WW2 BAD-T 2 - BDA AI Dogfight Tournament [SEMIFINALS]

[gridghost]

17 hours ago, tetryds said:

<snip>

I have seen piston airplanes killing jets, mainly because of the AI, not sure how they go with the update.

</snip>

I tested this yesterday (guns only), and given the AI setup I used on the jet, it either killed the prop rather fast or shot to the sky in a never ending climb.

6 hours ago, Gnoyze said:

How do you design your planes so well? what cockpits are those and how do you get the body to not be stock color?

I would guess he is using B9 Aerospace Procedural Wings and Procedural Parts to make his planes.

[Pds314]

9 hours ago, gridghost said:

I tested this yesterday (guns only), and given the AI setup I used on the jet, it either killed the prop rather fast or shot to the sky in a never ending climb.

I would guess he is using B9 Aerospace Procedural Wings and Procedural Parts to make his planes.

That would be correct. For ex, the cockpits are 13-19 procedural wings. The bodies are all almost entirely P-wings.

19 hours ago, Veeltch said:

You're building a flying wing, aren't you?

I did, and it works with me piloting it, although it's a bit too unstable in pitch to be a good fighter, but the AI can't control it, unlike a previous flying-wing I built with 2x Panthers.

With regards to my 2x Vickers S sailplane fighter, apparently, there were Hawker Hurricanes of that configuration, though I doubt they were intended for dogfighting. 

Edited March 4, 2016 by Pds314

[pyrosheep]

I keep having stability problems with the mods in the list.

I run into NaN errors and strange phantom masses, i think the B9 procedural wings, FAR and maybe procedural parts are the culprits.

Is  anyone else having issues?

[Gnoyze]

After about 30 prototype planes that failed, I'm afraid I will be dropping out and restoring the backup of my previous KSP folder. Honestly, I'm not good with planes ^^' (Though I still have these mods in that save as well, so I may happen to create a working plane after all)

[Doke]

14 minutes ago, Gnoyze said:

After about 30 prototype planes that failed, I'm afraid I will be dropping out and restoring the backup of my previous KSP folder. Honestly, I'm not good with planes ^^' (Though I still have these mods in that save as well, so I may happen to create a working plane after all)

Don't be discouraged! Making planes is hard, but I'm sure people will be happy to give you advice. Anyway, it doesn't have to be the best plane. The point is to have fun.

[tetryds]

@pyrosheep procedural parts with zero diameter in one of the faces is known to cause issues when you place things on the node created at the 0 diameter face. Especially when you use ctrl+z.

So I would advise avoiding ctrl+z to undo anthing that interacted with a procedural part and nor using 0 diameter parts, use the nosecone instead.

[tetryds]

Attention everybody, the deadline for submitting your BAD-T airplane is 13th March 23:59h.
You have a bit more than a week to refine your designs and submit them, if some of them breaks the rules accidentally, I will send you a PM and you will have 24h to submit a new one that does not break the rules.
Tell everybody you know about this, and good fights

[MarvinCZ]

1 hour ago, tetryds said:

Attention everybody, the deadline for submitting your BAD-T airplane is 13th March 23:59h.
You have a bit more than a week to refine your designs and submit them, if some of them breaks the rules accidentally, I will send you a PM and you will have 24h to submit a new one that does not break the rules.
Tell everybody you know about this, and good fights

What time zone? Also, what version of BDArmory will be used? The first post still says v10.3.2 but most people seem to be testing on a newer version.

I will have a light fighter ready. I don't expect to win much against the great craft I saw here, but it will fly

[tetryds]

10 minutes ago, MarvinCZ said:

What time zone? Also, what version of BDArmory will be used? The first post still says v10.3.2 but most people seem to be testing on a newer version.

I will have a light fighter ready. I don't expect to win much against the great craft I saw here, but it will fly

I won't be THAT rough on the deadline, as long as the date says 13th, it's okay.
And yeah, latest BDArmory, let me update that.

[Pds314]

It seems that there's a general rule with my designs: monoplanes suck, fused wings and biplanes own.

Like, seriously, when I make a plane that I think is totally impossible to stall under any circumstances, the AI will find a way to make it fly in reverse.

Edited March 9, 2016 by Pds314

[SasquatchM]

Whelp, I just submitted my first FAR based craft -  after only 27 revisions! A 95 point light fighter.

 

Coincidentally this is also the first time I have used FAR, so thanks for the reason to finally start learning the ins and outs of it.

