not planned Easy/Medium/Hard/Realistic refueling options.

[Exorcet]

3 hours ago, Furiz said:

You can practice refueling in any session right now.

All you have to do is choose a short mission with tanker, fly up to it and spend 10 min practicing, after that go bomb stuff and land, refuel/rearm and do it again.

That narrows mission selection. If you can't reliably refuel, you're not doing a long distance mission. On the other hand, an assist would mean that any mission is open to being flown.
 

Quote

 

Its not that kind of assist as others.

 

It has not even really been defined yet, so how could that be? Also, since unlimited fuel seems to be accepted, AAR assist seems like it would be an ever more acceptable assist since it doesn't just wave away a problem and take all effort out from the player.

Unlimited fuel simply removes fuel from the sim, unrealistic and does nothing for skill.

AAR assist allows for fuel management practice, requires the pilot to fly the plane, and also allows the pilot to get a feel for how refueling fits into a mission if it's used to refuel mid mission. That's something that random tanker practice doesn't get you.

Quote

Meaning we don't want WT or MSFS here, thanks.

MSF Simulator isn't an arcade game. War Thunder has an arcade mode and a sim mode. Whatever you want to classify them, a refueling assist in DCS does not remove realistic refueling from the sim, not does it alter flight physics, weapons, AI, etc. DCS is still going to be DCS even with assists, which are already part of DCS by design.

3 hours ago, PawlaczGMD said:

If the proponents of this feature would spend the time practicing instead of flaming on the forum, they wouldn't need the aids.

Let's say the same for dynamic campaigns. Stop spending time asking for more features and just build them yourself.

Besides, practice refueling doesn't provide all the benefits of an assist.

3 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Easy. Just select unlimited fuel and try some tanker practice on your missions. Then when you feel you’ve got it, take off the training wheels. Simple.

So then a refuel assist should be fine as the same logic is followed, except it doesn't remove important physics like the change in aircraft performance with fuel weight, or the need for the player to manage fuel.

3 hours ago, Grodin said:

I'm not saying it would be bad if they could just magically make that kind of option appear without spending time to code it. But they cant and i want devs to focus on things like fixing bugs, adding missing features to the modules, implementing vulcan, improving the AI etc etc which i consider more important. Now the question is how big part of the customers want this or that. There are more pressing matters that affect 99% of players or 70% of players etc and then there are things that maybe 0,5% of players consider important. We can only guess which features are which.

This topic comes up often enough that it's probably impacting a large number of players. If you want to go by % of player base then this should probably be somewhere on the higher end of priority. Not only does it impact refueling, but mission design.

When it comes to development resources, this is why I'm a proponent of using what already exists. The AI knows how to refuel, so one possible form of refueling assist is AI control. Minimal work needed to add to DCS. Another option is expanding the range of the fueling probe. Yet another is to transfer fuel by proximity. The code already exists in part since it's needed for airbase refuel/rearm and supply truck rearm. This won't be a heavy project in all likelyhood. And then ED is going to improve refueling code anyway so it's good time to add an assist which should bring down the resource cost by lumping it with another project.

1 hour ago, cfrag said:

So is an AAR helper a legitimate wish? Yes. Why? Because you wish it.  

Absolutely.

  

2 hours ago, Tippis said:

The only issue with that is almost completely separate: taking control over AI aircraft make them abandon their flight plan, so the coding needed would be to either just continue what they were doing before the player intruded (which arguably is a needed fix anyway), or — in this case — be context sensitive enough to figure “oh, I'm being activated in a refuelling scenario, so let's refuel from this tanker right in front of me”. Remembering what waypoint they were on, or doing a specific in-flight task when called upon through some UI mean that explicitly says “do this task” shouldn't be a huge coding hurdle. It's a contextual auto-generated pushTask for one of the most trivial tasks in the game.

The best part, the AI remembering the flight plan is how to it used to work. I'm not aware of patch notes mentioning the removal of this, so I'd assume it's a bug that they forget. If that's true, then the code for auto AAR is already in DCS. If the change was intentional, it needs to be reverted as taking control of wingmen without sending your original plane off into the void is a very good way to get around AI limitations.

Edited April 9 by Exorcet

[lmp]

58 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Imagining 3D on a 2D screen is something everyone does their whole life of watching video and playing games on a screen so it’s no too unusual. 

