It has always bothered me that several twin engined planes performing in a bomber role were sitting ducks, so some pretty observable changes were made to this behaviour. They will now be more evasive and may actually even start fighting back, after all they're heavily armed and why not use this feature for a more challenging fight.

Ofcourse their main objective is to bomb the target and they're still pretty successfull at that, even when under heavy attack. Their behaviour was enhanced without compromising the original routines, in other words they will still do as was programmed but with an additional chance to do something new. In most situations they will try to regroup but it may not always be possible when for instance these planes are under constant attack or suffer from target fixation, which is not abnormal in the game.

Planes with extra (dorsal/tail/turret) gunners may try to bring down the enemy or at least try and slow them down so the rest of the group can make it out of the battle area safely, even when they have no primary weapons or these ran out of bullets. I programmed a distinct difference between Axis and Allied aircraft, in that the Axis planes tend to be more agressive, which I think is in line with reality and since I think there are more Allied pilots still flying it also serves as a purpose to make it a bit tougher for them, but it will also not be easy when you fly the other side.

These changes will be in the next release of EAWPRO!

VonBeerhofen

Few questions.

Is this dependent on the AI experience level? Meaning, is it more likely to occur with experienced AI pilots than with green pilots?

How is this different from the "Attack plane" setting in the planes.dat file?

"Planes with extra (dorsal/tail/turret) gunners may try to bring down the enemy" - Are you saying you have added extra guns to some of the aircraft in a formation?

No it's currently luck of the draw, but it easily can be. I think it's not a bad idea though.

Enemy AI bombers in Intercept missions and friendly AI bombers in Escort missions don't care about the Attack plane switch, not even the twins. They rely on their escorts to protect them, their objective is to drop bombs and get the hell out, they will not fight in v1.2 but they do now.

No, it means that it will use whichever guns were given to the plane unless those guns are out of bullets.

VonBeerhofen

Sounds interesting. A nice enhancement. Looking forward to taking a look. Thanks

Ah, OK. I'd forgotten about the limitations in the older versions of EAW.

Off memory do the Me110,s do the defensive wheel when under attack?

No planes will attack when performing bombruns in Escort and Intercept missions, they're not primary airplanes and not under human control. In EAWPRO the Mosquito, P38J, 110G and 410 do for now, but any plane can be assigned to do this behaviour. It's essentially part of designing EAWPRO's slotfree system.

In other bombing missions as primary planes under human control they will start fighting as soon as they spot the enemy but regroup when the command is given by the human pilot. The Attack Groundtargets command doesn't help in this when these planes are under attack, something which these new routines can possibly fix too but I haven't looked into that yet.

VonBeerhofen

It is as I suspected and with a minor addaptation to the new routines, bombers will no longer engage, irrespective of what mission they fly wether it's a human controlled group or not. However in human controlled missions all tactical commands remain operational, i.e. commands to attack, and they may well follow those orders.

Obviously bombers are not meant to fly an escort with other bombers but they still can and will stay in close formation unless ordered otherwise. I think the fun of it is that new strategies have to be develloped in order to accomplish the mission and keep the group alive. The AI will follow the leader and as such human pilots need to keep an eye on attacking aircraft and fly evasive when necessary, after all most of the bombers don't have human controlled guns and their strength lies in staying in formation. In short, bombers now behave as bombers should when they have no real fighting capability and it feels realistic to me.

When bombers are on their own, after for instance the initial attack on ground objects or having been crippled and slowly loosing connection, the human player can try to slow down too to maintain a coherent group and perhaps save the crippled plane from getting destroyed. As far as I can tell from these few missions it's a whole new ball game.

Bombers can seek the protection of the escorts in human flown missions but that may lead em straight into the turmoil as the escorts will be fighting enemy AI and there's no telling when they'll head back to base. All in all there's no telling how the AI routines will handle this new stuff but I kept all original behaviour intact except where I felt this behaviour wasn't appropiate and the new routines will only kick in when everything else fails. They were written for easy addaptations and tweaks when necessary but there's a tonne of new possibillities which simply can not all be tested but I'll be keeping an eye on how it behaves during the Launchpad's online sessions and tweak things further when necessary.

