We must not only Debate here about making the flight simmer experience more enjoyable, but we must talk about the mission builder too. Many flight simmers depend upon 3rd Party mission creators for their missions. I like to think that the more flight simmers find mission building to be easy and available, the more power they will have to enjoy flight simming the way they wish to.
For the WallDog, one example of AI programming that would be useful in both offline and online flight simming (dull dull description followed by explanation)
The tactical space game O-R-B (Orbital Resource Base) allows the player to command hundreds of AI ships either individually or collected into groups. The ships conduct their own very simple combat. The player may select what formation the groups of ships will fly in. For example "X" formation, line formation, Vee formation. The corresponding idea here is to allow flight sim mission builders to define formation that AI planes fly instead of being limited to a single default type (thinking of Forgotten Battles here).
The O-R-B player may take any number of individual ships and order them to group into a single fleet. In O-R-B, if this number exceeds 20 ships then the ships form multiple formations of 20 ships (or whatever number is left over for the remaining formation). These multiple formations are easily controlled and act as a single entity (fleet) but still retain individual ship behavior but confined within its formation.
Even better, the player may define AI behavior for each ship or groups of ships. The available behavior includes total agressive and attack anything within range, shadow or escort another ship or group of ships, total evasive behavior, or "neutral" behavior where the ship/group ignores any targets or threats to itself. Further behaviors include maximum distance before retreating for re~arming weapons. Many other behaviors that I did not explore in my short time playing the space sim.
~
http://www.o-r-b.com/ -----------------------------------------
Sorry for the long description; the important "flight sim" points for O-R-B AI are...
(1)Flight sim mission builders defining number and formation of aircraft from 1 plane up to hundreds of planes.
(2) Flight sim mission builders defining the behavior of AI aircraft. We give an example of hidden AI behavior not documented in Forgotten Battles manual or readme files. If a single engine AI bomber follows a "normal fly" waypoint, it will drop bombs and attack any enemy aircraft within standard AI engagement range--no matter if the enemy plane is not a threat--even a lowly Fi~153 Storch. However if the AI bomber is following a "ground attack" waypoint then it will ignore any aircraft threats to itself and keep bombs and fly to surface target.
The mission builder should be able to define which of these two types of behavior the AI bomber will follow--with the AI programmers possibly coding a random chance of AI ignoring ordered behavior as in real life ~~> THIS last point is a perfect example of how one may "improve" AI programming.