I'm explaining what I experienced. Imagining 3D based on a 2D image is based on your brain understanding the size and shape of the objects in the picture. It doesn't work perfectly, especially when the objects aren't familiar everyday things. Even if you've never experienced it I encourage you to be open minded enough to believe other people's perception may work differently than yours. Many people, including pilots who have performed AAR in real life, said this is one area where DCS is more difficult than real life.

[Tippis]

20 minutes ago, Exorcet said:

The best part, the AI remembering the flight plan is how to it used to work. I'm not aware of patch notes mentioning the removal of this, so I'd assume it's a bug that they forget. If that's true, then the code for auto AAR is already in DCS. If the change was intentional, it needs to be reverted as taking control of wingmen without sending your original plane off into the void is a very good way to get around AI limitations.

It may very well be. And to be fair, it's been an age since I played around with the full capabilities of that whole thing so it might have been changed/restored since.

I know a similar problem still exists when you order planes around in CA, and that could really use some (probably related) fixing as well.

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, lmp said:

I'm explaining what I experienced. Imagining 3D based on a 2D image is based on your brain understanding the size and shape of the objects in the picture. It doesn't work perfectly, especially when the objects aren't familiar everyday things. Even if you've never experienced it I encourage you to be open minded enough to believe other people's perception may work differently than yours. Many people, including pilots who have performed AAR in real life, said this is one area where DCS is more difficult than real life.

Oh I get it that VR might help just pointing out that many people are able to do this without it. One video I saw of actual A-10 pilots using DCS for training they were indeed using VR and training at AAR with it. 

1 hour ago, Exorcet said:

So then a refuel assist should be fine as the same logic is followed, except it doesn't remove important physics like the change in aircraft performance with fuel weight, or the need for the player to manage fuel.

Well we don’t even know what the hypothetical assist would do or how it works. But unlimited fuel is already in the game. AFAIK you can AAR connect with it enabled. So it’s not an impediment to practice during a mission. The effect of changing fuel weight while you’re tanking is minor or unnoticeable. 

[SharpeXB]

Although AAR training missions logically seem like a good idea and they might well be, this discussion makes me realize why there aren’t more of them. Training missions are for beginners. AAR is an advanced skill. You see in these discussions many beginners who somehow think this is something they need to tackle right away but they really don’t. There is hardly any use for this in normal DCS gameplay. Putting this right there in the training roster along with Startup and Landing etc would lead new players to think it is required and would just frustrate them. Like you see here. AAR can wait until you’ve mastered many other tasks in the sim. When you’re ready and willing to put in the effort you’ll be able to figure out how. But putting it right there on the menu in front of someone new really isn’t a great idea.  

[Tippis]

31 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Well we don’t even know what the hypothetical assist would do or how it works.

Eh what? Yes we do, exactly because it's hypothetical. Because that means we can freely define how it should work; what it should do.

32 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

But unlimited fuel is already in the game.

…and it removes the need to manage fuel, which is kind of the whole purpose, so that doesn't actually solve anything. Remember the things you keep mentioning as the things you need to practice to get good at refuelling? None of them actually relates to whether you have fuel or not. So it does not help in practising refuelling in any way and can, in fact, block it completely. Fuel is not the issue when practising refuelling. But an infinite amount of fuel most certainly is an issue when you want to create or play a mission where fuel is supposed to matter.

2 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Although AAR training missions logically seem like a good idea and they might well be, this discussion makes me realize why there aren’t more of them.

Unfortunately, your realisation is incorrect.

The reason why there aren't any of them is because there can't be. There are no ways to create them. The best you can do is make a mission that teaches nothing, where the player can hopefully glean some experience from grinding away, with no help and no feedback as to what they're doing right or wrong. That is not training. That is just guesswork where, with a bit of luck, you get enough right that you can start honing your mistakes into deep training scars. The very thing you are arguing against is the means to make actual training missions possible.

7 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

But putting it right there on the menu in front of someone new really isn’t a great idea.  

Yes it is. There is never any sensible or rational reason to hide skill acquisition from the player. If it were possible to create AAR missions that actually teaches something to players, they should be right up there with all the other, technically far more complex skills that we have training missions for.

[Jackjack171]

5 hours ago, Furiz said:

Back and forth, pointless request.

