Aircraft demands and how to execute the requests

[AF]

A lot of people here seem to be unhappy with aircraft, and a lot of people are talking about the need to rewrite or fix it, yet veyr few people if any have talked about what is wrong with the code (not the behaviour but the reasons why that behaviour exists ), and how to remedy the problem.

We cannot fix something if we do not know the cause. A lot of people are also suggesting a new aircraft flight model, but no suggestions as to what this would be or how it would work are offered.

This thread is aimed at solving that by discussing:

• What is wrong with the code that is causing the problems
• What replacement systems could be devised that are easier to develop with and scale better when there are large numbers of aircraft

[imbaczek]

1. problems for devs: the code isn't documented pretty much in any way and is a source of crashing bugs (nans) which aren't simple to pinpoint.
2. problems for modders: no ways to tweak aircraft behavior, except for some loopbackattack tags (maybe some more, can't remember now). no idea what modders want here, though.

We cannot fix something if we do not know the cause. A lot of people are also suggesting a new aircraft flight model, but no suggestions as to what this would be or how it would work are offered.

+1 please identify your requirements precisely. (like OTA == not precisely, I haven't played OTA since 10 or so years.)

[Gota]

Personally i don't like the default behaviour air units have in spring and how they are divided and given names.
I personally want a fighter that moves in a certain way but attacks in a different way.
I want a fighter that moves like a gunship I.E turns on the spot but attacks by doing flybys.

Now I'm guessing That the fighter movement in spring,the way it moves and turns,is creating the need for more controls over aircraft as opposed to land units since fighters are impossible to control.

I think aircraft behavior needs to be broken down to more basic tags that you can assemble and create whatever you want.
Like if i want my aircraft to stop in the air when not moving or land or if i want it to never be able to stop or if i want to seperate the way it attacks from how it moves...etc...

And i don't always care if the fighter will move unrealistically or not cause I don't want to simulate realistic flight necessarily in my mod.
IT shpould be possible to have your fighters moving "realisticly" for mods liek s44 etc...but not for ota based mods or any mod that is sci fi..

[AF]

imo we should discard the whole concept of fighter and gunship when talking about how we want to define aircraft behaviour, this si what derailed past discussions

The most basic proof to blow apart any discussion of gunships versus fighters:

An aircraft which swoops down and delivers a bomb does a U turn and then deploys turrets and hovers firing weapons before ascending upwards and raining down bombs and then zooming off.

I agree though a means of assembling disparate behaviours together would be preferable, but how?

[Licho]

I dislike the delays before aircraft becomes controllable. For example after taking off aircraft continues straight line for some time before it starts responding to orders. This is fine for slow aircrafts of BA but in CA they are much faster.


Similary bombers often refuse to turn instantly when given new command, depending on maneuver state - after dropping bombs for example.

[Gota]

Yes i posted about this already.
fighters and bombers,after making an attack run and flying away form the target cannot be ordered to move back(180 degress or close to it) to a location that is inside the radius specified by one of the tags(the tag that makes them fly away form the target to a certian distance before going back).

You can still order them and make them turn back to the point inside the raius if u give the move command to a further location.so u can still make them turn back you just have to click outside the radius...
This is really ridicules.

[lurker]

That's clearly a bug. Don't pretend it's intentional.

[imbaczek]

any volunteers to draw the whole air move types state machine diagrams so both devs and modders have something more concrete to bitch about? it's a complex piece of code, full of not-so-simple math, everybody could use that.

yeah, i know, but i really got to work on that graduation stuff...

[Gota]

That's clearly a bug. Don't pretend it's intentional.

Who said it was intentional?

[lurker]

This is a topic about changing the mostly-intentional air behavior. Something you complain about sounds like that by default unless you say otherwise.

[AF]

hmm, so we know the problems, what about the solutions? How would we redesign the aircraft management system?

[Neddie]

It would be nice to refactor those on/off & 1/0/-1 relationships and insert optional discreet systems where you can actually scale.

[Forboding Angel]

Here is one that has been addressed to some extent..

Aircraft take off and landing speeds, transport pickup and drop speeds. Until recently the only way we had to control this was use maxaccel which is shakey at anything besides 0.3.

Aircraft shaking like old people fucking while flying in a straight line.

The way bombers work. Bombers need to be jsut ripped out and redone from scratch, because everything about their behavior fails. Don't believe me? Give a ba bomber a cruise alt of 500 or 1000 and watch the gheyness ensue.

Gunships are the only aircraft in spring that don't piss me off.

Remove our need for maxaccel. Using maxaccel to control aircraft speeds totally fails. They should obey acceleration and maxvelocity just like everything else.

Fighters, when they aim, they don't point at their target, they point slightly above the target. As a result, any weapon that shoots a straight shot (like a beamlaser) misses epicly, unless you fly the aircraft over the target and then give an attack order in which cause the fighter will then plunge straight down towards the target.

