Hello all, a quick question. Last knight I tried a Campaign mission as Axis and as a test decided to wander off from my squadron towards the English coast, after about 8 minutes of flying it was a scenic flight. No AI attack from the ground, aircraft etc. Is this normal or it has to be created into the mission? I'm pretty sure it has to be implemented by the creator of the mission but want to make sure. Thanks!

Hi GFeros,

The mission editor in CoD (like most mission editors) presents you with a map, and you need to add the AI-controled objects to it. This includes individual planes or flights, ground vehicles, ships, etc., and there are many "static" objects that can be added as targets or for "atmosphere".

Airbases, cities, roads, bridges, etc., are already present on the map.

The person creating the mission has to make decisions regarding "system resources". If an attempt is made to fully recreate a typical day in the BoB, none of our systems could handle it. So what typically happens is that "just enough" activity is built into the mission to provide the illusion that you are in a real battle.... but if you go off flight path too far, you'll quickly find an empty battlefield.

For online coop missions, there are scripts that cause "timed" spawning of new flights, with some randomness, and this actually can provide the illusion of a fully-populated battle area... you can fly the same mission for quite awhile (assuming no launcher crashes!), and as flights continue to spawn and fly their missions, the mission takes on a "lif of its own" (never the same twice).

Best wishes.

Hello, that explained it very well. Thanks Leadturn_SD.

Yes, and it is a sign of good design if you can fly a frie jagd over the battlefield and still encounter enemy action without following waypoints slavishly.

In my Sealion campaign, I did heavily populate the SE England region with aircraft (and ground vehicles) completing totally independent missions to the main mission the player was engaged in, with the intention of adding immersion. So if your target was to attack shipping off Dover, but you wandered north to Canterbury, you would see RAF and Axis aircraft engaged there.

I also used the proximity trigger in the FMB to spawn enemy aircraft if the player entered a certain area on the map, but I only experimented with this on one occasion, because it is hard to perfect when you have no idea where a player will wander, and it isn't practical to blanket the entire map with these random spawns and then get them to actually intercept the player. You have to trade off a small intercept 'bubble' so that the enemy will engage the player, against the need to cover the most likely areas a player will fly over. It might be possible if, for example, you scripted a spawn bubble over all the RAF airfields, factories and big cities on the map, but that would be a huge undertaking.

As LeadTurn states, you have to make choices, and in Sealion I kept my focus on a small area of the total map, and populated it heavily, but if you as player decided to leave this zone and go totally 'off reservation' and fly north to 12 Group or west to 10 Group, you would find no patrols and only the objects that are hard coded into the map.

This is a little OT, but if you want a truly dynamic BoB campaign experience, you need Battle of Britain II. In that sim the campaign is entirely dynamic and a campaign commandr AI generates the intercepts and responds to your actions so that it is very unusual for any raid you are part of to go without a response. In a BOBII campaign, if you leave your assigned mission and fly off across country, you will often see other raids underway, other dogfights, AAA attacking you, squadrons landing and taking off from British airfields etc etc because the campaign commander AI is generating all that activity, and not relying on a mission designer to do it.

H

Looks like awesome work Heinkil, I will be downloading the Sealion campaign- nice! This community is the best! Great atmosphere here.