investigating Mission 1 - Biff just flies around in a circle - won't land!

[bclinton]

This is my second stab at finishing the very first mission and Biff simply flies in a circle around the truck stop and will not land. This is my first campaign that I have tried. What am I missing here? lol

[Yurgon]

When we tested the campaign, this problem didn't occur, or at least not that I'm aware of. After the campaign was released, this problem and some similar ones for take-off started to show up. As far as I'm aware, it's a problem with DCS; unfortunately I'm not sure if there are good work-arounds for the time being.

@baltic_dragonis currently on vacation, but maybe he can chime in with some hints, time permitting.

[bclinton]

On 8/3/2022 at 4:19 PM, Yurgon said:

When we tested the campaign, this problem didn't occur, or at least not that I'm aware of. After the campaign was released, this problem and some similar ones for take-off started to show up. As far as I'm aware, it's a problem with DCS; unfortunately I'm not sure if there are good work-arounds for the time being.

@baltic_dragonis currently on vacation, but maybe he can chime in with some hints, time permitting.

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it. 

[bclinton]

Just a follow up opinion on this.......if there are known issues with the campaign regardless of who is at fault, the campaign should be not for sale. Why sell something that you know is not working right? 

[Yurgon]

On one hand, you're right.

On the other hand, DCS is under perpetual development. It's not like a AAA title that sells one polished version every couple of years. We get lots and lots and lots of changes all the time. Many of them are under the hood and don't introduce features that we could see or identify, others are really big, like the current weather engine that is waaaaay better than the old one, or the new FLIR renderer that is also a big leap forward.

The downside is that DCS is never really finished, to put it positively. There are problems with the sim right now, and there will be problems in the future. Missions always depend on the AI, some more than others. In this case, it looks like some of the most basic tasks are currently broken, which in turn breaks some of the campaign missions.

Like I said, in testing we didn't see these problems. Once the product is out, it doesn't make much sense to take it down when such problems emerge. Baltic Dragon is investing a lot of time supporting the existing campaigns and fixing problems that show up after the initial release. For starters, in testing we don't always find all the problems, that's why this forum is so important, so all the players can report when something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. And then, some things break after the release.

In some cases, it's out of BD's hands; I think this issue here might be one of them; if the AI circles forever and just doesn't go ahead to land, there's little a mission designer can do. The underlying problem is known and has been reported to Eagle Dynamics, and we're all waiting for it to be fixed, so all I can do really is to ask you for some more patience.

When the problem happens as the end of the mission, you could skip ahead on the campaign's main screen. You'll lose a few lines of dialog near the end, but you'll have had most of the mission's content and can progress through the campaign.

Edited August 6, 2022 by Yurgon

[bclinton]

12 hours ago, Yurgon said:

On one hand, you're right.

On the other hand, DCS is under perpetual development. It's not like a AAA title that sells one polished version every couple of years. We get lots and lots and lots of changes all the time. Many of them are under the hood and don't introduce features that we could see or identify, others are really big, like the current weather engine that is waaaaay better than the old one, or the new FLIR renderer that is also a big leap forward.

The downside is that DCS is never really finished, to put it positively. There are problems with the sim right now, and there will be problems in the future. Missions always depend on the AI, some more than others. In this case, it looks like some of the most basic tasks are currently broken, which in turn breaks some of the campaign missions.

Like I said, in testing we didn't see these problems. Once the product is out, it doesn't make much sense to take it down when such problems emerge. Baltic Dragon is investing a lot of time supporting the existing campaigns and fixing problems that show up after the initial release. For starters, in testing we don't always find all the problems, that's why this forum is so important, so all the players can report when something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. And then, some things break after the release.

In some cases, it's out of BD's hands; I think this issue here might be one of them; if the AI circles forever and just doesn't go ahead to land, there's little a mission designer can do. The underlying problem is known and has been reported to Eagle Dynamics, and we're all waiting for it to be fixed, so all I can do really is to ask you for some more patience.

When the problem happens as the end of the mission, you could skip ahead on the campaign's main screen. You'll lose a few lines of dialog near the end, but you'll have had most of the mission's content and can progress through the campaign.

 

Fair enough. Thanks for explanation. 

[baltic_dragon]

On 8/6/2022 at 1:22 PM, bclinton said:

Just a follow up opinion on this.......if there are known issues with the campaign regardless of who is at fault, the campaign should be not for sale. Why sell something that you know is not working right? 

In this case we would have to take down all the campaigns, because every other patch breaks something and it is impossible to follow all the missions and fix them (and quite often the fix is completely out of our hands and we have to wait for ED). This is something you just have to get used to if you want to fly the campaigns: that things will stop working from time to time and then will get fixed eventually. There is no way around it with such a complex game as DCS.

[Jascha]

I did this mission twice (that's how much I enjoyed it ). In both cases Biff's landing was weird. His approach pattern is off, he lands on 21R instead of 21L and after landing he plows though dirt to get to 21L. First time I thought that it was my fault taking to much time to leave the active runway but he also did this the second time when I cleared the 21L in no time.

[Yurgon]

Yeah, he started doing that at some point. I don't remember ever seeing it during the testing phase, but nowadays that's happening every now and then, and I'm pretty sure it's not the player's fault.

[baltic_dragon]

I will check if there is any trick to make him land, but NTTR is quite buggy when it comes to AI behaviour unfortunately, especially the taxi part.

[Thx1137]

In mission one he seemed to start an approach at the end of the mission but then turned into the opposite direction. I noticed he had two waypoints assigned on the F10 map. Once he flew them he landed fine.  It got me wondering that maybe there is an issue where we don't fly close enough to some waypoints so they don't get marked as "passed" so when asked to land the AI feels a need to finish them? Probably not, but it is a guess and given we have to fly manually or with a primitive AP it is easy to miss a waypoint! 

[Wyverex]

I had the same happening to me today. Biff flew back all the way to Moapa, turned and then followed the FP to land.

Things that I might have done to cause this:

- I landed on 21R and took a while to clear the runway

- I stopped between 21L and 21R because I wasn't sure how far to go. After a while I continued further beyond 21L until I saw the UI message to wait there

During my landing approach, Biff also stayed beside me for a long time and wildly oscillated up and down. I don't think he was orbiting around the truck stop. Then I didn't observe him any further until I was on the ground. I guess he started back on his FP then.

[baltic_dragon]

No, this is just an DCS AI bug in Nellis, been there from the day the campaign was released (didn't happen before, so I assume that patch introducing the campaign also contained this bug). Nothing to do about it but move on, it doesn't happen in any other mission oddly enough.