WWII BAD-T V: The AI Strikes Back - BD AI Dogfight Tournament

[Pds314]

On 9/24/2019 at 5:51 PM, splatn't™ said:

Aw hecc.

I was going to submit a Do. 335 lookalike but I would have to stuff it full of ore tanks for it to meet the 5.25 ton minimum.

Bulk up the wings?

Edited September 30, 2019 by Pds314

[SuicidalInsanity]

13 hours ago, Pds314 said:

On a serious note, did you tweak the weights of the engines? I don't remember the higher end ones being so light.

Engine stats are unchanged from BAD-T IV. So no, those Falcon engines should still weigh 1250 kg each.
 

[Pds314]

1 minute ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

Engine stats are unchanged from BAD-T IV. So no, those Falcon engines should still weigh 1250 kg each.
 

ok yeah that's correct.

[Pds314]

My current two main designs. Unfortunately the large one is vulnerable to very minor damage destroying a wing section, whilst ironically the small one's main wing segment has 2300 HP....

Fastboi:

 

Mini bird:


 

 

Tough plane with lots of HP:

Edited October 1, 2019 by Pds314

[Pds314]

An actual test battle. Pretty one-sided because of one side having blatantly superior AI tuning and other reasons.

 

 

[GDJ]

@Pds314

Nice!

Unfortunately I can't seem to get a clear winner in my game. I'm building planes and battling them against my AVRO Kraken Mk1 and it's been a draw (one would run out of fuel after 20 minutes, the other will run out of ammo, etc).

Maybe I should submit my Kraken? 

Edited October 2, 2019 by GDJ

[Mr. Peabody]

5 hours ago, Pds314 said:

<snip>

That aircraft is ugly as sin.

[Pds314]

3 hours ago, The Dunatian said:

That aircraft is ugly as sin.

Yeah it's definitely not the sleekest design.

[SuicidalInsanity]

Looks like you have the ALG stutter bug:
To create a MM patch to fix, create a .cfg inside /Gamedata with the following code:
@PART[KF-ALG*]
{
        !MODULE[KSPWheelMotor] {}
}

Meanwhile, The KSC has had a recent influx of UFO reports:

Edited October 3, 2019 by SuicidalInsanity
clarity

[Pds314]

1 hour ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

Looks like you have the ALG stutter bug:

@PART[KF-ALG*]
{
        !MODULE[KSPWheelMotor] {}
}

Meanwhile, The KSC has had a recent influx of UFO reports:

Yeah I have some stutter caused by landing gears I thought were patched. The motors are visually disabled though so IDK what's wrong.

 

Nice flapjack. My Flattitude snd Flatition are inspired by a mix of a Flapjack and a Horton.

 

How is its performance? And how is its stability? It looks to me like it would be a bit lawndart-y.

Edited October 2, 2019 by Pds314

[SuicidalInsanity]

CoM is a bit farther forward than ideal, and that affects pitch axis control somewhat, but it performs quite well. Excellent roll characteristics, good stability, fairly good energy retention, decent top speed.

 

[Bob_Saget54]

That moment when you rediscover the entire save file dedicated to the previous BAD-T tournaments

 

[Pds314]

8 hours ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

Looks like you have the ALG stutter bug:

@PART[KF-ALG*]
{
        !MODULE[KSPWheelMotor] {}
}
 

Where exactly do I put

 

@PART[KF-ALG*] {         !MODULE[KSPWheelMotor] {} }

???

Edited October 3, 2019 by Pds314

[SuicidalInsanity]

7 minutes ago, Pds314 said:

Where exactly do I put

It's a MM patch; create an empty .cfg file somewhere inside /Gamedata, and copy/paste the code into it. Sorry, should have been more clear from the beginning.

Edited October 3, 2019 by SuicidalInsanity

[Pds314]

17 hours ago, GDJ said:

@Pds314

Nice!

Unfortunately I can't seem to get a clear winner in my game. I'm building planes and battling them against my AVRO Kraken Mk1 and it's been a draw (one would run out of fuel after 20 minutes, the other will run out of ammo, etc).

Maybe I should submit my Kraken? 

Is your Kraken or your other plane overly durable or combat averse? Or very slow to turn? Or are your AI settings causing poor marksmanship? That used to happen back when I had extremely conservative AI settings for most craft I made, but nowadays I know how to make craft both maneuverable and controllable by the AI and have less conservative settings and Ki = 0.2-0.6. Running out of Ammo has been a thing but only against pretty tough or maneuverable enemies, or those that are deliberately designed to disengage from combat and shrug hits to win a long war of attrition against enemy ammo counts. Normal, sensible designs that I have built can shoot each other down. I have not had very many fights ending in ammo depletion. And ZERO ending in fuel depletion.

29 minutes ago, SuicidalInsanity said:

It's a MM patch; create an empty .cfg file somewhere inside /Gamedata, and copy/paste the code into it. Sorry, should have been more clear from the beginning.

Hmm... funny. BADTV_Tweaks.cfg has that exact thing inside it but seems not to help. I will make a dedicated ALG fix cfg but I'm not optimistic it'll work.

I'm also gonna check windows game mode or something like that isn't messing it up.

