AI Ships sometimes stop unexpectedly (non-deterministic behaviour)

[mrprime]

I'm making a mission with 4 fleets that should all move to a waypoint. Routinely when running the mission however, one or more of the fleets will just come to a stop for no apparent reason. This randomly affects different fleets after each reload of the mission.

I've attached a number of tracks, no mission parameters were changed between these tracks, this is just reopening the mission and running it for a few minutes to see what stops.

• ShipsStop_1 - Forrestal fleet stops
• ShipsStop_2 - Washington and Forrestal stop
• ShipsStop_3 - Washington and Liaonling stop
• ShipsStop_4 - Liaonling fleet stops
• ShipsStop_5 - Liaoning, Washington, Forrestal all come to a stop

I've attached the .miz also, unchanged from when those tracks were generated.

This one's a bit of a head scratcher for me! hopefully someone can make some sense of what's happening here  happy to give any more info.

ShipsStop_1.trk ShipsStop_2.trk ShipsStop_3.trk ShipsStop_4.trk ShipsStop_5.trk ChineseInvasionofMarianas_v0_2.miz

[rayrayblues]

I haven't seen that yet, IDK if this is related, but sometimes my fleets will not even start. They just sit there going nowhere.

[mrprime]

19 hours ago, rayrayblues said:

I haven't seen that yet, IDK if this is related, but sometimes my fleets will not even start. They just sit there going nowhere.

Sounds related, my ships have a starting speed and it's as if randomly their engines are cut and they drift to 0, so if your ships were stationary I could imagine if this bug affected them, they'd just never move. 

[Grimes]

Use AI Task Push and not AI task Set when changing options. Or really everything else unless you want the AI to completely stop their current tasking. 

Basically when you set the task, no matter what it is, assigns that one and only task to the AI and deletes any other task they were assigned to do. Their route is one such task. When you do it with commands and options the task is executed immediately and the AI just stop because they now have no route. When you use task push it puts the assigned task at the top of their task queue and when complete they continue on with whatever else they were doing. 

[mrprime]

20 hours ago, Grimes said:

Use AI Task Push and not AI task Set when changing options. Or really everything else unless you want the AI to completely stop their current tasking. 

Basically when you set the task, no matter what it is, assigns that one and only task to the AI and deletes any other task they were assigned to do. Their route is one such task. When you do it with commands and options the task is executed immediately and the AI just stop because they now have no route. When you use task push it puts the assigned task at the top of their task queue and when complete they continue on with whatever else they were doing. 

Yup, thank you, switching from AI Set to AI Push means everything works as intended.

I'm still confused why 'AI Set' is non-deterministic (the triggers were definitely firing, so why did the ships sometimes continue their route, and sometimes not?)

Either way, really appreciate the explanation, I'd suggest it'd be worth updating the 'DCS User Manual ED 2020.pdf' document to better reflect the behaviour of Push vs Set, as what you said there makes perfect sense, but the docs don't cover that important difference.

 

[Grimes]

It is odd that they would sometimes stop and sometimes not. I didn't run the test that many times nor did I look at every single track, but I think in mine they always stopped.