Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[ElAurens]

Quash the robots now!!!!!

[MaxGunz]

Originally Posted by Janosch

As technology advances, AIs become more and more "beings" with real emotions, ambitions and dreams. As such, they should have the same rights as human players do. For now, however, they don't even get to decide whether or not to play in the first place, so they should in fact have some advantages over Joe Regular Player.

What fantasy do you live in? Does it cost extra to send mail that far?

There is no such AI as you describe except in fantasy. There is nothing that can fake it well enough to pass a Turing test.

[MiloMorai]

A Japanese robot got emotionally attached to a female tech and wouldn't let her out the room. Engineers had to shut the robot down so she could leave the room.

[MaxGunz]

If that actually happened then someone put a label on a simulated behavior. Nice machine.

Now how about fooling an intelligent adult human in an extended phone conversation?

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by majorfailure

a rookie should be able to judge by his tracers if he's shooting too high or low.

Too high or too low, maybe, but as for actually getting the distance right (and hence, factoring in bullet drop) maybe not. One of the things I've learned is that tracers actually create an optical illusion that can fool poorly trained gunners. As I understand it, tracers make a bullet seem like it's closer than it is.

Originally Posted by majorfailure

Strangely enough, the most troublesome Axis bomber for me is the Ju87, because it is so small and usually evades and its gunner shoots below where IMHO he shouldnt even be able to see me.

This is possibly because it's one of the older planes in the game, which might have had less realistic gunnery arcs.

Originally Posted by majorfailure

High 6 attacks are better IMHO, its easier to hit the wing tanks, and thats the Bettys vice, its basically a big unprotected flying fuel tank. I would guesstimate that nine out of ten I got were due to fuel tank fire

Yep. The only problem with high attacks from the rear quarter is the fact that you have to deal with 2 20mm cannons.

Originally Posted by majorfailure

That may be one of the reasons we do get strange results, the AI gunners acquire targets at any angle at about 5km, even if they can not see it.

This changed a bit with 4.10. To some extent, it's realistic because gunners could talk with other crew, allowing them to "anticipate" targets moving into the arc of fire covered by their guns. But, IL2 still takes it too far and doesn't the need to physically track the target with your guns in order to "acquire" it.

The code needs to be reworked to make gunners delay for a fraction of a second before opening fire on a plane that just entered their cone of fire to simulate reaction times, and then accuracy needs to go down for initial shots against those planes.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

Maybe it's a subset of "slowing the process down," but the AI can also introduce random errors and do other things that reduce the probability of an accurate targeting solution.

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

OK, let's stop speaking about the AI as if they are beings. OK?

The AI is the computer program that runs the sim. It doesn't have to "calculate" anything. It already "knows" evey parameter of your aircraft's performance, and it knows how you have set your gun convergence. It "knows" where you are at all times, it knows when you make a control input, and has a perfect solution for hitting you at all times.

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

That is more or less correct in my opinion, but you don't have to mess with the AI at all. What you have to do is make any round fired not along the exact bore of the gun, but an random point in a circle around that boresight. This is called a circular area of probability, usually it's given as the radius that 50% of the shots fall within, but as a simplification in a sim one could plausibly use a circle within which 99% of the shots would naturally fall and make all of the shots occur at random points within that. Then the AI could be as accurate as they like, but they wouldn't be pulling off 100% headshot kills at 750 metres, because there would be a random element in there, which would counter their unnatural non-randomness and make the whole game a lot fairer overall. It wouldn't affect the scores of humans, because we're not accurate enough to get headshot kills by other than random chance anyway.

[MaxGunz]

Or you could simply round off the aiming angle values (3D takes 2 angles) to say 0 decimal places for a rookie, 1 place for the next level, 2 for the next and so on. If the shot is close, even a rookie won't miss though the rookie may not hit the exact aiming point.

I passed that one on to Oleg well before 4.07, btw.

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by MaxGunz

Or you could simply round off the aiming angle values (3D takes 2 angles) to say 0 decimal places for a rookie, 1 place for the next level, 2 for the next and so on. If the shot is close, even a rookie won't miss though the rookie may not hit the exact aiming point.

I passed that one on to Oleg well before 4.07, btw.

Your idea is not practicable.
Two situations, AI gunner, Rookie, correct firing solution is a)47.935° and b)47.000° . For a) and b) Rookie shoots to 47.0, and for b) he hits dead on. All of the times -whenever accidentally your plane gets to a firing soultion that is or is close to and higher than an integer number, a rookie will hit.

[MaxGunz]

At 200m, 1/2 degree missed by 1.75m, about 5' 9".

Not far enough? The calculations are in radians anyway. 1 radian is a bit over 57 degrees so in the math even a rookie would get a couple-three places and be missing.

I mention doing it this way because it calculates quicker than figuring actual degree to miss by, requires less changes to the existing code and once in a while even a rookie gets lucky.

But what do I know? I only paid my rent and bills by writing/developing code for many years in many languages. I've done a good bit of shooting too, including with automatic weapons though not from a moving plane. They are still so much easier to hit targets with than single-shots it's funny, especially at ranges I wouldn't even try single-shots.

That algorithm can adjust for conditions too, like when the plane the gunner is in is turning, though IMO under some conditions it should be impossible to shoot and one the plane is going down the gunner should be bailing out, not sniping. masking a few bits in an IEEE floating point number takes only a few cycles, especially when the mask is in a pre-set variable.

What can I say? I learned to code on old, slow, 8-bit micros without FPU's and still make the programs seem fast. I do know what I'm writing about.