit with antenna pointing straight ahead in this situation.

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Big thumbs up for the elevation suggestions; having spent quite a bit of time in the RIO seat and having learned to calculate the elevation required at certain ranges/altitude differences, it is very frustrating with how coarse the Jester options are.

 

Some options/techniques I use with my pilots from the RIO seat which I would love to be able to command Jester to utilise are (Jester 6 - Radar settings);

Slave RDR/TCS 3 position switch. The most practical use of this is to slave the radar to the TCS which allows you to target a low notching target with the TCS providing azimuth tracking and radar providing ranging.

Stab In/Out 2 position switch. This sets the Radar to stabilise either on the horizon or aircraft's axis. Very useful for using the nose of the aircraft to point the radar instead of the typical horizon stabilised method.

One last thing which I also dream of but have no practical ideas how it would be implemented is Jester to give IFF feedback when using RWS. Typically when in the RIO seat, I will correlate RWS tracks with an IFF scan and report general information such as 'Three friendlies, 30 left for 40 and two bandits, 10 right for 60' or 'On the nose 20 miles, friendlies and bandits merged'. Not having this capability with Jester is very detrimental to operating in RWS with no datalink as the only way you can get IFF information is to either STT a contact or use the much smaller volume of TWS.

 

Ideally, the two suggestions in bold are also featured as binding keys for the pilot too (already are for RIO) so it will be compatible with voice attack/quick access without going through the Jester menu.

 


Edited by _DK_
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I would just love a bindable command to switch flares/chaff. 

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I quite agree with your suggestion!

Jester is hard to be satisfied now. I use vioceattack to control the back seat, I asked Jester to adjust the radar pitch angle according to the range and altitude information,

but the imperfection of Jester AI still makes me have to fight with him often:

1. Jester currently has no command to control the number of radar bars,He often chooses 8-bar scanning, which makes the scanning speed particularly slow!

2.Jester is currently unable to provide P-Search capabilities,And he can't get target information through DDD

3.Jester cannot adjust the radar according to the data link information,The jester menu also does not provide the option to specify any target as the primary attack target in the  tws-man mode.

4.The jester menu does not provide the option to control the horizontal scanning angle of the radar

5.The jester menu does not provide the option to control MLC,Phoenix missile activates the seeker...

 

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On 11/9/2021 at 4:22 AM, draconus said:

FYI you'd have easily detect the top bandit with antenna pointing straight ahead in this situation.

I didn't, jester kept locking the bandit below. But regardless of that, you are never sure of that when you are on the middle position, because it depends on distance and altitude. The only way to be sure is to set an angle that only scans co-altitude and above, which is what I'm proposing.

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I would love to not need to have micromanage Jester as the pilot to be combat effective at all. I mean, I'm pilot I'm fly... Not some computer tech button masher knob turner.

I think the whole idea of Jester was to have a distinct separation between the two roles because the Tomcat required two people in order to fly. Lately I'm noticing a lot of command Jester this and that feature creep.

Jester, isn't exactly organic self thinking AI per say... He has some kind of a decision making scripted process if this do that logic it seems. Yes, it is tied into voice lines which makes him seems more organic and "alive" it certainly helps with making the player pilot believe in the illusion.

If you hear the in cockpit combat tapes from the F-14s that shot down the Libyan air force planes (and granted, it is possible you don't hear ICS comms in those recordings) you will notice how little direction or commands the pilot up front is directing to his RIO. If anything the pilot is getting very brief informational calls from the RIO like "there's collision" (letting the pilot know RIO selected collision steering, which Jester does not do) or "centered the T" (pilot letting RIO know he has steered the plane to center the collision steering T) and etc, etc.

If anything, we may possibly have way too much talking between our pilot and Jester in a combat environment and certainly the pilot shouldn't have to issue all of these directives to the RIO. I look at it like HB did it that way as a stop-gap measure.

But in reality the RIO knows how to do his job and doesn't need extremely specific directives or micromanagement from the pilot like we currently have in DCS.

With that said, maybe when DCS fully revamps the comms system... We someday could just talk to the AI RIO in the back with your microphone similar to like a "voice attack" 3rd party software and not need that compass rose type command system at all, like we currently have.