It has been said before over and over, practice AAR instead of dropping bombs, and you wont need any aid. Practice makes you better;)

Well said! 

[PhantomHans]

53 minutes ago, Tippis said:

Eh what? Yes we do, exactly because it's hypothetical. Because that means we can freely define how it should work; what it should do.

It's easy to explain that.

At the easiest setting, the AI takes over temporarily and flies the AAR, fills the tanks,  and returns the aircraft to player control.  Should be easy enough to program. 

At progressively more realistic settings the AI gives less and less input help or a greatly exaggerated sweet spot becomes smaller.  May be difficult to program and may be released later if ever.  This would be my preferred difficulty setting so that when I'm missing the basket by a foot I get the nudge I need to make it in, or a nudge to keep the right position on the tanker.  I'm willing to deal with handing it over to the AI.

At the most realistic setting AAR happens without any assistance, and potentially in an EMCON environment where you use hand signals only instead of radio calls.  In other words more realistic than we have now except nobody complains about the things wrong with it now, they just beat their chest and tell people to "Get Good" like a bunch of children playing COD...

[SharpeXB]

28 minutes ago, PhantomHans said:

It's easy to explain that.

At the easiest setting, the AI takes over temporarily and flies the AAR, fills the tanks,  and returns the aircraft to player control.  Should be easy enough to program. 

At progressively more realistic settings the AI gives less and less input help or a greatly exaggerated sweet spot becomes smaller.  May be difficult to program and may be released later if ever.  This would be my preferred difficulty setting so that when I'm missing the basket by a foot I get the nudge I need to make it in, or a nudge to keep the right position on the tanker.  I'm willing to deal with handing it over to the AI.

At the most realistic setting AAR happens without any assistance, and potentially in an EMCON environment where you use hand signals only instead of radio calls.  In other words more realistic than we have now except nobody complains about the things wrong with it now, they just beat their chest and tell people to "Get Good" like a bunch of children playing COD...

See this has all been discussed before including ideas like this and many others in the 17 pages of the previous discussion where ED already stated they had no plans for this. It’s all been said before. So there’s no real consensus about what this is and how it would work. 

The trouble with this idea of a progressive helper that gets more and more difficult as you dial it up. Where your goal is to get it to zero %. You can do this already. That’s how you teach yourself to do this. Step by step. Why does your plane magically filling with fuel help you learn at all? You can practice with unlimited fuel if you want to. Or try to just connect. Then to stay connected etc. No change to the game is needed for that. 
 

And I gotta ask again. Why do you need to do AAR so much? Why does this matter? It’s a fun and rewarding thing to learn but how does watching the AI do it for you add anything to the sim experience?

Edited April 10 by SharpeXB

[Tippis]

18 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

See this has all been discussed before including ideas like this and many others. So there’s no real consensus about what this is and how it would work.

So what?

That just means that there are plenty of ideas on how to solve various aspects of the issue, and that no-one has really come up with a solid argument against any of it.

18 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

The trouble with this idea of a progressive helper that gets more and more difficult as you dial it up. Where your goal is to get it to zero %. You can do this already.

We really can't. That's the trouble with the idea: there is no middle ground between “don't do it at all” and “do everything”. There is no way to create a progression and thus no way to teach it step by step. The tools to do so do not exist. It is the same difficulty every time because, unlike with just about every other task you can set for yourself in the game, there are no helpers that can be employed; no way to break the problem down into isolated chunks; no way to selective make some things hard and others easy.

18 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Why does your plane magically filling with fuel help you learn at all?

Why? What an odd epistemological or possibly cognitive question. It helps because our brains function that way: learning by example. It helps because you have broken down the problem into slightly smaller chunks and we learn better that way. It helps because it lowers the barrier of frustration and offers more opportunities to get more repetitions in, and repetition and lack of frustration makes the brain happier.

And if what you meant to ask was “how” then that has already been answered many times over.

18 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

You can practice with unlimited fuel if you want to. Or try to just connect. Then to stay connected etc. No change to the game is needed for that. 

There's no point to do that because unlimited fuel doesn't make any difference. You need to stop bringing it up because it shows a profound ignorance and incomprehension of the mechanics involve and the topic at hand. All you're saying here is that, if you want to practice using the game as it is, then the game as it is already is the way it is. It's vapid tautology. It says nothing. It doesn't address the simple fact that the way the game is is not conducive to either teaching or learning effectively.