VonBeerhofen

I've build a new plane filter for EAWPRO and it's working great. The filter allows a better use of the current PLANES.DAT switches which control AI behaviour and I now have additional strike-fighters, attack-bombers, fighter-bombers, and invaders which can easily be set by the players, that is if they understand how to edit the PLANES.DAT file with or without Jelly's tools. Needless to say that with these changes the PLANES.DAT has become more version specific but remains backwards compattible. The older versions of this file will merely activate this new behaviour when any of the switches are set, which I believe will only result in more interesting and definately different mission types in which bombers play a more intelligent role and stick to what bombers usually do, focus on delivering their payload. Once that's done they become more free to make it harder on the players to kill them but their objective from then on is to try and leave the battle area asap.

There's now also a possibillity for an automatic night-fighter version selection, which is obviously selected when it's dark and I may filter out the Quad planes to always stay in formation, irrespective of what mission type they're used in. I found it a challenge to fly these planes in an escort mission and try to stay with the other bombers to have more defensive fire power. The group just followed me where ever I went, so I filled up a gap in the bomber formation. With that I performed the exact same role as the bombers themselves. The only snag is that I can't tell my own B17's to attack, disperse or break away yet but they did listen to the formation orders to loosen or tighten formation. It'll need a lot more flying to find out what else is possible.

As I wrote before it's a whole new ballgame and the full effect of this still have to be discovered, so I'll be doing a lot of flying to see if things can be further improved. It's all working the way I imagined it would and I may still add some extra features, like the night-fighters and commands which aren't in yet. I just don't want to do too many checks on all planes which could compromise framerates. In my experiments I also found that it's possible to program conflicting behaviour where my new AI behaviour is overridden by another routine elsewhere, telling the plane to do something else. Both commands are executed in the same loop which led to nervous behaviour, much more throttling up or down and/or planes seemingly changing their minds.

For now I didn't incorporate this behaviour and the attack switch is also temporarily disabled. Although it worked great it seemed to cause an intermittent CTD late in the mission, so I'll see what's been causing that and hopefully fix it. I liked what it was doing and I want it. It mainly caused a small chance for planes under fire to turn against their agressors and go into full fighter mode (even B17's but it can be made optional). Basically it's the same behaviour as what happened when you flew bombers in the original game, but this will now only happen to an individual plane under fire and not the whole group, so that's usually the planes in the rear which get hit first and fall back. They attract attention from the enemy and kind of fight to the death making them eligible for a heroic posthumous medal giving the rest of the group a better chance to get away after fullfilling their objective.

It's not all there yet but the basis for it is programmed and tested to work. Bombers are less easy to shoot down and will break up into two formations when attacked when the proper switches are set in the PLANES.DAT and each group will be more or less evasive depending on the situation they're in. Still a long way to go but it's getting there. The number of missions I already flew is staggering and the game is running from dawn till late at night, selecting all kinds of missions and planes, due to a lack of beta testers who know what to look out for or what to test. There's no quick and easy way to make this work good, you have to fly, try and observe. It was fun to see the Stuka try and attack B17's or even P38's, hell they even killed a few of em. P38's would pull up steep and the Stuka would try and follow but usually got into a near stall situation because it's way too slow and heavy. Hey you do what you can right? Even if you happen to fly a postal plane into the battle area with a pilot who's only got a handgun to defend itself, lol.

I realise that what I've done may not be to everyone's liking but I like it a lot and I need new approaches to keep the Launchpad squadron happy and flying, which is my main objective and I think it will incite them to fly the bombers more often, if they don't then I will as I'm always happy to be the target. They'll be testing things further and occasionally give some feedback. A release of this just has to wait untill a few other issues are fixed, like the new pilotmap lead plane's colors for which a new palette will have to be created. I'm sorry for this delay but there's a lot of work involved.

