Volunteers needed, to test experimental AI tweaks

[kapuhy]

Hi Muckenberg, thanks for the report. Hopefully I'll get some free time during next weekend to try to experiment with plane characteristics and see how they come into play. For now thing to look into: spitfires, zigzagging, and crashing into sea.

As for second Hurricane continuing, that's a but weird - it should only behave this way if it's out of bombs...

Originally Posted by Pascal

It's strange to see some planes crashing into the sea by themselves - well, it's obviously quite unrealistic and it should be possible to simply remove this action from the script (beginner pilot removed)

If only it was so simple... avoiding crashing into water is done by following block of code:

strategy AvoidImpact(Plane)
{
precond
{
Plane:StrafingTooClose()
}
action
{
Plane:AvoidWaterImpact();
}
}

Simple, right? Problem is, we don't know how exactly StrafingTooClose() and AvoidWaterImpact() work. Their code is inside sim.act file which we can't read. So we can only experiment with adding some extra conditions for these functions - but not modify functions themselves.

Edit: only way I was able to eliminate crashing into water completely, was by switching ALL planes to "level bomber" mode and adjusting their minimum height so that they just pass high over target trying to carpet bomb it. With this approach, however, they were so inaccurate they might as well be removed from game to save some fps.

[Pascal]

March 41 - 2 spitfires hover over the sub gracefully; these planes do not appear to be armed and are easily shot down

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by Pascal

March 41 - 2 spitfires hover over the sub gracefully; these planes do not appear to be armed and are easily shot down

Thanks!

According to game files they are armed - but these light fighter types are also the worst in terms of being able to use their weapons. In my tests Spitfires crashed into sea more often than drop bombs, unfortunately.

There's also another problem with these planes - they should be extremely rare in game (please correct me it I'm wrong, but for all I know there was not a single historical case of Spitfire or Hurricane attack on U-Boat at sea), yet from what I hear SH5 players encounter them more often than dedicated anti-submarine patrol planes.

I'm not a campaign expert, so maybe there's a reason this wasn't done but as far as I'm concerned, game would benefit from drastic reduction of light fighter planes range, to the point where player would only encounter them close to harbors.

[propbeanie]

Depending upon how much of SH4 is in SH5 kapuhy, look at the AirBase cfg files for the AirGroups. In SH4, there are Small, Normal and Large Type=406 AirBase sets, and the LargeGr has a 2 Group of

[AirGroup 2]
StartDate=19401226
EndDate=19420601
Squadron1Class=USFighter
Squadron1No=9
Squadron2Class=LBSUSSearchPlane
Squadron2No=10
Squadron3Class=FBHurricaneMk1
Squadron3No=9
Squadron4Class=LBWhitley
Squadron4No=2
Squadron5Class=USHeavyBomber
Squadron5No=4
Squadron6Class=FBP40Kittyhawk
Squadron6No=4

That is 38 planes altogether, which with the game's logic is about 26 planes too many... - when the player's boat is detected in SH4, the AirBase seems to send out all-available, with a bit of an AirStrike.cfg pause between each "send". From what we saw in testing in SH4, a player boat will usually cause the game to generate seven response planes, each round of the AirStrike (whatever that is set to), and they'll show up in grouping of one, two or three airplanes usually, with each grouping on a slightly different heading. btw, SH4 (and 3) has the use of DummyBomb to "fake" the airplane into attacking, and of course, on that DummyBomb attack run, the plane gets close enough to engage with it's machineguns, so it looks like a strafing run. SH5 of course, has the script files to help with that also... - so check the cfg file of the LAB_NameAirBaseCountry set of files, and see if the Spitfire and Hurricane might not be over-represented, and probably have to large of a "radius" set for them. Also, there is no such thing as "bingo fuel" to a Silent Hunter airplane...

[Pascal]

http://www.histoire-en-questions.fr/...is-avions.html

[Pascal]

http://www.avionslegendaires.net/dos...astal-command/

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

- so check the cfg file of the LAB_NameAirBaseCountry set of files, and see if the Spitfire and Hurricane might not be over-represented, and probably have to large of a "radius" set for them.

Oh I did, back when I was working on Air Force mod. Not just Spitfires and Hurricanes, but fighters in general are over-represented both in stock SH5 and in TWoS. I also browsed through uboat.net while working on that mod and basically made a list of all documented cases of either plane damaging/sinking a U-Boat or vice versa, and I'm pretty sure many fighter planes present in SH5 never attacked a U-Boat during entire war.

Fixing this, however, requires pretty big edits to campaign air groups and is beyond scope of little AI tweak tested here.

[Mister_M]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

I also browsed through uboat.net while working on that mod and basically made a list of all documented cases of either plane damaging/sinking a U-Boat or vice versa, and I'm pretty sure many fighter planes present in SH5 never attacked a U-Boat during entire war.

I would be very interested to see this kind of list.

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by Mister_M

I would be very interested to see this kind of list.

Sure - here's my spreadsheet file, listing planes from the one with most recorded battles with U-Boats to ones with no encounters at all:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1db9...ew?usp=sharing

As for sources, I used two lists on uboat.net:

1) Aircraft losses to U-Boats:
https://uboat.net/history/aircraft_losses.htm

2) U-Boat losses (these are ordered by year, with cause of loss noted by each boat):
https://uboat.net/fates/losses/

Of course there's a gap in data here - the list doesn't cover battles that didn't result in destruction of either plane or the boat. Still, if a plane didn't score any kills or suffer any losses, one can assume it either wasn't used or was utterly ineffective in this role.