16 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

And I gotta ask again. Why do you need to do AAR so much? Why does this matter?

This has been explained in full. Inclusiveness. Ease of creation. More fun. But let's mirror that question: why do you need to keep AAR away from people so much? Why should they not be allowed to do it? And if it doesn't matter, why are you so adamantly against these improvements?

Edited April 10 by Tippis

[PhantomHans]

26 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

And I gotta ask again. Why do you need to do AAR so much? Why does this matter? It’s a fun and rewarding thing to learn but how does watching the AI do it for you add anything to the sim experience?

 

Frankly that's none of your business. 

12 minutes ago, Tippis said:

This has been explained in full. Inclusiveness. Ease of creation. More fun. But let's mirror that question: why do you need to keep AAR away from people so much? Why should they not be allowed to do it? And if it doesn't matter, why are you so adamantly against these improvements?

 

I would also like an answer to these questions!

As it stands now I have several missions and campaigns that require AAR that I cannot complete.  Telling me to "Git Gud" doesn't and won't solve this.  However a "magic workaround" will still allow me to complete them.

 

So yes why is there a segment of the community so rabidly spiteful and hateful towards this?  Does it insult their macho standing as real fighter pilots?

[freehand]

33 minutes ago, PhantomHans said:

Frankly that's none of your business. 

I would also like an answer to these questions!

As it stands now I have several missions and campaigns that require AAR that I cannot complete.  Telling me to "Git Gud" doesn't and won't solve this.  However a "magic workaround" will still allow me to complete them.

 

So yes why is there a segment of the community so rabidly spiteful and hateful towards this?  Does it insult their macho standing as real fighter pilots?

You have a serious attitude problem you only have to look at your footer lol throwing your toys out of the pram here will do you no favours.  

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, PhantomHans said:

Frankly that's none of your business. 

I don’t mean to be combative in asking this. Just trying to understand the issue. 

1 hour ago, PhantomHans said:

As it stands now I have several missions and campaigns that require AAR that I cannot complete.

Which campaign? As far as I’ve experienced AAR isn’t required for the campaigns in this game. In fact what you experience after putting in all the work to learn this is you hardly get to do it. Every campaign I’ve tried has some sort of workaround. The only campaign I’ve played that flat out required it was the A-10 Qualification Course where that’s the goal.

1 hour ago, PhantomHans said:

However a "magic workaround" will still allow me to complete them.

There already is one. Select unlimited fuel. I originally learned AAR in order to get through a campaign. What better reason do you need?

Edited April 10 by SharpeXB

[PhantomHans]

7 hours ago, freehand said:

You have a serious attitude problem you only have to look at your footer lol throwing your toys out of the pram here will do you no favours.  

You guys are pretty sensitive about this game huh?

I have never in my life seen so much pushback against adding difficulty options nor have I ever seen so many people so rabidly insist on what others do with their time.

If you all want to fly around on maximum realism, grunting like you're pulling Gs IRL, that's your business and I'm not telling you not to, am I?

Yet you seem personally offended by the request for easier AAR options. 

[freehand]

13 minutes ago, PhantomHans said:

You guys are pretty sensitive about this game huh?

I have never in my life seen so much pushback against adding difficulty options nor have I ever seen so many people so rabidly insist on what others do with their time.

If you all want to fly around on maximum realism, grunting like you're pulling Gs IRL, that's your business and I'm not telling you not to, am I?

Yet you seem personally offended by the request for easier AAR options. 

I have no problem to what you want it's just how your going on about asking for it just chill and people will help e.t,c

[Minsky]

21 minutes ago, PhantomHans said:

I have never in my life seen so much pushback against adding difficulty options nor have I ever seen so many people so rabidly insist on what others do with their time.

That's what you usually get for asking to make a simulation game more accessible to newbies, so they could skip the suffering the old-timers had to endure  

[Tippis]

15 minutes ago, Minsky said:

That's what you usually get for asking to make a simulation game more accessible to newbies, so they could skip the suffering the old-timers had to endure  

Quite.

