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[RealDarko]

The Taxi to Take off seems promising even If not all planes can do it.

[UberDemon]

Bad news first, I have a little tweaking I have to do to the code for the BLUE team for it to work as below...

Good news.  Composite flight handling is working well.  I did an experiment generating a mission script attaching 9 Wildcat planes to the ZRCV.  Composite relations can be simple or complex.  In the simple case, it is like a glider, one waypoint attached to the tug... which is working.  For a complex attachment, I want association with many mothership/tug waypoints.  That also would be necessary for escorts.

Because UQMG uses Flight Group perspective, you can have any flight group assigned to any of the start, combat or landing locations... so if I want to use 4 Flight Groups associated with the same base, I can... you could even have the start and end locations be different... even landing at an enemy base.  Anyway for this test all flights are associated with the general waypoint setup of the first flight group, which makes sense... I have to have 3 flights to get 9 planes, and I want the airship to be associated with same base/start location.

In this case the Airship has general bombing at the Action zone... that is so that the AI planes are released from the Airship.  All FGs have landing points at the original base... that is a problem not due to UQMG but the IL-2 engine.  If the Airship does not have a landing point, as opposed to circling around last point, all its associated planes (drones) also do not land.  So if you want your AI drones to land, you have to assign a landing point to the Airship (again, not a UQMG problem... it is an IL-2 engine issue).  Problem is that if Airship survives the mission, it will explode on landing... so it is best to finish mission before that happens.

Anyway, because this is a complex relation between the planes and the Airship, the planes have target points associated with teh mothership throughout the mission.  Once they are released, they will do their own bombing mission (because they were assigned ground attack behavior at the action zone) then they will fly back to the base.

Something very interesting that repeated a few times is that Plane #9, because it is the last to release its bombs, I think, stays further back, and flies back home while escorting the Airship, that happens because of the target waypoints... the other ones take off early so they go home.

Please note the Clone engine is not working yet... so when that works... you will not need to use 4 Flight Groups for this same result... you would use 2.  One for the Airship, and one for the fighters/drones... you would simply have the flight have 3 planes, and add two clone flights.

Anyway here is some eye candy.

[RealDarko]

Looks like a really fun mission!

[UberDemon]

All the talk about speed in the FMB here (https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,72160.0.html), gave me an idea to just incorporate a simple unit converter in the Waypoint Editor.  It has no function in the mission generation, it just displays a simple conversion from meters to feet for altitude, and km/h to Knots for speed for reference/convenience.



It gave me a chance to mess around with VB Lambda Expressions... or Inline functions...

For inquiring minds:

Code: [Select]

'x is input value, and return is the remainder of line
'I am just demonstrating two ways to write it below
Dim CFeet = Function(x) CInt(x * 3.281)
Dim CKnot = Function(x)
                Return CInt(x / 1.852)
            End Function



[genXgamer]

G'day UberDriver

This may be above your pay level, but is there any way to make the squadron codes when marking are switched ON random?
Currently when markings are on the numbers or letters are sequential eg. flight one 1, 2, 3 and 4 or A, B, C and D.
It would much better if they appeared random eg. 11, 5, 16 and 3 or T, J, F and Y.

My preference is always user made skins with full markings but it would still be a great inclusion.

[UberDemon]

That is not something you could control in a ".mis" mission file script.  Within a flight, the sequence is part of the IL-2 engine, combined with the SFS files containing MAT files with the actual characters (ABC, 123, etc).

If someone wrote a routine in Java to randomize the character progression within the 4 aircraft in a flight by randomizing the character sequence without messing the integrity of the code, it could be a possibility, but it would not be something that UQMG would be able to do, as a mission script generator... it would have to be a java class MOD.

What UQMG could do would be to randomize flight clones themselves, but I tell you, I will not do that.  The cloning algorithm implementation will be hard enough using a sequential approach to the regiment names in IL-2.  It would be a nightmare trying to keep the similar units and countries in any kind of rational organization.  Also you lose the inherent communications within the flights of the same squadron.

Sorry.

I recall back in the day there was an application that reorganized the MAT files and allowed for such things.  It did something akin to taking a "01.mat" and assigned a 2 to it and a 3 to the 4, and a 4 to the 2, etc... but I am not sure if it was dynamic enough to change it on a per mission basis...  The guy who wrote it went through the pain of extracting all the MATs by looking at the cache files during program runntime... an arduous task considering that was before the modding days where there was access to extracted SFSs or Java classes... before the Empire... oh wait that is a different mod universe!!!

I did chuckle at "UberDriver" though... I was UberDemon before Uber was created...  I should have copyrighted that...

[genXgamer]

No worries mate, I suspected as much.
I think the application you're referring to is Mat Manager.

[UberDemon]

Yes!  Mat Manager!

And I do have a phone, a face and a car... so I can start my Uber career!

[UberDemon]

Have a lot to report... just not enough time.  Will provide an update when I am able, but it is all good news.