EDIT: something I did seems to have fixed it. Massive Garbage Collection spikes averted.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Pds314

[GDJ]

6 hours ago, Pds314 said:

Is your Kraken or your other plane overly durable or combat averse? Or very slow to turn? Or are your AI settings causing poor marksmanship? That used to happen back when I had extremely conservative AI settings for most craft I made, but nowadays I know how to make craft both maneuverable and controllable by the AI and have less conservative settings and Ki = 0.2-0.6. Running out of Ammo has been a thing but only against pretty tough or maneuverable enemies, or those that are deliberately designed to disengage from combat and shrug hits to win a long war of attrition against enemy ammo counts. Normal, sensible designs that I have built can shoot each other down. I have not had very many fights ending in ammo depletion. And ZERO ending in fuel depletion.

 

All the planes are aggressive, The Kraken wants to do 15+G turns (and until the pilot passes out it does so very well) but all the planes have difficulty in hitting the target (Kraken has the least problems, but it's not great). As for durability, the construction is pretty much the same (minimal builds, light and fast). They just seem to try to outmaneuver each other and they go for the long haul. Makes for a neat movie, but not much for score counts.

[Pds314]

8 hours ago, GDJ said:

All the planes are aggressive, The Kraken wants to do 15+G turns (and until the pilot passes out it does so very well) but all the planes have difficulty in hitting the target (Kraken has the least problems, but it's not great). As for durability, the construction is pretty much the same (minimal builds, light and fast). They just seem to try to outmaneuver each other and they go for the long haul. Makes for a neat movie, but not much for score counts.

Maybe it's just very good at dodging bullets? Does it look like the bullets are generally aimed where the target plane would be if it didn't do any harsh maneuvering? If so I don't think there's a fix. Except for maybe "add faster guns." (Hispano 20mm comes to mind) or maybe "be less accurate and hope spray works where aim doesn't."

I have found that two things you wouldn't always expect do affect accuracy: 1 is roll rate. 2 is yaw authority/stability. And of course having a substantial Ki control will probably help as well because it corrects cumulative error in a timely fashion. Just don't have TOO MUCH ki control or it will hurt your ability to make sustained turns.

I guess if you can just dodge all the enemy bullets, that also means you are gonna have a very competitive craft.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Pds314

[SuicidalInsanity]

Best armor is distance after all - the thicker the better.

Try a combination of tuning weapon alignment (F2 in the SPH + Rotate Gizmo) to make sure they are pointing where they should, and running a test flight with infinite ammo (maybe infinite fuel as well) + Paintball mode and tweak AI/Ctrl Surf. settings until the plane can reliably hit?

[Pds314]

On 10/3/2019 at 1:33 PM, SuicidalInsanity said:

Best armor is distance after all - the thicker the better.

Try a combination of tuning weapon alignment (F2 in the SPH + Rotate Gizmo) to make sure they are pointing where they should, and running a test flight with infinite ammo (maybe infinite fuel as well) + Paintball mode and tweak AI/Ctrl Surf. settings until the plane can reliably hit?

Distance is rather the second best armor. The best is being BEHIND the guns.

[Me1_base]

A quick turning performance demo of my potential candidate.

severe FPS impact even recording using an i9 9900k why?

Edited October 5, 2019 by Me1_base

[GDJ]

8 hours ago, Me1_base said:

A quick turning performance demo of my potential candidate.

severe FPS impact even recording using an i9 9900k why?

1) Nice plane!
2) FPS impact is probably due to the CPU crunching a lot of data. BDA and the related mods chew up a lot of CPU resources, and add to KSP being naturally a CPU hog.

Edited October 5, 2019 by GDJ

[tetryds]

Wow this thread OP even has an entire FAR tutorial in it, how amazing is that!

Edited October 5, 2019 by tetryds

[Alioth81]

Spoiler

 

@Me1_base

Did you try the mod memgraph?

It solved my stuttering issues.

On 9/25/2019 at 8:46 AM, SuicidalInsanity said:

Yes, Kerbal G Limits will be on, more as a formality than a serious restriction. It'll be run in sandbox, so everyone will be a 5-star Pilot, which means your Kerbals should be fine as long as you aren't pulling sustained 15+G turns. (I seriously doubt you will be able to build something with the BAD-T prop engines that can do this {No, this is not a challenge}, so GLOC shouldn't be an issue anyway.)

 

I can say from my limited testing that GLOC will be a major issue for all those normally designing super agile planes.

In fact finding the right balance between agility and not flying around in eternal circles with unconscious Kerbals will be a deciding factor.

My limited experience tells me high g-load for a very short time no problem. Sustained 12 g not good. Especially if the AI tries a downward facing tight turn it can get bad very quickly if it does not bleed speed quickly.

Edited October 6, 2019 by Alioth81

[GDJ]

Almost ready:

[Dwerto]

I've gone through dozens of designs but I still haven't come up with something that can consistently beat one of the first things I threw together (the pusher design). Here's a video of a test fight:

Maybe I can dig up my entry from the original BAD-T tournament. My problem back then was I had no Idea how to properly tweak the AI. I still don't really know what the best settings are.

Edit: Also my FAR install is messed up somehow, but it seems to work.

Edited October 7, 2019 by Dwerto