VonBeerhofen

A new filter was programmed which allows more diverse maneuvering for the lower skill levels. Expert planes remain unaltered by the new filter. The lower skills now have a 10% chance to do expert moves when the enemy is within 2000 feet. Expert planes are programmed to enter this phase when the enemy is closer then 1000 feet, simply because they react faster then lower skills. Additionally, the lower skills can still optionally follow the original game's maneuvering phases when not selected by the random routine. This essentially seperates rookie pilots from the more skilled and asigns them to their own maneuvering phases with a newly added phase for the greenest, which wasn't there previously.

In short, the lowest skill, which in v1.2 was set the same as medium, now has it's own maneuvering phases and criteria for carrying them out and with the medium skilled they have an additional random option to do expert moves if the enemy is closer then 2000 feet. An additional benefit of this is that planes are less likely to get stuck in a repetitive or endless loop, like endlessly flying circles around each other because the game only allows that one option for a particular skill level under certain circumstances. The random expert moves will make em do something entirely different.

Another benefit is that these lower skill levels are more likely to react sooner when an enemy gets close, i.e. within 2000 feet. This behaviour changes real time and makes it much less predictable as to when the none expert planes will start using expert maneuvering or when they stop doing that. The routine doesn't influence the preprogrammed reaction times for each skill level, so inspite of being able to detect the enemy sooner their moves will remain as sluggish as in v1.2. You can't become an ace pilot in a single battle but you can occasionally do the right thing either by accident or by learning from mistakes.

Furthermore the criteria calculation now also allows higher skill levels to be introduced (Advanced Criterium Emulation or ACE for short, ), EAWPRO already has many provisions for this but it's only partially active due to a limitation in the cofiguartion screen to select only 3 skill levels. I hope full implementation will follow.

How this will play out in the end is beyond my prediction but anyone with advanced knowledge on AI behaviour is welcome to write an essay about it,

VonBeerhofen

After an intense week of testing and finding out what's possible here's a few pictures of the fun I had:

Bombing mission, the Heinkels are under heavy fire and I have an enemy plane padlocked


Interdiction mission, While I went down to destroy the train my group dropped bombs from high altitude causing the secondary explosions in the background, close but no cigar!


Escort mission, my B24's coplemented B17's en route to the target and I tried to stay in formation with them while under heavy enemy fire.


In all missions fighters were fighting fiercely in the battle area, in total around 100 planes were smoothly doing their job on my ancient WinME Pentium IV with an old 32MB gForce2 and 256MB memory, haven't had this much fun in while, it was a blast! I tried all the altered planes as well, mainly twins, and they obeyed every command and in bombing missions focused on their task, unless they got hit and dropped their loads to attack the enemy. In one mission my group got through the enemy fighterscreen, destroyed the target and I regrouped as the enemy was landing. I flew back and told my group to start attacking while I strafed the airfield. One enemy plane was still eager to fight and I had to deal with him myself, but I got shot down trying to eliminate enemy gun positions on and around the airfield. My group was reluctant to leave after I made an emergency landing between the smoking planes, captured but still alive!



VonBeerhofen

It's come to my attention that some people do not understand how to select the previously none flyable planes which are not directly accessible through the plane selection screen. They can be selected and edited from from within any hangar by selecting the MISSION PARAMETER editor that sits on each desk in any hangar. When in the Parameter Selection Screen you then select the LOAD option at the bottom of the screen and a list of MISSION (.MSN) files will be displayed. You can select any of them, no matter which hangar you're in. The Default** ones contain your last flown mission for each plane, sadly they don't give much information about which number corresponds to which plane but they're sequentially American, British, German.