[Van Disaster]

Well I started on something, but the AI seems to change behaviour every BDA patch atm & I can't keep up ( my old jets from Wanderfound's contest are currently attempting orbit rather than combat, so it's not specific to slow planes ). Maybe next round then, will eagerly await some video of this one.

I still suffer horrible control bounce too, a long-standing battle that one...

[tetryds]

The version of bdarmory that will be used is the one on the OP.

You still have plenty of tine to work on your airplane

[Van Disaster]

Hm, well here's a stream of a dev hack fighting the ( default AI settings ) dummy, I'm pretty sure you can hear me screaming at the AI quite often well we'll see, but it's pretty frustrating that it still decides to be a sitting duck every now and then. We somewhat got round that in older versions by making the craft so snappy that flying straight was difficult, but that doesn't really work.

 

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NezL0siOLYw

Admittedly seems to be a little more aggressive with a wingman...

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-VnPaHwq2g

But still makes me want to punch the AI pilot

Hurricanes with 2x40mm were anti-tank aircraft, I'd seriously doubt any of them shot at an aircraft actually in the air.

Edit: much later, I still don't understand why the AI does what it does; sometimes it doggedly hangs on to a target's tail, sometimes it just goes skywards or simply ignores a target :S

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmfXtfdbtnA

Still, I appear to be able to stream 1080p which might be of use ( time permitting ).

Edited March 9, 2016 by Van Disaster

[Dwerto]

5 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

Edit: much later, I still don't understand why the AI does what it does; sometimes it doggedly hangs on to a target's tail, sometimes it just goes skywards or simply ignores a target :S

Does adding one of the WW2 ball antenna radars help with the ignoring of targets?

Also I've found that at least in my experience with the new AI changes, the best airplane is no longer always the one with the smaller turn radius.

This is one of my best fighters and it doesn't even turn that well.

[Van Disaster]

IIRC they decide whether to extend based on the difference in energy between them and the target, but there's a worrying tendancy to forget the target they just flew past when they're extending vertically so they end up sitting ducks. Sometimes they just seem to pick a behaviour at random. They do like extending above the default altitude setting - I thought that was what was influencing matters but apparently not. I'd build B&Z craft if I trusted they'd not try and get in turn fights - same as several months ago

I'll check the WW2 radar is actually turned on, I guess that might help. I was amused by one of the 2x4 fights where the plane I was focusing on saw her wingman attacking four craft and promptly pulled an Immelmann & ran off!

[tetryds]

So, we have a few days until the submissions close. I didn't try the airplanes, but they look really promising, I have hopes that this will be the best dogfight tournament to date.
That is mostly thanks to the dummy, it turned out to be the best idea I have ever had, on the previous tournaments you had literally no reference when building your airplanes.
But this time there is a goal, it's actually fun to build something to crunch the dummy mercilessly, and that raises the overall quality of the submissions by orders of magnitude.
I am not sure if some people did this, but while the dummy was meant to raise the standard, I also built it with the idea that it could be easily improved to put up a better fight, that is also the reason why I did not add the AI to it.
So, one can easily remove the bombs, put a pair of .50cals instead of the ShKAS's and tweak the AI, that way you can quickly get a fairly decent opponent to fight against, and improve your airplane even further.

But the original dummy itself is already fair, it's underarmed, underpowered and undertweaked, and still ended up performing much better than what I would have expected, I literally tried to make an airplane that does nothing but fly in circles but people reported being killed or having a hard time against it at first, the first iterations of my own entry didn't kill it as fast as expected either.

Unfortunately I did not have time to make the FAR tutorials I have promised so many times, I am sorry, but I see that most of you learned a lot anyway, and that is really good.
I still plan to make them on the future, it's not like BAD-T will die at its second version, but the opposite, I hope to be able to host much nicer battles on the future.
But that is not all, I recently ordered an i7 4790k, which I plan to overclock to around 4.6GHz, so the idea is to be able to host insane battles at decent FPS.

So many people asked if they could submit both a fighter and a heavy fighter that I will study the possibility of making 2+1x2+1 battles on BAD-T 3 on KSP 1.1, with two fighters and one heavy fighter, and raising the part count up to 80 on the heavies, that kind of stuff.

The data that will come from this set of battles will also allow me to fine tune the DMG_MULTIPLIER of BDArmory, to either make the battles last longer or be faster, provide feedback for AI improvements and even improvements on the weapons modules themselves.

The new BAD-T arenas are simply amazing, I had a lot of fun experimenting with them, their locations are quite unique and if I throw scatterer on the top of it everything looks fantastic (I'm having small RAM issues but I should fix that removing everything that is not an arena).