[UberDemon]

19 Mar 2024

* Have a good test mission generation engine, so that I can test features
* Fully Implemented "SAELogic" Algorithm
  --- SAE = Start/Action/End:  This means that any Flight Group (FG) can use the parameters of any other.  There are 12 FGs per Team, and each can use parameters from another FG.  So, FG 1 can start in its base, then go to Action area of FG 3, then it can land in FG5's home... and the waypoint editor allows you to remove certain mission sections... the options are dare I say... endless.  I have been having a bit of fun... you can even land in an enemy base... maybe there is a defection scenario...

* Start Options:
  - Flying over start location (whichever location you pick from below)
  - If you use the FG's default settings, based on the options below

* Land Base is Default - Options are:
1) The Land Base (Spawn points for original flight for taxi, and Line Up to the Right for Clones, also you can scramble or do classic line take off)
2) Water Start (A point in a water body to takeoff using a seaplane, when practical it maybe a real seabase)
 3) Fixed or Moving Carrier in a water body
 
* Map Seabase is Default – Options are:
1) The Seabase (with taxi to takeoff where appropriate)
2) Water Start at alternate location
3) Fixed or Moving Carrier in a water body

* Carrier is Default – Options are:
1) The Default Carrier
2) Water Start (A point in a water body to takeoff using a seaplane, when practical it maybe a real seabase)
3) Alternate Fixed or Moving carrier at different location

Now grasp the concept that for all those... you can start at a different FG's perspective... so you could Take Off from FG2's Alternate Carrier, and Land in FG3's Landbase...

Using Sebases sometimes yields strange results at times... because it uses the default waypoints with alternative start/end locations...  when not over water the planes could crash land...  but... remember you can do a bulk move of whole sections by several kilometers if you wish...   All this is through a fairly simple GUI.

Composite flights are Working (Super easy to setup!)
* Something I am really happy of is the Escort composite feature.  You can have a group of fighters escort a group of bombers with a couple of clicks.  It took me a while to develop the algorithm to do a rough calculation of the escorted flight waypoints so that escorting makes sense...
* Gliders and Tugs work really well and you can set up delays for proper behavior… that is, you can set delays for when the glider appears.  For most scenarios, you can have the Gliders appear at the same time if it starts on air with the tug.  When you takeoff, behavior varies.  You can have a typical He-111Z + Me-321 pairing in a runway, but it must be a classic takeoff in the runway… you can’t taxi like that.  If you wanted the tug to taxi, if would need to taxi on its own.  Through trial and error you can figure when the He-111Z is ready to takeoff in the runway, then you can have the Me-321 Spawn then.  Depending on how long the taxi is, it is generally a matter of 2-3 minutes.
* Other composites work as well and you can setup an ace flight in a similar way.  For example, get Erich Hartman plane, then use a separate FG as an escort of Bf-109G-6s to him… that makes for a powerful foe, since the Ace of Aces has an escort…

*Briefing engine and all mission properties are working, such as Fog of War settings.
…
And I wanted to wait to talk about it but… Fortunately I was able to adapt the UQMG Classic routine to account for Clones…   I have made great progress and I am at the point that these are now working:
* Cloning Engine Accounting of used Regiments is working correctly, and is fully adapted from my old code, so it is very stable, the difference is that instead of using several files being written, it is all done through my own way of using field based pseudo matrices, all through memory and not in the disk.  Much faster.  (This does not sound like much but keeping tabs on what regiments are used and can be used is a labor intensive thing, especially because each regiment has 16 total flights (00, 01, 02, 03, 10, … etc, up to 33)
* Wing construct is working
* Flights properties for clones are functional
* Clone Waves, including algorithm to spawn at proper times is also working (so if you have 1 flight with 8 clones, and you want 3 flights per wave, at the beginning of the mission, you have 3 flights in the same flight group, then at your selected interval, say, 5 minutes, another wave of three planes appear, and at 10 minutes the last wave of 3 flights appear.

Things I need to work next:
* Build engine to calculate Clone waypoint differentials (first implementation will be just like UQMG classic in which the large clone formations look like an asterisk… because I can adapt the existing function from UQMG Classic
* Adapt the Waypoint Routine already working for original flights but for clones, using the function above,
* Develop other formation shapes like large diamonds, spirals, wedges, etc…
* Clone details, such as AI skill variation

There is still much to be done:
* Randomization
* Ground object options/editor
* Some basic help features
* Tutorials
* Full save/load capabilities
* A way to apply some obsjectives
* other features…

At some point I'll have some screens.

[UberDemon]

Bad News First:
* I have not finished implementing cloning... and there are a few bugs I need to fix, mainly on keeping track of some global variables (which are causing some bad syntax in the mission, and I need to make sure that taxi points and landing points are not being changed during the cloning process.

Good News:
* Generated a first run using 40 B-18s for a trial of the engine, and it worked, but as I mentioned above, I need to fix it to allow full functionality.  I was able to adapt some of the pieces from the old UQMG classic, but some other things are new because the engine is more complex.

More to come.

[RealDarko]

Pretty impressive!