Right now, it seems like Jester really truly doesn't know how to do his job in relation to the SA he sees on radar. If I have a bandit gorilla group, why are you not selecting the closest bandit Jester, for a multiple Phoenix launch? Usually the closest in the gorilla formation is the darn fighter escorts/sweep Jester. He doesn't seem to change the target priority at all by using "next target" on armament panel.

Quirks and things like that, anyway that was my thoughts on this whole Jester concept. And yes, of course a human RIO in multiplayer is far more desirable as long as you have someone who knows what they're doing too.

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5 hours ago, RPY Variable said:

I didn't, jester kept locking the bandit below.

That means the antenna was wrongly pointed down.

 

4 hours ago, Baz000 said:

If I have a bandit gorilla group, why are you not selecting the closest bandit Jester, for a multiple Phoenix launch? Usually the closest in the gorilla formation is the darn fighter escorts/sweep Jester.

Sounds improbable. Never experienced such behavior. Jester does not change what WCS selected for launch priority but in similar circumstances it was always correctly prioritised.

 

If you're sure it was improper behavior make a bug report.

I'm all in for OP's features implemented but even then it needs wise management. Even if Jester was real AI he cannot guess player intentions and I bet a lot would not like his AI RIO in command - but I wish we can see it some day.


Edited by draconus

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I think this topic is always going to have a divide between reality of real life and reality of single player simulator.

For what its supposed to do Jester is far and away the best AI companion, but I don’t think it will ever be able to direct the mission from the back seat. Half of players would ignore his directives or blame the AI if the intercept went poorly.

Right now most of the Jester function is to give some limited directions to the TWS auto algorithm, and in some ways thats really all we can expect out of him. An AI that really could be presented with a PVP scenario and direct an engagement following some kind of gameplan / tactics manual is well out of scope.

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6 минут назад, AH_Solid_Snake сказал:

For what its supposed to do Jester is far and away the best AI companion, but I don’t think it will ever be able to direct the mission from the back seat. Half of players would ignore his directives or blame the AI if the intercept went poorly.

100% agree! Yeah, after F-16C radar nerf and recent problems with AMRAAMs, many pilots consider F-14B as the best platform for easy kills and would like to have a single "go kill that datalink target" Jester option 🙂.

I think Jester is quite good in what he is doing if he got a proper "guidance" from pilot.

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43 minutes ago, AH_Solid_Snake said:

I think this topic is always going to have a divide between reality of real life and reality of single player simulator.

For what its supposed to do Jester is far and away the best AI companion, but I don’t think it will ever be able to direct the mission from the back seat. Half of players would ignore his directives or blame the AI if the intercept went poorly.

Right now most of the Jester function is to give some limited directions to the TWS auto algorithm, and in some ways thats really all we can expect out of him. An AI that really could be presented with a PVP scenario and direct an engagement following some kind of gameplan / tactics manual is well out of scope.

Yeap, a lot of players also simply don't know how the backseater position works even in basic form. The act of interpreting a readout on the DDD (your main instrument) already contains enough intricacies to dedicate an entire machine learning project to. Capturing this in Jester is entirely unreasonable. At the end of the day, no matter how sophisticated he is, Jester isn't a RIO. He's a smart interface providing us access to a selection of backseat functionality. He's pretty good at that.

However, right now he is unnecessarily increasing single pilot workload in combat.

While I'd love to add a billion other elements to this enhancement request, the core of it is simply to provide quick access to the tools most critical for target discrimination in combat.

In my mind there's only three things important to attain this goal:

  1. The ability to designate a TWS track for next launch
  2. Maximize control over radar elevation, azimuth and scan volume parameters
  3. Do the above with as few interactions as possible

Even in this list I only consider TWS designation and antenna elevation to truly be problems that need to be solved for release. Anything else I'd consider a bonus.

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16 hours ago, draconus said:

That means the antenna was wrongly pointed down.

 

It was not pointed down. But despite that, at 30 nm with a closing speed of +1200kn... tried to lock him with no luck, jester kept locking the guy below, then I tried two times the altitude at distance... at that distance I can't start looking at the radar scan volume table to se if the center position will or will not see the bandit that was on the deck. He shoot before I was able to lock him up. That was a perfect situation to apply my middle high angle of the radar proposal. Middle high should scan co-altitude and up. middle low should scan co-altitude and low. As they are today the middle high, high, middle low and low angles have no use at all.