We have 11 entries + 2 confirmed entrees so far who didn't submit yet, a total of 13 airplanes.
So I will be aiming for 16, 20 or 24 entries, but I have the feeling that we are going to have 16 airplanes again just like on the previous BAD-T, which was a good amount.
If you want more than that, simply advertise the tournament to people who would be interested, the more the better

This time the battles will be scheduled, and I will upload them on a fixed pace, with 16 entries we will have 15 battles, I am still unsure about how much time I am going to have for this, but the plan is to upload 3 to 5 battles a week, and get BAD-T 3 going as soon as all the mods are updated and working flawlessly on KSP 1.1.

I am still studying the possibility of a decent prize for the winner, but I am not sure about what I can do, so I won't promise anything for now.

[Wjolcz]

OK, submitted my... THING. I hope it performs alright.

[Van Disaster]

I have an i7 3930k running at 4.4Ghz & well, you saw how the 2x4 fight went, the stream encoding was 30fps but sadly not the game - hopefully 1.1 should be better for big fights. I'm not sure if there's any other cpu intensive mod I stuck in there which might help if removed, it's basically scatterer & the old cloud mod which do very little damage to fps if there's only one craft around.

The dummy is a good idea; I did like the last BDA tournament I was in because it was a rolling king-of-the-hill thing, so your reference was always the current champion; craft improved *fast*. For this one, fighting your previous best is probably a good idea.

[crashsolo36]

this dummy performs better that a lot my designs, the dumb thing keeps shooting my planes down.. YEAH! the DUMMY all i added was the AI and Weapons Modules.. i didn't even tweak anything just default and it kept shooting my early designs down.. at this point i got frustrated and went for my P-51 Clone i made a few months ago..(http://www.ksp-players.com/en/logbook/crashsolo36/crafts/227).

the thing with the dummy is that is so balanced that even when it's UNDER-ARMED, UNDER-POWERED and UNDER-TWEAKED. if your craft sucks it lets u know by killing you OVER and OVER and OVER until u get it. this DUMMY was a good idea.. my entry [KSP-JA] J45-BK is on it's way.. it takes some time by ship it's traveling all the way from Jamaica..

[tetryds]

The best report I got from the dummy was that if your airplane fails to take off it turns around and bombs you, lol.

Edit: but what really matters is having the simulation in real time, at the default delta physics per delta time that is around 24fps.

Since KSP is a rather slow paced game, that is just fine for watching, barely noticeable.

[crashsolo36]

Entry Submitted. Cant wait to watch my baby in action.

[Wjolcz]

What will be the positions of the planes? Will you be setting them the same way you did last time, or will they have their own starting points?

Can we expect the first battle to happen soon-ish? Next week perhaps?

[Pds314]

I'll definitely be submitting, it's just a matter of which airplane. Currently under consideration are my Yellow Moth, which is 20mm and exceedingly quick, thanks to minimum weight and minimum thrust, my Hunter/Stalker, which is fairly hard to crunch due to the segmented wing and H-tail structure and more stable than the moth, and my Vickers Sailplane, which is incredibly aerodynamic with good stability, and, needless to say, kills anything in one hit, if it can make one.

 

My 4-meter-wingspan pusher prop triplane tail experiment has an advantage against all, as does my annular-winged STOL craft, but now that boom and extend tactics are working, the insane biplane fighters of doom don't win EVERY battle, just most of them. Sadly, they're apparently "obsolete technology," so the powers that be aren't willing to let them fight.

Edited March 10, 2016 by Pds314

[tetryds]

@Veeltch I want to pick a pace when running the battles, but as I sometimes have classes from 7:30am to 7:30pm straight and cannot run them every day I will probably run a few in a row then release them during the week, as mentioned above.
I should start as soon as the submissions close, everybody is excited about the battles, so do I, they will definitely not take as long as the last time to be released.

The positions of the airplanes depend on the arena, some arenas can only be fought by airplanes with specific characteristics, such as takeoff length.
But not all battles will happen on arenas, thanks to vessel mover I can set them up anywhere, in which case they will be positioned like on the last tournament or somewhere different depending on the terrain.

In cases where the positioning is too uncommon, the battles will start as competitions, it's currently broken when using the release version of Aviator Arsenal's antenna, but on my side it's already fixed so don't worry about that.
I didn't update yet because of the tournament, didn't want people having to update the mod midway, not like it would change much but it's inconvenient.

 

@Pds314 That only works because of how KSP deals with structures (it doesn't), the engines are really overpowered compared to real life ones and the wing interactions are not perfect.
If I threw in AJE and FAR after the wingcode updates it would probably become an obsolete design straight away.