You'd think that the old-timers had a better idea of what the product they've grown old with is actually meant to offer, but that often seems to be forgotten a long time ago. It's doubly funny since the whole point of a simulation is to make as much as accessible as possible to all skill levels, and that having the ability to match skills and skill progression with various options for what problems you want the user should be subjected to — something that the product description and advertised feature set also highlights.

Edited April 10 by Tippis

[Northstar98]

27 minutes ago, Minsky said:

That's what you usually get for asking to make a simulation game more accessible to newbies, so they could skip the suffering the old-timers had to endure  

Well, if that's the attitude, why improve anything at all?

[scoobie]

22 hours ago, Tippis said:

Also, the idea that this would take a lot is… questionable. (...) Auto-fly already exists. Just not for players. It could be further enhanced with more UI element control similar to guidance gates (which are currently restricted to static positions and only to “player,” rather than “client” aircraft), which would help in telling you what to look for and what to line up. This could conceivably also help with the proximity box if it were made a bit more dynamic. Again, this is something that largely already exists.

"Magic enlarged basket" wouldn't be a big deal. Just like the Minsky's "cuboid bubble" wouldn't, or my "spherical bubble" wouldn't, whatever the type. That's relatively easy, I think, that's why I wouldn't be against it. But you also proposed "fake autopilot" for boom AAR planes, one that would guide you to the boom and help you stay on the boom, with adjustable autopilot "strength". Sorry, a DCS plane is either AI, or flyable, they're separate aircraft, so it seems it would actually have to be an AAR-autopilot, for EVERY such aircarft separately - Heatblur now must sit down to write their own AAR-autopilot for Tomcat, ED for the Viper/Hornet, Aerges for the Mirage F1 etc. That doesn't sound easy peasy, lemon squeezy. If you look at it from some kind of "computer science" perspective, than maybe it's no big deal, I know, people have been to the Moon etc., but let me remind you that the "sound bug" in the Sabre took 6 years to solve. And it wasn't a minor one. That's why some people are worried, or at least I am. You don't want to spend 1-10 hours to learn AAR, so instead you want devs to spend hundreds (maybe, in total), while other urgent improvements or bug-fixes will grind to a halt during that time.

I just... I don't want to be an "obstacle to other people's happiness" (don't know how you say it in English), you know, that's not what I desire in life, but OTOH there are jobs to do and actually we're talking about this when ED got down to work on core improvements (MT etc.), so that they can keep the platform afloat, make DCS ready for new CPU/GPU intensive improvements, such as the AI be able to "see" clouds etc. I'd very much like them to continue. I think, BTW, that the recent spate of new 3rd parties might have something to do with it. Maybe ED need... like "external funding" (from 3rd party module sales) so that can finance core features development - which, in their business model - doesn't make any money for them. Modules do, core doesn't.

 

Edited April 10 by scoobie

[Tippis]

4 minutes ago, scoobie said:

But you also proposed "fake autopilot" for boom AAR planes, one that would guide you to the boom and help you stay on the boom, with adjustable autopilot "strength". Sorry, a DCS plane is either AI, or flyable, they're separate aircraft, so it seems it would actually have to be an AAR-autopilot, for EVERY such aircarft separately - Heatblur now must sit down to write their own AAR-autopilot for Tomcat, ED for the Viper/Hornet, Aerges for the Mirage F1 etc. That doesn't sound easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

The only hurdle I can see is whether or not you'll be able to keep the cockpit view. The rest is already in the game. You can take over AI aircraft; you can make the AI take over player (or at least client) aircraft. That's your autopilot right there. The question then becomes one of, is it possible to make the aircraft movement and… I don't even know what to call it, “world interactions”(?) — eg. connecting and disconnecting the nozzle — be driven by the AI but the player still retains the cockpit view and sees what it looks from that perspective? This extreme example would obviously have to have complete player lock-out. The AI is handling the aircraft, so no clicking for you at the moment. It's purely there for you to watch passively without leaving the aircraft.

That's also why its utility would be a bit limited in a larger perspective. As a “do this thing while I get coffee, and then I can go back and spamraam” bypass, it obviously fits the bill. As a teaching tool for AAR, though, it can only really show you the proper perspective and sight lines. Other additional tools would be needed to make it properly interactive. So, good and bad depending on the desired outcome.