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On 11/6/2021 at 1:19 AM, RPY Variable said:

Yesterday I had a situation with two mirages coming hot from 30 miles in front of me, both on the exactly the same location but one at 5k and the other at 43k. I was at 40k. It was on a Fox1 server so I had to pick one. I wanted to shoot the one on top but Jester only locked the one on the bottom. [...]

9 hours ago, RPY Variable said:

It was not pointed down. But despite that, at 30 nm with a closing speed of +1200kn... tried to lock him with no luck, jester kept locking the guy below, then I tried two times the altitude at distance... at that distance I can't start looking at the radar scan volume table to se if the center position will or will not see the bandit that was on the deck. [...]

Sorry, I need explanation here. How can Jester keep locking the lower bandit without pointing the antenna down? This is beyond my comprehension. Upper bandit is totally in the center scan being only about 1 degree up, while the lower one is about 10 degrees down. [image not to scale]

lock.jpg


Edited by draconus

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Read a few postings above, just want to add 2 cents:

At least I would right now love to have:
.) a "NEXT LAUNCH" command I can send to Jester
.) a "RESET RADAR TWS" command to start from scratch (center horizontally and vertically in TWS manual)
.) a "RESET RADAR RWS" command to start from scratch (center horizontally and vertically in RWS)
Both in Jester Menu and ViacomPro.

The rest I am currently able to handle (more or less) using calls like e.g. "scan sector angels 20 for 30" (I use VIACOMPRO) using information from AWACS or GCI.


Edited by TOViper

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7 hours ago, draconus said:

Sorry, I need explanation here. How can Jester keep locking the lower bandit without pointing the antenna down? This is beyond my comprehension. Upper bandit is totally in the center scan being only about 1 degree up, while the lower one is about 10 degrees down. [image not to scale]

lock.jpg

 

What can I say.. he kept locking the guy below.. I don't understand why you are so engaged on this being that it is not the point.

But don't worry, I made a video replicating the same situation so you can finally tell me that I was right. One bandit is at 1k the other one is at 40k.

https://streamable.com/z22atc

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2 hours ago, RPY Variable said:

What can I say.. he kept locking the guy below.. I don't understand why you are so engaged on this being that it is not the point.

No offence. I just found your situation very interesting. I'm not against Jester getting new features and learn a few skills.

Thx for the video. You clearly have Jester change the elevation to middle from the menu and the numbers on TID confirm this, however then you use some binding to lock the bandit and then elevation changes correctly (when locked) and goes back to level when you go back to TWS. I don't know why the lower bandit stays as sensor target while the higher one stays as DL target temporarily adding unknown sensor track sign only... Either bug or I don't understand something. @QuiGon ?

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53 minutes ago, draconus said:

No offence. I just found your situation very interesting. I'm not against Jester getting new features and learn a few skills.

Thx for the video. You clearly have Jester change the elevation to middle from the menu and the numbers on TID confirm this, however then you use some binding to lock the bandit and then elevation changes correctly (when locked) and goes back to level when you go back to TWS. I don't know why the lower bandit stays as sensor target while the higher one stays as DL target temporarily adding unknown sensor track sign only... Either bug or I don't understand something. @QuiGon ?

Huh, this is quite an odd one indeed. While I know the RIO stuff I'm not familiar with Jester and what kind of commands you can give him, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on there.

From what I can see it looks like this:
Initially he is scanning low (-8.2°), tracking the low bandit. Then Jester gets the command to scan middle (0°), which puts the low bandit outside the radar volume. Despite this he stays visible on scope as a radar track, which is odd. I'm not sure where the (attempted?) locks are comming from (keybind command for Jester?), followed by immediate break lock command when he locks the low bandit?
Whatever caused the (attempted) locks it seemed to happen often enough that the radar briefly scans the low bandit during the (attempted) locks which seems to reset the track file timer, so the track stays alive, despite it being outside the radar search volume. That's the only explanation I got for this :dunno:


Edited by QuiGon
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That's the command I'm using. And "Radar - Brake Lock". Nothing special.

1.jpg

2 hours ago, TLTeo said:

Maybe TWS: Auto is centering the scan on the low bandit for whatever reason?

I'm on TWS. No TWS Auto. Check the radar elevation which is at 0°.


Edited by RPY Variable

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