+1. This is exactly the mechanism needed. Various factors that Horseback, myself and others have mentioned just increase the size of the circle.

And this is a potentially quite good way of differentiating between skill levels, although I'm not sure that the difference between "Rookie," "Average," "Veteran," and "Ace" skill is actual orders of magnitude. Even so, it's an elegant solution.

I think I didn't quite get my point to the both of you, so I'll try again:
I think that simply rounding off the aiming angles will not give the desired results -it will make rookies as accurate as ace when the plane they are aiming at is near an angle that is integer or slightly above.

Say correct firing solution is 1.040rad, target distance is so that 0.01rad off is miss.
Rookie will shoot to 1rad, and miss. Average will shoot to 1rad, miss.
Ace and veteran to 1.04rad and hit.

Next time, target is at 1.000rad, thus rounding the solution will give a hit for all.

So the result is that rookies get accuracy spikes when the angle that represents the correct firing solution is close to an integer. And on the other hand, when I approach at 0.5 rad I can get as close as I want toward a rookie gunner and he can't touch me.

I'm not suggesting to round to 57 degrees. I'm suggesting to mask some low bits, rounding to a small error that means you will get hit ==less often than in-game Nowwwww at long range==.

I am NOT suggesting to replace the system we have Nowwww with something else.

From what you write, I don't think that you have much of a grasp on geometry let alone trig.

1/2 degree off at 200m misses by 1.75 meters. Do you think that you in a virtual moving plane can maintain that angle to the virtual gunner in the virtual moving target?

I count on bigger positional changes over seconds within the game.

No, it's not random. It's not IRL. Neither is uniform distribution of shots. But guess what methods require more or less CPU load and memory to implement?

You play with your ideas but IL2 is not a game of crawling up on fixed positions where you can know the possible fixed lines of fire a defense can make. Get close enough and the shot that would go between your eyes will hit you anyway.

Potentially valid points, but there are ways to overcome the problem. For example, modeling turbulence and propwash effects on an aircraft, or airframe or gun vibration will constantly introduce a bit of randomness into even an otherwise static firing solution.

Additionally, how often do you get a firing situation that never changes with respect to the target?

I think that MaxGunz's solution plus a simple random number generator would work fine for most situations.

I'd love to find more data on how WW2 flexible guns actually worked, however. It's almost inevitable that the USAAF and USN did a lot of work on gunner accuracy, and the RAF probably did some, too. Perhaps all those old technical reports are moldering is archives somewhere.

Could just use a number of bitmasks and cycle through them. Mask logic, like shift operations, eats far fewer cycles than integer or floating-point math.

Now I have to agree, given the mask cycle is long enough to generate near random results.

And it could resolve the rookie 1000times as accurate than ace. Just mask/shift the same decimal positions and use different max deviation limits, e.g. an ace mask allows for 0F as max deviation, while the newbie mask allows for say 4F max.

Something like that except that mask being an AND operation, the ACE masks would mask out of the last 8 bits; 0xFD, 0xFE, 0xFA, while the rookie might be 0xE8, 0xF0 kind of thing. These would be applied to the mantissa part of the FP value already being used for aim.

It's the kind of thing that has to be tried to find out what works.

A simple random roll could be used to adjust the aim, or dispersion.
rookie=1 100% roll
average=2 100% rolls divided by two
veteran=3 100% rolls divided by 3
ace=4 100% rolls divided by 4.

When you superpose rolls, you create a bell like curve of probability, with a higher probability in the center of the curve. Make this values the target ones, and you got a nicely adjusted AI, that still could miss.

More the rolls, higher the accuracy.

Still, I don't know how taxing it will be to generate s many random numbers while firing.

More math/operations, slower FPS.

True, but right now with 16 B17 flying and with gunners firing, my CPU 3 and 4 nucleus are below 20% usage. (it's an old phenom II X4 955)