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

[DoctorDavinci]

Talk about a hair raising experience ... You think a plane is gonna bite it and it just keeps going and going

It was basically a fight with one pair having too much yaw authority and the other pair having too little

 

[KamikazeF0X]

One half-hour combat !!!
The next combat will be : "the first to be out of fuel will loose" !
My huge fear is to be out of ammo ! that's why I have 2100 20mm rounds and 600 23mm rounds ! (And only 40 Units of Fuel ...)

[DoctorDavinci]

28 minutes ago, KamikazeF0X said:

One half-hour combat !!!
The next combat will be : "the first to be out of fuel will loose" !
My huge fear is to be out of ammo ! that's why I have 2100 20mm rounds and 600 23mm rounds ! (And only 40 Units of Fuel ...)

If it happens again I will endeavor to speed it up a bit more but some of the weaving and aerobatics going on in this match was too fast if I increased the speed too much

All 3 runs were 57 minutes together at first ... until I increased the speed a bit which left me with just over 31 minutes

Edited April 4, 2016 by DoctorDavinci

[Pds314]

23 hours ago, KamikazeF0X said:

One half-hour combat !!!
The next combat will be : "the first to be out of fuel will loose" !
My huge fear is to be out of ammo ! that's why I have 2100 20mm rounds and 600 23mm rounds ! (And only 40 Units of Fuel ...)

Had quite a few asymmetric test battles where 3+ dummies chased 1 fighter until both were out of ammo.

[tetryds]

After a head-snapping test at uni, time to run some battles again

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

On February 20, 2016 at 6:07 PM, ferram4 said:

I'll likely enter a heavy fighter as well, but I decided to be... well, interesting.  Already executes the dummy without a problem and has somehow managed to out maneuver and destroy most of the light fighter designs I've tried to create to kill it.  I may have to create a heavy fighter to try and kill it.  At the moment I'm tweaking it and trying to balance how much fuel and ammo it should start with to have the necessary endurance.

What!? Oh, yes, not stock aero. Darn, this contest would be really fun if you let the the non-FAR using world in.

[tetryds]

@OrbitalBuzzsaw Trust me, it's way more fun to learn FAR to participate on it.

It's not really that much harder than stock, a lot more fair and allows you to improve your craft almost indefinitely.

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

2 minutes ago, tetryds said:

@OrbitalBuzzsaw Trust me, it's way more fun to learn FAR to participate on it.

It's not really that much harder than stock, a lot more fair and allows you to improve your craft almost indefinitely.

I had the perfect plane using a normal SXT engine and it would have been PERFECT with just 1 change in stock aero. How many people had this and then realized it was FAR?

Edited April 6, 2016 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[DoctorDavinci]

2 minutes ago, tetryds said:

@OrbitalBuzzsaw Trust me, it's way more fun to learn FAR to participate on it.

It's not really that much harder than stock, a lot more fair and allows you to improve your craft almost indefinitely.

What this guy said ^^^^^

Once I figured FAR out I have become a little bored by stock aero

Edited April 6, 2016 by DoctorDavinci

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

1 minute ago, DoctorDavinci said:

What this guy said ^^^^^

 

You FAR people don't even understand the concept of using stock aero, do you?

Edited April 6, 2016 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[TheSpaceManiac]

5 minutes ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

You FAR people don't even understand the concept of using stock aero, do you?

 No need to insult just because the competition runner wishes to use FAR for the reason he gave.

Anyways, back to the battles...

Edited April 6, 2016 by TheSpaceManiac

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

*Crosses arms* I rest my case. My tournament, Skies Of Laythe, is nearly ready, so feel free to shoot at me. I'm not coming back to this place. 

Edited April 7, 2016 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[Vanamonde]

Now that's settled, please abide by the rules of the challenge, keep the discussion on-topic, and please do not insult each other over playstyle preferences. 

[DoctorDavinci]

2 hours ago, TheSpaceManiac said:

Anyways, back to the battles...

I second the motion

[tetryds]

Game Y u crash so much D:

Will see what I can do to fix this, but this is like the tenth time I try to run this specific battle and fail.