Transports... Anything besides atlas style transportation breaks in every other spring version. As a result, my air transport is essentially an atlas.

[Pressure Line]

Now for srs!

I personally want a fighter that moves in a certain way but attacks in a different way.
I want a fighter that moves like a gunship I.E turns on the spot but attacks by doing flybys.

Thats a bizzare request at best. What possible logic is there for a plane that can stop midair and change directions while just flyin' around, but not when its trying to aim its weapons?

But, if we do get into the business of recreating OTA bugs, why dont we also recreate the one where if you have a bomber (or other slow aircraft) flying in a straight line, and a fighter (or other fast air-to-air capable) tailchases it, fires a few times (without getting a kill) overtakes it, then cant decide which way to turn to get its firing cone back onto the bomber and simply slows down to the bomber speed and flies a few plane lengths in front of it?

Like if i want my aircraft to stop in the air when not moving or land or if i want it to never be able to stop

Already possible. Use the airhoverfactor tag in the .fbi/.lua file.

Fighters, when they aim, they don't point at their target, they point slightly above the target. As a result, any weapon that shoots a straight shot (like a beamlaser) misses epicly...

Geniune bug. Although there are ways around that, but they often don't look pretty at close range. Still a good call though.

Transports... Anything besides atlas style transportation breaks in every other spring version. As a result, my air transport is essentially an atlas.

Yeah, thats annoying too. Having armed transports be able to handle like fighters while flying/attacking then land to embark/disembark transportees would be nice.

Gota, intended behavior that you just don't happen like is not a problem with the engine. Its a problem with you. As before you have several options: shut up and move on, do it yourself (if you need help, just ask [nicely]. But don't expect other people to drop everything they are doing to do something for you.), or find someone with similar goals to do it for you.

As I am sure you know, because you did what I said and looked at the airmovetypes in the source code, combining the current fighter attack code and gunship movement code is not a trivial thing to do. But if you had spent the last 12 months learning about the ins and outs of the code, and picked up a bit of coding skill, you probably would have had it done by now. But instead you chose the other option, which is to piss and moan about how the engine wont do what you want, and that it really needs doing, but that you're not willing to spend the time to even attempt doing it.

/rant

[Gota]

PL,lol,save your time and stay on subject.
There is no point recreating behavior which is not fun.
Why should there be logic involved?If i want my aircraft to move in a certain way how does the fact it makes no sense in RL matters?This is a game..
The point is to make aircraft fun..OTA is an example where they were fun to play with and the only reason im mentioning it over and over is because its the closest thing to spring...

[Otherside]

PL,lol,save your time and stay on subject.
There is no point recreating behavior which is not fun.
Why should there be logic involved?If i want my aircraft to move in a certain way how does the fact it makes no sense in RL matters?This is a game..
The point is to make aircraft fun..OTA is an example where they were fun to play with and the only reason im mentioning it over and over is because its the closest thing to spring...

Fun is subjective, the specific behavior your asking for that you make out to be extremely "fun" does not seem to be a priority or of any importance to anyone else. Your threads about aircraft behaviour turn into flamewars/MTR because you say the same things over and over again whenever flight behavior is mentioned.

Flight behavior does need fixing it does need additional tags

It DOES NOT need to replicate OTA bugs that you seem to make out to be "fun" behavior because it seems that only you want this type of behaviour. So let the people willing to discuss flight behavior and ways to fix it have a discussion rather than butt in and baaw about OTA bugged flight behavior which you seem to believe is the most important thing the spring engine needs.

/gota in this thread.

Ontopic: Id love to see multiple air transports that work ala supreme com without LUA and without jitter :p

[thesleepless]

Id love to see multiple air transports that work ala supreme com without LUA and without jitter :p

for those of us without supcom, care to explain in more detail?

request: possible for aircraft to try to keep a distance from other aircraft while flying as real aircraft would attempt to do?

flying in formations?

[Otherside]

air transports with multiple (visible) load points that can pick up units and deploy them all at the same time. Although this has probably more to do with transport behaviour than air behaviour

[thesleepless]

air transports with multiple (visible) load points that can pick up units and deploy them all at the same time. Although this has probably more to do with transport behaviour than air behaviour

ahh i understand now.

yes.. is transport behaviour tied into aircraft? or is it abstracted between air/sea/land/etc (can you have land transports?)

perhaps transport ideas should be branched off into another thread to keep this focused purely on flying characteristics?

[KDR_11k]

Give a ba bomber a cruise alt of 500 or 1000 and watch the gheyness ensue.

That's because the turn radius is AFAIK computed from the ground (unless that got fixed) so a cruise alt greater than the turn radius means the plane is always "too far away". Increase the turn radius.