Anyway, the point is, full control wouldn't need to be a big deal either. It all depends on how much you can give control to some other mechanism while the player still retains the cockpit view. It's partially possible already, as we see with tracks, but then track recording and playback is still in a way the player controlling the thing using normal inputs… it's just that the inputs come from the track rather than any input devices. So it's hard to say what restrictions and capabilities are needed and what this one example of having the player just ride along tells us about those limits.

[freehand]

So going on the posts this thread is to convince ED to include the feature ? because some like and some do not and if some does not you want to know why correct ?

 

[scoobie]

Regarding what @Tippis wrote 2 posts above.

Oh, OK - full control by AI, probably, I guess. I didn't even know you can pass/take control from/to AI to/from flyable, one day I must read some documentation to DCS
But full control is simply a different feature from what PhantomHans is asking for - a fully automatic AAR (make your coffee or pick your nose etc.), whereas he'd like a guided or handheld-AAR (what?) to ease the learning process. Something like a Russian autopilot, where the A/P has about 20% of authority and the pilot retains the remaining 80%.
Maybe that's easy and can be done "once for all modules" - if so, cool, do it. I'm not sure if it actually helps anybody, but meh - if it's easy, why would I care? But if it's not so easy, and it has to be done for each aircraft separately, I wouldn't like it to be implemented. Other urgent items on the TO DO list, you know.
Still, something tells me it may not be as easy as it is suggested in this thread, because - my way of thinking - if it was easy-peasy ED would have implemented the damned feature long time ago and would have had the recurrent forum commotion out of the way.

As for the perspective, "how it looks from the cockpit", yeah, but... there are plenty of YT videos where you can see that. It looks the same on Youtube as in DCS. And I watched all those videos thinking I would discover some kind of "secret" that would suddenly make me know how to AAR, but... no. Not a bit. A motor skill, not an IQ-related task, no secrets or anything.

EDIT: And regarding those crucial "alignment lines" - the ones that tell you that you have to have this element on the canopy bow aligned precisely with that feature on the tanker's wing/fuselage... Frankly, I never cared about them, I find them more of a distraction. I'm playing in 2D. When I connect (I mean the basket now, not the boom) I just look at the tanker at an angle so that I can see its both the wing and the fuselage and try to take a "mental snapshot" of how it looks. The wing then tells me when I veer off position left/righ/up/down (left/right is easy, the hose is telling you this, up/down is less easy), while the fuselage tells me if I'm falling behind or heading forward too much. The wing is also OK for forward-aft movement, but the fuselage is more precise. Something of this sort. Not that much important for me at least, just a basic guideline, "that looks about right" rule.

As for the missions, some of you have mentioned there are no or not enough of them in DCS out of the box, maybe that's true, but - again - it doesn't matter as there are plenty of them in the User Files, for various planes. And, just like some have explained, they won't teach you anything, they only give you opportunity to get down to practising quickly. It's those where you can get right behind the tanker quickly. Some of such missions are... a bit unwise as the first "phase" is to fly to the tanker using TACAN. Which takes 10 minutes. Sorry, is it a TACAN lesson, or AAR lesson? These missions make no sense, find one where you get behind the boom/basket within a minute, or 2 maybe. But I digress, sorry.

 

Edited April 10 by scoobie

[Tippis]

27 minutes ago, scoobie said:

Regarding what @Tippis wrote 2 posts above.

Oh, OK - full control by AI, probably, I guess. I didn't even know you can pass/take control from/to AI to/from flyable, one day I must read some documentation to DCS
But full control is simply a different feature from what PhantomHans is asking for - a fully automatic AAR (make your coffee or pick your nose etc.), whereas he'd like a guided or handheld-AAR (what?) to ease the learning process. Something like a Russian autopilot, where the A/P has about 20% of authority and the pilot retains the remaining 80%.

Sure, they're quite different. This whole topic has given rise to a bunch of ideas to solve half a dozen related problems over the years and it all overlaps in various confusing ways.

By and large, though, I'm mostly highlighting cases — admittedly extreme ones — that wouldn't require nearly as much work as one might think, as a counter to the standard “wasted dev time” spiel given as opposition. If we wanted automated AAR, we could have it with ease. If we want semi-automated flying helpers, then that requires a bit more, and probably on a per-plane basis which makes it a problem of volume, but even there, some of the code to “nudge” or “snap” the player into place already exists.