The game keeps bleeding ram everywhere and implodes, it doesn't make sense, it didn't do that with the other battles.

Maybe I just have to switch cameras less, I will manage it, but it's annoying.

Edit: ok, I got this.

One crash per round, but heh, round 1 recorded, more one or two left.

And again someone is losing with a better airplane because of the AI setup, I really need to come up with a better dummy, the airplanes are great but some AI setups are not up to the task, let's see what we can do.

(All I wanted was the match to end asap while watching my memory slowly leaking to a crash, which should happen at least after the round is over, so seeing the AI derping a bit was almost physically painful )

I believe that the GUI can have to do with this issue, I don't know, I hope it does not happen again on the future, memory usage didn't go past 2.8GB before.

Edit2: The issue is the far terrain.

UGH. Let me see if decreasing the quality fixes it.

Sounds like this would happen even without mods.

Edit3: Yep, fixed it permanently, unless the airplanes decide to flee from the battle and go around the planet it shouldn't crash anymore.

Memory still leaks, a LOT, but it doesn't leak enough to crash, given that I had to remove some mods for this to even work.

So, yeah, I can fix the problem hooray.

[DoctorDavinci]

You can do it ... I am confident in that

[tetryds]

So, I ran the battles just fine, this time with GUI, which was pretty much needed, you will see why.

I need a way to keep the markers turned on while the GUI is off, it's not as simple to handle as the text messages.

[DoctorDavinci]

@tetryds  maybe leave the gooey on and just minimize the nav ball ... might work well

 

Edited April 7, 2016 by DoctorDavinci

[Van Disaster]

The AI is a little random too - it's not just a case of bad AI setup, it's decision making is still rather suspect, there's nothing much you can do about that with design other than set up to avoid fighting. It'll improve over time, it's just not an easy thing to perfect at all, so no surprise it's frustrating at times.

A baseline combat dummy or two wouldn't hurt anyone at all though - also a baseline combat arena.

[MarvinCZ]

When I was tweaking my plane, in addition to an improved dummy I also created a small (.625) and rather nimble unarmed drone to improve my aim.

I think it helped, but AI tweaking is a lot about feeling - it's hard to measure whether what you're doing is helping. I guess we'll see in one of the future battles :-) 

[DoctorDavinci]

8 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

The AI is a little random too - it's not just a case of bad AI setup, it's decision making is still rather suspect, there's nothing much you can do about that with design other than set up to avoid fighting. It'll improve over time, it's just not an easy thing to perfect at all, so no surprise it's frustrating at times.

A baseline combat dummy or two wouldn't hurt anyone at all though - also a baseline combat arena.

Depending on the setup of control surfaces in combination with the AI pilot settings, I discovered that I could totally change the way the Bad Company engaged targets

[Van Disaster]

2 hours ago, DoctorDavinci said:

Depending on the setup of control surfaces in combination with the AI pilot settings, I discovered that I could totally change the way the Bad Company engaged targets

Yes, it does some neat stuff if it sees it can't get it's nose back on  the target ( sometimes it just climbs away even if it could, which ends up with another dangerous head-on pass ) - but some of the decision making depends on the *other* plane, so you can't cover everything. There's also not a lot you can do about "turn away - climb - reduce throttle - ignore incoming shells", or flying all the way to one target before turning round & flying back to the other, or the pilot's occasional desire to just fly straight which was something that drove me mad in previous BDAs. All that will be worked out eventually, I don't really envy the guys working on it though

[DoctorDavinci]

Took me a good 3 weeks of tweaking the Bad Company to see how she responds to slight changes in settings (both AI Pilot and control surface settings).

Learning how FAR works has been an experience and a half ... I thought I had a good grasp of aerodynamics but have learned so much just from screwin' around in Kerbal.

[tetryds]

By the way, uploading at least one battle tonight!

And I actually rocked that test despite not finishing a single exercise, it was THAT hard.

[DoctorDavinci]

Fantastic that you rocked the test ... Really excited to see more of the BAD-T2 competition