A question of height
 

I recently bought IL2:1946 on steam, and have spent many happy hours since then playing it. However I must admit that I'm very confused by the course announcements over the radio when my flight reaches a waypoint.

For instance, I played the single mission US/P-51B/P-51B.mis with all the other aircraft removed to be sure that I wasn't hearing somebody else's instructions, and let the autopilot figure out the height, and here are some highlights:

Radio says: "Vector 090 Height 01 (350)"
Altimeter says: 1100'
Speedbar says: 330m

Radio says "Vector 330 Height 05 (1,500)"
Altimeter says: 1650'
Speedbar says: 500m

The heights I'm giving are the heights that the aircraft stabilizes at after the autopilot makes any course corrections. The trouble is, neither metres nor feet seem to bear any relation to the height instruction that comes over the radio. Different air forces all seem to have the same numbering scheme, too, which is strange.

There is no such ambiguity with the vector - it's simply the compass heading.

Am I just supposed to know the mapping between the number that comes over the radio and the height we're supposed to fly at? What is that mapping?

Thanks

In the subtitle "Vector 090 Height 01 (350)", the 01 stands for 100 m, or 0,1 km ; the 350 is the same alt, but in feet. A feet grossly equals 1/3 m.

In the second one, you have 05 -> 500 m, or 0,5 km ; and 1500 feet. Your altimeter must be graduated in feet ; your speedbar in meters. You can change the settings of the speedbar, but of course not the altimeter...

Hope it helped.

Okay...that all makes sense.

But that's not the height that the altimeter reads. None of the aircraft are flying at 350 feet. They're flying at 1100 feet. And it can't be a difference between height above sea level and height above ground, either, because the mission in question was partly over sea and partly over land.

In any case, why would a pilot of issue instructions over the radio that don't match up with the instruments used by the aircraft receiving the instruction?

Perhaps I'm coming at this from the wrong perspective. First of all, is this discrepancy something that others have noticed, or is it just me? Perhaps this is just a problem with the steam version of IL2.

Your not necessarily listening to your flight leader. If you have radio chatter enabled, you will hear information unrelated to you over the radio whether there are other flights with you or not. You have to follow your flight lead over the indicated waypoints on your map, not verbal instructions.

You must remember that the base code is over ten years old on this game, don't expect to much. In spite of the fact that it's the best game in town, IL2 is very long in the tooth.

Oh, I forgot to mention - the announcements over the radio came exactly as we passed over the waypoints, and the headings indicated were exactly the headings we were taking. There was nothing else in the sky. There was no other chatter.

I think that the orders mean that your leader want you to dive from 1100 ft to 350 ft, because the next waypoint is at 350 ft ; if you are already at 350 ft and heading 090 the order (and the waypoint) would be useless, isn't it ?

I already said: "The heights I'm giving are the heights that the aircraft stabilizes at after the autopilot makes any course corrections."

Play the mission I mentioned and you'll see. There are really only two heights to fly at in that mission, and most of the waypoints are simply heading adjustments. But I've noticed the same problem in different campaigns for different services all across the game.

Sorry then, I misunderstood...
Maybe there is a pb in low-level missions ?

So if you fly that or similar missions, do what do you hear over the radio?
Does the height given at a waypoint match the height your formation is flying at when you get to the next waypoint? Or is it mis-matched, like mine?

I think the height and the vector are random, just authentic sounding noise. That could be wrong, I'd like it to be.

Sometimes I think the height is given in feet and converted from that height in metres to feet. It certainly often seems to be about that much wrong. From that discrepancy I've jumped to the conclusion that the vectors are noise too, I'd be glad to hear that's wrong.

Over the years I have noted that the altitudes given are relative to the terrain, not indicated altitude, check it out while landing, the altimeter will tell you the altitude over sea level, the "speed bar" will give you the altitude over the terrain.

That isn't true in my experience, I've crashed into the ground with a non-zero height in the speed bar many times, and quite often taken off from a height of 200 (metres I believe), in the speed bar. I don't usually use the altimeter in the cockpit for my height. The heights in the text coming "over the radio" don't match the speed bar. The speed bar, as I understand it, is the three lines of text (height, speed and heading) in the lower left of the screen.

The speedbar gives the alt from sea level, like the altimeter in the plane. When you use the view without cockpit, you have alt from the ground directly under you.
I played quite a lot offline, and it seemed to me that the indications were quite logical, but maybe it changed...

This is not what I see. I just took a Mossie over the mountains inland of Yalta, paused with maybe 100 metres clearance, certainly no more, and the speed bar height didn't change when I switched from F1 view to F2 view. If this has changed, I don't remember noticing it.

Yes, you're right but I didn't mean that, I was talking about the view with the virtual cockpit (MAJ - F1 by default, IIRC) and a sight.

I'm not sure about this virtual cockpit business. I thought F1 gave you a cockpit view? or you mean that thing with five dials and no sign of your own plane? I know <shift> (or was it <Ctrl>) <F1> centres your gunsight in planes where it isn't already centred, which the Mossie's wasn't, so I changed into that mode before doing the test.

The heights coming over the radio (maybe only for American and British missions?) are definitely weird, certainly since "1946", maybe since the "Complete Edition", could even have been as early as "Pacific Fighters" at a push. The heights don't match your height from the speedbar, which is metres for me usually, they might sort of match your height in metres converted to feet, but then the numbers in brackets seem to usually match your height in feet taken as a number and converted from metres into feet, even though it should already be feet (i.e. too high by a factor of slightly over three).

It's not a big deal for me, but when people say it isn't happening when I saw it myself, that makes it a matter for concern.

Resolved
 

I've figured it all out!

First of all, the height in the speedbar and the height in the cockpit are both "above sea level" and not particularly fine-grained, while the height in the wonderwoman/F-35 view is "above ground level" and accurate to the nearest metre.

Secondly, the height you hear over the radio isn't necessarily the height of the waypoint. They only recorded a few voice samples for height readings: 01, 05, 10, 15, 20, and so on. When the announcement comes over the radio, the game takes the waypoint height in 100s of metres, and rounds down to the nearest multiple of 5 (or to 01 if it's less than 500m). But the aircraft ignore that instruction and adjust to fly at the height of the waypoint itself.

I first noticed this when playing a Russian mission just now. There were two flights - one at 2500m and another at 3000m, and I got to hear radio traffic from both and verify their heights by flying abreast of them. It seemed like the radio was giving the right heights for once. Then I went back to the original P-51B mission, but this time I modified the waypoint heights. I've listed, in order, the waypoint height in metres, the radio announced height in metres and feet, and the height we ended up flying at:

As you can see, the height you fly at is very close (up to the accuracy of the altimeter) to the waypoint height.

A similar thing happens with the heading, but there's one of those for every 30 degrees so you're less likely to notice it. Plus, the heading only makes sense if you're starting from the actual waypoint so if you're off a little the heading will be too and it'll be your fault - not the game's. Taking the nearest reading seems like a good idea and 30 degrees seems accurate enough for our purposes.

I do wish that the game would round to the nearest sample instead of just rounding down all the time - perhaps they can remember that for the next game.

Thanks to all of you for your ideas and comments.

Check your reading skills.

As you can see from this thread, I read your post before you edited in the "wonder woman" bit. Without that hint, I took the "no cockpit" view to mean the chase (F2) view. I still read the red bit as saying something I don't see, it may be that changes in the wonder-woman view.

@ adapted.cat I like that post. That does make some sense of what I was seeing, I don't remember what it was that I saw that well but I remember it not being right, and it's interesting that 350 metres is reported on the radio as 350 feet.