Author Topic: Flight Offsets Zero'd Out on First Turn  (Read 715 times)

Offline CptTrips

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Flight Offsets Zero'd Out on First Turn
« on: March 08, 2020, 07:24:39 PM »
Nefarious ran into a nasty little bug.  We were seeing some bizarre behavior of flights on a route forming a conga line instead of maintaining the desired offsets from the route origin.
After a bit of head scratching and cussing we narrowed down the pattern.

In this demo mission we have multiple flights on a common route and each has an offset forming a large bomber group.  It is air-spawned.

There are a series of waypoints.  Here is a happy path where everything is in a straight line.  You click "run" and you see a series of parrallel lines denoting each flights path along their offset from the common route.  This is how it should look.  The offsets are maintained between waypoints.



What we found is if there was any turn or bend between wp0 and wp1, then something weird happened.  It's like the offsets are forgotten during the turn and the formation fall into a conga line until they get past that.  This is an unhappy path.




Other waypoints don't seem to have this problem.  It seems limited between wp0-wp1.



Demo mission is attached.

:salute


[edit]  What we are doing now for a temporary work around is starting our route with two short wp segments that can be kept in line.  After that, everything works normally.






 
« Last Edit: March 08, 2020, 07:31:29 PM by CptTrips »
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Offline hitech

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Re: Flight Offsets Zero'd Out on First Turn
« Reply #1 on: March 09, 2020, 02:42:50 PM »
The work around should be to not add a way point, but to have 2 segments in the first way point. First segment being very short.

HiTech

Offline CptTrips

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Re: Flight Offsets Zero'd Out on First Turn
« Reply #2 on: March 09, 2020, 02:58:53 PM »
The work around should be to not add a way point, but to have 2 segments in the first way point. First segment being very short.

HiTech

Good idea.  Thanks.

 :salute
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Offline hitech

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Re: Flight Offsets Zero'd Out on First Turn
« Reply #3 on: March 09, 2020, 03:12:01 PM »
Fixed for the next patch, but why is that mission created with all solo flights?

Thanks
Dale

Offline CptTrips

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Re: Flight Offsets Zero'd Out on First Turn
« Reply #4 on: March 09, 2020, 03:41:31 PM »
Fixed for the next patch, but why is that mission created with all solo flights?

Thanks
Dale


A couple of reasons. 

1. It allows us more flexibility in creating various formations and spacing how ever we want instead of being limited to only the pre-canned elements that might not fill our needs.
For instance, a Staffelwinkel where the bombers form a large V that ALSO bias' vertically.  Hard to achieve that with a pre-canned formation.




2.  It avoids the bad behavior of drones following their AI leader to their deaths if he is shot down.  Attackers would quickly learn this ploy and wipe out the entire formation in a couple of passes.


However, even if we had used multi-planes elements, with 36 plane formations we would still have had to have had multiple flights with offsets off the route and would have run into this same problem.


:salute
« Last Edit: March 09, 2020, 03:50:30 PM by CptTrips »
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