The ones which display their name were SAVED from within the parameterscreen, very usefull to setup planecombinations and targets that you like but can still edit after it's loaded. I could give you a list of the default numbers but I think you can also write each number down after selecting each and note the plane you've selected. If you want to fly Mosquitos you select Mosquito vs ******. You can also save the Default missions with a name yourself. To do this you start with loading Default00 and you save it under the name P38J vs WHATEVER. Having all planes there you can quickly navigate between planes and load any on the fly without having to go back to the plane selection screens.

When a mission is SAVED it'll store all your selections and you can store up to 256 mission files yourself, either before or after the mission is flown. It's more convenient to do things this way and has become a real timesafer when testing all possible combinations. The saved missions remain unchanged untill they're overwritten with a new one but every time you load one it will randomise the target location as part of a new airfield and target check to prevent CTD's when .MSN files are corrupt, don't work, or aren't at all present (which is the case in nearly all old addons). When a certain plane's selection has become corrupt you can still get to it's Mission file via any other Hangar and set it right again by editing the corrupt plane's mission parameters, provided you understand which one to select. Flying the mission will overwrite the old Default**.MSN file and things will work normal from there on.

Note that when you reselect the same target and/or airfield already present in a corrupt .MSN file, the selection can't be set since either of the two is an illegal choice. Just select another one which displays the target number on mouse over and the file should be fine from then on as the editor only allows legal targets to be selected. Illegal target locations are greyed out in the editor, an indication of a corrupt .MSN file. Sometimes they can still be flown and will allow take off from enemy bases or attacks on friendly ones, but being corrupt you may not be able to enter these plane's hangars on startup directly, except with this method.

VBH

With the bombers becoming more usefull a new calculation for their positioning on the runway became necessary and has been successfully implemented. The new routine now uses the various planetypes in the calculation to offset their location in the grid. All planes are now using this new routine and spacing is in 3 categories for now, single engined, twins and quads. The two rows were seperated a bit more to make room for the B17 and other quad planes.

VonBeerhofen

At last, and well done

Thx Mr. Jelly. Things just tend to take a bit more time without an entire codegroup to help, it's a one man operation here but it's getting there. First things first right? How's your illuminated airfields coming along, any progress?


VonBeerhofen

We have flarepaths if needed but I cannot run EAW on this laptop here in Rochefort, so I cannot post a screenie.
As far as coding goes it is a one man band here too

I wasn't going to say anything because, well, you all know why, but this is the truth.

At it's peak the Code Group had two very good amateur coders and a few others who made important contributions, lets say second tier programmers.

Then there were probably 4 to 5 modelers who took advantage of the improvements the Coders produced. There was some crossover in this group because some of them could code AND model.

And there was a separate group, The ModSquad, who worked with the coder group on a number of projects but had their own management structure.

Now it's just Jel coding, Iron Mike skinning and me working through the various scenarios, adding improved aircraft and targets. ( We do hope to get Moggy back in the mix at some point but he's deep into some real life, pay the bills, projects.)

Putting things in perspective, the small group that makes up today's Code Group has produced an incredible variety of functional improvements to the game as well as a vast array of new aircraft.

For the most part only available in the 1.6 development line, I might add.

Well that explains why things don't always immediately happen, doesn't it? It's all a matter of importance. I've seen Moggy's little illuminated blocks and they're a pain to place a few hundred on each airfield in the airfield.dat. There's some 150 of those, that's 15.000 edits and you'll run out of room real quick in the target files, not much room for anything else after that. I think you'd better look for some other way to do it, I know it's just eyecandy but still. I guess you have other things on your mind too, so all in due time eh?

What I show is only available in EAWPRO,:) and was done without anyone's help I might add.

VonBeerhofen

It has been very calm and polite for a good while.

Let’s not start things up. Small comments results in more pointed responses which then escalate into a conflagration.

Sorry OG but this comment suggests that I am using Moggy's little illuminated blocks for the flarepath, which unfortunately needs a correction. The effect is achieved by a completely different method.

Jel