32 minutes ago, scoobie said:

As for the perspective, "how it looks from the cockpit", yeah, but... there are plenty of YT videos where you can see that. It looks the same on Youtube as in DCS. And I watched all those videos thinking I would discover some kind of "secret" that would suddenly make me know how to AAR, but... no. Not a bit. A motor skill, not an IQ-related task, no secrets or anything.

EDIT: And regarding those crucial "alignment lines" - the ones that tell you that you have to have this element on the canopy bow aligned precisely with that feature on the tanker's wing/fuselage... Frankly, I never cared about them, I find them more of a distraction.

I bring them up mostly because the detractors always bring them up.

It's usually this curiously mixed argument of “the game can't help you in any way” yet watching a youtube video is supposed to help you even though it offers even less than the game can. And the standard “help” is always to not look at the basket but to line up different bits of your immediate surrounding  — things that will look different to everyone unless they are running a completely static forward cockpit view and if the person showing it off in a video does the same. Almost irrespective of what you're looking for, it's all part of teaching that mental snapshot you're talking about. If you can see the lineup as you will see the lineup — i.e. as your particular setup makes everything show up on your screen with your preferred FoV and seating position and everything — rather than how it appears on someone else's screen with their particular setup, then the game has already done more than the video can.

And I'll readily agree that passively watching the AI go through the motions is only a hair's breadth above watching a video of it, and that there are other implementations that could do a lot more good. But the point of bringing it up as something the game could do is to show that whole notion that the game can't help you is bunk. Well… bunk again, for this reason as well. It was always a contradiction to begin with.

37 minutes ago, scoobie said:

As for the missions, some of you have mentioned there are no or not enough of them in DCS out of the box, maybe that's true, but - again - it doesn't matter as there are plenty of them in the User Files, for various planes.

There really aren't. Yes, there are plenty of missions that put you in the seat of an X behind a Y tanker, but you don't need user files for that — you can set that up in… oh… 15 mouse clicks. Less than it takes you to even go to the relevant webpage section. The problem is, as you point out, that they don't teach you anything because they can't. The facilities needed to do so don't exist in the game. This is where a good set of AAR helpers would allow for the creation of proper missions that teach all the aspects and components of refuelling. The fact that players could conceivably use them to make AAR easier in “live” missions, and some would like this a lot, is mostly a coincidental side-effect.

So don't worry — it's not a digression. You actually put the finger on exactly what the problem is and why more mission creation tools and options are sorely needed.

[PhantomHans]

50 minutes ago, scoobie said:

Regarding what @Tippis wrote 2 posts above.

Oh, OK - full control by AI, probably, I guess. I didn't even know you can pass/take control from/to AI to/from flyable, one day I must read some documentation to DCS
But full control is simply a different feature from what PhantomHans is asking for - a fully automatic AAR (make your coffee or pick your nose etc.), whereas he'd like a guided or handheld-AAR (what?) to ease the learning process. Something like a Russian autopilot, where the A/P has about 20% of authority and the pilot retains the remaining 80%.
 

Full control by AI, "Please wait, the AI will fly to contact and fill the tanks then give control again" would be acceptable for me to have as the easiest difficulty setting, and if it was the only alternative implemented by ED, I would say 'My request has been dealt with in a manner of speaking I guess its good enough for now'...  For that type of system I would ask that it work so that the player gets into precontact without help, and when they ask to be cleared contact the AI takes control, and hands it back over when the tanks are full.

 

What you mention about something like a Russian autopilot would be my ideal solution.  Settings where the player retains a variable amount of control to guide them in a little and lend a helping hand.  When you realize that you're plugging every time all the time with 50/50 control, step it down to the AI only having 40% control, then 30, then 20, etc.  Some day you're at 0% help.

 

If ED said "Programming this is too hard, you get all or nothing" then so be it, as long as scripted missions will recognize the AI taking control and flying to contact as if I am doing it I guess it's good enough. 

 

I am willing and able to accept a solution that isn't my dream ideal fix if it means I can fly with limited fuel and still hit the tanker.

[SharpeXB]

10 minutes ago, PhantomHans said:

if it was the only alternative implemented by ED, I would say 'My request has been dealt with in a manner of speaking I guess its good enough for now'

Good luck with that. They’ve stated repeatedly over many years that they aren’t going to do this. You’re wasting your breath on a well worn topic.